Rusalka

“It ought to be. It’s all moonflufF, boy, me ‘witching old Yurishev, us shape-shifting our way through the gates. God, I used to play the devil around The Doe’s kitchen when I was a kid, used to carry their wood for them, then drop down to the cellar where they hung the sausages…”

  “You didn’t!”

  “I did. They kept saying how they had to have done something to set the house-devil off, because he was eating them out of their profits. So they must’ve figured it was since they hired me—and I do bet their profits came up when they let me go.”

  “You’re a thief!”

  “I was hungry, boy. I didn’t have relatives. And in case you’ve ever wondered, the Little Old Man around The Cockerel’s barn is a black and white cat.”

  Sasha shuddered to hear that kind of talk. “It’s not lucky,” he said. “Don’t say things like that, Pyetr Illitch.”

  “Poor Sasha. There aren’t any House-things. There’s nothing in the bathhouse. The bannik won’t get you, and it can’t tell you any more than the fake wizards on Market Street.”

  Sasha got up, walked off and squatted down on the other side of the road, where he did not have to be near Pyetr Kochevikov.

  The man was wicked. He had no fear. Aunt Ilenka had said it, and he had not believed it; and now he had Pyetr Kochevikov for a guide, if Pyetr was not going to bleed to death on the road before morning and leave him alone with everything that had gone wrong.

  No wizards.

  He only wished—

  But that was the trouble. He could do too much by wishing, and he dragged himself back from that terrible wish he had, that something should bring Pyetr Illitch to his senses.

  “There aren’t any wizards,” Pyetr said from across the road. “The bogeys won’t get you.”

  “Stop it!”

  “If the bogles are anything, they’d have come after me long since. It’s not stealing to take what people are setting out for the cat—unless you count the cat.”

  Sasha stood up and faced him. “We’re in enough trouble, Pyetr Illitch. Making jokes isn’t going to help it.”

  “It does help it. It helps not to be fools.” Pyetr staggered to his feet. “It helps us that the thieftakers are probably suspecting the haystack or the horses, and the gate guards who let us out aren’t going to admit they were tricked off their post, they’re going to say they were ‘witched, and they aren’t going to come out here in the dark looking for wizards and shape-changers who walked right through a locked parley-gate. So be grateful that they’re fools.”

  “Where are you going?” Sasha asked, for Pyetr was leaving the roadside, heading off through the meadow, eastward.

  “To blazes,” Pyetr said. “Come with me or go back and explain to the thieftakers how you were ‘witched, too.”

  “I can’t!” Sasha cried.

  But Pyetr kept walking, slowly, and there was nothing to do but run after him.

  They came on a road in the dark, or at least a memory of one, so overgrown and weedy it was almost more trouble than the open field, but better, Pyetr thought, to be on it, since a road, however old, promised a sure way through. The god knew he was in no way for climbing or rough ground, and from time to time he would come back to himself with the feeling that he might have been wandering—except for the road, which at least kept them on a course for somewhere, at least guided them away from Vojvoda, and steered them clear of dead ends and drops over banks—one hoped.

  “Talk,” he said to the boy finally, because he knew that his wits were drifting.

  “About what?” Sasha asked.

  “Anything. I don’t care.”

  “I don’t know anything to talk about.”

  “God.—What do you want to do, where do you want to go in the world, what have you always wanted to see?”

  “I don’t know. I never thought.—I thought we were just going to hide a while, till your friends—”

  “Don’t be naive.—Did you plan to work for old Fedya for the rest of your life?”

  Silence.

  “Did he pay you?”

  “No,” Sasha said in a small voice.

  “That old skinflint.—Mischa spends him blind and you’re jack-of-all-work, is that it?”

  “Mischa’s his own son.”

  “And you call me a thief.” He had no wish to argue, he had not the strength, but the boy’s docile gullibility infuriated him. “He took you for a fool, boy, he worked you like a tinker’s donkey, so his son could squander his money in every inn in Vojvoda, and you make excuses for him.”

  “He didn’t have to take me in.”

  “Oh, he took you in, boy.” He felt the pain come back, riding every step, and he wanted to drop the whole conversation, but the argument called up old, disturbing resentments, and he wondered if he had ever understood the boy. “You should have beaten Mischa’s head in—years ago. It might have done both of you some good.”

  “I couldn’t.”

  “Mischa’s soft—soft, and you aren’t, if you ever added it up. You let people push you, they get used to it and they don’t even think about it. Same with Mischa, same with your uncle, not mentioning your aunt. You want a witch, boy—”

  “That’s the trouble!” Sasha said. “That’s the trouble. You don’t believe in witches. But I might be one.”

  “You might—bee—one.”

  Perhaps Sasha comprehended that that was sarcasm. Several moments went by in silence.

  “Boy, everybody makes-believe. Everybody has terrible hidden powers, everybody is going to get back at the fools around him. And then you grow up, boy!”

  “Everybody says I’m just unlucky,” Sasha cried. “But I wanted Mischa to fall in a puddle, you understand? I wanted us to get through the gates and them not to follow and the bar fell down—”

  “So did I want it, boy, luck’s got nothing to do with it.”

  “It does with me! My parents’ house burned, Pyetr Illitch. Mischa fell in a puddle and we got through the gates and they haven’t found us. Sometimes it’s good and sometimes it’s bad, but you can’t always tell whether a thing’s going to be good or bad when you wish for it, you can say I don’t want my father to hit me anymore and your house can burn down—”

  The boy was crying.

  “That’s nonsense,” Pyetr said.

  Sasha sniffed, turned his face away and rubbed his eyes as they walked.

  “Did your uncle tell you that?”

  “Our neighbor did. Our house burned down. People say I’m a jinx, uncle Fedya wouldn’t let me come near the customers, he said if things ever did go wrong, people would believe it was my fault.”

  “Kind of him.”

  “But it’s not just bad luck! Things happen that I want.”

  “So why don’t you want to be tsar?”

  Sasha sniffed again, and said nothing to that.

  “So don’t say things happen that you want,” Pyetr said.

  “You can’t say how it could happen. If you wish for things like that, the tsar might die, there might be a war. I don’t wish for things like that. I don’t even want to think about things like that!”

  “Large thoughts. What do you wish for, boy?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Don’t make wishes? Wish we were out of this, if you believe it’ll work.”

  “You don’t understand. You can’t wish for things like that. If we were dead we’d be out of this. It can come true that way. You have to think of something that hasn’t got any harm in it, and even then you don’t know if you’ve thought of everything—”

  “So you try not to wish for anything, you try not to want anything. That’s really hell, Sasha Vasilyevitch. That’s hell you live in.”

  Sasha wiped his nose.

  Pyetr was amazed at his own stupidity, to be betrayed by everyone he knew, and find himself doing it all over again, believing the boy with a conviction and a trust he had never placed in anyone so much as now—seeing he had lately had his own delusions, chased his own moonbe
ams—which had, whatever else, at least been pleasant while they lasted.

  Not Sasha’s.

  Poor crazed lad, he thought. The boy’s not altogether sane. At least they’ve not encouraged him to be.

  “You don’t go at things the right way, boy. You’ve been wishing for things likely to happen. What you do, you wish for the tsar himself to ride along and recognize us both for the honest, upstanding sort we are, and make us rich and happy. Wish for us both to marry tsarevnas and die at a hundred and twenty, rich as lords and surrounded by great-grandchildren—”

  “It doesn’t work that way.”

  “You’re too honest, Sasha Vasilyevitch. You should learn to laugh. That’s your trouble. You’re too serious.” He clapped Sasha on the shoulder as they walked—which was a very good thing, because he turned his ankle on a rock and depended on that hold quite suddenly.

  “Pyetr!”

  He got his feet under him again, with Sasha’s help. “Joke,” he said.

  But it had hurt. He walked a few more steps, Sasha never letting him go.

  “I think I’d better sit down for a while,” he said, short of breath. “I’ve come a long way for a man in my condition. Have pity.”

  Sasha snatched up standing weeds, gathering dry ones that way, the same way a good stableboy never took hay or straw from the damp ground. He gathered another armload and piled it over Pyetr’s arms, Pyetr lying on a mat of more such weeds, against a thorn-bush with tightly-laced branches, the best shelter Sasha could find in this season before leaves were out.

  No blankets, Pyetr in a shirt, himself in only the lightest of coats—Sasha kept reproaching himself for the horse blankets and the extra clothes they might have brought, if he had had his wits about him and not thought only of running—

  Or there was the food he might have had in his pockets, if Pyetr had only said, plainly, Let’s run away, once and for all…

  Pyetr was chilling now that they had stopped walking. The night cold came on the edge of a wind, and the wild grass was the only blanket he could think of.

  “Good boy,” Pyetr said between chattering teeth. “Good lad.—More sense than ‘Mitri and that lot ever will have…”

  Sasha pulled weeds until he was sweating, until his hands felt raw, and built up a bank beside Pyetr, higher and higher, until he could lie down and rake the weeds over them both.

  He was warm, at least. He burrowed under the weeds, opened his coat and put himself up against Pyetr chilled body.

  “Wish us a warm day tomorrow,” Pyetr muttered. “Wish us a horse or two while you’re about it. And the tsar’s own carriage.”

  “I’m wishing you to live,” Sasha said, and did, as hard as he had ever wished for anything. He was trying not to shiver, up against Pyetr’s chill side as he was, but it was not the cold, it was fear.

  “Good,” Pyetr said. The shivers were down to little ones now. “I’m glad you’re minding the details.”

  A moment later, Pyetr said, with a small shudder, “But do spare a wish for a horse, two of them—fast ones, if you find the time. I’ve always fancied black, myself.”

  CHAPTER 5

  “NO HORSE,”Pyetr complained, in the morning—a frosty morning, Sasha found, in which it might be a great deal warmer to stay where they were, but fear of the thieftakers and the sting of Pyetr’s ridicule made it unlikely he would rest.

  “No horse, no coat, no carriage,” Pyetr said. “I expected the tsar for breakfast. For supper tonight, do you think?”

  Sasha got up, picked weeds out of his hair and felt bits of them go down his collar.

  “No sense of humor,” Pyetr said.

  One could be very angry at Pyetr, except he tried to move and sit up, and it hurt him, so that he caught after the branches of the bush and stabbed his hand on the thorns. Sasha winced, himself, while Pyetr just drew back the bleeding hand, shook it and sucked the blood with a weary, aggrieved frown—and held it up then, still bleeding, with: “Do you do small cures, perchance?”

  “No,” Sasha said sorrowfully, and came to help him up. “I truly wish I did.”

  It took a bit to get moving, cold as it was, but it was the only help for a stitch like that, just to work it out by walking, the boy trying to help him the while.

  “It’s better,” Pyetr said, finally, when moving and the warmth of the sun on his back had helped what it could. And, his wits being a little clearer, he thought that the boy was very quiet and very unhappy this morning. “Cheer up,” he said. “We’re away, we’re not on the main road, we’ll come across it again, eventually, beyond any distance they’d search for us…”

  “But what town are we going to? Where does this road go? Don’t they say—don’t they say east is the way to the Old River, don’t they say—people don’t go that way any more? Only outlaws—”

  “What do you suppose we are?”

  “But—” Sasha said with a distressed look, and seemed to be thinking about it.

  “But?” Pyetr said, and when Sasha said nothing to that: “We’ll follow the river south,” Pyetr said. “There has to be a road. Or the river itself. We can build a boat of sorts. It goes all the way to the sea. It’ll carry us to Kiev. People are rich in Kiev.”

  Sasha trudged beside him, arms wrapped around his ribs, hardly looking confident.

  “So serious,” Pyetr said.

  Sasha said nothing. Pyetr clapped him on the shoulder.

  “It’ll be all right, boy.”

  Still there was nothing. Pyetr shook at him. “No wishes?”

  “No,” Sasha said in a dull voice.

  “No horse?”

  “No.”

  “You let me devil you too much.”

  No answer.

  “Boy—” Pyetr flexed his grip on Sasha’s shoulder, and held his temper. “You go where you want. If you want to go back, go back. If you want to go ahead, go ahead. Make up your own mind. If you don’t want to hear about horses, say, Shut your mouth, Pyetr Illitch. Try it. It’s good for your stomach.”

  Sasha twisted away from him. Pyetr held on.

  “Say it, boy!”

  “I don’t want to hear about horses!”

  Pyetr let him go. “Then I beg your pardon.” With a bow as they walked, the doffing of an imaginary cap—a mistake: it did hurt.

  They walked a while more in silence.

  “Your uncle is a bully,” Pyetr said. “I am a profligate, a gambler, a liar and occasionally a person of bad character, but I do swear to you, I have never been a bully, and you insist to make me one. Look me in the face, boy!”

  Sasha looked up, stopped, startled as a rabbit.

  “Good,” Pyetr said. “Say it again, about the horses.”

  “I don’t want to talk about the horses, Pyetr Illitch!”

  “Then accept my deep apology, young sir.”

  Sasha looked as if he feared he had gone mad, and kept looking at him.

  “You’ve got it right,” Pyetr said, and slowly, slowly, the boy’s face lost its frown. “Go on. You’ve almost got it. Don’t be so glum.”

  “Why shouldn’t I be? We’ve no blankets, no food, the law wants to kill us—and probably the outlaws will.”

  “Then what worse can happen to us? Only better. If you could only wish us up a supper—”

  “Shut up about the supper, Pyetr Illitch!”

  He laughed. The boy glowered, and he laughed until he hurt, holding his side.

  “Stop it!” Sasha cried.

  So he shrugged and started walking again, shaking his head.

  Sasha overtook him. “I’m sorry,” Sasha said.

  “Of course you are,” he said, not kindly.

  “I’m not mad,” Sasha said.

  “Of course you aren’t. That’s the problem, lad.”

  “I can’t be,” Sasha said, “don’t you see, I can’t be! I can’t—”

  “Because your wishes come true,” Pyetr said in disgust. “God, boy—forget that nonsense.—Or conjure us the horses.”
>
  There was an intake of breath, a moment of silence.

  “If you’re afraid to lose your temper, boy… then laugh. Can it hurt?”

  Another deep sigh from the boy. A miserable little try at a laugh.

  “More practice,” Pyetr said.

  It should be absolutely the worst time of year to be out and living off the land, Sasha thought, the winter berries spent, the new growth merely swelling in the bud, the tubers all dug, the insects still in the egg—all of which meant a mouse could not have found a living in The Cockerel’s in-town garden in this season, let alone two shivering travelers turned out in the wilderness. But grain had seeded here, gone wild and sparse from a time, perhaps, when this all had been cultivated fields, or it was simply the drift from fields closer to Vojvoda, Sasha had no idea. They could pick remaining heads caught in thickets, up against stones, where the heavy winter snows had not altogether flattened and spoiled it. There were a withered few berries in the center of bushes, food that the birds must have missed, but perhaps they were poison, Sasha had no idea, and Pyetr said he had none, and they were small anyway.

  Pyetr did not say, Wish us well-fed. Sasha did it on his own, hoping for food and safety they could find without being found, but he was not sure where that wish might lead, here, in the wilderness. He was sure of nothing that The Cockerel’s walls did not contain, he had no experience else, and he kept thinking of bandits and trying most desperately not to wish for his own bed and aunt Ilenka’s kitchen, or anything else that might bring them more than they wanted.

  But there was no food more than the heads of wild grain he could gather; and as they walked, the forest shadow that had been on their left since last night began to spread across the horizon, making clearer and clearer where the road was going.

  He was sure there were bandits and worse things beyond: travelers who came to The Cockerel told of forest-devils and things that snatched and clutched, evil spirits which misled a man, and left him to ghosts and wild beasts. He mentioned these to Pyetr, but Pyetr said they were granny-tales, and scoffed, as Pyetr would.

  Sasha kept his fears to himself thereafter. He had never seen a forest, but he knew the worst of it, and this one looked less and less savory, winter-barren across a winter-ravaged meadow.