Rusalka

  “Yes, sir,” he said, shoved the hook with the water pot back over the fire and was quickly back to be sure Uulamets was doing nothing crazy.

  “Front and back?” Uulamets asked. “It went entirely through?”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Sword?”

  “I think so, sir.”

  The old man muttered to himself, and pressed, and Pyetr screamed.

  “Not good,” the old man said, but Sasha could have told that for himself. Uulamets soaked a bit of moss with oil and set it on the remaining square of bandages, got up and poured more vodka into a bowl.

  And drank it, sip by sip, while he selected this and that from the cupboards.

  Sasha dared not a word, only folded Pyetr’s limp hand in his and sniffed and mopped his running nose and shivered, despite the fire, despite the old man’s promises.

  It was bad, he knew that it would be when Uulamets came back to lift the bandage off; he wanted to shut his eyes, but he had told Pyetr he would not.

  CHAPTER 7

  THERE WAS terrible pain. Somehow Pyetr had lost his way in the forest and fallen in with devils and leshys, most of whom had old friends’ faces and one of whom looked like a horse and another a black and white cat.

  Finally he was in a dark hovel by a fireside, and a terrible old man was singing at him, not singing to him, but at him, and leaning forward to blow smoke into his face from a bone pipe.

  He coughed. He stared in horror at this painted apparition, lit in fire, and in the way of all nightmares saw Sasha Misurov’s face hanging in the smoke, firelit and malevolent in its presence, while the song buzzed in his ears and the smoke stung his throat.

  He coughed again. The singing stopped. “Keep him warm,” the old man said; and gathered up his pipe and his foul smoke and loomed up as a shadow against the cluttered rafters.

  Sasha leaned forward, strangely distorted, strangely ominous, and he could scarcely move or breathe as Sasha dragged a quilt up to his chin and weighed him down under it. Whatever Sasha or the old man would have done there was nothing he could do to prevent it. “Lie still,” Sasha said in a voice that buzzed in his ears. “Lie still. Everything’s all right. It’s all over. You can sleep now.”

  He could not remember what should be over. It sounded frightening. He saw the shadows move on the ceiling, like scampering cats in the rafters, strange shapes like creatures lurking and slithering and pausing again.

  “I’ll be here,”Sasha said.

  “Good,” he said thickly, finding speech difficult. He was not sure whether he could trust Sasha, or at least this dream of Sasha. It looked highly unreliable, and friends had played wicked games on him too often in his life—he did not remember when or why, but it seemed to him that one had attempted his life lately, and that this place was the result of it.

  “The old man is a wizard,” Sasha whispered, tucking the blanket under his chin. “I know you don’t believe in wizards, but he truly is. He says you would have died if you hadn’t come here. He says you have to stay very quiet and not try to get up even if you feel better.”

  He was not sure he felt better. His head was throbbing from the smoke or from the singing, and his side was bound so tightly it felt numb. But Sasha said, “I’m going to sleep right beside you. I won’t leave.” It seemed that that had been the condition for some time now, and that they had wandered a very long journey under those terms.

  Daylight streamed into the clutter, light in which dust danced, and Sasha lay warm and dry, a condition which argued he should be in his own room in The Cockerel. Instead he was here, in this strange, object-crowded ferryman’s house, watching Uulamets fling the shutters open one after another, bang and rattle. Sasha’s nose had stopped running. His throat was only a little sore, despite the days of cold.

  And Pyetr was by him, stirring a little, pulling his quilts over his head—which Sasha was glad to see. He had wakened from time to time through the night to assure himself that Pyetr was alive and well; he had seen the terrible sights all over again every time he had shut his eyes and fought his way back to sleep, and now that Pyetr seemed awake enough to defend himself from the daylight, more sleep was what he would only too gladly have had—pull the covers up between himself and the light and truly rest now.

  But if it were aunt Ilenka opening up the shutters, she would take a broom to a boy lying abed, no matter how hard it was for that boy to move this morning, and he had no wish to start off badly with the old man; so he got up and ran his hands through his hair and made a respectful bow to Uulamets.

  “Can I help, sir?”

  “Take the bucket,” Uulamets said, “go down to the river. Fill the water-barrel. Mind you don’t get sand.”

  “Yes, sir,” he said, pulled his bloodstained, dirty coat off the peg by the door, took the bucket and went out to do that.

  It was several trips up and down the narrow track to the ferry landing, under the arch of dead trees—a clear sunny morning with bright edges to everything—a nip in the air, but a promise of warmth by noon: sunlight on the broad, tree-rimmed river that went—by everything Pyetr had sworn was true—down to great, golden-roofed Kiev.

  Once their debt to Uulamets was satisfied, Sasha thought on his first trip downhill. Then Kiev. He tried not to think about the debt part of it, because he knew Pyetr would be angry with him when he knew he had bargained himself into an agreement with the old man—a very unlimited and vague kind of agreement, namely that he should help the old man, and the old man had not said how long this should be or what form this help should take-Yes, he had said, and spoken for Pyetr, too; and Pyetr was surely going to take exception to that.—Even if it was to pay for Pyetr’s life, Pyetr would insist there had been nothing wrong and Uulamets was a faker like the wizards in Vojvoda—

  Pyetr might be angry enough to go off to Kiev and leave him; and that prospect, being left alone with the old man—

  Sasha recollected smoke and fire and the terror the old man had put into him whenever he had flinched from the old man’s orders. He opened his eyes wider to the daylight and tried to drive that vision out of his eyes and the feeling out of his bones that there was something terribly dangerous and sinister about Uulamets beyond the obvious fact that he was a wizard.

  The ferryman’s house he was sure had never been Uulamets’ proper post; no more than that boat, that very large, age-grayed boat which rode at its moorings in the river—had ever belonged to Uulamets … who therefore had taken this place. The god only knew what had become of the ferryman, or how long ago, or what the old man did here, in these woods so dead there was not even the sign of a rabbit—

  Uulamets was at work in the root cellar when Sasha came back with the first bucket. He poured it in the barrel and went out again, not without looking to be sure Pyetr was still safely asleep and that nothing had happened, because he had a sudden, horrible imagination of Uulamets as a Forest-thing of particularly malevolent sort, who might for some reason known only to magical creatures be powerless so long as it was the both of them; but singly, and against a sleeping man—

  It was a childish kind of fear. Duck the head under the covers and be safe from goblins. As if there was anything, he told himself, that Uulamets could not have done last night, when he had worked with knives—

  He could not put it out of his mind, how Uulamets had started to pour the pain-draught on the floor, with that look of hateful satisfaction in the act—

  No, not hateful. Malevolent. Hating. Wishing Pyetr to suffer

  Sasha hastened his steps, filled the bucket and soaked his knee slogging uphill and up the sloping walk to the porch.

  But there was nothing, when he opened the door, but old Uulamets poring over a book at the table, in the yellow light from the parchment windowpanes, and Pyetr still sleeping with the covers over his head, peaceful and unmolested.

  He told himself he was a fool and trekked after the third bucketful, banishing thoughts of long-nailed demons and Forest-things. Uulamets was a
wizard, absolutely: he had watched the color come back to Pyetr’s face last night, he had watched Uulamets hold his hands over the injury and seen Pyetr’s sweating, pain-twisted face settle slowly to ease.

  No wizard in Vojvoda could do that… or there would be no people hurting who could afford the cure. Everyone in town would know it: people would flock to that wizard and make him richer than any boyar could dream—he would be the tsar’s own physician.

  Uulamets could surely go down the river to Kiev and make his fortune with such skill-Could he not?

  Then why did he sit in this hovel, beside a ferry crossing where no one came anymore, in a woods that had not a rabbit or a squirrel to populate it?

  Bandits, he had called them.

  But where were the bandits that everyone believed lived in this forest? And if they were off in some secret camp deep in the woods—how did they feed themselves with no travelers to rob and no game to hunt, except they lived as old Uulamets claimed he lived, by fishing and by gardening? That hardly seemed the life brigands would practice.

  There was a lightness about the morning and a wrongness about the place which counseled Sasha«he might be in greater danger than the bright sun could warn him of, and he might well, if he were wise, wish himself back in Vojvoda, carrying buckets to his ponies that he very much missed this morning, or expecting the cat to walk the rail and wish him good morning—

  —all the homely, ordinary things that just were not here, in this musty, dusty place on the edge of a river that saw no boats.

  He had Pyetr, without whom he did not know what he would do. The thought of being alone with the old man appalled him for reasons he could not precisely lay a name to, and he was not so naive as Pyetr accused him of being: he knew which of uncle Fedya’s customers to avoid and how to give the slip to trouble.

  But Uulamets, he thought, lugging the bucket the third time up the hill—but the way Uulamets looked at him with those eyes that did not let him look away, eyes that once fixing on him had made him fool enough to mumble yes when the old man asked would he pay the price he asked, not asking first what it was—

  Because otherwise Pyetr would die and he would be alone here.

  Pyetr could not leave without him, Pyetr could not be so cruel as that, Pyetr surely would owe him some gratitude—

  —that because he was not wizard enough to heal him, he had made such a fool’s bargain with one who was.

  By afternoon Uulamets had put him variously to scrubbing the log walk-up and the porch (more water to carry) and mending a loose plank and a broken shutter. By afternoon Pyetr was awake, sore and very weak, but avowing himself free of pain. He took a little tea, which Uulamets prescribed, and then got up, wrapped up in his ghastly rag of a shirt, and tottered outside for necessities, with Sasha’s help, scarcely steady enough to walk.

  Pyetr had very little to say, except that the tea was good and that he felt better—and finally, before they reached the porch again, he said that they had best stay a couple of days before they were on their way again.

  “We can’t,” Sasha said miserably. “—The ‘be on our way again,’ that is. The old man holds us to account for your doctoring.”

  “Well, we’ll pay him.”

  “We tried that,” Sasha said, realizing that Pyetr might have dropped many more things than that from his recollection of last night, and he stopped while they were still alone. “He’s a wizard. He says he doesn’t want money.”

  Pyetr laughed, a weak, desperate sound. “All wizards want money, it’s what they do best.”

  “Not this one.”

  “The old man’s a good herb doctor. His stuff works. We pay him a couple in silver—I’ve got it—and we pay for our lodging and our board and maybe for a passage, if we can persuade the old goat to take that boat out—”

  “He’s not the ferryman. I don’t think there’s been a ferryman here for ages. Not since the East shut down. And he won’t take money, Pyetr, he’s not interested.”

  “Well, what does he want?”

  It was not the question Sasha wanted at the moment nor the one he knew how to answer, and he shrugged. “I think he likes my cooking. I think maybe he just wants company for a few days—” That sounded entirely lame. “Maybe just some things cleaned and fixed. I told him I would. You need to rest, and I can scrub his floors and carry his water for him, that’s all he’s asked so far. That surely keeps us even for room and board.”

  “That crazy old goat’s been working you all morning, I’ve been awake now and again.” Pyetr was white with the effort it cost him to stand, and he leaned trembling against the rail of the walk-up. “You’ve got yourself another uncle Fedya, he’s so anxious to do you favors and have his floors scrubbed. I’d watch this old fellow! I don’t trust him.”

  There was real fear in Pyetr’s eyes. Sasha wondered how much of last night he did recall, or how much of the singing still ran through his brain.

  “There are wizards,” Sasha said. “This old man is one, I don’t have any doubt about it, and it’s not safe to cheat him. There’s no telling what he could do.”

  “Damned right there’s no telling what he could do! Drug our tea and carve us up for bacon is what he could do! Listen to me!” Pyetr seized his hand where it rested on the rail. “I don’t like his look. I don’t like dealing with crazy men and I don’t like eating and drinking with a crazy man brewing the tea and for all we know doctoring the soup. You’ve never been out on your own. You don’t imagine the kind of world this is and you don’t imagine what kind of things people will do to each other. For the god’s sake, boy… don’t trust this man and don’t consider yourself obligated to him for anything.”

  “I promised him—”

  “Listen, I’d patch a man up if he was bleeding on my floor, boy, and I’m not an honest man. What did it cost him? No more work than you’ve given. We’re even. That’s all. We’re quit.”

  “He’s a wizard!” Sasha said. “Pyetr, you were dying, and he pulled you back—”

  “Horsefeathers! I was tired, I was cold, I needed a bed and a meal—”

  “You don’t remember! I watched him do it! Look at you. You’re sweating, you’re white as a ghost, you couldn’t have gone on another day.”

  “You watched a good show, boy, it was already scabbed over, I wasn’t dying, I’m not dying this morning and I have no plans to be staying here any longer than takes me to get my wind back.”

  He said that. He was hardly able to go on standing.

  “Get out of the wind,” Sasha said. It sounded too much like an order, but he was not dealing with a sane man this morning. He tried to soften it. “Please, Pyetr Illitch. Please be patient, please just get well and do what he asks for a few days and don’t go off and leave me here…”

  Pyetr was shivering now, his teeth chattering. The cold was getting too much for him, and the shirt was hardly more than a rag. “I won’t leave you here,” he said. “Damn if I will. Don’t promise the old goat anything. Don’t let him bully you. If he makes threats, tell me.”

  “I promise,” Sasha said. He would have said anything to silence argument and get Pyetr inside and get another cup of hot tea into him.

  There were things Pyetr would understand and there were things Pyetr would refuse to understand—or to believe in, until it was too late.

  Maybe he was a fool, Sasha thought; and maybe Pyetr was entirely right; but if he had ever had a danger-feeling about a thing it was this place and this man.

  Pyetr’s reasoning seemed sound to him, except in one thing—that it reckoned on simply walking away down the river shore; and he did not think Uulamets would allow that right now.

  When he would allow it—or if he would allow it: that was the problem.

  Uulamets put him to tidying up the cabinets and dusting before supper; and to cooking after mat, which was not so bad—one could filch a little while one worked, and Sasha did learn, in dusting off the lids of the smallest pots and rearranging things, where more of
the spices were—and where other things were, some of which had clay seals, and some of which had scratches in those seals he thought might be magic signs; or perhaps—because aunt Uenka had had her marks, too, although she had no reading or writing—they might simply say what they were: things like mushrooms and moss and lichens, wormwood and what he thought was belladonna, and other things he had no idea at all.

  Uulamets spent all the rest of his time reading and writing, by window light and by candle, except when he went out to the river and came back with a pair of good-sized fish, which he gave Sasha to clean; Pyetr offered his help at turnip peeling while Sasha cleaned the fish at the edge of the yard.

  Of a sudden wings fluttered and cracked, and Sasha looked up in alarm as a raven settled to the ground and strutted solemnly over to pick at the offal.

  It was the first bird, the first living creature he had seen in all this place except the fish they had for dinner, and by the way it looked at him, with a single black liquid eye—the other was put out—he was quite glad to feed it the offal, only so it let the fish alone.

  “Be welcome,” Sasha said to the creature, and it dipped its head in the way of its kind, which might have been a bow, or only an inspection of its dinner. “I don’t suppose there’s a flock about? A rabbit or two? A deer?”

  The raven looked coldly up at him with a fish liver in its beak, and after due consideration, bolted it whole.

  “Quite,” Sasha said. “Too many questions. Excuse me, brother Raven.”

  It gulped another mouthful and regarded him again with not quite disinterest.

  One did not take such a creature for ordinary, not in this forest. He was glad enough to leave it the offal and take the fish up to the house, not without a backward glance.

  But it was only a fish-loving raven.

  “There’s a black bird down by the river,” he said to Uulamets, who was still at his studies.

  “He comes and he goes,” Uulamets said, without looking up, so he took the fish to the boiling pot and threw it in, washed the fish-smell off his hands and took to the spice-bottles.