While Pyetr drowsed in the corner, or wisely pretended to, to evade quarrels.
The boy was a good cook, Pyetr decided, give or take the fact it was fish stew again. And he was not in a mood to complain. He had made up his mind to keep his head down and take Sasha’s very sensible advice, in fact, since he was weak as a day-old kitten, and since the old man and his stick1 were not inconsiderable.
But he kept score, and reckoned up the tab at this irregular inn, and assessed whether there was anything valuable to be had, beyond a clean shirt and maybe a coat or a blanket or two-reckoning that Uulamets would have worked at least that out of the boy in the time it took him to heal.
In particular he kept his eye on Uulamets and the old man’s access to the stewpot and the tea, this evening, in the case their kindly host decided to add to the recipe.
Uulamets sat all day long hunched over a book, following the lines with his finger—only rousing himself to give Sasha more orders.
Maybe that was all he ever did in this desolation—sit at that table all day and read that book, and set his fishing lines and cook and read that book again.
God knew what he was reading, or what could occupy him hours on end, just the occasional whisper of a turned page, about every candlemark or so.
Old man in a dead woods, reading his book till the words ate up his mind.
Except he enjoyed Sasha’s cooking.
“Good,” Uulamets said, tapping his spoon on the bowl. “More.”
And when Sasha had filled his bowl again:
“Set one outside,” the old man said.
Sasha bowed politely and went and did that—with the night and the dark out there which had once seemed halfway safe so long as they were in it; but which now, with light inside the cottage, seemed blacker than it had ever been. Pyetr watched that dark carefully, not able to figure just why the hairs were rising on his nape, but he was anxious until Sasha had (quite hastily) shut that door.
Foolish, Pyetr told himself. There was nothing different about the night than any other night.
But he spilled a little of his tea when a flurry of wings battered at the shutters.
Sasha spun around and looked at it, as if doubting the security of that window.
“What in the god’s name is that?” Pyetr muttered.
“Only a bird,” Uulamets said. “Just a bird.”
It was surely just exactly that, Pyetr thought; and thought that he would be just a little more confident of the honest, solid world if this damned old man had not said that: he was set to believe nothing Ilya Uulamets said, and Uulamets stole the truth and left him with this most foolish half-heartbeat of doubt what ground he was standing on.
Pigeon, perhaps. Perhaps the old man fed them and strangled them for his dinners.
“Tonight,” Uulamets said, gesturing at one and the other of them with his spoon, “tonight is the full moon. I have business tonight. Roots, you understand. Digging roots.” The white eyebrows lifted, and he took another spoonful of stew, smacking his lips. “I’d finish the pot. Wouldn’t waste this.” He set his bowl aside and rose. “Then I’d get to bed.—Would you care to come along, boy?”
“No, sir,” Sasha said; and Pyetr took a quick, measuring glance toward his sword, over against the wall with Uulamets’ staff.
Uulamets shrugged and took down his coat from the peg by the door.
Pyetr got up from the table, and walked over to pick up his sword and the old man’s staff.
The old man held out his hand. Pyetr thrust the staff into it.
“It’s boring work,” Uulamets said, “—digging herbs.” He lifted the latch. “Young people. They never like the working part. Just the results. My daughter was like that.”
This withered old man had had a daughter? Pyetr thought to himself. Incredible. Probably with the look and disposition of a shrike.
Uulamets went out into the dark and pulled the door to. The latch fell.
Pyetr let his breath go.
“We’re getting out of here,” he said. “Tonight.”
Sasha gave him a frightened look but he said nothing. Pyetr went over to the pegs by the door and took down the shirt that was hanging there and pulled it over his head. Sasha was still standing there as if he had no notion what to do or what to say.
“Get the quilts and some rope,” Pyetr said, and when Sasha hesitated: “Do I have to do it myself? Take down a string of turnips. The smoked fish there. It’s a long way to Kiev.”
“Pyetr, he’s not just any old man. And he helped us!”
Pyetr glared at him.
“—At least,” Sasha said faintly, “at least we don’t have to take a lot. One quilt. One string of turnips.’We can get by.”
The boy’s disapproval stung, foolhardy as it was. Pyetr stalked over to the hearth and gathered up both quilts, cursed under his breath and threw one down, pulled down a coil of light rope from one rafter, while Sasha took down a string of withered turnips from the other.
“Can you walk that far?” Sasha said, jumping down off the bench, looking his direction with concern. “Pyetr, there’ll be other chances. Let’s not do this. We don’t know what the old man may do…”
“There’s nothing the matter with me. There never was. The old faker puts on a good show. He drugged me. You drank the tea. God knows what he put in it. He could make you see anything.” He took the turnips and rolled them up in the quilt on the table, doubled the ends toward the center. “Take a knife. We could always use a knife.”
“I won’t steal!”
“It’s not stealing. It’s fair pay for the work you’ve put in. Take the knife over there. And take the fish, while you’re at it. He gets them for free.”
“No,” Sasha said.
“Fool,” Pyetr muttered, and tied the quilt at either end, with the rope for a handle. He slung it over his shoulder, took his sword from beside the table and picked up the knife himself, and took his belt and Sasha’s coat from the peg. “Listen, boy, if you want to stay with him, you just do that. But if you have any sense—”
“I’m coming,” Sasha said breathlessly, and Pyetr tossed the coat at him, tied his belt, lifted the latch and opened the door.
Something doglike the other side growled and snapped at them.
“God!” he cried, as it lunged.
He slammed the door so fast it hit it with a thump, barking and snarling and spitting, shoving it inward as he shoved out. Sasha threw himself against the door and both of them pushed, while it scrabbled and snarled and hissed.
“What is that thing?” Pyetr yelled, fighting to get the bar thrown, while it jolted them and scrabbled at the wood. “What in hell is it?”
The bar went down. They leaned there panting, and heard the click of nails as it walked the porch.
It hit the window next, and scratched at the shutter. The shutter bar jumped and rattled under a sudden assault.
“My god,” Pyetr said. His knees were shaking. He tried not to make that evident. He stood away from the door, drew his sword and listened while the thing abandoned its attack on that window and padded, click, click, snuffle, whuffle, back along the porch.
It tried the door again, scratching like a dog at the corner and growling.
“It’s the Little Old Man,” Sasha whispered.
“Man, hell! It’s a damned black dog!”
“It isn’t a dog. It isn’t a dog, Pyetr, it knows we’re stealing—”
He heard the scratching, the click of claws. Perhaps it was only a trick of haste and bad light, the way it had looked, all black hair and teeth. He tried to make a dog’s shape out of his memory of those jaws, or to reconcile it with that spitting sound it made.
It did it again, and hit the door hard, so it rattled the bar.
Then more pacing. His hand sweated on the sword grip.
Something else moved, underneath the flooring.
“We should put things back,” Sasha whispered.
“It’s just a dog, for the god’
s sake!”
“It’s not a dog—” Sasha unfastened his coat and hung it back on the peg by the door. He held out his hand. “Please.”
A man felt like a fool. If he were not recovering from a wound—if he were not still weak, he should fling the door open and behead the ill-tempered creature.
If there was only one.
It hissed at the door crack. And gave a cat’s ear-piercing shriek.
He winced.
“Pyetr!”
He shed the bedroll and Sasha moved quickly to untie it and to put everything back in its place, rope, turnips, quilt and all.
Another battering and scratching at the door.
“It hasn’t improved its disposition,” Pyetr said. “Dammit, boy, it doesn’t listen to your granny-tales.”
“Don’t make fun, Pyetr, please! It’s not to make fun of—”
“I swear to you I liked the Old Man at The Cockerel better. Pleasant cat. Scratch its ears and it behaves. This one—God!”
It hit the door with a force that brought him around on his guard, shaking in the knees. Its claws had to be ripping wood from the door-frame.
And something thumped under the boards beneath his feet.
He stood there with his breath coming hard and this terrible feeling that he was locked in a nightmare, that things had not made sense since they came to this house and that they might not make sense ever again.
He had no wish to be killed by a bogle in which he resolutely did not believe.
“How’s your luck tonight?” he asked Sasha. “Wish that one away. It’s rather well your line of work, isn’t it?”
“Put the sword up,” Sasha cried. “It doesn’t like it. Put it up. Please put it up.”
The boy was serious. So was the thing on the porch. And Pyetr had a most dreadful suspicion that tonight, this moment, nothing he knew for certain was certain at all.
“Put it up!” Sasha said.
He sheathed the sword. He walked back to the center of the room with a shrug, a swagger, and a misgiving glance at the door.
There was quiet outside.
He liked the conclusions that offered almost as little as he liked the slithering under the floor.
Sasha took the jug of vodka from the table and uncorked it, which Pyetr thought an excellent impulse.
But Sasha poured a little onto the floor, where it ran down between the cracks.
“Don’t make it drunk,” Pyetr said. “Haven’t we got enough trouble?”
Sasha glared at him. Sasha took all this appeasing of spirits with disturbing seriousness, and the stableboy was for a moment the one of them with no doubt what he was doing.
Pyetr lifted his hands. “I apologize,” he said. “I most earnestly beg its pardon.”
There was quiet then, just a little creaking of the boards.
He and Sasha looked at each other a long, quiet moment.
There was no sound but the wind.
“I’ll make tea,” Sasha said. “I think we can use some tea right now.”
Pyetr wanted the vodka. But he was ashamed to say that, so he sat down at the table, telling himself the wobble in his knees was only his recent injury and the tremor in his arms was surely natural after all the days they had gone cold and hungry.
He was glad to have the boy fussing about something as ordinary as making tea, which let him think about that instead of what might be on the other side of that door. The tea gave him, finally, something to do with his hands and something warm to hold.
“I think it’s settled down,” Sasha said, sitting down opposite him at the table.
“What ‘it’?” he retorted. “I don’t know what kind of livestock the old man keeps, but as cats go—”
Sasha looked at him from under his brows and bit his lip unhappily.
Like an accusation for a fool, Pyetr thought, denying the foolishness his eyes had seen, while he was shaking from having seen it—or not having seen it clearly enough or quickly enough to see it for what it was.
If things came out of granny-tales and attacked a man going out a door, then other things could be true, which he had no wish to think about.
He dropped his head against his hands and wished they had gone some other road but this.
There was the boat. He had no idea how to manage a boat, large or small, but he supposed that if one cut the ropes and set it loose even a big boat would drift; and the river had to be a safer route to Kiev than any shore with creatures like that roaming the woods. It might come to shipwreck…
He could not swim. Probably the boy could not.
So it was back to wandering the shore, and, he told himself, if they had made it here without accident, they could just as well go south with as great a confidence.
“We’ll try again,” he said; and Sasha whispered, anxiously:
“The old man’s a wizard, I tell you. He’s terribly dangerous.”
“Well, so are you,” he retorted. “Isn’t that what I heard all the way from Vojvoda?”
“Not like him.” Sasha raked a hand through his hair. “He can bring back the dead!”
“I wasn’t dead, dammit!”
“You were cold, Pyetr, cold as ice, your color was gone—”
“I was cold from walking three days with no food.” He reached after the vodka jug, poured a half a cup and sipped it. He did not want to think about that. Not tonight.
“It happened,” Sasha said. “Why can’t you see the truth?”
“Because it’s not sensible!” he said.
Which was all he could say at this point.
So he drank down the vodka and poured himself another cup.
Pyetr was angry at him, Sasha thought unhappily, while Pyetr drank his way to bed.
His relatives were like that. They said they placed no belief in his curse. But they still looked at him and frowned when things went wrong. Sometimes when she was angry, aunt Ilenka would say, Things happen with you around. I don’t know why I put up with you.
Pyetr did not believe in the Thing in the yard, even when it nearly bit him; and he did not believe in wizards, but he looked Sasha’s way with a certain frown that said to Sasha that he was certainly under consideration for fault in this—if Pyetr could find one.
And it might be his fault. There was always the chance that it was. In the face of someone as powerful as Uulamets, his I-will and his I-would were a whisper against a gale; but they were there: he knew that they were, with a conviction he had never had until this place—not a happy conclusion to reach.
But worst of all was the fear that Uulamets knew what he was.
That invitation tonight to join him—an invitation to him, but not to Pyetr…
Pyetr’s head sank onto his hand. He looked so thoroughly disheartened.
It was a long time before old Uulamets came back. Pyetr had taken to the quilts by the hearth, with his sword tucked in with him, with more than enough vodka in him to account fora sound sleep.
But Sasha waited, drowsing a little, listening for the old man’s step on the boards outside; and when at last it came, human footsteps and the tap of Uulamets’ staff, and finally the lifting of the latch, he was there to take the old man’s cloak.
“Still awake,” Uulamets said, a half-whisper as he set his staff against the wall. “I trust nothing disturbed you.”
One could not lie to a man like Uulamets. Sasha had made his mind up to that. He went and poured Uulamets a half-cup of vodka.
“My friend wanted to leave. Something objected.”
Uulamets took the cup and, with a frown, leaned against the table and sipped it. “I’m not surprised.”
“My friend and I—” Sasha made a bow. “We want to go to Kiev, master Uulamets. We want your leave to go.”
“After trying to rob the house—”
“Only a quilt and a string of turnips. Of nothing else.”
“—without a shred of conscience.”
“We understand we’re indebted to you, sir. We’re not thi
eves. Only we don’t understand what you want from us. We want you to tell us.”
“Huh.” Uulamets took a drink, wiped his scraggly white mustaches with the back of his hand. “Tell you.”
Sasha took a deep breath and ticked off the points on his fingers as he would to a merchant in the market. “We want a string of turnips, we want a quilt, and a string offish, and if you can sail the boat, we’d like very much for you to take us to Kiev, if you would, sir.”
Uulamets stared at him with those wolfs eyes and finally grinned, as pleasantly, Sasha thought, as the Thing in the yard.
“To Kiev.”
“Yes, sir, if you can. If not…”
“I won’t.”
“Then the quilt and the turnips and the fish. And a clean shirt and a proper coat for Pyetr. He’s a gentleman. He shouldn’t go ragged.”
“I’m sure. A gentleman with a certain difficulty: light fingers and lighter morals.”
“He’s not a thief. Neither of us is a thief, sir.” His voice began to tremble, and he was afraid it was going to get worse. “We’re willing to pay for what we take, but you won’t take money. I offered to work and I’ve done that. It seems as if we should be even. What else do you want?” His voice completely broke and worse, his chin trembled. “If you’ll make it clear what will square accounts we’re quite ready to do anything reasonable.”
Uulamets persisted in that slight wolf-grin. He drank another sip of the cup, set it down and stood up straight. “A bargain, is it?”
“For all the things I said, sir. And that you be fair with us and don’t play any tricks.”
“A wary young man.”
“And don’t arrange anything to happen to us.”
Uulamets turned his back and walked a few steps toward the hearth where Pyetr slept. He scratched the back of his head as if he was thinking, disarranging thin white hair, and slowly turned and looked back.
“A very clever young man,” Uulamets said, half-whispering. “Suppose that I did have a task for you.”
“What?” Sasha asked.
“I have a need for a clever lad. Tomorrow night, as it happens.”
“Doing what?”
“Digging roots.” Uulamets mouth quirked into a toothy smile. “And other things. For several nights, perhaps. Until I find what I’m looking for.”