R1 - Rusalka (12 page)

"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.

«
^
»

T
here 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."