R1 - Rusalka (33 page)

He flung himself down onto Sasha, knocking him flat and holding the rail with one arm as the boat shuddered over sand and branches came right over the bow, splintering and poking them with twigs.

The boat swung sideways to the shore then, floated free, and more branches splintered over their heads and all along the right side.

Then it was still, except the wild bobbing in the current, and Uulamets , astern, was shouting: "Fools! Get the ropes! Take down the sail! Hurry!"

Pyetr stumbled up to his feet, staggering in the pitch, and started untying the rope, cursing the while Sasha pulled to give him slack to get the knot free. The two of them let down the spar. Torn canvas billowed down around them while the boat scraped its whole side against the overhanging branches.

"Fine place," Pyetr said, as Uulamets shouted at them to make the boat fast to the trees. Pyetr still felt the wobble in his knees when he crossed the uneasy deck; his firm hold on a small branch of a tree solidly wed to earth came as a profound relief in one sense. He flung the mooring rope over a larger branch and tied a solid knot.

But the deep night between the trees made him glad to look toward the twilight still sheening the water, and toward human voices aft—Uulamets sharply instructing Sasha how to tie a knot, Uulamets bidding Eveshka open the stores and make supper—

Certainly, Pyetr thought, they would get no farther in the dark tonight, and with the sail lying in rags, maybe not tomorrow. He dreaded the thought of going on, he felt uneasy to be spending the night against this wooded farther shore—and he felt especially uneasy that the sail had torn and the rope had parted all at once. A handful of wizards ought to manage better than that. Or at least—

"Have we gotten there?" he asked Uulamets as he came aft, with no more idea than he had ever had exactly where they were going. The last light was fast leaving, the river reflected a dim sky, and the constant lap of water and the scrape of branches against their hull made a dismally lonely sound.

"We've gotten where we are," Uulamets muttered, and brushed past, leaving Sasha to whisper, ever so quietly,

"I think he was holding the boat together. I think he just gave out."

"/think we're in trouble," Pyetr said.

Eveshka set up their little stove on the stern and lit a fire in its pan with wood they had brought, though the god knew they had twigs enough lying on the deck and accessible just off it. Soon enough there were cakes baking and Eveshka even brought out a little honey to go on them—while master Uulamets lit the lamp, set it on the ledge of the deckhouse, which was really too tiny for anything but the stores they had brought and stowed there, then sat down with his book and his inkpot to write down the things he had done—

And to think, Sasha supposed: certainly Uulamets would not want to be disturbed with questions this evening.

"How far have we come?" Pyetr asked Eveshka, as they sat with her around the little stove. "Do you have any idea where we're going?"

Eveshka looked up. Her hair was plaited in two huge braids that made her face look very small and her eyes very large-eyes pale and softened, as it happened, by the little light that came up from the stove and down from the lamp. She had said hardly two words to anyone since breakfast. She had stood by Uulamets ' side the day long, helping her father and suffering his anger; and now she looked very worried.

"To find Kavi," she said. Her voice left a hush like a spell on the air; any voice would seem coarse after that; and the water lapped and the branches scraped and the fire crackled and snapped.

"Where?" Pyetr insisted finally.

"My father knows where he is."

A page turned, behind them.

The silence went on a moment or two while Eveshka turned the cakes, a scrape of the spatula on the stove top. She said, "I was foolish to trust him. My father was right. I know that now."

"What are we going to do about this Kavi Chernevog?" Pyetr asked. "What's this about hearts? What did the Thing mean, this morning?"

Eveshka stopped, then turned a last cake, her eyes set on her work. She said placidly, "I was foolish. My father was absolutely right."

Sasha felt a little chill. Perhaps Pyetr did: he cradled his hand in his lap and looked at Eveshka as if he suspected what Sasha had begun to feel, that there was indeed something hollow about her.

Pyetr looked at him. Sasha said nothing, only sent him a warning look back, fearing that too many questions now might upset the peace—if there were more answers in Eveshka at all, or if she were free to speak them. The god knew what kind of hold Chernevog still had on her.

Eveshka served the cakes. They sat together in the flickering light from master Uulamets ' oil lamp, ate their supper, and had a little of the vodka—the first of their jars having fetched up against the deck house unbroken: Sasha had done that much. But Uulamets took his supper over in the light, sitting cross-legged on the deck, poring over his book and paying no attention to them.

Pyetr said, "I suppose we've got to fix that sail. Did we bring any cord?"

"I don't know," Sasha said. "Eveshka?"

"Yes," Eveshka said softly, and got up and went around to the deckhouse.

"What's this about hearts?" Pyetr whispered urgently when she was out of earshot. "What was he talking about? What's wrong with her?"

"I don't know," Sasha whispered back. "I never did understand."

Pyetr looked disappointed in him—as if Pyetr expected wizardry answers from him. He could not so much as keep Pyetr's hand from hurting—he knew that it was, even at the moment—and still Pyetr trusted him in life and death ways and expected him to come up with miracles.

That scared him more than the River-thing did—but maybe it was part of being a man, not to ask for help. Maybe it was part of being a man to try to do what people expected.

There was master Uulamets , for one thing, with his book that recollected everything he had ever done—while Sasha had never thought that he ought to do the same: at least he had never even imagined that he could write, until master Uulamets saw fit to teach him. But he thought now that he had not been very responsible throughout his dealings with Uulamets and the vody-anoi, wishing this and wishing that at random, simply because master Uulamets had told him he had the gift—exactly the kind of mistake master Uulamets had said most people made: but a wizard had to remember, that was all, had to figure out the connections before he made a wish, the very way he himself had used to sit and think in the quiet of the stable, sometimes for hours before he decided what he wanted about a thing.

Then Pyetr had come along, half again his age and wiser about the world than he was; and for the first time in his life having a friend, what could he do but want what Pyetr desperately needed?

But he had never until now understood how much he had lulled himself into thinking it was only himself and Pyetr and Uulamets involved in his wishes. It never had been. There was the River-thing and Eveshka and now somebody named Kavi Chernevog, and he had made so many desperate wishes lately he was on the edge of not remembering all the things he had wished earlier in his life and he was far past understanding how things fitted together. He could not even clearly
remember
the stableboy at The Cockerel, because that boy felt like someone else, someone he did not know how to be, now—

Because if he should meet Mischa now, and Mischa shoved him off a walk, he would not be afraid; he—

He could kill Mischa: he pulled back from that idea with a chill close to panic, and wished hard,
not
wanting Mischa to die, no, please, not wishing anything harmful, no matter how far away in the world, because he had been a fool. He thought-even aunt Ilenka had kept a tally with a charcoal stick, just of turnips and cabbages.

But so many things had tumbled on him one after the other he had somewhere stopped thinking how they fit together; and it was not The Cockerel's stable any more, where days were one after the other the same and where he knew everything and everyone and nobody wanted more than his supper on time.

"What's the matter?" Pyetr asked him, nudging his arm.

Sasha wiped sweat from his lip, hearing Eveshka's quiet returning step on the boards, and shook his head.

Eveshka set a basket by him. There was cord and there was an awl.

"Too dark now to do anything about it," Pyetr said, and gulped the last of his cup as Eveshka bent to pick up the little stove with its ashes. He motioned toward the bow of the boat. "Grandfather's got his book. Let's get some sleep."

It was a good idea, Sasha thought. He felt guilty: he thought he should oifer to help Eveshka clean up, but he knew he should not leave Pyetr alone either, and he thought with longing of blankets and a soft spot in the canvas piled on the deck up there.

But once he had it, and once his eyes were shut, with the river lapping at the hull and the branches raking back and forth against their side, he kept thinking of things he had wanted and about aunt Ilenka and the tally board, and wondering what his added up to by now.

Pyetr for his part had no trouble getting to sleep, no matter that the dark behind his eyelids was alive with the vodyanoi's coils and murky water, and that he still felt the deck tilting under him: he knew where he was now—tied to a forest he did not want to think about, but as far as safety it looked to be the most he was going to have—and the hand hurt, but it had hurt ever since carrying the loads down to the boat, so he reckoned finally he had simply bruised it.

He was reasoning more clearly now that the boat was at rest and his stomach was less queasy. Uulamets certainly had other, more subtle ways to do away with him than pitching him off the boat, which Sasha would never believe an accident; and the boat, if they could get it to move at all, was surely not going to roll over tomorrow any more than it had today—not with three wizards preventing it…

The old man got tired and the boat broke a rope and tore a sail, but it got to shore…

Upon which thought Pyetr burrowed into the nest of canvas and blankets and just let go—not without knowing where his sword was, in the blankets with him; or knowing Sasha was an arm's reach away. And that there was that little bit of salt in a bit of cloth, that Sasha had given him this morning.

Keep it in your pocket, Sasha had said.—It could never hurt.

He agreed with that.

And agreed that a bed well back on the deck was better than near the rail, be it the river side or the forest side of the boat.

He slept. He woke with the sun warming the blankets uncomfortably and the impression that there had been a sound a moment ago—

Sasha was getting up. Pyetr thought about that a heartbeat or two and realized it was very late for Uulamets to be still abed, and it was very unlike the old man to let them rest.

At which point he pushed the blanket off and picked up his sword on his way to his feet.

"Master Uulamets?" Sasha said aloud, a small and lonely voice against the sound of the river and the trees.

No one answered.

"Damn," Pyetr said, with an increasingly upset stomach. He pulled his sword out of its sheath, stepped over the spar and its mass of canvas, and walked quietly toward the stern, hearing Sasha walking behind him. He worried about tangling with Sasha on the retreat: he reached back and touched Sasha's arm, warned him back as he edged around the riverward side of the deckhouse.

There was nobody aft. That left the forestward side, and he beckoned Sasha to catch up and took the wide path around to a view of the rest of the deck.

No one there either.

"There's the storage," Sasha whispered, coming up beside him.

Pyetr took a deep breath and said, "I doubt it—"

But he had no good feeling about walking around the deck house to make that search. He took a good grip on his sword, lifted the latch and pulled the door open-But there was nothing inside but their stores—from which the basket of Uulamets ' belongings, including the book, was missing.

"That damned old fool's gone for a walk!" Pyetr exclaimed, and Sasha came to look for himself.

"Unless the vodyanoi got him," Sasha said.

"Don't you think we'd have heard that?" Pyetr asked.