R1 - Rusalka (36 page)

"What happened?" Sasha asked, holding to his shoulder. "Pyetr?"

Pyetr raked his hand through his hair and propped his arm against his knees. "God," he muttered. "She—"

"What she'?" Sasha had a dreadful premonition what "she" Pyetr meant, and shook him hard to keep him awake. "Eveshka? Pyetr, was it Eveshka?"

Pyetr nodded, rested his head against his arm and stayed that way, as if sitting up and breathing was all he had in him at the moment.

Sasha grabbed up the blankets and put them around Pyetr's shoulders. He hesitated to leave Pyetr even for a moment, considering the water and the woods on either hand and the nature of the danger, but he hurried across to the deckhouse and brought out the stove, brought wood and the firepot and with trembling, mistake-ridden efforts got a fire started in the pan, enough to warm Pyetr's immediate vicinity and make a strong cup of tea. Meanwhile he gave Pyetr a small drink of vodka, and Pyetr's hands when he touched them were still like ice.

"What did she do?" Sasha asked, steadying the cup on its way to Pyetr's mouth.

Pyetr took a sip, shook his head, and gave up the cup then to hold the quilts about him. He suddenly began to shiver, bent double and very evidently not wanting to talk about the matter.

But: "Where's master Uulamets?" Sasha persisted. "Pyetr, for the god's sake he's in trouble! Talk to me! Tell me what you know! Did she say where he was?"

"I don't know," Pyetr said, between rattling teeth. "I don't know. She's lost him—"

"Did she say that?"

Pyetr shook his head and rested it against his arm.

Sasha built the fire as high as the stove and the deck would bear, applied all his intention to Pyetr's warmth and well-being until he actually felt dizzy himself, while with another trip to the deckhouse for the honey, he made him a cup of hot, sweetened tea.

Pyetr drank it slowly, warming his hands with it, and that seemed to Sasha to have helped most of everything he had done. "I'm sorry," Pyetr said, when he had drunk it down to half. "I don't know why we're alive this morning." He felt the back of his head and grimaced. "Fell on my head, by the feel of it. I must have walked—"

"Was she alone?"

"I think so. I can't remember. I just can't remember. I'm sorry. Small help I was."

"It's not your fault. Pyetr, did she say anything?"

"She was a ghost again." Pyetr looked as if he had just realized he had not said that. "She wasn't threatening, she didn't feel—angry: she was worried. Upset. God, I don't know… I don't know, it's just—like she was before, lost and trying to get back and she can't. I can't say why and don't look at me like that!"

Sasha shook his head. It was hard for Pyetr to talk in terms of feeling things were so. Pyetr wanted to touch and handle things before he believed them. "I'm not," Sasha said. "I just wish I'd been awake."

"I wish I'd woke you. God, I don't know what's happening—"

Sasha grabbed Pyetr's arm and held it hard to bring him back, because Pyetr was having trouble being aware of things, and Pyetr halfway did know what was happening to him—that was the terrible part.

"Listen," Sasha said as reasonably, as steadily as he could. "I'll make more tea. Just rest. Maybe Uulamets will show up." But the thought in his heart was that Uulamets was not coming, that they were alone on this boat with the wind blowing them against the shore this morning, not a hope of getting off, for all his wishes to the contrary—and even if it turned, he doubted he could get the boat downriver—the more so if something as magical and powerful as the vodyanoi had other notions.

They had a breakfast offish which Pyetr helped catch, but Pyetr had no stomach for them after they had cleaned and cooked them. "The smell," he said. "They smell like the water."

And several times that morning that Sasha looked Pyetr's direction he was gazing off toward the woods, just staring, lost in his thoughts or lost somewhere.

The breeze blew steadily from the west, and the boat heaved and rubbed against the broken branches. Sasha looked into the stores and had no idea what to do about feeding them, since most that they had to eat was fish and turnips and the flour was running out.

He made some of it into cakes; and Pyetr would eat that, and drink the honeyed tea, and a few of the berries.

But while Sasha was cleaning the stove and turning out the ashes, he glanced back and found Pyetr standing by the forest-side rail, looking out into the trees, and when he came there carefully to suggest Pyetr stay more to the middle of the boat, Pyetr said, "I don't think we'll get off this shore," in that same lost way.

"The wind will turn," Sasha said, upset because Pyetr had just echoed his own convictions. Pyetr grasped one of the ropes that held the mast and gave a twitch of his shoulders.

"I don't think so," Pyetr said, lifted the back of his right hand to his mouth and stood there looking out into the woods. "Sasha, it won't let me alone."

"Is she out there?"

"I think she is. Maybe she's found a new tree."

"You think she's killed Uulamets?"

Pyetr did not answer for a moment. Finally he shook his head.

"Is your hand hurting?" Sasha asked.

Again a hesitation, as if the question were mere distraction to his thinking. Then a shake of his head, a deliberate effort to tear his eyes away and to look at him. "I'm not afraid to go there," Pyetr said in a distant, bewildered tone. "I think that's probably very stupid. This place scares me—this boat does. In there—" A glance toward the forest an arm's length away. "In there doesn't seem safe, either, but it doesn't give me the feeling I have here, and I don't trust it."

Pyetr was asking for advice. Sasha had nothing so definite, only a sense that there was a hazard in their trying to put out again, even if the wind should shift.

But Pyetr seemed to be in touch with Eveshka, in whatever form; and Eveshka was pulling at him, not as absolutely as Eveshka could—perhaps that her power was in some fashion diminished; perhaps that it was greater—because she had not succeeded in drawing him away from the boat; but neither was he free of that pull in her absence.

More, Pyetr seemed to be reasoning quite clearly around his premonitions: his caution was persuasive; his account of Eveshka argued distress and trouble. There was a very plausible chance that Eveshka, disembodied, separated from her father, might run back to them and speak to Pyetr the way she had before—

For whatever purpose.

"You think we should go out there?" he asked Pyetr. "Be out there in the dark? That doesn't bother you?"

Pyetr sucked at the wound on his hand and after a moment shook his head. "Not as much as staying here. That's just what I think. I don't insist. I don't trust my judgment."

"I think—" Sasha said after a breath to think twice about it, "I think there's a reason the sail tore. I think there's a reason we're stuck here.—Can you talk to her? Can you get her to come here now?"

Pyetr made a face, took hold of the rope with both hands and stared into the woods a long, long moment. Then he flinched and shook his head. "Just that feeling. It's worse."

They set foot on shore—splintered limbs and gnarled roots were their bridge and their ladder to the sheer bank, likely the way Uulamets and Eveshka had left the boat, in Pyetr's reckoning, if they had left of their own free will at all.

One fear left him the moment he found secure footing off the deck; but in the moment he reached back to steady Sasha in clambering down with his belongings, he found room for another, more sensible apprehension: that Sasha might have listened to him not because he was right, but because he was older, armed, and, admittedly, experienced in things about which Sasha was naive.

Perhaps, he thought, all his premonitions regarding the boat were nothing but fear of the water and the voyage home-perhaps he had tilted some delicate balance he should never have touched in Sasha.

He said, pulling the words out, "I'm still not sure of this. I don't know I'm right. What if whatever got Uulamets is just stronger?"

Sasha hitched the ropes of the blanket toll and the basket up on his shoulders. "Then I think we'd better find it," Sasha said. "Remember what you said about swords and magic? If it's not going to let us leave, we've got to get close to it to do anything, don't we? And the longer we wait—"

"I think I said something about fools and swords," Pyetr said under his breath, and cast a look back at the boat, thinking he might be pushing them both into a fatal, foolish mistake. "What if whatever-it-is
wants
us to do this? Have you thought of that?"

"Yes," Sasha said solemnly. "I have. But how else do we get at it?"

"God," Pyetr muttered.

But he worked his way along the crumbling rim and past the brush.

Much better feeling, then, when they were clear of the boat. Much better, when he had gotten through the first curtain of brush and in among the trees—like coming from winter's end into spring. He drew a slow breath, looked around him as Sasha was doing, at a woods where live moss was greening and springy underfoot, leaves were breaking pale from branches all around—the like of which he himself had never seen—certainly not in Vojvoda's tame little garden plots, and certainly not in the dead woods the other side.

"Where?" Sasha asked him.

He wished he could say he had no idea. But when he thought about it he did. He lifted his hand and pointed nowhere, really, that looked any different from any other way through the trees, but it was absolutely certain in his mind—

A fool following a dead girl, his old friends would shake their heads and say: Pyetr's gone quite mad.

Which was probably true, he thought—though not one of them would blink at the idea she
was
a ghost; and Sasha Misurov took it quite matter-of-factly, simply took a good grip on the ropes of his bedroll and his basket of what he called necessities, and motioned him to lead off—

Sasha having his salt pots and his herbs and fishing line and hooks and their cooking pan and such; while his own basket-pack had most of the food—and the bandages they had both thought of, Sasha because it was the kind of thing Sasha would think of, and himself because he had the glum opinion one of them was likely to need them; likewise a jug of vodka, medicinal, he and Sasha had quite solemnly agreed.

A bird started up from a limb, scolding them. A bush was in white bloom. The very sound was different, a constant whisper of wind in leaves and living branches.

"Certainly a more cheerful sort of place," Pyetr said, watching the sun dapple the bracken and the limbs as they walked—no great difficulty to find a way through, the trees generously spaced and tall, the ground rising and falling in little hillocks, the rare saplings vastly overtopped by old, wide-limbed trees. The worst going was the bracken, the old growth crunching and breaking under the new as they waded knee-deep through this pathless place; but it was over all a quick progress. "Better than the woods near the house," he looked back at Sasha to say, about to add that, over all, he had no bad feeling at all about this place.

But then cold fingers touched his neck. He spun back forward and felt a little breath of cold air hit his face.

"Pyetr?" he heard Sasha ask—Sasha was puzzled; but he had another demand on his attention at that instant, an urgent and impatient presence, carrying with it a fear he could not immediately understand. It only seemed that the contact was fading and that if he turned his head and lost touch with it now, that would be the last of it.

"It's here," he said. "Keep with me…"

He had no doubt now which direction to take. He started off as quickly as he could over the rough ground, dodging around thickets and up over the shoulder of the hill. He heard Sasha behind him, trusting that Sasha would keep up, and battered through increasing brush and foliage with his arms, a course virtually in a straight line, disregarding of obstacles.

"Pyetr!" he heard, and waited a breath or two, but, he felt that breath of cold again, felt a gentle touch of icy fingers, smelled a taint of river weed.

"Pyetr!" Quite close now. Sasha was all right. They both were. He started to move again, less and less liking the feeling he had of something behind them, and feeling equally strongly that safety was in front—