Rusalka

CHAPTER 13

EVESHKA… that was her name… talked on and on with the old man, much of the time in words too soft for Pyetr to hear above the patter of rain on the roof, but Pyetr watched her, all the same, and caught snatches of Uulamets’ answers—how the old man had feared she had drowned herself, or that she might have met some accident trying to run away; but no, Eveshka said…

“I was walking down along the river,” she said, in a soft, breathless voice, “and the vodyanoi caught me. I should have known him. I should never have listened. But he looked like a traveler…”

Odd, Pyetr thought. No one would expect travelers here… not for a hundred years.

But, he suddenly thought, the rusalka had killed the forest. The forest had been dead—how many years?

How old is she? How old is Uulamets himself? Could someone like him have a daughter so young?

“…and I came too close,” Eveshka said in her soft, lilting voice, calmly telling things that would make a grown man blanch. She was so calm—like a tsarina, he thought: a face like that, hands like that, feet like that, should be set off with cloth of gold and jewels; but she wore only a thin white dress with ragged, dirty sleeves. “He asked my help, I was a fool, and he suddenly showed his real shape and wrapped me up in his coils. The next thing I knew I was in the river. I breathed the water. That was all.”

Uulamets hugged his daughter. Liar, Pyetr thought sullenly, hearing the crotchety old man whisper that he loved her very much, truly he did. If his own dice-loving father had ever hugged him and said he missed him in that adoring tone of voice, he would have been sure his father was up to no good. The present spate of endearments from Uulamets made his flesh crawl.

But he felt a little gnawing doubt of his own judgment, Ilya Kochevikov having been no good example of a father—and he felt the old resentment for that mixing in all his other feelings about Uulamets, and in his new reckonings about what might have happened to the girl…

How long ago?

Who was her mother, anyway?

“I knew,” Eveshka said, her head on Uulamets’ shoulder, “that if anyone could help me, you could. I so much wanted to tell you I was sorry. I kept thinking… the last thing I’d ever done in this world was quarrel with you, and all through these years, I could see you come and go in the forest and I could watch you working in the yard—oh, I was there! And I couldn’t even tell you I was sorry—”

She began to cry again. “Hush, hush, hush,” Uulamets said, and stroked her hair and rocked her.

So much tenderness was acutely embarrassing. Pyetr found interest in the wood grain of the table in front of him, and in the firelight on the metal of the sword. He earnestly wished the house afforded somewhere else to go, and likely Sasha wished the same; but there was no such refuge. He would get up himself and rattle around pouring himself a drink and then ask the girl his own morbid questions—except she looked distraught, and where things might go with her then was too uncertain. She might take offense, and that certainly was not what he wanted—although he was far from sure precisely what he wanted from a dead girl whose bones he might well have touched this morning. It was altogether outside his experience.

So he sat still, beside Sasha, who was quite mouselike quiet, until Uulamets proposed his daughter was surely tired and might want to rest.

“I’m sure these young gentlemen won’t mind giving up the hearth,” Uulamets said. “You’ll sleep in your own bed tonight—”

Pyetr inclined his head with some dignity; Sasha attempted to rise and make a bow, inside the limits of the bench as Eveshka looked at them, shyly lowered her eyes and said Thank you in a soft voice that could well get possession of more than a spot by the fire.

Uulamets went to his bed and began dragging another cot from under it. Sasha clambered over the bench and went to help him. Pyetr simply sat still at the table and watched Eveshka watching them, all white and gold, standing there in front of the fireplace, with her hair—dry now—floating around her like the light itself.

He reminded himself sternly then of Kiev, and of the certain fact that Uulamets would in no wise allow a man near the girl, particularly considering Uulamets’ estimate of him. Doubtless this dispossession from the hearthside was Uulamets’ signal to them both that he was quite ready to see their backs.

So they might set out down the river tomorrow with no thanks and probably cheated of half the provisions they had bargained for—and won!—while the old skinflint kept a girl like her locked away in a dying forest…

No matter that the condition of the forest was in some measure her fault. She was certainly no ghost now.

Was she not?

A sane man at least had to think the thought, as he began bedding down in the dark corner beyond the table.

“Do you suppose she’s safe?” he whispered to Sasha in the faintest of voices as he lay down to sleep. It seemed to him if Sasha had wizardry talents he might be more sensitive to such things.

“What do you mean?” Sasha whispered back. So much, he thought, for wizardly sensitivity.

“Nothing,” he said, and pulled the quilt over his head, exhausted and determined to sleep, entertaining himself with thoughts of Eveshka.

But immediately as he shut his eyes his traitorous mind conjured instead the sudden drop into the pit at the knoll; and when he banished that memory, gave him the cave and the vodyanoi’s soft body wrapping around him—none of which promised pleasant dreams or a restful night.

Doggedly he remembered Eveshka by firelight, which chased the dark to the far edges of his mind.

Until his imagination, sly beast that it was, came around to Eveshka’s image on the river, and the touch of her cold fingers—and then, by unpleasant surprise, brought back the feeling of the bones in the cavern mud.

So, well, but even as a ghost, Pyetr told himself, putting his unruly imagination to rout again, Eveshka had hardly done him harm, a little cold water on his face, a scowl and a retreat—which he could now attribute to her desperate frustration rather than to any anger directed at him: she had tried so hard to speak, always without a sound. She had tried, there by the willow that was her tree—

The cave came back, perniciously. He heard the vodyanoi saying, “Best three out of five,” with his father’s voice, which he reckoned was less prophetic than the fact that he had been recollecting his father with unusual clarity this evening.

Back to the fire, then, and Eveshka: his thoughts kept going in circles, and he sincerely wanted to put all of it away and get some sleep—but with darker and darker images beginning to drift through his eyes when they were shut, he decided he had rather stay awake awhile. Unlikely things seemed to have happened to him with such persistence these last few days that nothing seemed quite safe: his mind was all a-boü with sights it refused to reconcile, and he was beginning to have a great difficulty telling the imaginary from the real.

He was not, tonight, with a dead girl dreaming by the hearth and his whole body aching from the battering of the vodyanoi in the cave, entirely certain that he was in control of his life any longer, and he found that a very upsetting idea.

He could go away from here, he and Sasha could just walk away in the morning with no one to stop them (granted they kept an eye to the river), and two or three days after this he would be able to wonder again if he had ever seen a rusalka or a dvorovoi, or wrestled with a River-thing.

But of nights—

For the rest of his life, he feared he was going to dream about things he did not understand, His confidence and his courage were the only assets he had ever had in life, the fact that Pyetr Kochevikov would make a try while everyone else was hesitating. For a man who had a knowledge of the odds for his only inheritance from his father, the existence of unknowables and uncertainties threaded through every situation was a terrible revelation.

One had either blindly to discount them—the action of a fooler wisely to unravel them, which di4 not look to be a study of a handful of days.

Of course he could walk out of this woods. He could quite possibly look at the ladies of Kiev in years to come and not compare them too unfavorably with Eveshka’s ethereal beauty. And between his light-fingered talent and Sasha’s odd ability, he reckoned the two of them could make a tolerably comfortable living in a world of natural men and ordinary risks.

But he would always know there were other rules, and that at some fatal moment they could intervene and tip a balance he thought he had calculated.

It would always be a possibility, even in Kiev, particularly as long as he had Sasha Misurov in his vicinity. There might have been things even in Vojvoda he had been fortunate not to have come afoul of; and one of Vojvoda’s wizards might have-No. Absolutely not. There was no wizardry at all in old Yurishev’s death, and nothing but his own stupidity had brought him to that pass.

Unless—

Unless Sasha, the stableboy at The Cockerel, had, in a momentary slip, wished very, very hard to escape his lot, or to find a friend, or to understand what he felt he was—

Or he might once have wished that a real wizard would someday teach him how to handle that deadly gift of his—

Who knew?

God, maybe Uulamets himself had wished—had wished someone like Sasha to help him.

Who was safe anywhere in the world, if wizards could put a thumb on any balance, years and leagues away?

He wanted, damn it all, to understand what he was involved in before he left the place most likely to have the answers, and to know for a certainty whether he had any free will left, even in the choice to go or stay.

In the morning Eveshka was up before any of them: Sasha heard the rattle of a spoon, lifted his head and saw that Eveshka was mixing something in a large bowl. Beside him Pyetr was quite soundly sleeping, and Eveshka smiled and waggled her fingers at him to bid him lie down and take a little more sleep himself.

Certainly he had no wish to deal with her alone, Uulamets being still abed. It seemed far safer to take advantage of a little more sleep, so he ducked down in the quilts against the morning chill and shut his eyes.

It seemed only a moment later that he woke with the smell of cakes cooking: he could see past the table legs and the bench a three-legged iron griddle standing in the embers; and Eveshka was turning the cakes, talking to her father, who was up and dressing, and saying she had missed the taste of food.

It somewhat gave one a queasy feeling, thinking about rusalkas, and wondering exactly in what fashion they did sustain themselves, or what exactly her appetites had been.

But he decided he could no longer claim to be asleep, so he gathered himself up and waked Pyetr.

“Our lie-abeds,” Uulamets greeted them cheerfully enough, though Pyetr muttered under his breath that he was due a little lying abed after carrying the old man home yesterday.

“We owe our young friends,” Uulamets said, and took his daughter by the hand and introduced them each by their proper names, which attention embarrassed Sasha: no one to his recollection had ever introduced him to anyone, since everybody who ever came to The Cockerel had already known him—or had no interest in whether the stableboy had a name. He hardly knew what to do, except to look up at the girl with his face gone burning hot and, he was sure, quite red; while Pyetr in his turn made a bow and said he had never seen anyone so beautiful, not even the finest ladies in Vojvoda.

At which Eveshka looked pleased, and Eveshka was the one who blushed in that exchange, then exclaimed about her cakes and quickly rescued the griddle from the fire and dumped them onto the waiting plate.

“They’re not burned,” she said with a little sigh. “Go, go, everyone wash up. I’ll make the tea.”

They were wonderful flatcakes, better than aunt Ilenka’s, Sasha thought: there were two apiece, with tart dried berries he had not himself discovered in Uulamets’ jars, and every crumb disappeared. Uulamets said Eveshka’s mother had used to make cakes like that, and Eveshka smiled and laid her hand on her father’s as they sat together at the table.

Altogether Uulamets looked very tired, worn to the bone by the last two days, but he looked changed in a better way, too—as if he had let go all the bitterness and the anger he had, and suddenly remembered, with Eveshka in the house, a kinder way of dealing with people. He set his hand over his daughter’s and said to them, “I have to explain to you. There was so little I could honestly explain, there was so little I really knew, myself, except that Eveshka—” He pressed her fingers gently. “Eveshka might have run away from me. That wasn’t the case. But I feared it might be, and if it had been, it would have been all but impossible to bring her back.”

“Papa had a student, Kavi,” Eveshka said. “Long ago. I was very young—very foolish. I believed he was innocent of the things papa said. He was very handsome. Very persuasive. But when I did find it out, I was so—” Eveshka. looked down, then looked at her father. “I was so embarrassed. You were absolutely right. But I was too ashamed to say so. That was why I left that morning. I only wanted to sit down on the dock and think a while. Then the vodyanoi—”

Tears clouded her eyes and she stopped talking. Sasha sat there beside Pyetr wishing he knew what to do or say to an upset girl who had—he began to realize—been a ghost for perhaps more years than he had been alive, and who was at once a girl of sixteen and much, much older. His stomach felt upset. He remembered the vodyanoi and its malice and felt doubly upset, thinking of Eveshka dragged down into that watery cave.

“I was afraid,” Uulamets said quietly, “that she’d killed herself—or that that scoundrel had murdered her. I put nothing past Kavi Chernevog, absolutely nothing.” He patted Eveshka’s hand. “But you’re back. That’s all. To the black god with Kavi Chernevog. Do you know, I tried to keep your garden, but I’m afraid all I have luck with is turnips.”

Eveshka dried her eyes with her knuckle and suddenly laughed.

“It’s all there is to eat around here,” Pyetr said, and Uulamets frowned. “But,” Pyetr went on irrepressibly, “I can say this place has brightened considerably since yesterday.”

The compliment pleased Eveshka. It clearly did not please Uulamets, who immediately stood up and suggested they clear away the dishes and straighten up the house.

Chests in the cellar gave up blankets and clothes—Eveshka’s own, one supposed; and more shirts and trousers, fine ones, all of 3. size. Eveshka ordered a rope strung from the bathhouse to the porch and ordered the laundry tubs rolled out—which activity trampled into submission the weeds around the bathhouse, and meant, Sasha foresaw it, an incredible number of heavy buckets carried up the hill.

But this time—Sasha had not expected it—Pyetr bestirred himself to help, even taking the harder part of the course, carrying the buckets to the top of the muddy, root-laddered path from the river and letting Sasha carry them across the yard to the bathhouse.

Pyetr wore his sword while he was doing this, by which Sasha knew exactly the danger Pyetr was thinking about. Pyetr did not go down to the river with one bucket while he was delivering the other: Pyetr took the harder way, carrying both at a time, then sat on a tree root and waited for him to bring the buckets back, a choice which kept them always in sight of each other, and that, too, said that Pyetr was concerned.

So was he, out under a clear sky, with time enough to get a breath of rain-chilled morning air and to consider that they had had an uncommon amount of good luck in the last couple of days. He was tempted to congratulate himself: perhaps Uulamets’ few pieces of advice had helped him manage his gift; or perhaps, as Uulamets had said, it was at least possible to stifle one’s ability, to keep a tight grip on it in crises—

“Most people have the instinct for magic,” Uulamets had said to him, that morning that Uulamets had begun to teach him. “Some have a minuscule ability—and don’t manage it at all except by smothering it entirely. Or they smother their good sense instead, and make a thorough mess of themselves, wishing this and wishing that to patch what they last wished and never understanding anything: I tell you, good hard work and talent enough to nudge luck a little is a good combination. But everybody wants the one without the other.”

“And mine?” he had asked, full of trepidation.

“Might not be small,” Uulamets had said. “Let me tell you: it’s a law of nature: magicians and magical creatures can be affected by magic more easily than ordinary folk. The very talents which extend them into dimensions impossible for ordinary people likewise mean that wizards can be affected by incantations against which ordinary people would be immune—”

“Can a person—stop these things? Can he—?”

“Turn a spell aside, you mean? Yes. You know how.”

He did. He had thought so.

“Let me tell you,” Uulamets had said then, at the table that morning: Sasha could still see the old man’s cautionary lifting of a finger, feel the danger in the air. “It’s always easiest for the young: remember I told you that. Remember this with it: it’s very easy for a naive talent to get quite deep into the spirit world, rather too little resistance to be safe—”

The other clothes they were washing—

Papa had a student, Eveshka had said, Kan…

“—and the deeper you get, the easier it is to bind and to be bound, do you understand, boy? Be careful. Power is very attractive. Aggression is easier than defense. Using is easier than restraining, doing than undoing. Set things in motion only in one direction at a time, or at least remember the sequence of things you wished and know everything you’re moving, directly or indirectly. That’s very important. Most of all beware of ill-wishing anything.”

To the black god, Uulamets had said, with Kavi Chernevog…

Most particularly…

“Where did the flour come from?” Sasha asked, out of breath, as he handed the two buckets to Pyetr. “Where did the flour come from this morning?”

“Sometimes I have trouble following you,” Pyetr said.

“At breakfast,” He realized he had started in the middle of his thoughts. “This morning.”

Pyetr gave him a very odd look. Or maybe Pyetr was thinking. Pyetr headed down the path to the river and Sasha sat down on the tree root to wait.

He watched Pyetr go down to the riverside and dip the two buckets full. Pyetr came up the trail, hard-breathing, set the two buckets down and said:

“The old man must be trading with somebody. On the river, maybe.”

“It wasn’t there. Or he had it hidden. Why hide a jar of flour?”

Pyetr gave a large sigh. He looked worried. “I don’t know. Maybe it was just left. Maybe she knew where it was.”

“Flour won’t keep forever. The forest’s been dead for ages. Nobody sails the river…”

“So maybe he put a spell on it. Don’t wizards do that kind of thing?”

It was a thought. It was better than the thoughts he was thinking, that whatever they had really had for breakfast might be very odd. There was oil. There was flour enough for six cakes, and more, assuming one would hardly use up one’s entire store on one breakfast. Oil and flour and berries. It was entirely odd.

Sasha trudged back to the bathhouse with the heavy buckets, up in the yard where Eveshka worked amid clouds of steam. “There,” she said; he poured the buckets into the rinse tub and negotiated the boggy ground taking them back to Pyetr at the tree.

“Mostly,” Pyetr said when he got there, “I want to know why the spell worked.”

“Which spell?”

“The one for her.” Pyetr took the buckets. “There were bones in that cave. How do you do anything with bones? How do you bring a body back?”

“I don’t know,” Sasha said. “That’s what that book is, all the things he’s ever done or heard, written down.”

“Did he tell you that?”

“That’s the kind of things wizards have. He told me. You have to keep track of things. You can’t forget what you’ve done or you don’t dare do anything. He could have worked years on that spell. Pieces of it. Step by step.”

Pyetr looked at him as if he thought he was lying. After a moment he turned and went down the hill.

When he came up again, carrying the buckets full, he said, frowning, “All that book?”

“I don’t know. That’s just what he said.”

“But hasn’t he ever tried this before? Why did it work this time?”

That was one worrisome question. He could think of others. “Where’s the domovoi? Where’s the dvorovoi? Babi, he calls it. We haven’t seen him since out there by the knoll.”

Pyetr gave a worried grimace, and looked toward the house. “I don’t know. I never saw a place that had any. Maybe grandfather just conjured them up to keep him company. Maybe he’s forgotten about them now.”

Not impossible, Sasha thought. It could be the case. He picked up the heavy buckets and trekked back to the bathhouse, panting by the time he arrived.

“You don’t have to go so fast,” Eveshka said.

“It’s all right,” he said.

“Would you tip out the rinse water for me?”

He did. He poured fresh water in. Eveshka’s dress was wet and clung embarrassingly and he tried not to stare. He took his buckets back to the tree.

“I haven’t seen the raven either,” he said to Pyetr. “I’m worried.”

“About that damned bird?” Pyetr was being deliberately obtuse, which meant he was annoyed.

“About everything.” He was afraid-Pyetr was going to pro pose running off into the woods. But he was far from certain that was not safer than where they were. “I don’t think we ought to go running off from here. Master Uulamets may be in trouble, but the kind of trouble I’m afraid of—he’s the only one who can handle it. I can’t. And a sword can’t stop a ghost.”

Pyetr frowned more and more darkly. “You think she is.”

“I don’t know what she is.”

“You know better than I do. I never paid any attention to the granny-tales. I never had a grandmother. What’s out there? What could be?”

That was a terrible question. All sorts of tales leapt into Sasha’s head, things with clutching claws and long, long teeth, things that led you astray and things that pulled you into rivers and things that just took away your mind. “Leshys and such,” he said.

“Worse?”

“They could be.! don’t know. Sometimes I think Babi’s all bluff. But we saw him when he wasn’t.”

“Damned dog’s tucked tail and run,” Pyetr muttered, snatching up the empty buckets. “Or something ate him.”

With which Pyetr flung himself away downslope at some speed. Sasha saw him stop at the bottom and stand, just staring up the river a moment before he filled the buckets and slogged back up the hill.

“She was never malicious,” Pyetr said, setting the buckets down.

“Maybe she couldn’t be,” Sasha said. “Maybe she couldn’t do anything. Now—I don’t know. He said—he said the more magical a creature is the easier it is to control it.”

“That’s rot! Cut Uulamets and he bleeds, I’ll bet you. That Thing didn’t.”

“For magic to control it,” Sasha objected, but it seemed to him that Pyetr had pointed out an essential flaw in Uulamets’ reasoning, and he thought about that, and about what a rusalka might do in ghostly form and in a human one.

“What good’s magic,” Pyetr asked, “if a fool with a sword can cut your throat?”

“I wonder if anything could hurt her.”

Pyetr looked upset, and threw a glance up the hill, in the general direction of the bathhouse.

“Then what could she want?” he asked. “If she’s a ghost, and she’s lying, what’s she waiting for? Ghost stories never made sense to me. What’s all this mincing around, popping up and scaring people, except that they’re trying to touch you and they can’t. What’s to fear, except a guilty conscience? But she can touch things. So if she’s a ghost, what’s she here for?”

“Because master Uulamets wanted her,” Sasha said, increasingly disturbed by this line of reasoning. “Because he’s a wizard and he wanted her more than she could resist. And he wants her to be what he wants.”

Pyetr rubbed the back of his neck. “What if he wants us to stay here? I’m not sure it’s safe to go. I’m not sure it’s any safer to stay here. I’ve got two wizards wishing this and wishing that and I’m not sure what I want. I don’t like it.”

“Three,” Sasha said. “There’s three.”

Pyetr glanced a second time up where Eveshka was working. Slowly his hand fell from his neck. “Four,” he said, half a whisper. “There’s the vodyanoi: he’s not out of the game, is he? How can you ever make up your mind if wishes work? You don’t know who’s pushing you.”

“We don’t,” Sasha said. “But Uulamets is flesh and blood like us, and I’m not sure anything else is, around here. If something goes wrong, I’d rather be near Uulamets than not. That’s all I can think of. I don’t want to be out there in the woods or on the river all by ourselves with all this going on, that’s what I think.”

“You think he made her up?”

From not believing in magic at all, Pyetr had gotten to more precarious thoughts than was good for anyone, Sasha thought, and asked questions he had no idea how to answer, because he had no idea what nature would bear.

Maybe—worse thought—Uulamets himself had no idea: perhaps no wizard who tried the untried could ever know that, and the really powerful ones had no real idea what they were doing. By that reckoning, the more powerful a wizard became, the more foolish it was for him to do anything at all.

He picked up the buckets. “I don’t know,” he answered Pyetr. “I’ve no idea.” And he added, because a new thought was troubling him: “I wonder what happened to this Kavi Chernevog. I wonder where he is.”

“Five wizards?” Pyetr asked.

Sasha looked at him and for a moment could not move, no matter that the weight of the buckets made him short of breath. “I don’t know,” he said. He thought of asking master Uulamets. But the peace seemed already too precarious. Everything did. Anything might tip it in directions that no one could predict, if there were that many powers with contrary purposes. It was crazy.

No one could predict, if that was the case. If anything master Uulamets had told him was the truth, then no one involved could know the consequences of even the smallest, weakest wish he made.

Wish only good, master Uulamets had advised him, and don’t work without knowing what you’re doing.

And would a bad man, Sasha wondered, have given him precisely that advice?

One would, perhaps, who was powerful enough to brush aside a boy’s efforts and proceed deliberately about his business despite them—but master Uulamets did not seem to be in control of things that were going on. Master Uulamets had ignored his own advice, and worried over that book, and worried over it, and Sasha desperately hoped that master Uulamets was worrying now, much more than showed.