Rusalka

CHAPTER 15

PYETR COLLECTED himself on his feet, his sword still in his hand, by some presence of mind he would not have credited in himself. He could see, in the faint sky-sheen on the water, vast ripples where the thing had gone back under. He hoped to the god it had gone back—whatever had come lunging up out of the water right for his face—a horse, a snake, or something huge, dark, and wet that no rational man could ever admit seeing, involving, his shocked memory recollected, a vast array of teeth.

His legs began to shake under him. The tremor spread to his arms and his hands and he was ashamed of himself for that, but not very: it was time, he thought, to make a sensible retreat—the more so because for one very dangerous moment he had lost track of it. For that lapse he was honestly vexed with himself, and anxious, seeing the huge wallow in the clay where it might have slipped back into the river. He hoped it had.

He had been scrambling for his life at that moment. He had never seen anything so fast, never expected it to be out of the water in one move—the wallowed track went as far as the brush; and to his chagrin he realized that that brush went as far as the stand of dead willows between himself and the boat dock and the road.

That same run of brush likewise edged the trail to the house. That was both ways up, the only two routes to safety that he had, cut off if it had gotten past him onto shore, and right now he could not swear it had not.

“Pyetr!” he heard. Sasha’s frightened voice, from up the hill. He was afraid to answer. He was afraid to move from where he was, on his narrow strip of shore between the brush and the river, and he had no idea which direction to watch first.

“Pyetr!”

God, he thought, the boy was coming down.

“Stay where you are!” he shouted.

And saw a liquid darkness flow across that hillside trail, hip-high to a man.

It put itself between him and the house.

It lifted its head then and began to slither and heave sideways down the slope toward him.

“Sasha!” he yelled, gripping his sword, and thinking wildly of a dive for the river—but the river was where it was most powerful. “It’s on the trail! Look out!”

It gathered speed, it changed its shape and size as it came, smaller and faster. He poised himself to dodge if only it reared up the way it had before, but it was not doing that: its coils rubbed along the trunks of dead trees and slithered wider again as it came.

He jumped the thing, trod a soft back and sprang for the path, but its tail whipped around and hit him with a force that knocked him back against the brush.

Its face came around toward him then, all teeth, and he hit it a blow with the sword edge, which it did not like: it reared up and turned its glistening dark head toward a crashing in the brush, a high, shouted, “Here I am!”

Pyetr’s head was still ringing. He thought he had heard that, and he heaved himself for his feet with all the strength he had left, no wit, just a straight double-handed attack, as the vodyanoi hissed like a spilled kettle and reared up, breaking branches, screaming when he hit it, still screaming as he kept on hitting it for all he was worth.

It shrank, smaller and smaller until it was only man-sized, a withered creature dusted in pale powder, and Sasha was suddenly in the fray with a stout stick in his hands, clubbing it while it howled.

It was too tough to stab. Pyetr gave up trying and simply hit as hard and as often as he could, afraid it was going to recover and kill both of them.

“Get out of here!” he yelled at the boy.

Which Sasha did not; Sasha kept hitting it, too, yelling, “Keep it from the river!”

At which time Uulamets arrived and pinned it to the ground with the butt-end of his staff in the middle of its back, while the creature whined and clawed at its own now-manlike face, whimpering and rubbing its eyes.

Pyetr staggered over to a tree to catch his breath, aching from head to foot, while Sasha grabbed hold of him and asked him was he all right.

Honestly he was far from sure. He was trying only to get enough breath to stand upright, and simultaneously to watch Uulamets and the creature on the shore.

Eveshka arrived then—at which realization Pyetr got breath enough to hobble a step or two into the space between her and the prisoner, for what small protection he could be.

But it was not threatening now: it was trying to shield its face or to wipe its eyes, uncertain which. Pyetr reckoned, standing over it, that it must have met Sasha’s pot of sulphur and salt nose-on—thank the god and Sasha’s brave heart.

Uulamets meanwhile was threatening it with the sun, bidding it give up and swear to mend its ways, none of which made any more sense than the sight of the vodyanoi shrunk to the size and shape of a little old man.

“That thing won’t keep a promise,” he protested, when it did swear. “Yes,” it was saying, “yes, I agree, anything, only let me go—”

“Let my daughter go!” Uulamets said.

The vodyanoi twisted onto its face and covered its naked head with its hands. It wailed, “I can’t! I can’t do that!”

“Hwiuur. Is that your true name?”

It bobbed its head. “Hwiuur. Yes. Give me your leave, man. The sun is coming. Give me your leave to be here—I will promise, I will never, never harm you in this place—”

“—or elsewhere!” Uulamets snapped, and fetched the creature a crack of the staff. “Free my daughter! Give me back her heart!”

“I can’t, I can’t, I don’t hold it! Oh, it burns, man, it bums—”

Heart? Pyetr wondered, stunned by the thought. Uulamets asked with another thump of his staff:

“Who has it, then?”

“Kavi Chernevog!”

Uulamets’ staff met the creature’s back and held it still. Uula mets looked toward Pyetr then with a terrible anger on his face; but that look went past him and past Sasha.

“Is it true?” Uulamets demanded harshly.

Eveshka said nothing at all.

Hwiuur suddenly tried to slither for the river. “Get him!” Pyetr cried, lunging to stop the creature if he could, but Uulamets was there with his staff, and pinned it like a serpent to the ground.

Serpent it seemed to be for a moment. Pyetr watched in dismay as it lashed and writhed under the staff.

“Swear!” Uulamets ordered it. “Swear to help us!”

“I swear.” It was a man again, or mostly so, wrinkled, ridge-backed and serpent-twisted, clutching the mud with thin black hands.

“Swear to come and go at my orders; swear to do what I bid you do; swear never to lie to me and never to harm me or mine.”

It hissed, it writhed. Finally it said, “I swear by my name. Let me go.”

Uulamets drew back his staff. Quicker than the eye could follow it, it whipped across the mud and into the water.

“That’s one lost,” Pyetr muttered unhappily, but Uulamets called out, “Hwiuur!”

And a vast dark head of very unpleasant aspect rose up near the shore.

“Look out!” Sasha cried, and was on his way to snatch the old man back, but Pyetr grabbed him by the arm and held him where he was.

The Thing loomed up and up and arched its sleek, dripping head over to look down at the old man.

“The sunlight hurts my eyes,” it said in a deep voice like the booming of drums. “The salt was a wicked trick, man.”

“Don’t speak to me on that score,” Uulamets said. “I want Kavi Chernevog.”

Hwiuur reared back and settled deeper in the dawn-lit water, until he was on a level with Uulamets. “Ask me something I can do,” it said, again like drums speaking. “Chernevog is too powerful. He has what you want. You can permit me the sunlight; he can forbid. Then what will I do?”

The head sank beneath the water again, leaving an eddy and bubbles.

“Hwiuur!” Uulamets said.

It rose again, not so far as before.

“So you remember,” Uulamets said. “Obey my orders. You swore by your name.”

“So I did,” it said, and sank below the surface again. A black back broke the surface, long, very long, as it flowed away up-river.

Pyetr took a breath and flexed his right hand on his sword hilt while Uulamets turned his back to the river.

“Back to the house,” Uulamets said, and walked past them to take Eveshka’s arm and bring her up the path ahead of them.

Pyetr walked along beside Sasha, reckoning to himself what Sasha had done for him, coming down that hill and well knowing what he was risking. He wanted to throw his arm around the boy the way he had with ’Mitri, the black god take him, or Andrei or Vasya, none of whom had deserved thanking for anything.

But all that affection had been so cheap, and all that camaraderie so free with gestures that should have meant something he could not find one left for Sasha Misurov. He was lately scared and battered, he was tongue-tied and frustrated, and he stripped the bracelet of Eveshka’s hair off his wrist in a fury and flung it down on the path as they walked.

Dip the bracelet in the river, Uulamets had said.

Lead it to the house, Uulamets had said.

His sword hand was scored by teeth he did not like to remember. He sucked at the worst of the scratches, looked at the wound in the gray, beginning dawn, and spat, revolted by the taste of blood and river water.

“It did that,” Sasha said in dismay.

“It did that,” he said; and looked darkly at Uulamets ahead of him on the trail, walking behind Eveshka~who had run away from her father, it now seemed.

So, by Uulamets’ own word, had the wife; and so had this Kavi Chernevog—for reasons he personally began to suspect as evidence of good character.

There was anger and unhappiness in the house, and Eveshka was fixing breakfast only, Sasha suspected, because she was evading her father. Pyetr had poured himself a cup of vodka. He had been limping a little on the way up, his hand was swelling, and Sasha wished master Uulamets would do something about it, but master Uulamets just sat watching Eveshka as if he was waiting for her to say something, and as if he was thinking thoughts no wizard should entertain—all too easy for Uulamets inadvertently to let something terrible fly, if he had not done it already, and Sasha had no wish to disturb his concentration if he was trying to deal with that—

But Sasha himself was angrier than he ever let himself get, considering Pyetr was hurt and Uulamets had had a great deal to do with that, whether through bad planning or callous disregard for Pyetr’s life. He understood why Uulamets had not used the salt at the knoll: Uulamets had come prepared to deal with a ghost, not Hwiuur, and might not be expected, in the midst of a working that wide and that dangerous, to prepare for everything—

Though the vodyanoi should have been primarily suspect—given Uulamets had known then that Hwiuur even existed, which was by no means a certainty—or given that Hwiuur himself had not slipped around the edges of Uulamets’ attention with powerful wishes of his own.

Perhaps—Sasha tried to be charitable and to control his own temper—perhaps Hwiuur had put more strain on the old man than any of them understood, or perhaps neither Uulamets nor any wizard knew enough about vodyaniye: I wish I could tell you exactly, Uulamets had said to Pyetr—which did argue for some attempt at honesty on Uulamets’ part; but Sasha was not mollified. If Uulamets had known anything more than a stable-boy knew about such creatures, he should not have sent Pyetr without protection (the creature would smell it, Uulamets had said) or given him the instructions he had given, to try to outrace the creature on a steep trail, when it was that fast and that capable out of the water—but no, Uulamets had insisted, choosing the porch for a trap, the sun will reach here—

If Uulamets had paid a tenth part of his attention to anything but his daughter; if he paid it now, or even said, Thank you, Pyetr Bitch; or cared to do something about a wound that was already swelling and that, made by a creature like that, might have effects a stableboy from Vojvoda had no idea how to deal with—if Uulamets showed any least concern, Sasha thought, or even asked now what he was doing, rummaging through the herb pots and mixing up wormwood and chamomile, which were only kitchen lore and a poor second to Uulamets’ knowledge—

“Excuse me,” Sasha said of a sudden, as his search for a bowl took him near Uulamets. His own vehemence surprised him, but he was beyond any capability, at the moment, for Uula mets to muddle him with a look. “That thing bit Pyetr. Do you think you could possibly do something?”

Uulamets looked at him, registering a touch of surprise along with annoyance, and Sasha glared, quite ready to face an ill-wish from master Uulamets, more master of his intentions at the moment, he was sure, than Uulamets was.

Which gave anyone, wizard or no, Uulamets had once said, a moderate advantage.

Uulamets’ expression showed some concentration, then, perhaps even the effort to collect himself; and he said with surprising mildness, “I’d better look at it.”

That was one thing.

But when Uulamets got up and went over to Pyetr, sitting in the corner with his cup and the jug, Pyetr said, sullenly, “I poured a little vodka on it. It’ll be fine.”

“Fool. Let me see it.”

“Keep your hands off!” Pyetr jerked away from Uulamets’ touch, spilling vodka as he did so, and lurched, wincing, to one knee and to his feet.

“Pyetr,” Sasha said, and blocked his escape from the corner, fully expecting Pyetr would shove past him all the same.

But Pyetr stopped and caught his breath and said, with a motion of the cup toward him, “You and I are getting out of here. We’re packing up, we’re taking what we’ve earned from this house, and we’re going.”

“You’ll go nowhere!” Uulamets said. “Your own life may be yours to lose. But think of the boy. Think of him, when you consider going anywhere in these woods.”

“I am thinking of him.” Pyetr turned on Uulamets with such violence Sasha grabbed his arm—but Pyetr shrugged that off as if it was nothing and stood balanced on the balls of his feet. “Don’t tell me about the danger in these woods! I’ve handled that damned creature twice now, and it’s less hazard than you and your advice. You were surprised when I came back the first time, weren’t you? Wear the bracelet, you said. Go down to the river, you said. You don’t need a salt-pot, you said, it’ll only drive it back into the river, and that’s not what we want, is it? No. We just give it a little taste of what it wants. We just let it take my arm off and good riddance to the only protection the boy’s got from you. He’s safer with the damned snake!”

Uulamets’ anger was all around them like a storm about to break. Sasha threw everything he had in the way of it, and put himself bodily between them, as somehow the cup broke and the pieces hit the floor—maybe that he had knocked it from Pyetr’s hand, or that Uulamets had broken it, or that Pyetr’s fingers had cracked it.

“Go ahead,” Uulamets said in deadly quiet. “Take what you like. Go where you like. But the boy will stay—do you hear me, Sasha Vasilyevitch? If Pyetr goes alone, I’ll guarantee his safety to the edge of this woods. But if you go with him—he’ll die, by one means or another, he will die. I promise you that.”

Sasha looked master Uulamets in the eye and tried to withstand him. But the least small doubt began to work in his mind and that was enough: he knew that that doubt was fatal, and that there was no chance for them.

“Nonsense,” Pyetr said, and took his arm and pulled him away; but Sasha resisted and shook his head.

“I can’t,” he said. “I won’t. He can do it, Pyetr, and I can’t stop him—I’m sorry…”

He was afraid; and sick at heart, because either Pyetr would leave him or he would not, and either was terrible; but he did not think Pyetr would, he truly did not believe it—and that was the worst.

“If I have to carry you—” Pyetr said.

“No,” he said, looking Pyetr in the face, afraid his chin was going to tremble—because mere was nothing he could do but fight Pyetr if he tried, and that was the last thing he wanted to do, in any sense. He got a breath and shook Pyetr’s hand off. “But there’s no sense in you staying, is there? And none in me going to Kiev. He can teach me. He needs to. I’m too strong not to know what I’m doing—I’m strong enough now to be dangerous. But I’m not strong enough to beat him. So you go. He’s not lying about your being safe to leave. I know that—because he wants me to help him; and he wouldn’t like what I’d do if I found out he’d lied.”

He wished Pyetr would go. He wished it especially hard, because he was close to breaking into tears; and he wished Pyetr’s hand would be well, even if Uulamets refused to help him.

Pyetr folded his arms and turned away and looked at the floor.

“Tell him,” Pyetr said after a moment, “he’d damned well better think twice where he sends me after this, because you’ll take it out of his hide someday.”

“I will,” Sasha said. He had never in his life intended harm to anyone: but he did, for whoever harmed Pyetr, and had no qualms and no doubt about doing it.

For a moment he realized that he was capable of wanting harm. In a heartbeat more he realized that he already wanted it; and that that wanting was a wish already sped at Uulamets—

Who was far more callous and by that degree, more powerful.

“Do as you please,” Uulamets said, and added with malice: “I’d advise you try healing, boy.—It’s much harder; and much more to the point right now.”

Sasha looked at Pyetr. And knew—was suddenly sure—that Uulamets’ warning was absolutely real; and that Uulamets was absolutely confident he would fail.

“Or do you need help, boy?”

He looked back at Uulamets.

“So you don’t know everything,” Uulamets said. “I’d suggest you reason with your friend. Your threat is a future one—at best; but if the day comes, boy, that you have your way, believe this for a truth—he’ll be far more at risk from you then than he is now from me.”

He did not like to hear that. Uulamets might lie. He had a feeling this was not one of those times.

But Uulamets walked over to the fireside to investigate the cooking.

“Master Uulamets—” Sasha said.

“Let it be,” Pyetr said, catching his arm, and Sasha saw how Eveshka slipped away from her father, never looking at him as she gathered up bowls and spoons from the shelf.

“He’ll come around,” Sasha said, and looked at Pyetr. “I’ll talk to him. You don’t have to. Just please don’t—don’t fight with him.”

Pyetr said nothing for a moment, his jaw set so the muscle stood out. Then he folded his arms again, tucking the injured hand under as if it hurt him, and said, with an evident effort at reason, “There’ll be a way out. I’m not leaving you here.”

“I wish—”

“For the god’s sake don’t wish. Haven’t we got enough?”

It was cruel; and true. Sasha shut his mouth and stopped wanting other than what Pyetr wanted, especially about Pyetr leaving—Pyetr having very good sense when he was using his head: and having more wit than he had when it came to ways to get around people.

“We just mind our manners,” Pyetr said. “You think about it. Think, that’s all. I can put up with grandfather.”

“You’ve got to get along with him.”

“I can get along with him,” Pyetr said, and assumed a deliberate, thin-lipped smile. “I’ve no difficulty with that. I’ve dealt with thieves before.”

“Pyetr, please!”

“I’ve even been on good terms with them.” Pyetr gave Sasha’s shoulder a light rap with the back of his hand and made a quick shift of the eyes toward the fireside, reminder that Uulamets might well overhear. “So he’s got us. Nothing lasts. You use your head, and trust me to use mine, hear me?”

Sasha nodded; and glanced to the fireside where master Uulamets was ladling out a bowl of porridge, talking the while to Eveshka, who stood staring at the floor, hands folded, not responding at all to her father.

Eveshka was not all right. Nothing seemed to be, not the house, not Uulamets’ daughter. Nothing that Uulamets had planned seemed to be turning out the way he had intended.

And Uulamets wanted them, he even wanted Pyetr, quite badly, for that matter, despite his offer to let Pyetr go—Sasha had a deep, worried notion that Uulamets had had that string firmly tied to his finger before he ever made the offer—that Uulamets had known Pyetr would refuse, not least because Uulamets wanted him to. There were undoubtedly wishes loose, powerful ones: five wizards, Pyetr had said, constantly pushing things back and forth among themselves; and Hwiuur’s wishes and Hwiuur’s cunning were not to disregard.

“Conspiracies?” Uulamets challenged them suddenly, looking in their direction.

“No, sir,” Sasha said, and walked over to get his bowl and Pyetr’s, to fill them, but Eveshka did that, and he stood there waiting with his hand out, looking at what looked like a live girl, with wonderful long hair that she had simply caught back with a ribbon this morning; with a smudge of soot on her hands from the pothook; and with tears in her eyes that she was trying not to spill. He felt sorry for her. He wanted to do something.

“After breakfast,” Uulamets said, at his elbow, “there’s packing to do—things to take to the boat. We’re not finished.”

“Finished,” Sasha echoed, not because he did not understand that word. He was afraid he did.

“Chernevog,” Uulamets said.

“You know where he is?” Sasha asked.

“I’ve always known where he is,” Uulamets said.