Rusalka

CHAPTER 30

THERE WAS no certainty, there was only the least frail hope in Sasha’s heart, and he fought for it against the whisperings of the ghosts:

“Too late, too late,” one said.

And others: “Give up. They’re dead. You’ll all be dead soon…”

While he grew colder and colder from the ghostly touches and despair tried to take root in him.

He wished he knew what had happened to Babi; he wished he could find some sign of Pyetr and Eveshka in this thicket, but fear of what he was going to find crippled both wishes, because he kept seeing Pyetr the way he had found him by the forest pool, locked in embrace with a girl who was mostly raindrops and mist; and worse, that night on the riverside, the first time they had seen Eveshka, Pyetr lying all pale and cold in the brush—

This time—this time, beyond rescue.

Then Eveshka at least, gruesome thought, would have the strength to come back to them. He could not in conscience hate her if that was the case—and he tried to take hope from the fact that she had not; but he remembered what it was to be without a heart, and how one could know with the head that he had to care, and one could think so coldly and clearly what one had to do

And be so angry then—so terribly angry and so much more powerful than her father was now—

She might well go straight for Chernevog, wishing them along behind her.

That thought was so clear and stark in his heart he felt a pang of fear it was true, that was exactly what she was doing—

“We’re not gaining anything,” Uulamets said to him, stopping, leaning against a tree, hard-breathing. “Make a fire.”

“We’re not giving up!”

“I said make a fire!”

“I’m keeping going,” Sasha said. Master Uulamets wanted one thing, Sasha wanted the other, this time with no doubt at all, and he thought master Uulamets might strike him or wish him dead on the spot—

But after a moment Uulamets snarled, “All right, all right, young fool. Where are they?” A ghost dived through him, through the tree itself, and Uulamets winced. “Can you say? Do you have any idea? I don’t.”

Sasha was not about to confess to confusion. “Ahead of us.”

“Do you know that?” Uulamets challenged him.

Saying yes took a lie; and lying—the thought flashed through Sasha’s mind, his own recollection or Uulamets’—lying was dangerous. “They’ve got to be ahead of us—”

“Your friend could be lying dead in the brush somewhere, for all we know. We could be far past the spot—”

“He’s not dead!”

“Do you know that?”

Sasha shivered as a ghost echoed out of the dark: “Dead—”

“I don’t know that!” he said to Uulamets. “I don’t know anything, I don’t think you do, but we can’t stop—”

“We have to stop, boy, your friend has to stop, flesh and bone have their limits—”

“So does Eveshka,” he cried, “and you know what they are! The longer she goes, the more she has to take—”

“You don’t have to tell me that, boy, I know—”

“So what are you telling me? Stop and let her have him?” He trembled with anger, struggled for breath. “I’ 11 never forgive you if he dies, I swear, I swear I’ll—”

Danger, he thought suddenly. Terrible danger.

“Don’t be a fool,” Uulamets said, grabbing him by the shoulder, and Sasha knew where that thought had just come from. Uulamets shook him, pushed him against the brush and said into his face: “It’s our enemy, boy, it’s the ghosts, it’s doubt, that’s what’s happening to us, use your head, use your wits—” A ghost leaned close, whispering: “No use when there’s no hope—” and vanished in mid-word as Uulamets diverted himself to swat at it and snarl: “Perish!”

There was a sudden quiet about them, then a concerted wailing as if the woods had gone mad, making the ears ache, making any thought impossible for a moment.

Silence then; and the whispers came back, ominously. “You shouldn’t have done that…”

“Perish the lot of you!” Uulamets snarled. “You were nothing when you were alive and you’re less now. Get out of here! Let us alone!”

Another deafening shriek. Sasha clapped his hands over his ears, wanting quiet, the way he knew master Uulamets wanted it, but the sound diminished only while he was thinking about that, and rose whenever he thought about getting on their way, whenever he thought about Pyetr, about anything at all, until there was nothing to do but to endure the screaming and try to move, the two of them, as quickly as they could, while chills lanced through them like swords.

The wailing hurt, it ached, it occupied attention and multiplied missteps in this woods that had not so much as a deer trail, the god knew why no creature would come here. They had not seen the raven since they had first reached the stream they were following, Babi was gone again: they were alone in a streamside darker and darker with overhanging trees, with the white shapes of ghosts reaching at them, so real now Sasha feared it was not only thorns and branches catching at his clothing and his pack.

Then it all stopped, and in the ringing it left was a rustling and crack of brush, and a powerful, quick slither of some heavy body from the streamside.

“Master Uulamets!” Sasha said, as ripples showed beside them on the water, a little sheen in absolute black.

Branches broke above them, as something huge and dark rose straight up.

“Well,” Hwiuur said, tall and black as the trees themselves, “do you finally want help?”

“Where’s my daughter?” Uulamets demanded; and: “Where’s Pyetr?” Sasha asked, even knowing the creature would lie, knowing it meant them no good.

“I don’t know why I should answer you. Send that wretched little creature on my track, try to chase me back to the river—”

Is that where Babi was? Sasha wondered, and wondered with a pang of anxiety where Babi was now, along with Pyetr and Eveshka, while Hwiuur seemed so confident and so self-pleased.

God, he thought, god, no…

“You swore on your name,” Uulamets said, and stamped his staff on the ground, “and you’ve lied—”

“Not lied,” the vodyanoi said, and the voice came from lower and lower in the brush. A dank, river-smelling wind gusted at them. “I offered you my help—”

“Deceptions—”

“I am a snake,” Hwiuur said, smoothly, gently, “and left and right aren’t that important to me: everything’s one thing, really, isn’t it, a pretty girl—pretty, pretty bones—”

“Where is she?”

“Where? Always where and when, you folk, I swear you baffle me—as if it meant anything, to be one side or other of a place. I’m here, she’s there, she might be, will be, could be, all these things, but that’s not the question you should ask: you should ask where you are, and where you’re going, and I can tell you that. You’re in Chernevog’s forest, and you’re going the way everything here goes: his way.”

“Where’s Pyetr?” Sasha cried. “What’s happened to Eveshka?”

“I’ve answered that, haven’t I? Ask me another question. Or ask my help. I would give it.”

“Damn you,” Uulamets said, “you’re to blame for this!”

“Tsss. I? Ask your wife.”

“Ask her what?” Sasha asked, clenching sweating hands. It was none of his business, it was impertinent, but he had doubts of Uulamets, doubts of the vodyanoi’s truths, doubts of everything at the moment—

Which made a wizard far less defended than an ordinary boy.

And there was no reason he knew that Hwiuur did not kill them both.

“Tsss. Ask her who taught Chernevog.”

“I know who taught him,” Uulamets snarled. “I know too damned well who taught him…”

“Ask where he got his power.”

“From my book,” Uulamets said, “—the skulking thief!”

“Ask how he could read it.”

“I don’t need to ask.”

“Ask who was sleeping with Chernevog.”

“Damn you!”

“Tsss. So little gratitude. Let me help you. I would help you—”

The shadow rose above them, up and up above their heads.

Then Hwiuur crashed down, splintering limbs, and breaking brush in his retreat. From water’s edge came a sly, soft voice: “Old fool. You’re so wrong—in everything…”

“Hwiuur!” Uulamets said.

But there was only a disturbance of the water, a spreading ripple, and the rustling of the leaves as the wind rose, cold-edged.

Sasha thought: Can it tell the truth?

And about what Hwiuur had said: It doesn’t make sense.

“How could Chernevog beat you?” he asked Uulamets, suddenly brave enough to ask, because it seemed to him everyone was lying, or telling Hwiuur’s kind of truth. “He wasn’t that old. He—”

Uulamets grabbed him suddenly by the throat, hit him with the side of his staff while he was so startled he had not even his hands up to protect himself, and pinned him against the brush, a gray ness of hair and beard and shoulders, a harsh breathing in the dark, a hand on his throat, not tightening, not letting him go, either.

“He was eighteen,” Uulamets said, “He was a handsome, glib boy, as helpful as you are, until I caught him at his game.”

Sasha trembled, thoughts scattering like sparrows—what Uulamets could do, what some faceless man had done, long ago, holding him and hitting him—

A neighbor woman saying, His father beat the boy—

“Dammit, boy, I told you I wanted to stop, I told you, you understand me, but you didn’t care, you were getting your way, no matter what—I can’t fight that, not without doing something our enemy can use, so I gave in to your foolishness, and keep going, and damn you! you natter and you argue and push me—”

“I didn’t understand I was doing it, I didn’t mean to do it—not—not except the first—”

Uulamets was going to hit him again, Uulamets was going to hit him because Uulamets was terrified of his own anger and there was so much of it. Honesty was equally frightening to him—and he was practicing it now, wanting a foolish boy to know how desperate and frightened a wizard could be.

Sasha laid his hands on Uulamets’ arm, wanting Uulamets not to be afraid of him—desperately afraid that was the wrong thing to do, realizing he should have said it aloud, the way Pyetr had told him—Say, it, boy!

The raven settled, with a flutter of wings, in the thicket at Sasha’s back.

“Please,” Sasha said, pushing at Uulamets’ hand. “I was stupid. But—” Tears threatened him. “Pyetr—”

The bird fluttered uneasily, settled its weight on Sasha’s shoulder and brushed his cheek with a nervous wing. Tears spilled. Pyetr was dead, he was scared it was true, it was his fault, and Uulamets called him a fool.

Uulamets’ fingers slightly tightened, only slightly. “A wizard can’t want too much,” Uulamets said. “He can’t want a kingdom, he can’t want gold, he can’t want things that bring him near other people; but there’s one most dangerous thing he can want.”

“What’s that?” Sasha asked, because the old man was going to squeeze his throat shut, and the old man said, hardly louder than the wind,

“He can’t want more magic than he has, he can wish himself more and more powerful. And do you know where he can get that power?”

It was hard to think past his grief, and the old man pressing him back against the branches, off his balance in every sense—most of all with Uulamets trying to get some admission from him he did not understand. “He can learn,” was the only answer that came to him.

Fingers tightened again. “How did you feed my daughter?”

“I—” He panicked, unsure of what he was guilty, or what the old man suspected he had done.

“Where did you get what you gave her?”

“From the woods, from the—”

“From living things. Like the rusalka, from living things, from the inexhaustible earth—”

Is it inexhaustible? Sasha wondered, helpless, stupid curiosity, with everything tumbling through his mind, cold and distant now. He thought of the dead forest…

“—or from things that are magical. The vodyanoi certainly would lend us his, he wants to lend us his, as he lends it to our enemy, and do you know where he gets it?”

“From the river—”

“From the river, from the earth, from his victims, but what he is, boy, is cold, and linked to other things like him—I don’t speak of evil, boy, there’s no name for Vhat it is, except self interested and slippery and rarely holding an ambition that has to do with men—men hold that kind of thought, do you understand me?”

Sasha tried to shake his head.

“You borrow from him, boy, and he’ll give you all you want, he’ll give you cold power, and deep power,, and rivals, oh, you can’t allow rivals, not on that level of power, boy, because the last thing you want is another wizard to want things his way—”

“I’m not against you,” Sasha said faintly.

“You’re lying.”

“No, sir! No!”

“I taught once, and twice, and had a daughter—and what does it come to? To this! To this damned woods and a creature that for my simple asking would make me more powerful than the young fool who killed my daughter, than the young fool who fights me every step of the way—”

“I’m not fighting you, I’m sorry—”

“Let me tell you, boy, his whole use for my daughter was revenge on me, his whole purpose in coming to me was to take everything I had, including my free will. At least my thieving wife left me something—but look what that came to! The girl was her mother’s daughter—”

“Eveshka never betrayed you. You don’t believe that Thing…”

“I believe in fecklessness. I believe in youthful stupidity. I believe in self-interested treachery, I’ve seen too much of it, and here we both are, boy, in the middle of this damnable woods, with you with one purpose and me with mine, crossing each other at every turn, while there’s no resource our enemy doesn’t have. I thought I had my daughter back, the way she was before that blackguard came, but no, I should have known the difference; my Eveshka went straight for another light-minded, pretty scoundrel—”

“Pyetr’s not like that!”

“I’m not expecting to get my daughter back. Not my daughter! All I’m trying to do is stop her from joining him, because she will. I’m here to stop a fool who’s dangerous to everything alive, because that’s what he’s become, that’s why I wouldn’t let him have my daughter and that’s why I’m risking everything I’ve got left, damn you! I should have killed both of you at the start, I should have killed you when I knew how wrong things had gone. I more than’ don’t need you,’ you’re good, you’re powerful as hell, boy, and he’s got both my daughter and your friend, do you understand me, do you know what you’re going to do about that?”

“Kill him if I have to.” Sasha had never imagined intending a thing like that, he had never thought he could, but he saw where master Uulamets was leading him and what master Uulamets was asking.

Till Uulamets shoved him back hard and said, “And then who’ll be the power, boy, have you gotten that far in your thinking?”

“I—don’t want anything but—”

My friends safe, he thought, trying to figure what else that hid; and felt Uulamets’ hand relax, and close again on his shirt and pull him upright. The raven fluttered and settled on Uulamets’ shoulder as Uulamets pulled him into the circle of his arm.

“Believing stops,” Uulamets said, holding him so tightly for a moment his joints cracked, before he roughed his hair and let him go. “Then there’s nothing. You understand: there are very few old wizards. And thank the god, most of the young ones lose it fast.—Make a fire, boy, do what I tell you, do absolutely what I tell you.”

Sasha opened his mouth to plead their need for haste, then smothered that objection and said, bowing his head, “I’m trying not to wish, sir, but—”

Uulamets’ hand came up under his chin and held him eye to eye in a little patch of starlight. “But.”

“j__”

“Want nothing but what I want. There’s another place to get magic. Do you imagine what it is? It’s very dangerous.”

“From another magician,” Sasha said, with a little flutter of dread: he did not know whose thought that was.

Uulamets said, still holding him, “You have to stop fighting me, boy. You’ve got the power, I’ve got the experience, and it has to flow my direction: you don’t want to see the harm you can do. Will you do what I want? Will you absolutely do what I want? I’m going to work a real magic in a moment. It won’t be pleasant for you.”

“Pyetr—”

“No promises. No promises. We don’t even know he’s alive. But that blackguard student of mine is going to kill both of us—or worse. There is worse—if we don’t do something. Hear how quiet things are? He’s thinking. We haven’t much time.”

“He’s making the ghosts—?”

“He’s feeding them. He’s doing all of this. The vodyanoi is helping him; and he doesn’t want us dead, that isn’t half what he wants.”

Sasha thought he understood. He was afraid of what he understood, and afraid of mistakes.

And helpless, by that fact.

“Go ahead,” he said to Uulamets, trying not to let his terror show. “Whatever you have to do.”

They went in a hail of twigs and leaves, a passing dark flurry of branches, so rapidly that Pyetr ducked his head, held on to Misighi and when some crashing impact or downward drop made him sure he was going to die—he held the tighter, Eveshka clinging as a weightless chill about his neck, told himself that leshys would never fall, and never drop him, and kept his mouth tightly shut no matter what—until of a sudden they plummeted into empty air: “God!” he cried—

But they stopped abruptly and bounced up again, continuing to bounce slightly—like his heart, he thought, swallowing the outcry he had made: Misighi had evidently caught a resilient branch to stop them. Misighi immediately stretched out the arm holding him, opened all the myriad twiggy fingers and slipped others from his grip until he dangled only from his hands, and lowered him and Eveshka rapidly down and down through empty air.

“Fare well,” Misighi said, the mere creaking of branches, as its face retreated into the dark above him and shadowy limbs rushed up past them. “This is the boundary. Further than this is impossible for us.”

Pyetr’s feet touched ground, and it let them go, uncurling its fingers from his grip.

Then he did well to keep his shaking legs under him—instinctively tried to steady Eveshka, but his hands only met cold; and he looked up into the dark: “Thank you,” he said foolishly—difficult to bow to something far above his head; and only had a shower of leaves for his trouble, the creatures passing above them like a storm through the woods.

Eveshka had his hand, always able to touch him, surer of his edges, he supposed, than he was of hers. He looked about him at a woods no worse than where they had been—and beyond, at a starlit forest of dead limbs, dead as Eveshka’s own.

Closer than that, at a black ball sitting on the leaves, panting.

“Good dog,” he said to it. Babi licked his lips and got up, expectantly, little hands clasping, then one finding the ground, pawlike.

“You shouldn’t go,” Eveshka said, and turned and put her arms about his neck, looking up into his face. “Pyetr, please, no, I’m—not—strong enough—”

Babi growled and of a sudden jumped up and grabbed his sleeve—pulled him sharply aside, for which a man could be quite resentful, except he saw Eveshka flit and stop a little removed from him, hands clasped together, pain on her face.

“I—can’t,” she said, “I can’t not want you, and you know what that does to us.—Babi, keep him, watch him—”

Pyetr tugged to get his sleeve free. “Babi, stop it!” He knew what she was up to, where she was going as she started away. “ ’Veshka, no!”

She paused, looked back over her shoulder, paler, much paler once she had crossed that boundary of living woods and dead. And it was not his gentle Eveshka looking back at him with that cold, resolute anger, or speaking to him in a voice so icelike still:

“I can’t kill him the way I can you: there’s no limit to him. But you’re right: a sword might. A knife. I don’t know if I can get to him, I may weaken too much. But I’ll try, Pyetr—”

Something moved among the trees behind her, something walking through the starlight, among the pale, barkiess trunks. “ ’Veshka,” he said, shaking his wrist, trying silently to urge Babi to turn loose, not wanting to make overmuch commotion and precipitate something unwanted. “’Veshka, don’t look, but there’s somebody behind you—quietly, walk back here.—Babi, Babi, dammit, turn loose—”

She did turn and look, and the gray figure came walking steadily as she began to tear into threads again, streaming away into thin air.

“’Veshka!” Pyetr said—jerked violently to tear his sleeve free: cloth ripped, but Babi held like a lump of iron, seized his wrist with his hands, strong as chain, as Eveshka dimmed and dimmed. Babi began to pull him away, but of a sudden he wanted to go toward that ominous figure, and of a sudden Babi’s grip slipped, releasing him.

He caught his balance, walked across the boundary, stopped beside Eveshka all the while knowing he had made a grave mistake in his plans against Chernevog—knowing that Chernevog had wished him here all along, ahead of his companions, and a sword could do very little, when Chernevog wished not.

“’Veshka,” he said, feeling her attraction, too; and felt her attention—felt the touch of the threads that flowed from her and felt the delirious little jolts as his strength flowed out of him—to her, who was a wizard no less than Chernevog: “Take it all,” he said, with what breath he could spare, hoping she would go all the way to substance then: “Quickly. Take the sword…”

But she might not have heard. The theft continued the same as the flow of threads from her to Chernevog, who walked up to them, a fair-haired man younger than himself, a handsome youth with a gentle face and a smile and outstretched hand.

The hold on him broke, Eveshka’s touch stopped, sudden freedom, sudden loss: he reached, reeling in a struggle for balance, after the sword—got it from its sheath as his right leg went out from under him, and went down to his knee with the point, trembling, aimed at Chernevog’s heart.

Then his arm simply would not move further, while Chernevog brushed the blade aside to close about the hand that held the blade, Chernevog a faceless shadow against the stars, holding his hand, making him look up. “You don’t want to hurt me,” Chernevog said, the way Sasha would wish at him, just as gently, just as subtly: nothing wicked could be that gentle, or that reassuring, and he could not move.

Then it seemed for a heart-stopping moment the touch of a snake, and he recoiled, finding his sword in his hand and Chernevog close enough; he grabbed at Chernevog’s arm—

But he found himself quite, quite incapable of moving then, Chernevog laying an arm along his shoulder, taking the sword ever so gently from his fingers, saying to Eveshka, “Don’t do that, ’Veshka, he’s the one will suffer for it. Do you want that?”

“No,” she said.

“I know what you’ve come for. Shall I give it back to you? I can do that. I’ve kept it very well. I knew you’d come, soon or late.”

“No!” she cried, and Pyetr wanted with all his heart to get his hands on Chernevog’s throat, but he could not, could not even though Chernevog wished him slowly to stand up and look at Eveshka.

Her face was buried in her hands, her body heaving with quiet sobs.

“She knows everything she’s done,” Chernevog said, beside him, and put an arm around him. “A heart is nothing I’d want. But I can make her happy. And you—what do you want? Your young friend safe?”

“All of us,” he muttered, knowing it was useless.

“I’ll throw in Uulamets, if he’ll be reasonable, ease poor ’Veshka’s mind—yours, too. There’s nothing so terrible about what I want. No tsar you could find so kind as I am—”

“Go to hell!” he said, and suddenly Eveshka went pale, spinning off threads of herself, faster and faster, until the starlight shone through her, until the threads wrapped themselves about him, the shocks multiplied and he heard her sobbing, “Kavi, Kavi, no!”

“On the other hand,” Chernevog said, when the sparks cleared out of his vision and he was lying numb on the ground, “you can go to hell yourself, peasant lout, much, much more easily than I.”