Rusalka

CHAPTER 5

“NO HORSE,”Pyetr complained, in the morning—a frosty morning, Sasha found, in which it might be a great deal warmer to stay where they were, but fear of the thieftakers and the sting of Pyetr’s ridicule made it unlikely he would rest.

“No horse, no coat, no carriage,” Pyetr said. “I expected the tsar for breakfast. For supper tonight, do you think?”

Sasha got up, picked weeds out of his hair and felt bits of them go down his collar.

“No sense of humor,” Pyetr said.

One could be very angry at Pyetr, except he tried to move and sit up, and it hurt him, so that he caught after the branches of the bush and stabbed his hand on the thorns. Sasha winced, himself, while Pyetr just drew back the bleeding hand, shook it and sucked the blood with a weary, aggrieved frown—and held it up then, still bleeding, with: “Do you do small cures, perchance?”

“No,” Sasha said sorrowfully, and came to help him up. “I truly wish I did.”

It took a bit to get moving, cold as it was, but it was the only help for a stitch like that, just to work it out by walking, the boy trying to help him the while.

“It’s better,” Pyetr said, finally, when moving and the warmth of the sun on his back had helped what it could. And, his wits being a little clearer, he thought that the boy was very quiet and very unhappy this morning. “Cheer up,” he said. “We’re away, we’re not on the main road, we’ll come across it again, eventually, beyond any distance they’d search for us…”

“But what town are we going to? Where does this road go? Don’t they say—don’t they say east is the way to the Old River, don’t they say—people don’t go that way any more? Only outlaws—”

“What do you suppose we are?”

“But—” Sasha said with a distressed look, and seemed to be thinking about it.

“But?” Pyetr said, and when Sasha said nothing to that: “We’ll follow the river south,” Pyetr said. “There has to be a road. Or the river itself. We can build a boat of sorts. It goes all the way to the sea. It’ll carry us to Kiev. People are rich in Kiev.”

Sasha trudged beside him, arms wrapped around his ribs, hardly looking confident.

“So serious,” Pyetr said.

Sasha said nothing. Pyetr clapped him on the shoulder.

“It’ll be all right, boy.”

Still there was nothing. Pyetr shook at him. “No wishes?”

“No,” Sasha said in a dull voice.

“No horse?”

“No.”

“You let me devil you too much.”

No answer.

“Boy—” Pyetr flexed his grip on Sasha’s shoulder, and held his temper. “You go where you want. If you want to go back, go back. If you want to go ahead, go ahead. Make up your own mind. If you don’t want to hear about horses, say, Shut your mouth, Pyetr Illitch. Try it. It’s good for your stomach.”

Sasha twisted away from him. Pyetr held on.

“Say it, boy!”

“I don’t want to hear about horses!”

Pyetr let him go. “Then I beg your pardon.” With a bow as they walked, the doffing of an imaginary cap—a mistake: it did hurt.

They walked a while more in silence.

“Your uncle is a bully,” Pyetr said. “I am a profligate, a gambler, a liar and occasionally a person of bad character, but I do swear to you, I have never been a bully, and you insist to make me one. Look me in the face, boy!”

Sasha looked up, stopped, startled as a rabbit.

“Good,” Pyetr said. “Say it again, about the horses.”

“I don’t want to talk about the horses, Pyetr Illitch!”

“Then accept my deep apology, young sir.”

Sasha looked as if he feared he had gone mad, and kept looking at him.

“You’ve got it right,” Pyetr said, and slowly, slowly, the boy’s face lost its frown. “Go on. You’ve almost got it. Don’t be so glum.”

“Why shouldn’t I be? We’ve no blankets, no food, the law wants to kill us—and probably the outlaws will.”

“Then what worse can happen to us? Only better. If you could only wish us up a supper—”

“Shut up about the supper, Pyetr Illitch!”

He laughed. The boy glowered, and he laughed until he hurt, holding his side.

“Stop it!” Sasha cried.

So he shrugged and started walking again, shaking his head.

Sasha overtook him. “I’m sorry,” Sasha said.

“Of course you are,” he said, not kindly.

“I’m not mad,” Sasha said.

“Of course you aren’t. That’s the problem, lad.”

“I can’t be,” Sasha said, “don’t you see, I can’t be! I can’t—”

“Because your wishes come true,” Pyetr said in disgust. “God, boy—forget that nonsense.—Or conjure us the horses.”

There was an intake of breath, a moment of silence.

“If you’re afraid to lose your temper, boy… then laugh. Can it hurt?”

Another deep sigh from the boy. A miserable little try at a laugh.

“More practice,” Pyetr said.

It should be absolutely the worst time of year to be out and living off the land, Sasha thought, the winter berries spent, the new growth merely swelling in the bud, the tubers all dug, the insects still in the egg—all of which meant a mouse could not have found a living in The Cockerel’s in-town garden in this season, let alone two shivering travelers turned out in the wilderness. But grain had seeded here, gone wild and sparse from a time, perhaps, when this all had been cultivated fields, or it was simply the drift from fields closer to Vojvoda, Sasha had no idea. They could pick remaining heads caught in thickets, up against stones, where the heavy winter snows had not altogether flattened and spoiled it. There were a withered few berries in the center of bushes, food that the birds must have missed, but perhaps they were poison, Sasha had no idea, and Pyetr said he had none, and they were small anyway.

Pyetr did not say, Wish us well-fed. Sasha did it on his own, hoping for food and safety they could find without being found, but he was not sure where that wish might lead, here, in the wilderness. He was sure of nothing that The Cockerel’s walls did not contain, he had no experience else, and he kept thinking of bandits and trying most desperately not to wish for his own bed and aunt Ilenka’s kitchen, or anything else that might bring them more than they wanted.

But there was no food more than the heads of wild grain he could gather; and as they walked, the forest shadow that had been on their left since last night began to spread across the horizon, making clearer and clearer where the road was going.

He was sure there were bandits and worse things beyond: travelers who came to The Cockerel told of forest-devils and things that snatched and clutched, evil spirits which misled a man, and left him to ghosts and wild beasts. He mentioned these to Pyetr, but Pyetr said they were granny-tales, and scoffed, as Pyetr would.

Sasha kept his fears to himself thereafter. He had never seen a forest, but he knew the worst of it, and this one looked less and less savory, winter-barren across a winter-ravaged meadow.

There would be snow remaining in that shade, he was sure. There would be all too much of shade in a place like that, there would probably be drifts still standing, and there would be cold. Their thin clothes were scarcely enough to keep warmth in their bones while the sun was shining on their backs and the wind was still.

“I think we should stop,” he said to Pyetr, while there was still daylight, “and rest, and not go in there until morning. I can find us grain, still. I think we ought to go in with some in our pockets. And I can make us a bed of straw tonight.”

They were at the top of a brushy slope, where the road was completely overgrown, and below was the last of the meadow and the first of the forest. Pyetr stopped there, and gave a great sigh and leaned on the sword he had begun to use as a walking stick. “Good lad,” he said, hard-breathing. “Yes. I think that’s only prudent.”

There was a fair good stand of wild grain about the scattered thickets and rocks, there was the standing brush, and they might at least, Sasha thought, pulling heads of grain for their supper, sleep relatively secure tonight.

Except by twilight, as he was cutting straw with Pyetr’s sword, he heard a distant sound that might be horses coming, and he looked up in alarm.

It came again, with a flash of light on the northwestern horizon, above the rolling hills.

The straw was the best hope, Sasha had said, any they could gather, however wet and half-rotten, and Pyetr sat with Sasha’s coat around him, clenching his teeth against the cold, binding handfuls with straw twists to tie it around stalks of brushwood, the way Sasha had shown him—very much like thatch, Pyetr saw, once they laid the brushwood sticks down on a rough frame, into a roof, poor though it was and full of gaps, on a frame laid up against a boulder and a leafless clump of brush. The thunder muttered and they built, handful by handful, row by row, Sasha hacking handfuls of straw and bringing it back, building up a bed of brush and a layer of straw, in a nook he had hacked out between the large gray boulder and a berry thicket.

“You’re very resourceful,” Pyetr was moved to say, teeth chattering, when Sasha joined him in the roof-making. “Sasha my lad, I don’t know a gentleman in Vojvoda I’d have in your stead.”

“I should have brought the clothes,” Sasha said, and flinched as the thunder boomed. His hands were white while they tied knots of twisted grass. Came a second terrible crack, lightning throwing everything into unnatural clarity in the growing dark. “I’m sorry, Pyetr Illitch.”

“We were rather hurried at the time, both of us. And if we had them they’d only get wet tonight.”

Another peal of thunder.

“I’m a jinx!”

“Yesternight it was ‘wizard.’”

Sasha scowled and looked hurt at that gibe. “Maybe my wishes only work when it’s going to go wrong. Maybe that’s the curse on me. Maybe that’s why the wizards wouldn’t take me.”

“Wouldn’t take you.”

“My uncle brought me to them. After my parents died. There was talk. He asked them might I be a wizard, and they said no, I wasn’t. They didn’t find anything in me. But they said I was born on a bad day.”

“Garbage.”.

“I’d think they’d know.”

Crack and boom. Sasha flinched again.

“They’re fakes. Every one of them.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“I do. Jinxes and wizards are a hoodwink. You tell a wizard your troubles and ask him what to do, and he tells you; and he sells everything you tell him to the next customer—probably your rival.”

“Don’t you believe in anything?”

“I believe in myself. Tell me this. If those wizards are so powerful, why aren’t they richer than they are?”

That stopped the boy for a moment. He gathered up another bunch of straw. “There’s wizards,” he said. “There’s real ones.”

“Because you know there are.”

“I know there are.”

“And the cat gets the saucers. I believe in the cat, boy.”

“Don’t talk like that.” The boy made a sign, a fist and thumb. “The Field-thing left us grain, we shouldn’t talk like that.”

“Field-thing,” Pyetr said.

“There is. We should leave him something. We should be polite. We have enough troubles.”

“Because the straw-man will get us.” A man could begin to worry, listening to this sort of thing, in the dark, in the chill of the rising wind. “Hah.”

“Don’t.”

“Maybe you’re just afraid, boy.”

Sasha’s jaw set. He tied off his knot, while the thunder muttered threats.

“It’s only reasonable,” Pyetr said. “That’s a big cloud. We’re not so big. I don’t think you raised it. I don’t think you can send it back.—That’s the really terrible thought, isn’t it? That that cloud doesn’t care we’re already cold and we haven’t had a proper meal since yesterday and you really wish it would miss us. Go on and try.”

“Don’t joke! It has lightning!”

A man could believe in anything with the thunder rolling. A second shiver went down Pyetr’s neck.

Which often made him a fool, especially when there was someone watching him.

“So maybe we should wish the lightning away. Petition old Father Sky.”

“Don’t talk that way.”

“Well, hey, old graybeard,” Pyetr called out to the sky in general, squinting in the icy wind and the blowing bits of grass. “Hear that? Do your worst! Strike me dead! You might have better luck than old Yurishev! But do spare the boy! He’s very polite!”

“Pyetr—shut up!”

It was thin amusement, anyway. His side hurt too much, the wind had turned to ice, and his hands were shaking. But he said, “I’ll wager you breakfast lightning won’t strike us.”

Thunder cracked, right overhead. Sasha jumped.

So did he.

And when the rain was coming down and the thunder was racketing and cracking over them, the both of them tucked into a shelter rapidly leaking despite their efforts, Pyetr Kochevikov began to think that he might indeed die before morning, by slow freezing; and after an hour or so under a shared coat, thoroughly soaked from the dripping water, he began to wish that he could speed the matter, because he was so cold and because the shivering hurt his side, and he could not sleep, he could not straighten his legs or move his arms in the little shelter.

Sasha slept, at least, a still warm lump against his body—and a barrier which kept him from shifting his knees that small amount he was sure would relieve the pain in his side. He tried two and three times to wake the boy—and gave up, finally, figuring that there was no place for the boy to move in the shelter, and that there was a chance of the cold finally making the wound numb if he could just think about that hard enough and long enough.

It was very, very long before the sun came back.

“Wake up,” he said, shoving the boy hard. “Wake up, dammit.”

And when he finally had signs of consciousness from the boy: “You see. We’re alive. The old man missed us.”

“Stop that!” Sasha said.

“Move,” he said, his eyes watering with the pain and the immediate prospect of relieving it. “Move. You owe me breakfast.”

Sasha got up and lifted their soggy roof off with a thump of small rocks and a cascade of water droplets. But Pyetr lay there trying to make his legs work again, and it was several painful tries before he could figure out a way to get up, using his sword, and the rock at his left, and finally Sasha’s well-intended help, which hurt so he yelped.

“I’m sorry,” Sasha said.

He nodded. It was all he had the breath to do.

And it was, inevitably, a breakfast of raw grain, his hands shaking so he could hardly eat and his, teeth chattering so he could hardly chew it. He simply tucked it in his cheek to work on over the hours, not sure whether living was worth this.

“You shouldn’t have said that to the god,” Sasha said as they started out. “You should beg his pardon. Please.”

“Of what?” Pyetr said. “He didn’t hit us, did he?”

“That’s a forest we have to go through. There’s leshys and the god knows what. Don’t offend things! Please!”

“Nonsense,” Pyetr said, in less than good humor. “I’ve a wizard to help me. Why should I worry?”

“Don’t do that, Pyetr Illitch!”

“So go back to Vojvoda. Tell them I was an impious fool. Tell them I kidnapped you and forest-devils carried me off, and you ran home. I don’t care. I don’t need your nattering, boy!”

He was not, admittedly, in the best of humors. He tried the muddy downslope, with his sword for a cane, his knees shaking with the cold, and Sasha fluttering along by him. Every misstep and every jolt hurt him this morning, now that cold had set into the wound, and he swore when he hurt himself and swore when Sasha got in his way.

“Please,” Sasha said to him. “Please.”

He tried to hurry. He skidded on the mud and Sasha caught him. Thank the god.

Thank the boy, too, who was so stubbornly, seriously good-natured, no matter his other failings. Pyetr stood there braced against the lad and finally patted his shoulder and gave a breath of a laugh and said, panting, “Steady, lad. Steady.”

“Yes,” Sasha said. “Lean on me.”

He did that, took his balance from the boy, down to level ground where he could catch his breath, a little warmer now, despite the chill of their soaked clothing.

“Nasty place,” he said, looking at the thicket which closed off everything ahead, a dead-gray and lifeless wall across their path.

Sasha said nothing.

“There’s Vojvoda,” Pyetr said. “You could still go back, boy. Nothing you’ve done’s so serious. You could lie to them. You don’t have to tell them about helping me—”

Sasha shook his head no.

“Well,” Pyetr said, nerving himself, “it can’t be far to the river. One hopes.”

But bending down then, Sasha took a little of their precious grain and poured it on a rock.

“Field-thing,” Sasha said. “We’re leaving. Thank you.” And he stood and flung a little more, into the forest. “Forest, we’re only walking through. We won’t do any harm.”

Pyetr shook his head. Probably, he thought, the only thing it made well-disposed to them was starving squirrels. But he added to Sasha’s little offering a couple of precious grains from his own pocket, to please the boy, then flung another two or three at the thicket ahead of them and called aloud, feeling altogether like a fool:

“Forest, here come two desperate outlaws! We’ll do you no harm, so do us none, and get us safely to the river!”

The wind shifted. What breathed out of the woods was colder than the meadow air.

“Small good that did,” Pyetr muttered, caught his breath of that cold air, and limped ahead, saying: “Look out, devils.”

“Don’t joke,” Sasha said. “Please don’t joke, Pyetr Illitch. Don’t you know what they say? Forests are the worst to meddle with.”

“I don’t know. I don’t bother with such tales. They’re not healthy.”

“There’s leshys, for one, that have their feet on backwards. We mustn’t follow tracks. There’s Forest-things that sing to you and you have to follow…”

“We follow the road,” Pyetr said, setting his jaw. “We take nothing. We talk very politely to the devils and the Forest-things, and we keep walking and we pay no attention to singers in the trees, who are likely to be birds, if any live here.”

“Deer should have eaten all the grain,” Sasha said.

“Deer didn’t. I’m very grateful.”

“Maybe wolves got them all.”

“Boy—” Pyetr began, and found breath for argument too short and too hard come by. “Then they’re well-fed wolves, and we’ll be safe. Be cheerful. Stop wishing up trouble.”

“I’m not,” Sasha exclaimed, indignant. “I’m not, Pyetr Illitch, you are.”

“Well, I’m not the wizard in the company, so it doesn’t matter, does it?”

Sasha gave him a very worried look, as if he was not sure of that reasoning.

“There’s no such thing as luck,” Pyetr followed up his advantage, “with certain dice. And I doubt Father Sky needs your help with his.”

Sasha’s mouth was open. He shut it and walked without saying anything for a long while.

A man could feel ashamed of himself, the boy was so good at heart… precisely the sort of person who offered himself to persons like himself, Pyetr thought, and usually, at dice or in some prank, he was only too glad to find someone of Sasha’s gullible sort; but Sasha had tallied up favor after favor until a body stopped looking for the turnaround. The boy simply was more persistent in giving things away than anyone Pyetr had ever encountered in his life, that was the addition and subtraction of the matter; and Pyetr had long since passed from reckoning Sasha Vasilyevitch as clever and apt to sell him to the highest bidder, to realizing him as gullibly useful (in which realization, being a moral sort of scoundrel, Pyetr had set himself certain strict limits of that use) and finally as a person who needed a keeper and a protector, which Pyetr was nobly resolved to be, at least as far as keeping the boy from hanging.

But this morning he revised all those calculations. The boy had some wit; the boy knew a scoundrel when he met one: one hardly, Pyetr reasoned now, worked at The Cockerel for ten years without knowing the breed. Certainly Sasha must have realized by now that his dear aunt and uncle were scoundrels, else he would be running back to The Cockerel; but Sasha, taking all that aside, had suddenly taken advantage of his pain-muddled wits to appoint himself the protector and Pyetr Ilitch Kochevikov the fool who needed looking after.

Pyetr could hardly understand how this had happened to him; and he had the most uneasy thought that perhaps he should come full circle, and conclude that the boy had in mind some nefarious scheme of his own—

Except the boy had every mark of the gullible.

It was all bewildering, and entirely seductive—considering Pyetr Ilitch remembered his father explaining there were two sorts of people in the world, those who lived by wit and those who lived on luck; and followed that by showing him what luck was worth with loaded dice…

A boy had sat on a Vojvoda street corner once upon a time, and watching a mother coddle a child, had suffered a certain pang of curiosity, which of them was gullible and whether either of them was a fool—

A boy had watched a father showing his son woodworking once, had seen the skill change hands and wondered if the father would deliberately hold back some things to stay better than his son—but perhaps, too, he had thought, the son was clever enough to spy out the things the father would not willingly pass on—

A young man had thought once that the right friends would make him rich and happy, and as far as fools went, that one was the worst, young Sasha was quite right to pity him.

Besides, his side hurt and his head ached, because this particular fool had also thought himself so handsome no lady could ever think of anything beyond him.

All in all, Sasha Vasilyevitch seemed to have very little need of him, and still kept on being kind to him, and this absolute persistence, while it looked altogether like stupidity or villainy, did not agree on the one hand with Sasha’s competency in certain things; and on the other with Sasha’s tenderheartedness.

All in all, it was too much to think about with his head throbbing and his side aching with every step. Perhaps he had fallen in with a precocious lad who sincerely knew he needed a scoundrel and a gambler to protect him (which he was not doing outstandingly well, but leave that aside)—or, most incredible, with a poor boy so taken in by his manners that the lad cultivated him as a gentleman of potential help to him.

I think you mistake me, Pyetr would say if Pyetr were totally a fool.—You must have mistaken me for an honest man, Sasha Vasilyevitch.

—Except he can surely see what I am. We hardly met under the best of circumstances.

—So why, then, be a fool? Pyetr thought as they walked beneath the dry, laced branches. Mind your manners, Pyetr Kochevikov! The lad’s half-mad, so give him his fairyfolk and don’t torment him with the truth. He’s over all kinder than sane folk know how to be.

—And somewhere, when we’re through this—when we reach Kiev, and civilized men, I should teach him to protect himself.

At least… from other, less scrupulous scoundrels.

The sun lent them some comfort in the morning, but the road descended by afternoon into the very depths of the winter-barren forest, where branches raked and closed about the road, where the trees eventually locked their branches overhead and turned day to dusk.

“Eat,” Sasha insisted, while they were resting on a fallen log in a little spot of sun, and while they had water from a little ghost of a brook to wash down the grain they had. He gave Pyetr the most of what he had gathered; and after a little selfish consideration on the matter, and knowing how cold the wind was: “Here. Put on my coat again…”

Because he grew more and more worried about Pyetr, about the tremor in Pyetr’s hands and the paleness of Pyetr’s skin and the listlessness which took him from time to time. Aunt Henka would say that a healing man needed proper food and a warm bed to rest in; and there was nothing of the sort in his power to produce, nor looked to be, and Sasha felt—he could not help it—that if aunt Ilenka was in the habit of blaming him for everything that happened in The Cockerel, Pyetr should surely have a heavy claim to lodge against him—counting that, if not for bad luck, Mischa and a mud puddle, Pyetr might have left The Cockerel more rested, warmly dressed, and better-provisioned. But Pyetr insisted not to blame him for his misfortunes, and gave him a grateful clench-jawed nod for the loan of the coat.

Which touched Sasha in a strange way—the more so because Pyetr himself seemed to realize his danger from the cold, but had never asked him for the coat; and because he might truly be responsible for Pyetr’s condition, if only for failing to snatch up the blankets, and Pyetr had never once cursed him or blamed him for it. Pyetr’s only word on it was a gibe or two about his luck when he rallied, foolhardy jokes that worried him more than they stung—and worried him most for Pyetr, who, weak as he was, challenged far more than the sweep of aunt Ilenka’s broom or the sturdiness of uncle Fedya’s porch, and dared far less patient things than the lazy Old Man of The Cockerel’s stable.

Certainly, Sasha thought, if he might be responsible for Pyetr’s bad luck, he also must be responsible for things nature had not equipped Pyetr Illitch to feel or see—since perhaps the Field-thing heard Pyetr Illitch no better than Pyetr Illitch heard the Field-thing; and no better than Pyetr Illitch felt the chill in these woods which had nothing to do with the remaining snowbanks; and no more than Pyetr Illitch understood that, by all the talk that drifted around The Cockerel’s kitchen hearthside—eastward was not a good direction to travel.

“I’ve heard,” Sasha said while they rested on that fallen log, at that stream side, “—I’ve heard there used to be farms this way. I’ve heard there used to be travelers and towns and all, but things stopped coming from the east, and the bandits set in, and the tsar built the south road because it was just too hard to do anything about the bandits.”

“You’ve heard,” Pyetr said hoarsely, and dipped a hand in the icy water and washed his face with it before he worked himself, grimacing and biting his lip, into the coat. “Let me tell you about Kiev, boy. There’s towers tall as mountains, with gold on the roof ridges. Have you heard that? The river goes down to the warm sea, where there are crocodiles.”

“What’s a crocodile?”

“A kind of dragon,” Pyetr said. “A dragon with teeth like spears and armor on his sides. He weeps tears of pearls.”

“Pearls!”

“So they say.”

“You don’t even believe in banniks! How can a dragon cry pearls?”

He should not have asked. Pyetr thought about that a moment, and his cheerfulness faded and he looked harrowed and wan. “Truthfully,” he said, hard-breathing from his struggle with the coat, “I doubt the dragons. But the Great Tsar lives there. That much I know is true. The Tsar of Kiev is rich, his boyars are rich, and rich folk shed gold coins like birds in moult, never miss it, never care. That’s what I’ve heard. All the gold there is comes sooner or later to Kiev. So there has to be a little of it for you and me.”

Pyetr’s eyes brightened when he talked about the gold. And he had said you and me, which nobody had ever said in Sasha’s memory—you and me was much rarer and much more desirable, in Sasha’s reckoning, than pearl-weeping crocodiles. Pyetr doubted the Field-thing; Sasha doubted Kiev and the gold-capped towers; but you and me was precious here and now.

For the rest, Sasha knew his luck, and hourly watched it fade—Yes, he said to make Pyetr happy. Yes, I want to see that, yes, of course I believe in Kiev.

Mostly he believed that they were lost, and that if they went back to Vojvoda the tsar’s men would hang Pyetr and perhaps hang both of them; but if they went on there was no food in this woods and there was no hope either.

When we get to Kiev, Pyetr would say as they walked that afternoon; and told him about elephants with snakes for hands, and the great roc that laid eggs for the king of the Indee.

Truer than the bannik, Pyetr said with a wink, and shortly after that, hurt himself with a catch of his toe in a root and took a terrible stitch in his side.

“I’m all right,” he said after that, white and shaking; and would not let Sasha open the coat to see his bandages. “Let be,” he said, waving him off. “Let be.”

But the pallor did not go away and Pyetr did not joke after that, or tell him stories while they walked.

The bed they had this night was a pile of rotten leaves next an old log, on an evening so chill breath frosted in the twilight, and Sasha tried, with rubbing sticks over tinder and with the most earnest attempt at a spell he had ever tried in his life, to wish a fire into life; but he only overheated himself and blistered his hands and got not so much as a curl of smoke.

Perhaps, he thought, the wood was too damp, even the driest he could find; or perhaps it was because in his heart of hearts he knew that fire was the one spell he most feared, fire had killed his parents, fire was his curse and his worst luck, and he was direly afraid of it, even as desperate as they were.

“I’m sorry,” he said, panting, and Pyetr said:

“Boy, stop, your hands are bleeding. You’ll get nowhere.”

At least he was warm. He had that to lend. They shared the coat. Pyetr avowed he was not in so much misery this night, and that he would be better in the morning; perhaps, Pyetr said, they would get up early, and walk in the last of the night, when it was coldest, and sleep during the day, hereafter, when it was warmest.

But the last of the night seemed the only sleep Pyetr had gotten, and the road was tangled, and it seemed to Sasha the height of folly to go walking by dark, when they might lose the road and with it, whatever hope they had.

So he said nothing; and Pyetr said nothing the next morning about their being late on their way. Pyetr took a long time getting on his feet, sweated when he had done so and remarked that the morning was warmer than the last, when in fact Sasha felt no such thing and saw their breath frosting in the dawn.

Increasingly Sasha had a feeling of doom and disaster in their circumstances, while Pyetr once again began to talk disjointedly about Kiev, about the Great Tsar’s court, about elephants and rocs, and golden roofs and how his father had seen the tsar once, and how his father had been a trader’s son, and his grandfather had come out of the great east with a caravan; but of a mother Pyetr never spoke and Sasha finally asked:

“Had you no aunt or anything?”

“No,” Pyetr said lightly, lying, Sasha was sure. “I didn’t need one. My father got me in a dice-game.”

“That can’t be so.”

“Ah,” Pyetr laughed, but thinly, hard-breathing as they walked along the way. “The lad knows something, at least. Had you ever a lover, boy?”

“No.”

“Not even a stray thought, yet?”

“No.” It was embarrassing. It made him sound the fool. “There just weren’t so many people.” That was hardly right either. The Cockerel was full of neighbors. “At least—not my age.”

“No girls.”

“No girls.”

“There’s the tanner’s daughter—Masha…”

He felt his face burn, and supposed that Pyetr and his friends had scouted all the town.

“Or the brewer’s girl,” Pyetr said. “—Katya, isn’t it? With the freckles?”

“No,” he said miserably.

“Not one.”

“No, Pyetr Illitch.”

“No wizardess, eh?”

“No,” Sasha said, shortly this time. “What girl would have my luck?”

“Ah,” Pyetr said, with a sudden little frown, as if the whole matter were news to him. And Pyetr nudged him suddenly with his elbow. “But if you had money, you could have a curse and warts and you’d have every father in Vojvoda pushing his daughter at you. And one sees no sign of warts.”

The warmth stayed in Sasha’s face. He knew it was red and he was glad of the forest shadow.

“The girls in Kiev,” Pyetr said, and stopped, and put his hand on a tree trunk, saying nothing for a while, while Sasha stood there helplessly. “Damn!” Pyetr breathed finally.

“Pyetr, let me look at it. Let me see if I can do anything.”

“No!” Pyetr said; and more quietly, on a second breath: “No. I’ll be better—it’s just a stitch. They come and they go.”

Sasha had a terrible cold feeling of a sudden, not in the night this time, when things were always unreasonable, but by plain daylight, and all Pyetr’s jokes had no power to dispel it.

“Let me see the bandages,” he said. “Pyetr, please.”

“No.”

“Don’t be a fool. Please let me help you.”

“It’s all right, dammit, let me alone!” Pyetr shoved away from the tree, walked again with his sword for a cane, not the Pyetr who had defied aunt Ilenka with a flaunt of his cap, but a tired, hurting man with his shoulders hunched and his steps short and unsteady.

Please the god, Sasha thought, and wished Pyetr Illitch well with all the strength he had, for once completely sure of what he wanted and with no doubt in him that it was right to wish.

And perhaps Pyetr was right and he was only a silly fool, because it did not seem Pyetr was any the better for it, not immediately and not for hours afterward. The only thing that could be said was that Pyetr stayed on his feet, walking slowly, and that Pyetr seemed to have no more such pangs, but Sasha had not the least idea whether that was a good sign or bad.

He could not make fire, he could not find so much as a minnow in the ice-filmed brooks they met, he found few berries and not a fluff of fur or a feather of any game in these woods.

Everything was dead. It was that time when the winter died, and much else did, and spring was not yet alive; it was the month for ghosts to walk and the sick and the old to die, and for ill luck and unseasonable storms and for fevers to set in and aches to find old wounds: that was what the townsfolk always said; and the last night before the turn toward spring, the towns-women would go out and unbraid their hair and shake out the knots from their belts and their laces and plow a trench about the walls of Vojvoda, beating on drums and calling on the Lady, at which time every male creature took cover and stayed there till dawn; excepting wizards, who were exempt, and who also beat on drums and spoke to the gods and the friendly spirits to guard the sick in this terrible season.

But Pyetr had only a borrowed coat and a boy with notoriously bad luck, and if there was a place in the land unblessed it was this forest, which, far from having the outlaws and the wild beasts they had feared, had only dead trees and dying bushes, barren ground and lifeless brooks.

If there was even a Forest-thing here, Sasha could not feel it; and secretly that night he took a few berries and a few grains and put them on a dead leaf and said, beneath his breath, while Pyetr was washing, “Please don’t let us be misled. Please don’t let Pyetr stumble, it hurts him. Please get us to some friendly place.”

It seemed too little an offering to appease a remote and un-hearing spirit, which might well be hostile or itself as unhealthy as its forest. So Sasha took a thorn and pricked his finger and squeezed out the blood until it fell in heavy drops. He had heard of sorcerers doing the like. He had heard of terrible things that could go wrong, once blood was in an offering, how there were things that liked it all too well.

“What in the god’s name are you doing?” Pyetr asked him, from the stream side where they had stopped to rest, and he was afraid Pyetr would say something to offend the spirits of the place, so he said, desperately,

“Looking for roots.”

“You’re not likely to find any,” Pyetr said cheerlessly, in the same moment that Sasha realized that he had just lied at the very worst of times; and that if he had called the wrong thing to hear him there was all too much blood in their company.

Jinx, he thought, accusing himself.—Oh, Father Sky, keep wrong things away from us. Pyetr never meant to hurt anybody. Pyetr doesn’t deserve this trouble.

But Father Sky was not a god to trouble himself often, especially not for scoundrels and fugitives in trouble, and it was too much to expect that Father Sky would save a fool from his folly, for whatever it was worth.