Rusalka (v1.3) Read online

  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,” Sash
a 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.