Rusalka Read online

  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 want
ed 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.

  CHAPTER 6

  PYETR SLEPT, at least, laid his aching head down on his arm and waked in the morning in somewhat less pain than he had been feeling. That encouraged him for a moment, until he heard the crack of thunder and saw the forbidding gray of the sky.

  “Damn,” he said, and shut his eyes again, not wanting to move, not believing any longer in anything. Kiev was a dream. Like dreams, it was for people more fortunate. What Pyetr Kochevikov got was a cold bed on cold ground in an endless forest and both he and the boy he was with starving to death in a very stupid series of mistakes.

  Mistake to have come this way. Mistake to have hoped, mistake to have expected, mistake to have left the fields at all. Hanging was better than this. Surely it was better than this.

  A raindrop hit him in the face. Another did.

  “Father Sky,” Sasha said, on his knees, desperate. “Don’t do this.”

  “Father Sky isn’t listening,” Pyetr said in a voice more ragged than he had thought. “Father Sky was drinking late last night and he’s in a rotten mood.”

  “Please don’t do that!”

  The boy was scared as he was. The boy believed in banniks and Forest-things and they had proved as treacherous as the thunder-rolling heavens.

  The boy came and helped him to his feet and found his sword for his hand while the chill rain came spatting down through the branches and pattering against the leaves.

  The boy found a berrybush while they were walking in the drizzle and the thorns raked him cruelly while he gathered the winter-old black fruit. Blood ran in the rain spatters on the backs of his hands.

  “Breakfast,” Sasha said, and Pyetr took a handful and tried to eat, but his throat hurt when the tart flavor ran down, and he had no appetite for it. He felt warm this morning despite the drizzle that slicked the branches and turned the leaf mold treacherous. “Take the coat a while,” he said. “I’m warm from walking.”

  But the boy would not. “So am I,” he said; but Pyetr knew he was lying.

  He slipped once. It should have hurt. He caught himself, pain-free, giddy with relief. He made a flourish of his hand past Sasha’s white, frightened face, laughed at the heavens and said,

  “Let it rain. Father Sky missed us with his lightnings. He’s having a tantrum. Rich men are like that.”

  “Be careful,” Sasha begged him; and tried to take his arm, but he flung off Sasha’s hand and walked down the slope, slid to a stop in a clear space and looked up into the rain, blinking stupidly at the drops.

  “Pyetr!”

  “Old Father,” Pyetr called out, holding up his hand. “One more chance! Best shot!”

  “Pyetr!” Sasha came running down and slipped, himself, to one knee.

  Pyetr shrugged and spread his arms. “No thunder, even. The old fellow’s shot his bolts. He’s an old householder. He’s thrown all his pots and his brickbats. Now he’s just down to complaining.” He shook his head and watched Sasha get to his feet again, then turned and walked on the way the forest gave them, perhaps the road, or not the road, one could lose it now and never know. It was a ghost, a dream, like distant Kiev.

  False, like the promise of gold.

  Dangerous, like the warmth that protected him against the rain, that made him think he had no need of the coat. He walked with white daylight coming through the branches and once found himself on his knees, with the boy shaking his wrist and telling him he had to get up, he had to walk. The day passed in memories of branches, of leaf-strewn slopes, of bleak dead trees and the boy, always the boy with him, saying, “Pyetr, Pyetr, come on, you’ve got to keep going—”

  And himself saying finally, in the hoarse voice remaining to him, “I’m too tired. I’m too tired, boy,” because suddenly he was, and his head was hurting, and the whole world seemed one never-ending muddle of branches. All the places in this forest had become cruelly the same, one tree and another, one leafy bank and another, one dimly lit stream and another, and the pain was threatening again, less from his side than from his skull. That was what the fall had jolted, and he found himself near blinded.

  “Listen,” he said, “this is foolish. It’s near dark.”

  “Get up,” Sasha said. “Please, Pyetr Illitch—it’s smoke, don’t you smell it?”

  He could smell nothing, with his nose running and his throat so raw. The boy was lying: he was sure that Sasha was lying, only to make him walk.

  But he walked, with Sasha holding him up on one side, guiding his wandering steps. They were on clear road again, more leaf-strewn ground among dead trees the bark of which was peeling as if they had died years ago.

  And so desperate he was that he could imagine the smell of smoke, and that he could imagine among the dry trees a clear, wind-swept road ahead, and then a gray board shed, a fence, and a gray, ramshackle house, spotted with lichen and bearded with moss like the trees tha
t concealed it.

  He stopped, winced with the boy pulling at him, and gripped Sasha’s shoulder. “Speak of bandits—”

  “What else can we do? Where else can we go for help?”

  Pyetr leaned on his sword and tried to take his arm from Sasha’s shoulder—truth to tell, he had no idea why he was a fool. It only seemed sensible which of them should walk up to that door. But he wobbled badly, and Sasha held on to him and half-carried him down the road, the two of them weaving in their steps. The gray boards and the gray trees blurred together in the twilight as if the barren limbs had grown to the house or the house had grown and died and weathered with the trees.

  The closed shutters showed no light. The porch posts leaned, mere gray wood spotted with lichen; the yard was grown up in weeds, slanting down toward more of the forest.

  But beyond those trees, they could see from the front gate, was the river, a landing, a bell post, and a boat as decrepit as the house.

  “God,” Pyetr said in a painful whisper, “it’s a ferryman’s house. It’s an old ferry. We’ve come back to the road again.”

  Pyetr thought about bandits as they passed the gate and walked a bare dirt path that showed usage, headed for the long wooden walk-up to the porch. He thought of the chance of them being murdered, he thought of the terrible things that could happen to both of them, while he leaned against the wall by the door and listened to the boy batter away with his knocking.

  “No one’s home,” Sasha said in a voice which had begun to be as hoarse and as desperate as his own.

  Pyetr passed a glance up where the latchstring came down. “Evidently they don’t mind visitors,” he said, “and it’s no time for niceties. Probably the ferryman’s in back somewhere. Just pull the string. We’ll invite ourselves. Country manners.”