R1 - Rusalka (19 page)

"What, sir?"

Uulamets grinned. "The nature of your enemy. The nature of what you want. The nature of nature itself. I've
wanted
someone like you, boy, for much longer than you've been alive."

«
^
»

P
yetr cocked
an eye, lifted his head and winced at the pounding ache in his skull.

Much
too much vodka last night.

Some muddle of a dream about woods and a drowned girl, a most vivid dream about running through the woods and seeing a face—

That was the pleasant part. The unpleasant part was waking up with a head like this, with the light coming through shutters the old man had been cruel enough to fling wide to the sun.

Uulamets was back at his book, at the table beneath the window. Moreover—Pyetr lifted his head and winced—Sasha was sitting on the end of the bench, in converse with the old lunatic, their heads together as if they were sharing some direly important secret. Most disturbing of all, they stopped whatever they were saying and looked at him, both of them with one solemn expression, as if he had discovered them in conspiracy.

It was all the same thing as the ghost, too much vodka and, he recalled, god knew what in the stew last night.
That
had been the start of the trouble, after which nothing had made sense, and they had gone out in the woods—

Or he had dreamed that they had.

He let his head back and stared at the shadowed, dusty rafters where there was no light to afflict his eyes, and tried to keep his stomach from heaving.

He heard a scrape of wood, heard footsteps. Sasha came and

S

leaned over him, a worried young face against the dark of the rafters.

"Are you all right?" Sasha asked.

"I will be," he murmured. Talking hurt.

"Do you want some tea?"

His stomach turned. "No," he said, and shut his eyes. "I'll just lie here."

Sasha patted his shoulder. Pyetr's skin ached. He heard Sasha go and say to master Uulamets , "He's all right."

He recollected, he thought, Sasha and Uulamets talking about him last night. He saw them this morning, cozy and full of whispers, and his stomach felt upset for a reason that had nothing to do with last night's vodka.

He suffered the morning long, until Sasha brought him honeyed tea and some potion Uulamets insisted on. He drank the tea, he refused the nasty concoction Uulamets had made for him: Sasha pleaded with him, assured him there was no harm in it, but he pitched the contents of the cup into the coals.

"Pyetr!" Sasha said.

"Let him suffer," Uulamets said with what Pyetr was sure was satisfaction.

"I'll keep my headache," Pyetr muttered to Sasha. "At least I know it's mine.—Stay away from him!"

"It's all right," Sasha said.

"Fool!" Pyetr whispered. His head all but split from the effort. He sank against the stones of the fireplace with his knees tucked up. Sasha went back to his wizard and Pyetr sat there with his head spinning in a disquieting muddle of last night's dreams and this morning's discomforts.

His sword was leaning against the wall, behind Uulamets . He marked its whereabouts, and that of the blankets, and the clothes on the pegs and the rope over the rafters, and he laid a plan of escape.

Overpower the boy and carry him down to the boat, he thought. The boy would come back to his senses. There was nothing the old man could do against a young man with a sword and an outright intention to escape: Uulamets ' apparent skill with the staff and his influence with Sasha were the only things to fear—as long as he avoided the stew.

Pyetr set himself carefully upright finally and went outside, down to the river, for necessities and to reconnoiter.

Sasha tracked him, appeared at the top of the bank and came on down the steep path to the dock where the old boat rode creaking against her buffers.

Pyetr frowned and folded his arms as he came.

"Please," Sasha said, "come on back to the house."

"Of course," Pyetr said. He might have been talking to a dangerous lunatic. He was thoroughly patient. And so doing he measured Sasha's size against his own and decided that indeed, Sasha was tall and strong for his age and possibly more than he could manage in his present condition if Sasha decided to resist being carried.

So he simply turned and walked down the dock toward the boat, and Sasha of course followed him, saying, "Please, Pyetr. We don't belong here."

He paid no attention. He reached the end of the dock and took a jump across to the deck of the aged boat, disturbing the dust and accumulated leaves.

"Pyetr!"

Sasha followed him. He had reckoned so. He walked further, with no intention to alarm the boy or to involve himself in a stationary argument—just to lead him farther toward the shelter of the little deckhouse: no sense starting anything near the edge where the boy could fall in, and no need, either, for the extra work of dragging an unconscious body half the length of the boat, especially considering his headache.

"Pyetr, please!"

"There's no danger," he said, and kept ahead of the boy. "I'm just curious. Aren't you?"

"You're in danger. Please come back."

He walked around the other side of the deckhouse, back to the stern, and heard Sasha coming. Sasha caught up with him; he had the sudden thought that it might be well to be certain first that the boat was truly sailable, so he shrugged and walked back to the tiller, which swayed and moved in the river current, restrained by a mouldering rope.

"Looks as if it could get us a little way toward Kiev," he said to Sasha, racking at the bar to test whether the bolts were sound. "Doesn't it to you?"

"We wouldn't get that far," Sasha said. He had almost come close enough. And stopped. "Pyetr, please, she's dangerous."

"Looks perfectly sound to me," Pyetr said.

A sudden cold wind came up the river, or he had a sudden touch of malaise. He looked up and saw a shimmering in the air in front of him, a pale wispy thing. He blinked.

"Pyetr!" Sasha grabbed him and pulled him back from the rail. He gave backward in shock, seeing something like a veil and a face in empty air where nothing should be, and smelling a waft of water and rotting weed as something wet and cold touched his skin.

"Run!" Sasha cried, and he ran, looking backward, colliding with Sasha in a sudden stop at the side of the boat.

It was gone, then. He stood there with his knees weak, his head pounding, and the wind still icy cold on his wet hand and face. He was not accustomed to run from spots of cold air. He was not accustomed to have them touch him with what felt like fingers.

"Something dripped on my face," he said, looking to the overhanging trees. But no branch overhung the stern. "A fish must have jumped."

"She's looking for you," Sasha said, pulling at his arm. "For the god's sake, she's still here, Pyetr, wake up!"

He wished (hat he could. Maybe it was still the vodka. Drunk old men saw things in the streets. Maybe they thought watery wisps ran fingers over their faces, too.

"Pyetr! Get back to the house! Please!"

He stepped up on the rim of the boat and jumped for the dock, only scarcely keeping his feet. Sasha landed beside him, seized his arm and hurried him up the hill, but once and twice again he felt that chill.

It went away then with a last swipe of cold fingers, and Pyetr ran all-out this time, came panting and stumbling up the walk-up to the porch before he stopped, leaning against the wall of the house and holding his side.

It was not real. He was ashamed of running, and he looked around again to see only forest and the riverside, but so also was there water running down his neck.

Sasha pushed the door open, and cried, breathlessly, "Master Uulamets , she was here!"

Pyetr stayed where he was, leaning with his back against the wall, as Uulamets hurried out and into the yard, to stand there as if he expected to see the apparition somewhere about.

"Your daughter has cold hands!" Pyetr said, with as much sarcasm as he could muster, taking his part in Uulamets ' little play, or Uulamets ' madness, or whatever it was. Uulamets came back up the walk in every evidence of anger and disturbance, and said, on his way, "Fool. Stay to the house or there's nothing we can do for you."

Pyetr opened his mouth to protest, but Uulamets brushed past him and inside, and there was nothing to do now but follow or carry out his escape, and what with the tremor in his knees, the throbbing of his head, and the condition of his stomach, it did not seem the moment for it.

"Pyetr." Sasha caught his arm as he started inside. "You saw it this time, in the daylight. You saw it, didn't you?"

He nodded, since that course offered peace. It was not really a capitulation. He did not intend any such thing. He simply went inside and sat down by the hearth and thought about it while Sasha jabbered with Uulamets about how it had come up the river and he could not see it—"But Pyetr did. It touched him. In broad daylight."

"Daylight or dark doesn't truly matter," Uulamets said. "It's only that light distracts us with other details. You can't entirely see her with your eyes."

"You're crazy," Pyetr snapped, from his place by the fire. "How does anybody see without his eyes?"

"Easily," Uulamets said. "We all do it—don't we? You see her in your imagination."

He hated Uulamets turning his arguments back on him and leaving him nowhere to stand.

"That's precisely where she is," he said testily. "That's
all
she is."

"You're wrong. A danger of her kind is most unfortunately not limited to your feeble powers of imagination, Pyetr Kochevikov. Your mischief just now endangered your young friend, which may or may not be a matter of concern to you, and if it weren't for his good sense, you would
have
no further concerns. Lives have gotten very scarce in these woods."

Pyetr looked away across the room, wiped his neck against the persistent sensation of damp and cold, and told himself it had been a branch shedding dew—or some such.

The alternative, of course, was to let go of common, workaday reason once for all, smile at Uulamets and say, I'm sorry, whatever you say has to be true—the way Sasha had; and since Sasha had decided to take Uulamets ' side of things, Pyetr found himself their only anchor to things outside this woods. Once he began to assent to Uulamets ' personal madness escape became very remote for them.

He sat there all day listening to the boy tell Uulamets what precisely had happened on the river, listening to Sasha, damn it all,
tell
Uulamets about his investigating the dockside, if not the boat; and finally admitting that, too, in Uulamets ' persistent questioning. Pyetr stared at the rafters, ground his teeth, and asked the gods why he was saddled with a fool.