Rosa and the Veil of Gold (28 page)

Behind her, the quiet settled again. She turned. Daniel lay spent on the grass, two russalki curled around him stroking his hair. The blonde one sat and watched them, idly dangling her foot in the pool.

Em decided that the instant the other two were asleep, she would take her chances with their leader and steal the bear. As for Daniel…she could decide what to do about him later.

She stood, collecting her tools and readying herself. She left Daniel’s clothes safely on dry land, and backed down the ridge and out to the edge of the river.

By the time she got there, some commotion had started. Voices were raised, Daniel’s among them. She thought she heard him call Rosa’s name, and then there were the sounds of struggle and a splash. Em hesitated only half an instant, not sure whether to go back up to the ridge to see what was happening, or to dive in as planned.

Dive.
The cold hiss again, and she realised Morozko was still close in her thoughts.

She plunged into the water.

It was dark and freezing, but she didn’t fear the cold. She swam fast, stopped to see ahead of her, and swam again. Daniel was not on the bank. The blonde russalka was pulling herself out of the river. Adrenalin lit a fire in Em’s muscles, and she propelled herself through the water. Ahead, a thrashing limb, sinking.

Two seconds later she had him. There was shouting up on land. She hooked her arm around Daniel’s throat and swam away with him.

“
Daniel!
”

“
Daniel!
”

Daniel, unconscious but operating on dull instinct, struggled weakly against her. He slipped under water. She picked him up under the arms again, swam against the current. She glanced over her shoulder at the russalki, thought she saw three hags instead of three beautiful temptresses. Took a deep breath and plunged herself and Daniel under the water, away from their cries.

Seconds later they surfaced.

Daniel had inhaled water, his lips were white. She dragged him up onto the bank and laid him on his stomach, sitting on his back. She quickly filled his ears with mud as the russalki’s cries continued. She pressed down, crushing her knees into his ribs. Water spurted out of his nose and mouth.

She flipped him over. Airways clear. Not breathing. Pressing her mouth over his, she pushed air into his lungs.

Nothing.

More air.

Nothing.

More air.

He coughed. More water trickled from his mouth. His lungs began to work on their own. Em pressed her head to his chest. His heartbeat was surprisingly slow and rhythmic.

But he was not conscious.

She slapped his face gently, pinched him. But when she peeled back his eyelids, only the whites of his eyes were showing.

Daniel was alive, but dead to the world.

Em picked him up and dragged him further into the woods. The cold air had brought his skin into goosebumps. She returned to the ridge for his clothes. From here, she could see the three russalki, sitting on their rock and sobbing into their hands. The blonde one, in particular, was wailing and calling Daniel’s name. Em went back to Daniel and dressed him, bringing her breathing under control.

The russalki weren’t hunters. As long as Daniel couldn’t hear their cries, he was safe. She settled him under his almost-dry fur and built a fire. Daniel’s lighter was low on lighter fluid; she had to flick it two or three times to get a tiny flame which wouldn’t catch
on the pile of leaves she had made. It was the last on a long list of difficulties, but Em found herself bubbling over with anger.

“Damn it!” she shouted and flung the lighter away from her. Ten seconds later she was crawling around in the undergrowth, trying to find it. With shaking hands, she touched the flame to the leaves again; this time it caught.

When the fire was crackling low, the sun had broken over the horizon. Em’s eyes were sore and gritty, and she left Daniel and made her way back down to the ridge. The russalki leaned on each other now, mournfully gazing out over the river. They would see her if she came to take the bear. Unless she stayed underwater. Could she hold her breath that long?

Em drove her fingernails into her palms. Weariness, heavy as six feet of soil, made her sag. It was all too hard. She was exhausted. But she had to have the bear. Birds sang their morning songs, fresh daylight glinted on dew. Em walked through the moist shadows to the edge of the river and took a deep, deep breath.

Then dived in.

Before a quarter of her journey had passed she was already dying to breathe. The water was dirty and sunless, the pool seemed a million miles away. She focused and stayed steady on her path. In the gloom, she could see fish darting, weed twisting slowly. A shaft of light broke the surface just ahead, letting her know she was moving towards the treeless bend where the russalki sat. Her lungs felt blocked and her throat felt hard. She could see the algae-covered rocks where they sloped underwater, and swam for them. She longed to surface, to take a huge gulp of air.

Then she saw it, sitting in a green-tinted beam of refracted sunlight. The bear. The light played over her golden surface and her open eyes met Em’s as she smiled smugly and waited to be collected.

Em’s fingers closed on the bear. A small triumph. She needed to breathe. She couldn’t continue another moment without air, or she would black out and her body would draw in two lungs full of water. She turned, tried to swim as far as she could before she surfaced. Her body, operating on instinct, arrowed up to the air.

She breathed.

“There’s the woman!”

“She has our treasure!”

The russalki had spotted her and were climbing to their feet. Again, they had transformed: the sweet, full breasts had turned into wizened sacs, the creamy complexions sagged with wrinkles. Em dashed for the bank, heard them splash into the water behind her. She beat them to shore, ran up into the woods to find Daniel, still unconscious, by the fire.

Fire. Water.

Em knew nothing about Russian folklore, but knew these elements were each other’s enemies. She cracked open Daniel’s lighter, poured the remaining lighter fluid onto the end of a big stick and touched it to the flames. She turned, the burning torch firmly in her right hand, the bear curled against her ribs with her left. The russalki skidded to a halt when they saw her. They were girls again, beautiful and wet-eyed, with sad trembling mouths.

“Oh, let us keep him.”

“We didn’t mean to hurt him.”

“Get back,” Em said. “Leave him alone. Leave me alone.” She warily crouched next to Daniel. “I’m taking him with me.”

The girls backed away, tears quivering on their lashes. The lighter fluid was burning off quickly, she only had a few moments to scare them away. In front of them, a fall of leaves. Hopefully they were dry enough to catch. She flung the torch into the pile of leaves, and the girls cringed back as flame leapt up in front of them.

“Go!” she said. “Go, or I’ll set you all alight.”

Shrieking, clutching each other, their skin drooping to wrinkles, they fled. None of them looked back.

The fire was moving, catching on more deadfall. So much the better. It would put a screen between Daniel and any of the russalki if they dared to return. The flames moved slowly, but she knew she had to get out quickly. She crouched next to Daniel, got his arm around her shoulder and stumbled forward, away from the fire, away from the river. She hoped to get him as far from the russalki as she could before she decided what to do next. But he was heavy, a dead weight, and she was weary.

She stopped every ten minutes and rested, then dragged him a little further. She tried lying him down in the crackling undergrowth
and pulling him by his feet, and progressed quite a distance like that until she accidentally smacked his head against a protruding rock.

She dropped him, sat down to rest her exhausted body, and thought.

The woods were quiet, the trees wide spaced, allowing in the sunlight. Ahead of her was a ridge. Impossible to drag Daniel up there. She couldn’t head back to the river; she wasn’t heading north again towards the Dead Forest, and she didn’t want to go any further south, away from the Snow Witch.

She glanced at Daniel. His face was peaceful, his eyelids faintly purple, his pulse a soft flutter against his throat. He knew no pain, no hunger, no cold.

“I can’t leave you here,” she said, but already she was glancing around for a sheltered place. The bear seemed to be watching her, pleased with the new plan. About fifty feet away, a fallen log, collapsed on one side but with one intact curve: enough to keep off the rain if it fell, enough to hide Daniel from the greedy eyes of the forest demons.

Kneeling, she dragged him over and tucked him into the hollow. She collected twigs and leaves, took her time working to hide him properly, make him warm, hang his fur over the gap and remove him completely from sight. Then she bent to the ground and found handfuls of mud to smear over the bear. If nobody suspected she was made of gold, they would allow Em to keep her. It gave Em an odd shine of satisfaction to pack mud into the bear’s eyes and smiling mouth.

Finally, Em knelt next to the log and leaned forward, feeling she should say something but not sure what.

“I’ll make a deal with you, Daniel,” she whispered, pressing her cheek against the flaking wood. “I’ll walk until nightfall to see if I can find help, and then I’ll come back for you. If there is nobody to find, then I’ll just keep going and I’ll search for the Snow Witch alone.” She patted the log. “I’m sorry.”

Then she rose and walked towards the east.

Lack of sleep made the day nightmarishly long. Em forced her legs to keep moving, even though her brain was incapable of anything but dazed delayed reactions. She stumbled over rocks and walked into trees. As much as she tried to control them, her thoughts kept returning to the fallen log with Daniel packed safely inside. What if he woke from his enchantment? Would he come after her? Or wait for days for her return, more faithful than she by nature? Along the way, she had been arranging stones into piles—beacons to Daniel of where she had travelled—every three hundred feet or so.

The woods thinned, then plains unfolded, with only loose stands of trees dotted across them. Long yellow grass waved in the breeze, blazed under the sun. Grass seeds clung to her clothes and itched and insects darted around her. The ground was less stony, so she twisted the long grass stalks into knots, marking her path. From every ridge she scanned for civilisation; in every hollow she convinced herself she’d never see another living creature again.

She was worn out by late afternoon, but didn’t dare sit still for fear of falling asleep. Stopping to catch her breath, hands on her knees and weary head hanging forward, she thought about returning to Daniel, maybe even getting back on the river and following it towards the grassy fields they had seen, where they had been so positive they would be nearer the Snow Witch.

Keep moving east.

Again, the icy voice prickling in her mind.

So she kept moving, east if the sun setting directly behind her
was any indication. Nightfall was less than an hour away, and Daniel was still helpless back there in his hollow.

Then, at last, she crested a rise and her nose twitched. Smoke. She could smell smoke.

She had found somebody. But who?

Renewed hope invigorated her muscles. She began to run.

After half an hour she returned to a walk. Then half an hour after that, a reluctant dragging of the feet. A little cottage had come into view under the thin glow of the moon: an unpainted wooden building, stained with centuries, the door black with mildew. Behind it, woodland. She had no idea what kind of creature lived here, and she had no gold to bargain with.

Well, perhaps that wasn’t entirely true.

Em circled the cottage. She passed a half-fallen stable with a skinny horse inside, and a shed full of old rubbish and a dilapidated cart. She moved a few feet into the woods, stopping to hide the muddy bear carefully under a bush. Then she dusted the dried mud off her hands and took a deep breath, striding towards the front door of the cottage.

She rapped four times, hard.

“Who is it?” A weedy voice from within.

“A stranger. I need your help.”

“Go away.”

“I won’t hurt you, I—” Em leaned on the door and, realising it wasn’t closed, pushed it open. She took a step inside the single, dim room. Smoke filled the air, stinging her eyes as it rushed past her to escape out the door. The walls were streaked with soot. There was no light except for the open fire, and she could make out the silhouettes of three figures.

“I’m lost,” she said. “My friend is under an enchantment.”

The largest figure, a man of about fifty, stood up and turned to her. In the dark, she thought her vision deceived her.

But no, she really was seeing a face which was perfectly normal but for one defect: no eyes. Instead, little scarred hollows.

“You should leave,” he said with a scowl.

The woman—Em presumed this man’s wife—was bent to the fire, stirring a pot of meat stew. The greasy, gamey smell made Em’s mouth water. “Strangers aren’t welcome here.” Then she turned to
Em with the same empty hollows in her face. The third person, a son of about teenage years, didn’t bother to turn. He rocked back and forth in his chair by the fire, saying nothing. Em took a hesitant step forward to check if he was scarred the same way as his parents. He was, but only on one side. His right eye was still intact.

“Don’t come any closer,” the man said.

“Please,” she said, spreading out her hands, then realised they couldn’t see the gesture. “I’m sorry to walk in on you like this, but I am desperate.” She scanned the dark room again. Apart from two straw mattresses and the chair their son sat in, it appeared they owned no furniture. A few pots and pans and tools were stacked in corners. The people themselves had no features which made them different from herself: no bark-like skin or fish eyes or green hair. “Are you human?” she asked.

“What sort of question—” started the wife.

“I’m from Mir,” Em said. “Are you from Mir, too?”

The woman inched close to the man and felt for his hand. Em took their silence as confirmation.

“Please help me. I’m like you,” she said. “My name is Em.”

“I’m Mirra,” the woman said cautiously. “This is my husband Artur and our son Slava. We can’t help you.”

“Please. My friend Daniel…he’s unconscious, enchanted by russalki. I’ve hidden him as best I can, but I’m afraid a leshii will find him and I just want to bring him somewhere warm where he can recover—”

“Stop, stop,” said Artur. “Why should we help you? You would bring us into danger, and you offer us nothing in return.”

“What can I offer you?”

“Gold.”

“I thought only the enchanted creatures wanted gold.”

“So they do, and we have to deal with them,” Mirra said.

Em thought about the bear, tucked away in the woods. Was it possible to cut off the bear’s nose, or her foot, or some small portion of her? What if the Snow Witch only valued her intact? No, if anybody was going to be mauled for gold, it was going to be Em.

She had one gold filling and crown, her second-to-last molar on the left of her jaw.

“Do you have any gold?” Artur was asking.

She looked at him clutching his wife’s hand, the firelight creating unnatural shadows in the hollows where his eyes should have been. Daniel, unconscious and alone, needed her help.

“Yes, I have,” she said. “But it might be hard to get to.”

Without even a swig of brandy to dull the edges of her pain receptors, Em was duly handed a pair of rusted pliers and told to remove the tooth.

Using her index finger, she carefully felt along her jaw line, counting the teeth with her fingertip to make sure she had the right one. Then she inserted the pliers and fastened them around the tooth. Sour metal and dirt. She closed her eyes. She was cold, exhausted, hungry. She wanted to weep. She braced herself.

She couldn’t do it.

“I’m sorry,” she said, removing the pliers so they could hear her, “but you’ll have to do it for me.”

“I can’t see to do it,” Artur said, suspicious that she would renege on their deal.

“If I line the pliers up on the right tooth, all you have to do is pull.”

“Slava,” Artur barked to the young man. “Give up your chair for the lady.”

“Better if you do it with her lying down,” Mirra suggested, “then I can hold her head.”

This was a nightmare. Em’s thighs trembled as she lowered herself to the hard, soot-streaked floorboards. Once again she found the tooth and attached the pliers, then she guided Artur’s fingers to the handles.

Mirra’s hard hands closed over Em’s forehead, pinning her head to the ground. She wanted to entreat Artur to do it quickly, but couldn’t speak with the pliers in her mouth. The sight of him, pink hollows under his brows, grim-faced in the firelight, made her close her eyes and wish for the pain to be over quickly.

He pulled. Em bit back a shout of pain. He pulled harder, and she felt the tooth loosen. Her jaw was reluctant to let it go. Hot spirals of pain rushed up her cheek and into her skull. Even her eye sockets ached. One more wrench and the tooth came free, sucking
from its socket with a shuddering creak. Em tasted blood, her tongue instinctively moving to the hole to apply pressure.

“There!” Artur said. “Now, Mirra, show this to Slava. I need his good eye to confirm this is really gold.”

Em sat up, both hands pressed hard against her jaw. The pain was white hot, and her head throbbed sharply. Mirra clutched the tooth in her right hand, opening her palm to Slava. Em had thought him brainless, but his eye fixed keenly on the tooth.

“Shiny, shiny,” he said. “Shiny gold.”

Mirra snatched it from his grasping fingers and he moaned and cried and rocked back and forth again. Mirra turned an apologetic smile to Em. “He’ll be quiet soon,” she said. “We try to ignore him when he’s noisy.”

Em was in too much pain to care about the noise. Her eyes watered and she couldn’t stand up. Slowly, slowly, it began to dull, leaving her with a hot ache stretched across her jaw.

“Where is this friend of yours hidden?” Artur was saying, and Em realised he had taken his bearskin coat off a hook and was shrugging into it.

“I can show you,” she said, then realised that she couldn’t travel. She was bone-weary, in pain, stricken with hunger and the unrelenting cold of her blood. “Or you can follow my path back there,” she said. “I twisted grass, I left stacks of stones. I…” She hung her head. “I can’t go another step.”

Artur tapped Slava on the shoulder. “Get up, boy. Go out and bring the horse and cart round. Young woman, if you give us the directions and tell us exactly where this friend of yours is, we’ll go fetch him. You stay here with Mirra. She’ll make you food and give you a warm place to rest.”

“Thank you,” Em managed.

Within minutes, Artur and Slava had left, Em’s directions carefully memorised. Mirra served up a steaming dish of rabbit stew and Em, despite her sore mouth, ate it gratefully. She sat on the floor next to the fire, her skin hopeful though her heart knew the heat wouldn’t reach into her, while Mirra sat in the chair and mended socks. Her fingers found holes, threaded needles, made neat stitches all without the assistance of her eyes.

“How long have you all been blind?” Em asked.

“That would be a long and unpleasant story,” Mirra said, lips drawn so tight that her hairy chin puckered. “You should rest.”

“I can’t. I mean, I can’t sleep. If I did…” Em was almost too tired to form sentences. “I can listen. You could tell me your story. I must stay awake.”

Mirra sighed and put her mending aside. She rubbed her knuckles and shook her head sadly. “Do you think it’s better to be alive and miserable than to be dead?” she asked.

Em thought about Morozko’s touch, and how it had saved her life but filled her veins with frost. “I think so,” Em said. “Where are you from?”

“From Mir, as you guessed. We have been living here for sixty years now. We were originally from Chechnya, but in 1944 Stalin had our whole village sent to Siberia. Other communities went too. There were thousands of us in exile.”

“How did you get here?”

“Many of us exiled Mir folk came across. We’re common in this part of Skazki. One hundred miles out of Irkutsk, there is a crossing.”

“A crossing?”

“Through the veil. There are twenty-seven crossings dotted over Russia. The thrice-nine lands of Skazki.”

“So you’re saying there are twenty-seven ways out of here?”

“Yes. If you can find them, if you have sufficient magic to cross the veil.”

Em was excited now. Maybe they didn’t need the Snow Witch. “What do they look like? Is there one nearby?”

“About eighty miles north of here, right on the eastern edge of the Dead Forest. It’s where we first entered Skazki.”

Despite all her physical discomforts, Em was beginning to hope again. Eighty miles: she could be there in under a week.

“They’re difficult to see,” Mirra continued. “Impossible for me, of course. Best to see them at night, when the colours are brightest. Or if you have magic in your eyes: the second sight.”

As soon as Daniel was back, she could make her way up there. Perhaps she could persuade Artur to part with his horse and cart. She had no more gold, but maybe she wouldn’t need the bear.

“Many people, many good people came through that entrance when we did,” Mirra said, her voice dropping sadly.

Em tapped her forehead. What was she thinking? Of course she needed the bear. Magic for the crossing. Then how else could she get the horse and cart? Steal it? If only Daniel was here, awake and alert and able to help. He’d know something for sure. He understood all about this enchanted logic.

Em glanced up. An expectant silence hung in the air. Mirra must have asked a question. “I’m sorry, what did you say?” Em said.

“You were silent a long time. I thought you might have fallen asleep.”

“No, no. I shouldn’t sleep. Mirra, if there are so many crossings back to Mir, why hasn’t anyone told us before? Everyone we spoke to said there was no way back.”

“Leshii? Vodyanoy? Witches? They don’t want you to go back. They want to hunt you.”

Em leaned forward eagerly. “Tell me your story. You came here sixty years ago?” She pushed aside her tiredness and focused intently on Mirra’s tale, in case it contained more vital information.

“Give or take a few years. We came because we were starving to death in Mir, and because Slava was sick and dying. We were told that your own death couldn’t find you here, and we gave everything we had—except our horse—to a local volkhv to help us cross. We had a daughter then, a tiny girl of three.

“The volkhv was sending people over in their hundreds, getting very rich no doubt. We arrived and spread out, grateful for the milder weather, the possibility of living long, long lives. Friends of ours went west immediately, in search of water. They survived two hours in the Dead Forest. We heard their cries as they were slaughtered. We learned very quickly to stay away from the woods, then to stay away from the water. We learned very quickly there was, in fact, nowhere safe for us. We built our house here and huddled inside it and hoped for the best.

“Slava had been dying of a stomach ailment, but almost as soon as we arrived he grew stronger. Or at least, he grew no worse. For that, we had to be happy. We had our lives, we had a roof over our heads and woods to hunt in. We had our freedom. Or so we thought, because we hadn’t reckoned on Egibinicha.

“That’s how she introduced herself, but I know now that she has many names, all of them evil. A witch, foul to look upon, a heart
woven of snakes and a soul formed of flies. She killed and ate my daughter.” Mirra hung her head and the firelight glowed against her grey-streaked hair. “Without eyes, I can shed no tears for her.”