The Breathing Sea II - Drowning

by E. P. Clark

  “Don’t look like that,” Oleg told Dasha, glancing back at her as he hauled on the rope. “Nothing’s going to happen.”

  “I just don’t like the feel of floating on top of the water,” Dasha told him. “It’s so…unsteady. Like we could tip over or sink or fly away at any moment.”

  “Well don’t think like that. You’ll make the horses nervous, and then we will tip over.”

  Dasha had to admit the sense in that, and tried to clear her mind of her fears, and think of something else. She looked down into the water. It was brownish-green, but clear enough that she could see waterweeds waving at the bottom, at least two yards, maybe three, below her, and a shoal of little fish swimming across the path of the ferry.

  There’s nothing to fear, she told herself. It’s just water. You’ve been in water dozens of times without taking any harm. It’s supposed to be your element, remember?

  Something caught her eye. A very large fish was swimming towards them…or was it a frog…no, it was too big…its head was rising out of the water…

  Won’t you come and join me? it said. The water is soft and warm.

  “No!” cried Dasha.

  “What?!” shouted Oleg, his hands freezing on the rope.

  Dasha looked back into the water. The vodyanaya was gone. Or was she under the raft?

  “Keep going,” she said. “I thought I saw something, but it’s gone now.”

  “Probably a fish,” said Oleg, and began hauling faster. Dasha saw no further sign of the vodyanaya until they had reached the far shore and stepped off onto the sandbank there. As she and Poloska and Seryozha stepped off the ferry, she heard the bloop of something large splashing into the water behind them, and caught what looked like a large frogleg disappearing into the water out of the corner of her eye.

  You could have come to join us, she heard. Or was she imagining it? Peaceful forever, swimming eternally in the water, so soft, always so soft and loving…

  I don’t think that is my fate, she thought back. Peaceful swimming is not my fate. But I thank you for your invitation.

  As you will, said the voice in her head. We will always be here if you change your mind. There was another bloop, and rings spread out on the water as if a large rock had been thrown into it.

  “There must be pike here,” said Oleg, frowning at the ripples.

  “Must be,” said Dasha. “I’m going to take Poloska and Seryozha up onto the grass.”

  “Don’t go far,” he warned her, and pushed the ferry back towards where Alik and Svetochka were waiting on the far shore.

  Dasha led Poloska up over the low bank and onto the grass, where Susanna and Sister Asya were letting Chernets and Minochka graze. The grass was rich and green, and Poloska began grazing eagerly as soon as Dasha gave her her head, not even bothering to squeal and swish her tail at Chernets as she normally did. Dasha looked back at the river. Had she turned down the vodyaniye? Successfully? The river looked…river-like. Neither inviting nor threatening. It was not the river that called to her, it was the river’s destination. Were there vodyaniye in the sea? Dasha had never heard so, but she had been raised next to a river, not an ocean. She hoped the vodyaniye here were not angry with her refusal to join them, and would not take out their ire on Alik and Svetochka. As soon as she had that thought, she wanted to shout out some kind of warning, but what would she say? They had to cross the river. Which they did without incident. Or almost. At one point there was another bloop, and water splashed up, soaking the hem of Svetochka’s sarafan and getting down into her boots.

  “I don’t like ferries,” Svetochka complained, as soon as they were all on firm ground again.

  “Me neither,” said Dasha. Svetochka gave her a surprised and not very welcoming look, still clearly sore from their disagreement earlier. Her round face was set in unhappy lines, and her blue-gray eyes seemed darker than usual, as if a shadow lay behind them.

  “The smoke stinks,” she said. “You can smell it from here. How many buildings did those barbarians burn down?”

  “Half the village,” Oleg told them. “Lots of animals were trapped in the flames, and some of the people, as well. Are you sure you want to see this?”

  “No,” said Svetochka, as Dasha said, “Yes.”

  “As you will,” said Oleg, and led the way forward.

  The smell of smoke grew stronger as they rode closer, and Dasha could pick out the scent of roasted flesh as well, just as she had in her vision, when she’d been herself/Miroslava Praskovyevna. Who’d known the smell of roasted human flesh very well. Dasha tried not to think about that, and about how she was a direct descendent of Miroslava Praskovyevna through the female line. She could at least have inherited Miroslava Praskovyevna’s ability to farsee, which was supposed to have been much more reliable than her own shaky visions…Poloska snorted and stopped.

  “She can sense what’s ahead,” said Oleg. “Come on, girl. Follow Belka and you’ll be all right.”

  The grass on either side of the road was a thick rich green, just as it had been by the river, and the sky overhead was pink and orange to the West, and, when Dasha looked back, deep blue and purple to the East, with a couple of stars already out, and the moon starting to rise. It was difficult to reconcile the peaceful beauty of the evening summer sky with what Dasha knew lay ahead. Smoke was filling up more and more of the view before them, so that soon Dasha had to cover her nose and mouth to keep from choking on it. Her eyes filled with tears, and looking over at Svetochka, she could see that she was suffering from the same problem.

  “There you are.” Aunty Olga came riding out to meet them, followed by Dmitry Marusyevich. “We’ve found a couple more. Children.” Her face crumpled up till all her features seemed like nothing more than wrinkles. “They hid underneath a barn, in a hole too small for anyone bigger. They won’t say who their parents are, or even what their names are. Frankly, I don’t know what to do with them.”

  “Let me see ‘em,” said Svetochka. “I’ll watch over ‘em.”

  “Thanks.” Aunty Olga gave Svetochka the most approving look Dasha had ever seen her bestow on anyone. “They’re over here. The others we’ve found are gathered in the village square. Half of them don’t know who they are either. Maybe you can do something with them.” She pointed her chin at Sister Asya. “Because I’m at my wit’s end.”

  “I will take charge of them,” Sister Asya agreed. “You will be better served to continue searching for others still hiding away. Come, Tsarinovna: this will be a good task for you as well.”

  Relieved, and ashamed of her relief, not to have to search for survivors and perhaps stumble across dead bodies, perhaps animals that had been burnt to death in the fire—too horrible to contemplate!—Dasha followed Sister Asya past still-smoldering buildings to the center of the village, where a dozen or so people were sitting or standing in various odd attitudes, weeping or staring silently off into the distance.

  “We should see to their hurts,” Sister Asya announced. “First of their bodies, and then we can concern ourselves with their minds. Look, a hitching post. We can tie the horses up there and set to work. Tsarinovna, Susanna: you start at that end, and I’ll start over here. Be gentle and patient with them, even if they provoke you. Think of them as wounded animals if it helps you keep your temper.”

  It was good that Sister Asya had told them that, because Dasha found herself sorely provoked by the very first person she went up to, and Susanna and Alik gave up entirely on attempting to speak to him, saying instead that they would stand guard. The man rocked back and forth, clutching at his knees, emitting only coughs in reply to Dasha’s questions.

  “I don’t see any wounds,” Dasha said in frustration, after several failed attempts to elicit the man’s name. “But I can’t help you if you won’t tell who you are and what’s wrong with you.”

  “Leave him alone, girl,” said a woman sitting nearby. Her voice was rough, and every other word was punctuated by a cough. “He’s just lost his w
ife.”

  “Oh. Was he hit on the head as well?” As soon as she heard the words, Dasha wished she could take them back. On the other hand, she needed to know.

  The woman laughed. “Maybe, but that ain’t what’s bothering him, girl. Hain’t you ever seen a person grieve afore?”

  “Yes,” said Dasha, although that was only kind of true.

  “Sure you think you have, girl,” said the woman, looking Dasha up and down. “But you hain’t, not dressed as you is. You don’t know what sorrow is.”

  Dasha thought of several replies to that, but refrained from making any of them. “Are you sure he wasn’t hit on the head?” she asked instead. “A blow to the head will need a healer.”

  The woman laughed. “Ain’t no healers around here, girl. Unless you’re one?”

  “Unfortunately not.” Once again Dasha could have cursed the gods or whomever was responsible for giving her the gift of visions rather than healing. Why couldn’t she have gotten something useful? “But I can still help,” she said.

  “Can you?” The woman laughed again, then fell into a fit of coughing. “How?” she demanded, once she’d recovered. “Can you bring those as was killed back to us?”

  “No,” said Dasha. “No one can, not even the gods. But I can…”

  “Can you rebuild our homes as was burnt?” demanded the woman.

  “Not myself, no, but…”

  “Can you drive those foreigners out of our lands?”

  “Not on my own, of course not, but…”

  “So what good is you?” demanded the woman. “How can you help, little noblewoman? Standing there with spells of healing on your fancy shirt! I’ll warrant you didn’t sew so much as a single stitch of it! What good could someone like you do for the likes of us?!”

  “I can clean and bind your wounds,” Dasha told her. “I can bring you food and water, and help search for those who are still missing. I can send money and workers to rebuild your homes. I can send out soldiers in search of the people who did this. I can work to bring an end to the raids entirely, by treating with the foreign leaders responsible. I can take down the names and stories of those who were killed, so that they will not be forgotten. Now show me your hand. It looks badly burned. Let me apply salve and bandages.”

  The woman sniffed, but held out her hand grudgingly. “Fancy yourself a helper, do you, girl? Always knowing better than others?”

  “I don’t know about that,” said Dasha, pouring water onto the woman’s hand in order to wash off the worst of the dirt before she applied the salve and bandaged it. She kept the stream of water to a gentle trickle, but even so the woman hissed and jerked her hand back. “It hurts, girl!” she cried. “Be careful!”

  “I will be,” Dasha told her. “But it needs washing, even if it hurts.”

  “That’s easy for you to say!”

  “I know,” said Dasha. “But it’s still true. Hold out your hand. I’ll be as quick and gentle as possible.”

  “It’s easy enough to tell others what to do when it ain’t being done to you,” the woman grumbled as she held out her hand again. “You don’t let others tell you what to do yourself, my head for beheading.”

  “Not always,” said Dasha. “Only when they’re right.”

  The woman looked like she wanted to grumble and complain some more, but instead she found herself smiling at that, even as Dasha washed off her burned hand. “Saucy one, ain’t you?” she asked, when Dasha had finished.

  “I don’t mean to be,” Dasha told her. “But other people seem to think so, sometimes. Here. I’m going to put on this salve. It should help soothe the pain a bit. Nothing will take it away entirely, I’m afraid.”

  “No.” The woman shook her head. “I’m a fool, I guess.”

  “Why?” asked Dasha.

  “I didn’t have to do it. I was…” The woman’s voice shook. “They came just as the sun were rising,” she said. “Most people wasn’t up yet. But I’ve always been a lark. I were already up and taking my goats out. It’s just me an’ them an’ my little cat what I keep for mousing. I never took a husband nor had any children. Happens sometimes. I know you girls think you’ll have a handsome husband an’ all the children in the world an’ it’ll all come easy for you, no pain, no sorrow, but that ain’t how it works. Sometimes none of that comes to you. ‘Cept the sorrow. Anyways. I was already gone with my goats when they came. An’ I…first I didn’t know what were happening. Then I didn’t know what to do. An’ then…I hid. They was here, they was hurting us, killing us, an’ I just hid. I didn’t know what else to do. An’ then they left an’ I came creeping back, an’ started pulling people out of the buildings as best I could, an’ I came to my own house, an’ my sister an’ her kids was already gone, I don’t know where they went, I don’t know where they is, if they is even still alive, I don’t know, I don’t know, an’ I went inside an’ it were all full of smoke an’ flames an’ I thought I was gonna die an’ I didn’t know what to do, I didn’t know what to do, an’ then I could hear my little cat still inside there, hiding in the pantry, crying, an’ I just…yanked open the door an’ she were there an’ I snatched her up an’ ran. But I burnt my hand on the door. Everything were already starting to smoke. I coulda burnt the flesh right off my bones, I coulda died, an’ all over a stupid, worthless cat!”

  “The cat doesn’t think she’s stupid or worthless,” Dasha said, wrapping the bandage around the woman’s hand. “To her, she’s a whole world, just like you are to yourself. To her you’re a hero, and if you can be a hero to one person, you can be a hero for everyone. I hope I would have been brave enough to do the same.”

  The woman was sniffling, making her worn, coarse face look even more ungainly than usual. “I shoulda come an’ got ‘em,” she said. “I shoulda come an’ got ‘em as soon as I could, ‘stead of waiting till they was gone. Maybe I coulda saved more. Maks there”—she nodded at the coughing, weeping man—“he lost everyone. His whole family, his whole life. An’ I did nothing!”

  “You did what you could,” Dasha told her. “None of us could have saved them. Hearing you now, I can’t help but think, ‘If only we’d have been faster, if only we could have traveled a little faster and gotten here yesterday.’ But we didn’t know, and even if we had, I don’t know how much faster we could have traveled, or if we would have been able to stop them if we’d been here. We’re all doing what we can, and I wish it were enough, but it’s not. It’s better than nothing, though. Maybe you couldn’t save Maks’s family, but you did save two lives today: yours and your cat’s. That’s two more than might have been saved if you’d done something differently, acted otherwise. It might not be enough, but it’s more than nothing. And I think that’s all any of us are going to get.”

  “You do like telling people what to do,” sniffled the woman, but she seemed to feel better even so, and said she would go fetch some water for Dasha to use on the others.

  Maks, Dasha was glad to see, was the worst off, and his suffering seemed to be mainly in his mind, so they left him to it, since none of them could get through to him. The others cried and moaned and complained, and some were undoubtedly in severe pain, but she and Sister Asya applied water and salve and bandages where they could, and Sister Asya said most of them were likely to live.

  “Of course, with burns you can never be sure,” she said quietly to Dasha. “They’re a funny thing, even worse than other injuries. They can take septic at any moment, and the pain is terrible no matter what. But we’ve done what we can. There are a couple of houses nearby that weren’t burned. We can put those who lost their own houses in there for the night.”

  Moving everyone into the houses and getting them set up as comfortably as possible was a slow, tedious business, and made Dasha selfishly glad that she wasn’t a healer. Yes, it would be a useful skill, much more useful (she thought) than her own skills, but after just one evening with these people who needed healing she was feeling so impatient with them that she wanted to s
nap at them, even though they didn’t deserve it. Or maybe they did, but that didn’t mean it would be a useful thing for her to do. But they were slow in both body and mind, confused, and muddled in their thinking, and she had exhausted all her wisdom and good humor on the first woman, and could find little more than silent patience for the remaining sufferers. That they were suffering and both deserved and needed pity was undeniable, but the suffering seemed to have broken them and let all their worst aspects come out, or so Dasha thought uncharitably as she shepherded them to their places, and left them unable to summon up the strength to do anything other than wail and moan. Several of them shouted at Dasha, blaming her for not getting there in time to save the village, or for never having suffered herself, as if her suffering (and none of them knew so much as her name, so they couldn’t possibly have known of her suffering or lack thereof; they just wanted to shout at her) would somehow make their own easier to bear, or rather, as if they could unload some of their present pain by passing it on to her. Dasha was disturbed by their weakness, and even more by her own, but by the time she had arranged things as best she could for them in the houses they had been placed in, she was hard pressed not to slap them or shout at them or both. When Sister Asya said someone needed to fetch water, she leapt at the chance to escape into the open air.

  The late evening sky overhead was a deep twilight blue, with stars coming out here and there, and a faint glow still remaining in the West, and a waning moon, that looked twice as big as normal, hanging over them to the South. The fires had mostly burned out by then, and were little more than smoldering. The village seemed peaceful, even more so than it usually would, and Dasha felt (guiltily) her spirits lift as she walked towards the village well. She didn’t actually want the village to be emptied and abandoned, but there was certainly something to be said for being the only human around. All this suffering had been caused by humans, and the victims seemed so determined to make things worse! Well, they would soon recover, she told herself. Soon they would feel better and start behaving like decent people again, and, while she might claim them as her people, they weren’t really her people. They weren’t her kin, like Svetochka or Vladya, and they certainly weren’t her kind, like…Dasha didn’t know. Her mother, she supposed. They would help them as best they could, and then move on. She would only have to put up with this for tonight, and then it would be behind her. Which was selfish and cruel, since the villagers couldn’t just pick up their things and leave, but even if they did, they would bring themselves with them, so it probably wouldn’t do them much good (also an uncharitable thought, Dasha told herself, if a true one). She just had to get through tonight.