Rusalka

by C. J. Cherryh

  A man had no chance. He truly had no chance. He had thought he was standing by what Sasha would want.

  So he gave Sasha a reproachful look, another to Uulamets, and went back to sit at the fire, unstopped the jug and had another sip, disconsolately watching the patterns in the embers and thinking quite fondly at the moment of The Doe’s hearthside and ‘Mitri and the rest of his double-crossing friends. They at least were willing to applaud when he risked his neck.

  “Pyetr,” Sasha said, at his shoulder—sounding concerned.

  Good, he thought.

  “Pyetr, he’s right. We haven’t any choice.”

  He folded his arms on his knees, clamped his jaw and wished he could come up with a viable choice—damn it all, how could a body think with two and three wizards nattering at him?

  And one of them with his feelings hurt and probably wishing hard for him not to be mad—even if he was an honest boy and knew how absolutely furious that would make him.

  “God! I’m going crazy!” He thrust himself to his feet and gave a disgusted wave of his arm. “What chance have I got, with the lot of you?”

  “I’m sorry. I’m not doing anything!”

  “Good! I’m glad! Thank you!” He shoved both hands into his belt and faced back to the safe formlessness of the fire-patterns. “Grandfather’s not that polite. Neither’s his daughter. So we’ve got to go find this Chernevog—”

  “Please. Don’t throw names around.”

  “What’s the matter? What’s the matter with a name? I’m not magical! My wishes don’t work. What is this nonsense?”

  “I don’t know,” Sasha confessed. “I truly don’t know, just—”

  “It’s because,” Uulamets said from behind them, “when you name a name we hear it; and having weaknesses we want that person or we don’t want: the one’s a call, the other’s an attack, and it’s damned foolish to do either in our situation, since we don’t particularly want notice, does that answer your question?”

  “Well, then, why don’t we call something friendly,” Pyetr retorted, “like the leshy? It seems to me we could use the help.”

  Uulamets to his surprise actually seemed to think about that.

  “It was friendly,” Sasha said in Uulamets’ silence. “It didn’t like Eveshka being here, it didn’t like my borrowing from the forest, but—”

  “Did you?” Uulamets asked sharply.

  “Yes, sir,” Sasha said.

  Uulamets fingered his beard and plucked a twig from it, and sat there looking at them, one eye cast in a band of light between their two shadows, his face a maze of old secrets.

  “Clever lad,” Uulamets said. “Clever boy. And a leshy helped you. A leshy fed a rusalka. That’s quite remarkable.”

  One never knew with Uulamets what was sarcasm and what was not. Pyetr had a surly answer ready, but Uulamets went on looking at them as though they were something on his dinner plate.

  “It gave us its name,” Sasha said after a moment.

  “Truly remarkable,” Uulamets said.

  “So what does it mean?” Pyetr asked.

  “It means this woods wants us here.”

  “Oh, god! One more in the game!”

  “Quite,” Uulamets said. “I wouldn’t swear to which side.” He picked up his book, made a little shooing gesture past that burden. “Out of my light.”

  “So are we going to do anything?” Pyetr asked.

  “Just stay out of trouble, damn you. Why don’t you go keep my daughter company?”

  Pyetr opened his mouth to answer, but Sasha pulled him around by the sleeve and gave him at least that excuse to take the wiser course.

  “He has no feeling,” he said to Sasha, and waved an angry gesture in Uulamets’ direction. “Is that the way you want to end up?” It was unfair, perhaps, since Sasha was born what Uulamets was, at least Sasha had had precious little choice in it. “To hell with it. He’s driving me crazy. Just let me alone a while and stop wanting things, can’t you?”

  “I can’t stop caring what happens—” Sasha said, and cut himself off and looked desperate.

  Maybe thinking about Uulamets and his daughter, who knew?

  Pyetr sighed, and folded his arms and shook his head, looking at the ground, feeling better—damn the boy!

  He picked up the jug and stalked off with it, wanting and not wanting a drink, wanting it, damn it all, precisely because he suspected Sasha wanted him not to have it, and the whole thing was driving him mad.

  So he stood at the edge of the firelight, staring off into the dark of the forest in another quarter to that where Eveshka was, just wanting nothing for a while, except to rest his battered brain and not to have any demands on him, not from Sasha, not from Uulamets, not from Eveshka, that damned bird, or anyone else.

  He was quite out of his depth, he decided. Eveshka surely cherished no illusions about his competency; he was reasonably sure Sasha had none left; and the old man’s opinion of him was never in doubt from the beginning.

  Babi popped out of thin air, right at his feet, a fur-ball with solemn black eyes and a glistening wet nose.

  His heart hardly even jumped, that was how numb he was becoming to things like this. He stared back at the fur-ball, which was presently about cat-sized, and it squatted, staring up at him expectantly, licking its human lips and panting like a dog.

  He reckoned what it wanted. He tipped the jug, it opened its mouth and caught the dollop neatly, standing with little black hands on his leg.

  That, he looked at askance. But he took another sip for himself. The hand hurt, from which wound he was not even certain any longer. He made a fist and looked at it to try to tell, trying to hope it was the latest wound; but there was a coldness about the pain, like a cut on ice: it was the back of the hand that was hurting—and he did not like that.

  He liked less the feeling he got, looking off into the woods.

  So it was out there. That was no news to anyone, least of all to him, and he was in a fey and surly mood. He stood there obstinately, reminding himself he had beaten it before, thinking that maybe if he could get it in range he might be worth something after all; and then with a numb sort of chagrin, remembered his sword was lying against a log on the other side of the fire, which he really, immediately, imminently should do something about—He drew back a step—it was like walking in thick mud. The next was harder: he had great difficulty thinking why he was going at all, except, last and most desperate thought—something was wrong and he needed Sasha’s attention.

  But Eveshka was insisting to tell him something, which only confused the issue. He stopped, forgetting where he was going or what he had been about to say, except Eveshka was muddling him up—

  Something snarled and grabbed his leg. He yelled, spun half about to save his balance and staggered free as Babi snarled and knocked his legs out from under him, become as large as a wolf, as large as a bear as it stood over him. He yelled and tried to get out from under it, and something had his ankle, worrying it and growling as Babi trampled him and lunged that direction.

  “That will be enough!” Uulamets said, and Pyetr scrambled for clear ground and looked back at the edge of the woods. The raven was shrieking, Babi had vanished into the undergrowth. “Come here!” Uulamets ordered, and something whipped away through the woods, stirring the firelit brush.

  Babi popped up again at Pyetr’s feet, panting, dog-sized and showing a fearful lot of teeth, just the other side of Pyetr’s boots, one of which showed a single set of scrapes in the leather.

  “Are you all right?” Sasha asked, shakily, behind him, and Sasha took his arm, but Pyetr was still staring Babi in the face and discovering, quite to his embarrassment, that he had saved the vodka jug and all but broken his elbow hitting the ground.

  He flung it. It landed unbroken in a bush, which seemed to him the final insult. He resisted Sasha trying to pick him up, got his own feet under him and dusted himself off.

  “So much for your snaky neighbor’s promises
,” Pyetr snarled at Uulamets, who had come to stare at him, and glared at Sasha, who brought him the jug, ignoring him for a second, surlier look at Uulamets. “Won’t hurt your friends, will it?”

  Eveshka drifted near, her face grave and worried.

  “I’m fine,” he snapped, and flung out an arm to clear his path back to the fire. “I’m fine. I don’t need the damn jug!” He stalked back to where his sword lay, at the fireside, thought of taking it in hand and going off after the vodyanoi; but he had already embarrassed himself beyond bearing, and stupidity piled onto fecklessness was no help. He sank down in disgust on the log beside his sword and picked it up, scowling as Babi came up and put his little hands on his knee.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  Sasha came and put the jug down. “I think my wish on it must have stuck,” Sasha said very quietly. “It just won’t break.”

  “You mean I couldn’t turn loose of the damn thing! Thanks! Thanks ever so much! I could have gotten killed!”

  “I’m sorry. I’ve patched it. It’s what can happen if you wish things. They can come back on you—”

  Sasha looked white as Eveshka. And blaming Sasha was the last thing in his mind. He shook his head and massaged his bruised elbow. “We’ve got to get out of here,” he said. “First thing in the morning, we’ve got to get back to the boat—”

  “That solves nothing,” Uulamets said from behind him.

  “What do you advise?” Pyetr asked, with the sudden, uncharitable recollection exactly how Uulamets had had the vodyanoi swear. “Damn you, you said it shouldn’t harm you or yours. So what am I? Not inside those bounds? You’re trying to kill me, is that the game?”

  “Your own attitudes gave it its exception,” Uulamets said, leaning on his staff. “Think on that.”

  Wherewith Uulamets stamped his staff on the ground and went back to gather up his precious book.

  “I’ll kill him,” Pyetr muttered.

  “You don’t learn,” Uulamets said, with a sidelong look. “Go where you please. Walk to Kiev. Reason your way past the creature.”

  Babi patted his leg, and went over and picked up the jug, waddling back with it like a great pale gut.

  Pyetr shut his eyes and rested his forehead against his hands—which hurt his elbow, but he was beyond caring.

  “My daughter,” Uulamets muttered at their backs, “is very much its creature. And you are hers. Remember that, too.”

  Pyetr said nothing to that disturbing assertion. He only looked daggers at the old man, who was back at his book.

  “He means be careful,” Sasha said.

  “He has a damned nasty way of saying so.” He took the jug from Babi, who was waiting anxiously, unstopped it and poured a big helping into Babi’s waiting mouth: Babi had earned it.

  On which thought he poured him a little more.

  The jug, about half empty, seemed not particularly lighter by that. It had not, he suddenly began reckoning, gotten emptier all day.

  Maybe, he thought, that was Babi’s wish. Who knew?

  Pyetr took to his blanket and slept, finally—Sasha saw to that, a very little wish, a very cautious little wish, for Pyetr’s own good: Pyetr might catch him at it, but Pyetr was in so much misery, much of which Sasha held for his fault—as Pyetr said, what was one more at this point?

  Sasha added the jug to the tally of wishes on his stick, like all the others, some not even lightly made or unconsidered—but all unsummed, until for the same reasons as Uulamets he had begun that long-postponed ciphering, spiderwise trying to patch a web that should have been orderly from the start, but which he discovered frighteningly random. Writing was beyond him, but he made marks he wished to remember—

  While Eveshka brushed near him, angry at him, as if his attempt to understand things terrified her in some way too obscure for him.

  Then he remembered that she had died at near his age.

  He made a mark for that, in the line that was Eveshka.

  Young for all her years since, because it seemed to him she could learn about things, without learning things, sometimes acting exactly sixteen, in his reckoning, especially about Pyetr—

  No, she insisted, from across the fire.

  And maybe about her father, too, he thought, making another mark. Grown folk maybe puzzled Eveshka more than they did him: working at The Cockerel had shown him a lot more about people—and she had only met a few living souls in her whole life, all of them wizards.

  Until she died, Sasha thought, and maybe met others, to their regret-She drifted closer to him, more and more upset—of which Uulamets was quite aware. He realized that without looking around. Uulamets was suddenly upset with his line of thought, and he recollected the jug he had so casually bespelled: his most effective spell, Father Sky! The thing had resisted accident and almost cost Pyetr’s life—precisely as master Uulamets had warned him: Magic is easy for the young…

  Nothing had stood in that spell’s way—no one had ever wished that the jug break, no one had ever had a contradictory motive toward it, and the god knew he had not had a hesitation in his head when the jar had flown across the deck and he had wished it stay whole.

  Magic was so damnably easy—the jug showed that: he had gotten nonchalant about such little spells, being constantly in the midst of great and dangerous magic had dispersed his lifelong cautions and made him believe he could let fly a harmless wish—

  But his spell on the jug was not harmless. It had evidently been more powerful than the protections he had set on Pyetr himself, for reasons he could not entirely understand—unless—

  Unless his spells on Pyetr had flaws—like doubts—

  But that was not the thread he had started to follow. He found himself disturbed to the heart, feeling a wish happening around him, like a brush against his skin—or that insubstantial periphery he sometimes described to himself that way.

  Uulamets said, from behind him, “A rusalka is a wish. A wish not to die. A wish for revenge. That describes my daughter.”

  “The leshy helped her,” Sasha said, most carefully, and swung halfway about to look at him. “I didn’t get the feeling there was anything—wrong about the leshy. The opposite, actually. It felt—”

  “There used to be one near the house,” Uulamets said. “It’s not there anymore. Ask my daughter why.”

  “It’s not her fault, is it? She didn’t ask to drown—”

  Father Sky, there was a flaw in Uulamets’ story about Eveshka, Sasha thought suddenly and for no reason he understood. No matter what Uulamets had said at the first, he could never have believed his daughter a suicide: if a wizard really truly wished to die—

  Everything we thought we knew from Eveshka—he thought, too—that was the Fetch who said it, or the vodyanoi through her. Pyetr’s right: too many wizards—and too many of them lying…

  “Don’t waste your strength,” Uulamets said, suddenly rising, and Eveshka fled back a little. “What did I ever tell you, girl? Remember not to forget? Don’t wish without thinking? But you’re nothing but a wish yourself, and you don’t think and you don’t remember your mistakes.”

  “I’m trying,” Eveshka whispered. “Papa, I’m trying—”

  “For whom?” Uulamets snapped. “Get yourself together. It’s out there.—Boy, do you feel it?”

  Sasha did—suddenly recognized the subtle chill in the brush out there, twisting and elusive as the snake it sometimes seemed. He wanted to move. He wanted to warn Pyetr—

  “Bring it,” Uulamets snapped at them. “Wish it here. Bind it here!”

  Sasha shied off with a single thought for Pyetr’s safety and Hwiuur lunged for an escape.

  Stop! he thought, then, with Uulamets, with Eveshka, and felt it pinned, throwing wishes to this side and that like a snake under a stick. Pyetr waked with a cry of pain, that was one wish it sent: “God!” Pyetr cried, kneeling, bent over his hand, while a runaway spill of ink flowed out of the bushes and straight toward him—

  Stop! Sasha order
ed it; Uulamets ordered; Eveshka ordered. The front end began to rise, quickly taller than Pyetr’s head, rapidly thicker as more and more of it poured out of the dark.

  He had to hold onto it, had to hold, while it tried every way it knew to get at Pyetr, who was stumbling to his feet with his sheathed sword in his left hand, trying, Father Sky, no!—to attack it—

  “Liar!” Uulamets cried. “Deceive me, will you?” It tumbled down and circled into coils like a headless snake as Pyetr staggered out of its way. “Lie to me, will you?” The raven left its branch to dive and strike at the River-thing, and Babi, untidy fur stuck all over with leaves, bristled and hissed and nipped at it.

  “Let be!” Hwiuur cried, writhing. “Let be, let be!” Its hide began to smoke. Pieces of it came away in its struggles. “Stop it!” Sasha was yelling at Uulamets ; even Eveshka was flinching from Uulamets’ torment of it, everything was falling apart and Hwiuur was going to go at Pyetr again—throwing a quick, snaky twist of its intent about Sasha’s revulsion and trying to pull him apart from Uulamets : but he kept thinking about Pyetr’s safety, and it thrashed and wailed in pain: “Not my doing—not my fault. Never—”

  “The truth this time!” Uulamets shouted at it, and it curled itself into a knotty, smoking ball no larger than a man.

  It snuffled, “The man made me do it.” Smaller and smaller. “I didn’t kill her. Kept the bones, that was all, he said I could have the bones. She could have the forest, I’d have the river, that’sail.”

  Eveshka deserted the web. Sasha felt his own hold quiver like a plucked string, felt it about to snap, cried desperately, “Hwiuur: what man? Why did he do it?”

  “She knows!” Hwiuur cried, twisted in knots and grew smaller still. “He killed her, he drowned her in the river, he took away her heart and he won’t let her go—he won’t let anything go, not her, not me, not you if you don’t stop him, and I know how! I know all the secrets she can’t tell, I know what you need to know, and you burn me, you tumble down my cave, you blame me for things he did! Well, damn you all! Why should I help fools? Ask me why your plans go astray! Ask me where your daughter’s mother’s gone!”