R1 - Rusalka (38 page)

"Where's Uulamets?" Sasha asked of it, and it growled.

"Pleasant as always," Pyetr muttered, not about to put his sword away.

"But it
is
Babi," Sasha said. "I'm sure it is."

"One Thing probably looks a lot like another," Pyetr said. "It can keep its distance!"

It crept a little closer, flat to the ground.

"That's enough," Pyetr said; but—

"Don't hit it!" Sasha said, and grabbed up the food basket, found a turnip and tossed it.

Small black hands seized the offering, turned it. Babi sat up and gnawed at it with delicate, busy bites, darting little glances at them. Then it gulped the turnip in one gape of its mouth, scuttled into their shelter and grabbed Sasha around the ankle.

"Damn!" Pyetr exclaimed. Sasha yelped with the instant thought of those teeth and his leg. But it simply held on; and Sasha gingerly bent down and patted its head.

It grabbed his wrist, then, and held on as he stood up.

"Be careful!" Pyetr said.

"It's all right," Sasha said, trying to hold the creature in his hands. But it jumped for his chest and scrambled for his neck and ducked around behind him as Pyetr grabbed for it—after which it was still, arms locked around his neck, Pyetr in front of him with his sword lifted, and Sasha thought it a very good idea not to alarm either of them. "It's behaving itself," he said, calmly trying, pulling at one wiry arm, to persuade it to let go of his neck. "Come on, Babi. Let go."

It rose up against his ear and hissed at Pyetr.

"God," Pyetr muttered.

"It's all right," Sasha said, sat down on the log inside their shelter and carefully pulled Babi's hands loose.

Babi hissed again, bounded down onto the log and down to shelter under his knees.

Pyetr stood with his sword in hand and finally, with a scowl, ran it into its sheath and rescued the jug, which fortunately had landed unbroken.

He muttered, "I suppose it's a good sign, over all," put the sword down and sat down inside the shelter again, his hair glistening with rain and a scowl still on his face when he looked down at the creature.

Babi took tiny fistfuls of Sasha's breeches and climbed up into his lap.

"He's scared," Sasha said.

"He's scared." Pyetr made a face, unstopped the jug and drank. "What's with grandfather? That's what I'd like to know. If Ugly here ran off from it—"

Babi growled.

"Your pardon." Pyetr hoisted the jug. "Have some?"

It scampered down and snatched up Pyetr's cup, holding it up with both hands.

Pyetr poured. It drank, gulp after gulp, and held it up for more.

"I'd be careful," Sasha said.

He poured; it drank, and held up the cup again.

"Bottomless little devil," Pyetr said, and filled it again. "What's grandfather into? Do you know?"

It gulped the third cup, exhaled, and fell down in a heap where it stood.

Pyetr gave Sasha a puzzled look.

"I don't know," Sasha said.

«
^
»

S
asha slept
lightly by intent, rousing himself throughout the night to keep the fire going, while Pyetr stirred only the first and second times he laid a log on and Sasha said, "It's all right, go back to sleep."

Pyetr seemed to give up caution for himself then, and tucked down and simply rested, like Babi the dvorovoi, who or which curled itself into a ball where it or he had fallen, and snored.

Babi had disappeared when the imposter showed up at the house; Babi had come back to them last night, and as signs went, that was the most heartening thing that had happened to them lately, Sasha was sure of it.

But when the rain had stopped and the morning came cold and misty, when he had stirred his aching bones to get the fire going for morning tea, he kept an anxious eye toward the pool that lay invisible in the mist.

Not, again, that he did not trust Eveshka's intentions. It was her resolve he doubted.

He started the tea, he nudged Pyetr awake, and Pyetr put a rumpled head out of his coat and his blankets and took his tea with a murmur of thank you.

Babi came and held out his hands. Sasha gave him his own cup and had his tea in their mixing bowl: if one had a well-disposed dvorovoi in a situation like this he was by no means going to offend it—Yard-things being by reputation uncouth, not so home-loving and dependable as House-things nor so wise and so dangerous as the banniks: and fierce and uncouth seemed very fine company in their situation.

So it might have his cup if it made it happy.

So he was thinking when he saw Pyetr gazing off downslope.

He looked that way with apprehension and saw the mist moving, swirling as if a slow disturbance were passing through it.

"Pyetr," he said.

"I'm all right," Pyetr said, and lifted his cup to the valley and the swirling mist. "Patience!" he called out with something of his old spirit. "It's cold this morning; I'd like my tea."

But Pyetr's face looked still quite pale this morning; he had his coat on, and when it came time to put the fire out and pack up, he worked with his jaw clenched and a pained, worried look on his face.

Babi dropped his cup into the basket. That was his form of helping. And when they had taken up their packs to leave, and Pyetr said matter-of-factly, with a lift of his hand, "I think it's this way," then Babi quite readily clambered up Sasha's leg and up his arm to sit on his pack.

"You're heavy!" Sasha complained. "Babi, stop it."

Whereupon Babi simply stopped weighing anything.

But he kept a tight-fisted grip on a lock of Sasha's hair, until they had worked their way down the misty slope to the soft ground around the pool.

Then Babi bounded down, growled and hissed and splashed across the pool where the mist began to swirl and move with the passage of a ghostly body: Babi followed that movement, skipping and frolicking like a puppy.

It certainly seemed to answer one question.

The mist diminished as they climbed and that clue to Eveshka's whereabouts they no longer had, but Babi told them, Babi went by his mistress through the fog and by her over the hill, when her step was too light to disturb the leaves.

But Pyetr knew by other means that Eveshka was there—knew in his heart where she was, knew in his memory how she would move, a swirl of skirts, a sheet of pale hair-That was what he kept thinking, knowing he was a fool, knowing that his memory was making a goddess of a wisp of white, a hazy recollection of a face—

A sweet and gentle face, and a touch at his heart that made him totally—

Stupid, he told himself. He had outgrown that mooncalf silliness at thirteen.

But he had felt like that when he had found her by the pool, he had dreamed of her last night, he kept remembering the night the imposter had come to the house, how he had known from the moment she had looked past him—that
his
Eveshka would never have done that.

He knew it the way he had known that about a girl when he was thirteen; and another and another till he learned that a pretty face was no guarantee of good character.

But this one—

This one—

"Pyetr," Sasha said, catching his arm as they went, "Pyetr, remember."

A fifteen-year-old knew better: he certainly should—but he knew things about Eveshka, he had no idea how: he knew the thoughts she had, he knew the anger she felt toward her father and the longing she had that Uulamets be better than he was and wiser than he was; he knew that the loneliness her father had imposed on her had made her do unwise things—

He knew that she was determined now to rescue a father who had never been anything but grief to her.

And that he understood all too well, knew it so well it might have been years ago, and himself searching the streets of Vojvoda for a father he knew was in serious trouble—

Often. Only to fight with him when he had found him. But it never diminished the fear of losing him.

Now that fear was back—over Uulamets , for the god's sake, not even his own fear: he understood that; but it was still real, and he knew the dance so well—

Rotten old man. Ill-tempered ingrate. Unprincipled scoundrel.

Babi was more personable.

They stopped at a stream to drink. Sasha cupped his hands and paused, seeing Pyetr sitting on his heels only gazing into the water.

Don't, Sasha wished Eveshka.

And to Pyetr he said: "Do you see her?"

Pyetr reached out to the face of the stream and disturbed whatever he saw. "Not now," he said, doing passably well, Sasha decided, under the circumstances.

But the farther they went in the woods the more worried Sasha became. It was no longer a question of finding master Uulamets in the first few hours; or the first day; or now, in much of the second; and with the weather continuing to threaten and with Pyetr looking paler and more distracted than yesterday, Sasha asked himself seriously how much longer they could afford this search and for that matter, how much help Uulamets was likely to be to them at the end of it—counting that master Uulamets was himself the victim of a serious and willful mistake.

In fact Sasha began to lay fantastical plots for rescuing Pyetr: the wild notion of drugging his tea, for one, and while Pyetr was in that state seeing if he could break the rusalka's hold on him.

But he might lose that fight disastrously, and leave Pyetr with no resistance at all to Eveshka's demands; or he might misjudge the dosage; or by overcoming Eveshka leave them vulnerable to Hwiuur, or, or, or…

Reason was not working outstandingly well, either. "Let's give this up," Sasha had said several times, and each time Pyetr had simply said no.

"Let's go to Kiev," he had said; and Pyetr maintained there was no hope of that.

"You don't even like master Uulamets ," he had objected, and Pyetr had said, It's not for him I'm doing this…

"Let's go back to the boat," Sasha suggested finally. "Pyetr, we're walking and walking and you're getting
sick
, Pyetr, you're not thinking right any longer, please listen to me."

Babi growled at him.

Pyetr only shook his head, slowly looked toward him and said, "She's promised me it's not far. I don't think it is. Wish harder. I'm not crazy. She doesn't want to lean on me, but she has to."

"She's doing too much of it!" Sasha cried. He knew he was not resolved in his own opinion—too much yea and nay, go back and go forward, need of Uulamets and his desire to be free of him—

In fact today he was the one who most wanted to be safe in Kiev, following the life he imagined with Pyetr for a partner, living a bit by their wits and a lot by Pyetr's extraordinary luck—which looked now to be at ebb; and seeing such things as snake-handed elephants and gold roofs—which they looked now never to see.