C. Cherryh - Rusalka

It was very, very long before the sun came back.

“Wake up,” he said, shoving the boy hard. “Wake up, dammit.”

And when he finally had signs of consciousness from the boy: “You see. We’re alive. The old man missed us.”

“Stop that!” Sasha said.

“Move,” he said, his eyes watering with the pain and the immediate prospect of relieving it. “Move. You owe me breakfast.”

Sasha got up and lifted their soggy roof off with a thump of small rocks and a cascade of water droplets. But Pyetr lay there trying to make his legs work again, and it was several painful tries before he could figure out a way to get up, using his sword, and the rock at his left, and finally Sasha’s well-intended help, which hurt so he yelped.

“I’m sorry,” Sasha said.

He nodded. It was all he had the breath to do.

And it was, inevitably, a breakfast of raw grain, his hands shaking so he could hardly eat and his, teeth chattering so he could hardly chew it. He simply tucked it in his cheek to work on over the hours, not sure whether living was worth this.

“You shouldn’t have said that to the god,” Sasha said as they started out. “You should beg his pardon. Please.”

“Of what?” Pyetr said. “He didn’t hit us, did he?”

“That’s a forest we have to go through. There’s leshys and the god knows what. Don’t offend things! Please!”

“Nonsense,” Pyetr said, in less than good humor. “I’ve a wizard to help me. Why should I worry?”

“Don’t do that, Pyetr Illitch!”

“So go back to Vojvoda. Tell them I was an impious fool. Tell them I kidnapped you and forest-devils carried me off, and you ran home. I don’t care. I don’t need your nattering, boy!”

He was not, admittedly, in the best of humors. He tried the muddy downslope, with his sword for a cane, his knees shaking with the cold, and Sasha fluttering along by him. Every misstep and every jolt hurt him this morning, now that cold had set into the wound, and he swore when he hurt himself and swore when Sasha got in his way.

“Please,” Sasha said to him. “Please.”

He tried to hurry. He skidded on the mud and Sasha caught him. Thank the god.

Thank the boy, too, who was so stubbornly, seriously good-natured, no matter his other failings. Pyetr stood there braced against the lad and finally patted his shoulder and gave a breath of a laugh and said, panting, “Steady, lad. Steady.”

“Yes,” Sasha said. “Lean on me.”

He did that, took his balance from the boy, down to level ground where he could catch his breath, a little warmer now, despite the chill of their soaked clothing.

“Nasty place,” he said, looking at the thicket which closed off everything ahead, a dead-gray and lifeless wall across their path.

Sasha said nothing.

“There’s Vojvoda,” Pyetr said. “You could still go back, boy. Nothing you’ve done’s so serious. You could lie to them. You don’t have to tell them about helping me—”

Sasha shook his head no.

“Well,” Pyetr said, nerving himself, “it can’t be far to the river. One hopes.”

But bending down then, Sasha took a little of their precious grain and poured it on a rock.

“Field-thing,” Sasha said. “We’re leaving. Thank you.” And he stood and flung a little more, into the forest. “Forest, we’re only walking through. We won’t do any harm.”

Pyetr shook his head. Probably, he thought, the only thing it made well-disposed to them was starving squirrels. But he added to Sasha’s little offering a couple of precious grains from his own pocket, to please the boy, then flung another two or three at the thicket ahead of them and called aloud, feeling altogether like a fool:

“Forest, here come two desperate outlaws! We’ll do you no harm, so do us none, and get us safely to the river!”

The wind shifted. What breathed out of the woods was colder than the meadow air.

“Small good that did,” Pyetr muttered, caught his breath of that cold air, and limped ahead, saying: “Look out, devils.”

“Don’t joke,” Sasha said. “Please don’t joke, Pyetr Illitch. Don’t you know what they say? Forests are the worst to meddle with.”

“I don’t know. I don’t bother with such tales. They’re not healthy.”

“There’s leshys, for one, that have their feet on backwards. We mustn’t follow tracks. There’s Forest-things that sing to you and you have to follow…”

“We follow the road,” Pyetr said, setting his jaw. “We take nothing. We talk very politely to the devils and the Forest-things, and we keep walking and we pay no attention to singers in the trees, who are likely to be birds, if any live here.”

“Deer should have eaten all the grain,” Sasha said.

“Deer didn’t. I’m very grateful.”

“Maybe wolves got them all.”

“Boy—” Pyetr began, and found breath for argument too short and too hard come by. “Then they’re well-fed wolves, and we’ll be safe. Be cheerful. Stop wishing up trouble.”

“I’m not ,” Sasha exclaimed, indignant. “I’m not , Pyetr Illitch, you are.”

“Well, I’m not the wizard in the company, so it doesn’t matter, does it?”

Sasha gave him a very worried look, as if he was not sure of that reasoning.

“There’s no such thing as luck,” Pyetr followed up his advantage, “with certain dice. And I doubt Father Sky needs your help with his.”

Sasha’s mouth was open. He shut it and walked without saying anything for a long while.

A man could feel ashamed of himself, the boy was so good at heart… precisely the sort of person who offered himself to persons like himself, Pyetr thought, and usually, at dice or in some prank, he was only too glad to find someone of Sasha’s gullible sort; but Sasha had tallied up favor after favor until a body stopped looking for the turnaround. The boy simply was more persistent in giving things away than anyone Pyetr had ever encountered in his life, that was the addition and subtraction of the matter; and Pyetr had long since passed from reckoning Sasha Vasilyevitch as clever and apt to sell him to the highest bidder, to realizing him as gullibly useful (in which realization, being a moral sort of scoundrel, Pyetr had set himself certain strict limits of that use) and finally as a person who needed a keeper and a protector, which Pyetr was nobly resolved to be, at least as far as keeping the boy from hanging.

But this morning he revised all those calculations. The boy had some wit; the boy knew a scoundrel when he met one: one hardly, Pyetr reasoned now, worked at The Cockerel for ten years without knowing the breed. Certainly Sasha must have realized by now that his dear aunt and uncle were scoundrels, else he would be running back to The Cockerel; but Sasha, taking all that aside, had suddenly taken advantage of his pain-muddled wits to appoint himself the protector and Pyetr Ilitch Kochevikov the fool who needed looking after.

Pyetr could hardly understand how this had happened to him; and he had the most uneasy thought that perhaps he should come full circle, and conclude that the boy had in mind some nefarious scheme of his own—

Except the boy had every mark of the gullible.

It was all bewildering, and entirely seductive—considering Pyetr Ilitch remembered his father explaining there were two sorts of people in the world, those who lived by wit and those who lived on luck; and followed that by showing him what luck was worth with loaded dice…

A boy had sat on a Vojvoda street corner once upon a time, and watching a mother coddle a child, had suffered a certain pang of curiosity, which of them was gullible and whether either of them was a fool—