C. Cherryh - Rusalka

“Please,” Sasha said to Pyetr, kneeling down again, offering it. “Please drink it.”—Because there was nothing else to do and no one else to ask and no other hope but the old man’s medicines, with the fever starting to set into the wound. “You’ll die, else.”

Pyetr frowned, reached after the cup of black stuff. He tossed it off in a single mouthful and gave a sudden shudder, as if it tasted as bad as it looked, then glanced around where Uulamets was clattering about in a cupboard, with a rattle of knives.

“What’s he doing?” Pyetr asked. “Boy—what’s he after?”

Sasha did not want to answer. He saw what Uulamets was taking from the cupboard, the array of knives and bowls and pots and boxes, and he felt Pyetr sinking against his arm and heard him saying, “Stop him, boy, for god’s sake, don’t let him cut on me—”

But one had to, sometimes, horse-doctoring, Sasha understood that. He held on to Pyetr as carefully as he could until Pyetr’s head dropped and Pyetr went half-dazed, he laid him out and helped Uulamets cut away the bandages.

“They’re stuck, sir,” he said, wiping his nose quickly on his sleeve. “Please, be careful.”

“Do you tell me my business? Boil water. Hot! Make yourself useful.”

“Yes, sir,” he said, shoved the hook with the water pot back over the fire and was quickly back to be sure Uulamets was doing nothing crazy.

“Front and back?” Uulamets asked. “It went entirely through?”

“Yes, sir?”

“Sword?”

“I think so, sir.”

The old man muttered to himself, and pressed, and Pyetr screamed.

“Not good,” the old man said, but Sasha could have told that for himself. Uulamets soaked a bit of moss with oil and set it on the remaining square of bandages, got up and poured more vodka into a bowl.

And drank it, sip by sip, while he selected this and that from the cupboards.

Sasha dared not a word, only folded Pyetr’s limp hand in his and sniffed and mopped his running nose and shivered, despite the fire, despite the old man’s promises.

It was bad, he knew that it would be when Uulamets came back to lift the bandage off; he wanted to shut his eyes, but he had told Pyetr he would not.

THERE WAS terrible pain. Somehow Pyetr had lost his way in the forest and fallen in with devils and leshys, most of whom had old friends’ faces and one of whom looked like a horse and another a black and white cat.

Finally he was in a dark hovel by a fireside, and a terrible old man was singing at him, not singing to him, but at him, and leaning forward to blow smoke into his face from a bone pipe.

He coughed. He stared in horror at this painted apparition, lit in fire, and in the way of all nightmares saw Sasha Misurov’s face hanging in the smoke, firelit and malevolent in its presence, while the song buzzed in his ears and the smoke stung his throat.

He coughed again. The singing stopped. “Keep him warm,” the old man said; and gathered up his pipe and his foul smoke and loomed up as a shadow against the cluttered rafters.

Sasha leaned forward, strangely distorted, strangely ominous, and he could scarcely move or breathe as Sasha dragged a quilt up to his chin and weighed him down under it. Whatever Sasha or the old man would have done there was nothing he could do to prevent it. “Lie still,” Sasha said in a voice that buzzed in his ears. “Lie still. Everything’s all right. It’s all over. You can sleep now.”

He could not remember what should be over. It sounded frightening. He saw the shadows move on the ceiling, like scampering cats in the rafters, strange shapes like creatures lurking and slithering and pausing again.

“I’ll be here,”Sasha said.

“Good,” he said thickly, finding speech difficult. He was not sure whether he could trust Sasha, or at least this dream of Sasha. It looked highly unreliable, and friends had played wicked games on him too often in his life—he did not remember when or why, but it seemed to him that one had attempted his life lately, and that this place was the result of it.

“The old man is a wizard,” Sasha whispered, tucking the blanket under his chin. “I know you don’t believe in wizards, but he truly is. He says you would have died if you hadn’t come here. He says you have to stay very quiet and not try to get up even if you feel better.”

He was not sure he felt better. His head was throbbing from the smoke or from the singing, and his side was bound so tightly it felt numb. But Sasha said, “I’m going to sleep right beside you. I won’t leave.” It seemed that that had been the condition for some time now, and that they had wandered a very long journey under those terms.

Daylight streamed into the clutter, light in which dust danced, and Sasha lay warm and dry, a condition which argued he should be in his own room in The Cockerel. Instead he was here, in this strange, object-crowded ferryman’s house, watching Uulamets fling the shutters open one after another, bang and rattle. Sasha’s nose had stopped running. His throat was only a little sore, despite the days of cold.

And Pyetr was by him, stirring a little, pulling his quilts over his head—which Sasha was glad to see. He had wakened from time to time through the night to assure himself that Pyetr was alive and well; he had seen the terrible sights all over again every time he had shut his eyes and fought his way back to sleep, and now that Pyetr seemed awake enough to defend himself from the daylight, more sleep was what he would only too gladly have had—pull the covers up between himself and the light and truly rest now.

But if it were aunt Ilenka opening up the shutters, she would take a broom to a boy lying abed, no matter how hard it was for that boy to move this morning, and he had no wish to start off badly with the old man; so he got up and ran his hands through his hair and made a respectful bow to Uulamets.

“Can I help, sir?”

“Take the bucket,” Uulamets said, “go down to the river. Fill the water-barrel. Mind you don’t get sand.”

“Yes, sir,” he said, pulled his bloodstained, dirty coat off the peg by the door, took the bucket and went out to do that.

It was several trips up and down the narrow track to the ferry landing, under the arch of dead trees—a clear sunny morning with bright edges to everything—a nip in the air, but a promise of warmth by noon: sunlight on the broad, tree-rimmed river that went—by everything Pyetr had sworn was true—down to great, golden-roofed Kiev.

Once their debt to Uulamets was satisfied, Sasha thought on his first trip downhill. Then Kiev. He tried not to think about the debt part of it, because he knew Pyetr would be angry with him when he knew he had bargained himself into an agreement with the old man—a very unlimited and vague kind of agreement, namely that he should help the old man, and the old man had not said how long this should be or what form this help should take-Yes, he had said, and spoken for Pyetr, too; and Pyetr was surely going to take exception to that.—Even if it was to pay for Pyetr’s life, Pyetr would insist there had been nothing wrong and Uulamets was a faker like the wizards in Vojvoda—

Pyetr might be angry enough to go off to Kiev and leave him; and that prospect, being left alone with the old man—

Sasha recollected smoke and fire and the terror the old man had put into him whenever he had flinched from the old man’s orders. He opened his eyes wider to the daylight and tried to drive that vision out of his eyes and the feeling out of his bones that there was something terribly dangerous and sinister about Uulamets beyond the obvious fact that he was a wizard.