C. Cherryh - Rusalka

“Master Uulamets says he can bring her back to life.”

“Isn’t that kind of sorcery supposed to be dangerous?”

Sasha had no answer for that.

“How is he going to do it?” Pyetr asked. “What’s he need? I’ll tell you, I’ve heard recipes for witches—”

“I don’t know,” Sasha said. “He says he has to find out where she’s staying. He can’t see her or hear her. I can, almost, see her, that is. But you can see her plain as plain. Can’t you?”

Sasha wanted an admission. He stood there waiting for it. Pyetr nodded with ill grace and frowned.

“A rusalka’s very powerful,” Sasha said in a half-whisper, while the old man droned on at the other side of the room. Sasha came and hunkered down at the fireside, and leaned his broom against the stones. “Master Uulamets said she was just sixteen; and he doesn’t know whether it was an accident or not—if she just drowned, that’s one thing, master Uulamets said. That kind of rusalka is bad enough; but if she drowned herself—that’s almost the worst.”

One had to ask. “What’s worst?”

“The ones that were murdered.”

Pyetr gnawed his lip and considered the stones between his feet. “So what does she do? Look for men, I’ve heard that. So what does she do with them?”

Silly question, he thought then, seeing Sasha blush. But Sasha said, “I’m not exactly sure. I’m not sure anybody’s ever been able to say. They’re—”

“—all dead,” he said at the same time as Sasha. “Wonderful.”

“That’s why we have to keep close to you. We don’t know.”

He hated that “we.” He truly did. He scowled and looked at the sword in his lap.

“Rusalkas sleep a lot,” Sasha said, “until they want something. If nothing ever comes along at all, they just fade. But if they wake up, especially the violent ones—they’re terribly powerful. And she’s not the only haunt hereabouts. That’s what master Uulamets says. There’s a Water-thing.”

He stared at Sasha quite unhappily. “Oh, of course. A Water-thing, a Woods-thing, Things everywhere, and every ghostly one of them with a grudge to pay.” He shook his head. “Entirely unreasonable of them, I’d say.”

“Don’t—”

“—joke. They’ve got no sense of humor either.”

“No, they haven’t.”

“I don’t know why you’re so certain. Maybe they’ve been waiting all these years for a good joke.”

“Don’t—”

“—talk like that.” Pyetr made a little flourish of his wrist. “Absolutely. The whole world abhors levity. I’ll apologize to the first leshy I see.”

“Pyetr—”

“Earnestly.” He held up his cup. “Be a good lad. It’s been a hard night.”

“You shouldn’t have any more.”

“No, I shouldn’t.” He still held up the cup. Sasha took it and brought it back half-full, and Pyetr sat and drank and listened to the snap of the embers and old Uulamets chanting and muttering and mixing things in his pots.

Sasha watched a while, standing by with his arms folded. Maybe since Sasha was in some measure magical, Pyetr thought glumly, he had some special sense for what Uulamets was doing. Certainly Sasha looked neither confident nor happy in what he saw.

Pyetr tucked the blanket around himself and his sword, for all the comfort either was in the situation, and shut his eyes and tried to rest without seeing a wisp of white in his memory—

He could see her face when he shut his eyes now. It was a girl’s face, young and very pale, and desperately unhappy. She had long, fair hair, and a little chin and very large eyes, which looked at him so wistfully and so angrily-

It’s not my fault, he thought. I don’t know what I ever did.—Though I have my faults, his conscience added with unwanted honesty. He thought of a dozen escapades in Vojvoda. But his conscious self amended hastily, recollecting her nature: But nothing I ever did to you. It’s hardly fair of you, you know.

She was indeed hardly more than Sasha’s age. He would never introduce Sasha to some of the company he had kept or show Sasha some of the things he had seen—he could not say why, except it would embarrass both of them; and she was so young, she was so like Sasha, he found himself imagining her expression as offended innocence—and her pursuit of him less attraction than vengeful disgust for a scoundrel.

It’s still not my fault, he thought. I really don’t think I’ve done badly, considering my father’s faults. He really didn’t leave me a good example.

She hovered quite close to him—amorously close, he thought, much too close, for a young girl he had no wish to be in bed with.

He tried to wake up, he earnestly tried, in that sense of a dream about to go very wrong indeed…

He felt a grip on his arm and came to himself upright against the fireplace, sputtering and wiping furiously at his face and neck.

But there was no water. He was sitting amid his blankets in a room dark except for the embers, it was Sasha holding his arm, and the cold water running down his neck, real as it felt, was nothing he could touch.

“Are you all right?” Sasha whispered.

He caught his breath, leaned back against the stones of the fireplace and slid a glance toward the old man’s bed. He could still feel the cold water around him.

“Damn the luck,” he whispered to Sasha, and shuddered, pulling the musty, dry blanket up around his neck. “All the ladies I’ve courted and the only faithful one’s a dead girl.”

Sasha’s fingers closed on his arm. “Do you want me to wake master Uulamets?”

“It’s only a dream.” It came out with a shiver. “It’s nothing.”

Sasha did not move. Pyetr slid down further into his blankets and tucked his arms about him. For a long while he was aware of Sasha sitting there.

He was glad. If he had to believe in the rusalka he reckoned he was morally entitled to believe in Sasha Misurov—in Sasha, he thought, much before Uulamets.

Small good his sword might do, he thought, too, but he kept it close, against the few situations he did understand.

SASHA CAME AWAKE with an uneasy feeling, heard the house timbers creak, and heard a small sound from Pyetr—dreaming, he saw by ember light, and in distress.

He wanted to know what had waked him, and his heart all but stopped as he saw a black thing skitter along under the table across the room. It might be a trick of the dim light: that was all that kept him from waking Pyetr on the instant. Then it was the glitter of small dark eyes from under that table, eyes which locked with his so fixedly he was afraid to breathe.

Pyetr stirred, not awake, he thought. And something rattled a shutter. The wind, perhaps.

But the black thing skittered aside and back into the shadows, so that Sasha was left wondering if he had seen it at all. He was still afraid to move.

Then he heard the rattle of the second shutter, that at the end of the house.

Pyetr drew a deep breath and Sasha laid a hand on his shoulder and shook at him, but Pyetr did not wake, and he was yea and nay about wishing it in any concentrated way—totally confused, he thought in some distress, afraid that Pyetr might do something foolish, afraid that noise might bring attack from the Thing under the table or the Thing outside the window, though by what law of the unnatural he had no knowledge. He simply could not reach a decision what to do, even when he heard a board creak on the porch. He sat there like a fool, with Pyetr on one side and Uulamets in his bed both stirring restlessly.

Suddenly Uulamets woke and sat up in bed, which in some measure he was very glad to see, and in another way, made his heart turn over for fear the things were real. Uulamets put his feet over the side and a warning stuck in Sasha’s throat—but the Thing under the bed did Uulamets no harm: instead, it came out and clambered with human hands up onto the bed. Uulamets got to his feet and walked barefoot across the floor, to stand and look about him at a house in utter silence.