C. Cherryh - Rusalka

“We don’t know that.”

“Grandfather’s a pretty competent wizard, by what I see. And he didn’t do all that well, by what I see, either. What do we do, sprinkle salt, light a fire and hope?”

“Don’t make fun, Pyetr. It’s not funny.”

“No, this time it certainly isn’t.” He wound the rag around his hand and flexed his fingers, dripping water that hissed onto the stove. “But I don’t say taking the boat out in the dark is that much better, I give you that, too.”

“What you have to understand—” Sasha said. “Pyetr, I honestly don’t know what to do. And I can’t swear to you I know it’s my idea. I just have this feeling—I have this terrible feeling we won’t make it home—”

“Home,” Pyetr scoffed, and saw how upset the boy was, and shook his head. “I’ll allow you this—I’ve no fondness for that old man, but I’m getting a real understanding—” Why he’s crazy, was what he thought, but he said: “—that he’s not as bad as he could be.” Uulamets might, Pyetr thought, have done what Sasha had done. “I can forgive him.”

God, he thought… what am I going to do with this boy?

What if he weren’t as good-hearted as he is?

Or if he weren’t sane as he is—or if someone crossed him, seriously?

“If you want to go back to the house for a while,” Pyetr said calmly, “before Kiev—we can do that. Grandfather might even turn up. He’s probably wishing he was home anyway, by now. Or wishing himself back at the boat. We’ll have supper, we’ll sprinkle salt all over the deck, just in case. We probably should have done that last night. And we’ll get some sleep and in the morning we’ll untie and get out into the river.”

“We hit ground on the way in. I think there’s this long ridge—”

“We put the sail up just part way—it ought to blow us back a little. Maybe turn us around.”

Sasha looked a little more cheerful then.

“Wish up a wind for the morning, if you want something to do.”

“I’ll try,” Sasha said, and rubbed his face with his hands.

“But you’re right about the salt. He left us most of it. Maybe he was thinking about that.”

“Considerate of him,” Pyetr said.

They cooked a comfortable supper on the little stove—fresh grilled fish, right out of the river, Sasha having thought to bring fishhooks—and they cleaned up and flung the ashes overside, by which time the sky across the river was dimming from its last colors and the stars were coming out.

Sasha scattered salt and sulphur all across the deck then, one end of the boat to the other, and Pyetr forbore to suggest he try a few incantations and some smoke as well: Sasha would surely take it amiss, but, sincerely, if salt worked he saw no reason to stint on the rest of Uulamets’ rituals, rattles and singing and the rest of it: it all seemed alike to him.

Sasha did take a cup of vodka and draw a circle on the deck, which Pyetr watched, hands on hips, with some curiosity.

“So the wind won’t blow a gap in it,” Sasha said, “and I don’t think water’s a good idea.”

After which he scattered salt and sulphur right along that wet line, so it stuck.

Smart lad, Pyetr thought. “As a wizard,” he said, “you don’t do a bad job.”

“I hope,” Sasha said. “You’ve got that little bit I gave you.”

Pyetr patted his pocket. “Absolutely.”

Sasha looked at him as if to decide whether he was being laughed at, dusted his hands off and set the cup of salt and sulphur on the deck inside the circle. He handed Pyetr the cup with the vodka in it. “Nothing wrong with it,” he said. “It’s leftover.”

Pyetr grinned, took the cup and sipped it at his leisure.

He took a second, full one, but that was all, since he had no inclination to sleep too deeply this night. They lay looking at the stars and listening to the sounds of the boat, and planning how they would get off the shore and how they had to be sure to come to the house and the landing by daylight or risk missing it—discussing too—he could not figure out how an enterprising scoundrel had gotten to this pass—how they could get through the winter there, and how the garden could be better than it was and what they could do with the bathhouse to repair the roof.

He knew nothing about gardening or carpentry. Sasha did. Sasha was quite happy talking about turnips and beans and roof-mending, and if it eased his mind, Pyetr was willing to listen.

Only somewhere in the midst of Sasha’s plans for the spring planting Pyetr’s eyes began to close, and he began to drift—which he had not planned to do. He said, “I’m done. Get some sleep. I won’t swear to how long I’ll stay awake otherwise.”

“I can stay awake.”

“I’m sure. But I know I will.” He did not say that he had had practice at long watches in activities he did not want to explain to Sasha. He only sat up, laid his sword across his lap and propped his elbows on his knees, settling for a long night.

Sasha started to say something else about the bathhouse. “Hush,” Pyetr said. “I’m not staying awake so you can talk.”

Sasha hushed. Things were quiet after that, no sound but the water, the branches and some forlorn raucous thing chirping in the brush on this warmer night. Eventually it gave up. He listened only to the river, rested comfortably, and, after some hours, as a cold breeze began to kick up off the water, he thought about it a while, then finally unstopped the jug and poured himself a quarter of a cup, just enough to warm the blood.

Absolutely no more than that.

But he found himself nodding when he had finished it, his head dropping toward his chest. He straightened and stretched his arms and his back and shifted position. He ought, he thought, to take a walk around the deck—outside the salt circle, it might be, but things were quiet and the center of the deck was no problem.

He got up as quietly as he could, because sleep was coming down on him irresistibly and he figured the vodka now for very bad judgment. He looked to the wind to clear his head and wake him up, took a walk to the middle of the deck and turned around with a start as something moved in the tail of his eye.

He saw Eveshka walking, then, near the rail, saw her hair and her gown wet and the water streaming off her sleeves as she turned and held out her hands to him.

“Sasha!” he yelled, as lethargy came tumbling down on him, in the desperate hope that Sasha was not caught in it, asleep though he was…

But such salt as the wind left on the deck seemed no hindrance to her. She drifted closer, put her hands on his shoulders and looked into his eyes, soundlessly speaking to him, while he was too dazed to move; and her expression was so gentle and so concerned there seemed no threat in her. Her eyes were dark as her face was white, with moving shadow in their depths that might have been currents, or only a vision of the ropes and the rail of the boat as she put her cold arms about his neck and kissed him with the taste and the chill of river water on her lips.

It lasted a long, long while. He grew dizzy and dazed, he tried to remember what she was, but nothing he had ever felt was the same as this—profound, and dangerous, and at the same time so gentle there could never be any harm, as long as he did not move—

He drifted, then, in a dream where dangerous things moved around the both of them, but there was no harm, not so long as she was there—not so long as he looked into her eyes and not to other things.

But she drifted away then; and he was suddenly locked in one of the sweating, heart-thumping sort of dreams which usually meant he was looking for his father. He knew that somebody was going to tell him that his father was murdered, but that was long ago and he had long since gotten used to that idea. Nowadays it was not truly his father he was looking for—though he had never known precisely what or who it was. It was the searching itself that was the nightmare, a conviction that if he could not find what he was looking for, he was damned…