C. Cherryh - Rusalka

SASHA OPENED his eyes with a sudden feeling of alarm, the deck lit by dawn-glow and immediately near him, Pyetr’s blanket lying there—

“Pyetr!” He scrambled up with a foreboding of what had happened the day before, of Pyetr gone from the boat—dead, perhaps…

But Pyetr was lying just beyond the circle of salt, one leg bent under him, his arms in no natural posture of sleep.

Sasha reached him in two strides. He got an arm under Pyetr’s head, appalled by Pyetr’s deathly pallor and the feel of him—he was breathing, but he was ice cold and totally limp. Sasha let him gently down and ran back for the blankets and the jug of vodka, tucked the blankets about him and shook at him violently.

Pyetr’s eyes came half-open, wandered and fluttered with a dawning concern.

“Are you all right?” Sasha asked.

Pyetr made some confused answer, tried to get his arm under him and his leg straightened from its awkward position, and came up at least as far as sitting, with a blind and frightened look on his face.

“What happened?” Sasha asked, holding to his shoulder. “Pyetr?”

Pyetr raked his hand through his hair and propped his arm against his knees. “God,” he muttered. “She—”

“What she’?” Sasha had a dreadful premonition what “she” Pyetr meant, and shook him hard to keep him awake. “Eveshka? Pyetr, was it Eveshka?”

Pyetr nodded, rested his head against his arm and stayed that way, as if sitting up and breathing was all he had in him at the moment.

Sasha grabbed up the blankets and put them around Pyetr’s shoulders. He hesitated to leave Pyetr even for a moment, considering the water and the woods on either hand and the nature of the danger, but he hurried across to the deckhouse and brought out the stove, brought wood and the firepot and with trembling, mistake-ridden efforts got a fire started in the pan, enough to warm Pyetr’s immediate vicinity and make a strong cup of tea. Meanwhile he gave Pyetr a small drink of vodka, and Pyetr’s hands when he touched them were still like ice.

“What did she do?” Sasha asked, steadying the cup on its way to Pyetr’s mouth.

Pyetr took a sip, shook his head, and gave up the cup then to hold the quilts about him. He suddenly began to shiver, bent double and very evidently not wanting to talk about the matter.

But: “Where’s master Uulamets?” Sasha persisted. “Pyetr, for the god’s sake he’s in trouble! Talk to me! Tell me what you know! Did she say where he was?”

“I don’t know,” Pyetr said, between rattling teeth. “I don’t know. She’s lost him—”

“Did she say that?”

Pyetr shook his head and rested it against his arm.

Sasha built the fire as high as the stove and the deck would bear, applied all his intention to Pyetr’s warmth and well-being until he actually felt dizzy himself, while with another trip to the deckhouse for the honey, he made him a cup of hot, sweetened tea.

Pyetr drank it slowly, warming his hands with it, and that seemed to Sasha to have helped most of everything he had done. “I’m sorry,” Pyetr said, when he had drunk it down to half. “I don’t know why we’re alive this morning.” He felt the back of his head and grimaced. “Fell on my head, by the feel of it. I must have walked—”

“Was she alone?”

“I think so. I can’t remember. I just can’t remember. I’m sorry. Small help I was.”

“It’s not your fault. Pyetr, did she say anything?”

“She was a ghost again.” Pyetr looked as if he had just realized he had not said that. “She wasn’t threatening, she didn’t feel—angry: she was worried. Upset. God, I don’t know… I don’t know, it’s just—like she was before, lost and trying to get back and she can’t. I can’t say why and don’t look at me like that!”

Sasha shook his head. It was hard for Pyetr to talk in terms of feeling things were so. Pyetr wanted to touch and handle things before he believed them. “I’m not,” Sasha said. “I just wish I’d been awake.”

“I wish I’d woke you. God, I don’t know what’s happening—”

Sasha grabbed Pyetr’s arm and held it hard to bring him back, because Pyetr was having trouble being aware of things, and Pyetr halfway did know what was happening to him—that was the terrible part.

“Listen,” Sasha said as reasonably, as steadily as he could. “I’ll make more tea. Just rest. Maybe Uulamets will show up.” But the thought in his heart was that Uulamets was not coming, that they were alone on this boat with the wind blowing them against the shore this morning, not a hope of getting off, for all his wishes to the contrary—and even if it turned, he doubted he could get the boat downriver—the more so if something as magical and powerful as the vodyanoi had other notions.

They had a breakfast offish which Pyetr helped catch, but Pyetr had no stomach for them after they had cleaned and cooked them. “The smell,” he said. “They smell like the water.”

And several times that morning that Sasha looked Pyetr’s direction he was gazing off toward the woods, just staring, lost in his thoughts or lost somewhere.

The breeze blew steadily from the west, and the boat heaved and rubbed against the broken branches. Sasha looked into the stores and had no idea what to do about feeding them, since most that they had to eat was fish and turnips and the flour was running out.

He made some of it into cakes; and Pyetr would eat that, and drink the honeyed tea, and a few of the berries.

But while Sasha was cleaning the stove and turning out the ashes, he glanced back and found Pyetr standing by the forest-side rail, looking out into the trees, and when he came there carefully to suggest Pyetr stay more to the middle of the boat, Pyetr said, “I don’t think we’ll get off this shore,” in that same lost way.

“The wind will turn,” Sasha said, upset because Pyetr had just echoed his own convictions. Pyetr grasped one of the ropes that held the mast and gave a twitch of his shoulders.

“I don’t think so,” Pyetr said, lifted the back of his right hand to his mouth and stood there looking out into the woods. “Sasha, it won’t let me alone.”

“Is she out there?”

“I think she is. Maybe she’s found a new tree.”

“You think she’s killed Uulamets?”

Pyetr did not answer for a moment. Finally he shook his head.

“Is your hand hurting?” Sasha asked.

Again a hesitation, as if the question were mere distraction to his thinking. Then a shake of his head, a deliberate effort to tear his eyes away and to look at him. “I’m not afraid to go there,” Pyetr said in a distant, bewildered tone. “I think that’s probably very stupid. This place scares me—this boat does. In there—” A glance toward the forest an arm’s length away. “In there doesn’t seem safe, either, but it doesn’t give me the feeling I have here, and I don’t trust it.”

Pyetr was asking for advice. Sasha had nothing so definite, only a sense that there was a hazard in their trying to put out again, even if the wind should shift.

But Pyetr seemed to be in touch with Eveshka, in whatever form; and Eveshka was pulling at him, not as absolutely as Eveshka could—perhaps that her power was in some fashion diminished; perhaps that it was greater—because she had not succeeded in drawing him away from the boat; but neither was he free of that pull in her absence.

More, Pyetr seemed to be reasoning quite clearly around his premonitions: his caution was persuasive; his account of Eveshka argued distress and trouble. There was a very plausible chance that Eveshka, disembodied, separated from her father, might run back to them and speak to Pyetr the way she had before—