C. Cherryh - Rusalka

Uulamets himself was upset, Uulamets tried with all his good sense not to strike out at him or flinch from him: “Grow up, boy!” Uulamets said to him; and Sasha tried as hard as he could to be a man, the way he understood a man ought to be—

Which was Pyetr, so far as he had ever wanted to be anyone.

That was not by far master Uulamets’ choice: Uulamets thought Pyetr a bad man and undependable and self-indulgent.

Wrong, Sasha thought.

“Besides,” he said aloud, “he’s ordinary, and we’re not—you have to allow for that.”

“I don’t have to,” Uulamets said, “and I won’t.”

Sasha thought something then he had no desire at all to say to Uulamets : You’d have been better off if you had had somebody like Pyetr. You wouldn’t have been lonely all your life and somebody would have liked you.

The old man said harshly, “And made mistakes like yours and his, young fool.” Meanwhile Uulamets was thinking, My own are enough—because he bitterly remembered Draga and how beautiful she had been—how for Draga, he had almost made the mistake of calling back his heart, a long, long time ago, where she could have gotten hold of it.

That’s what Eveshka did, Sasha thought helplessly, and tried not to: it greatly upset Uulamets, as if in all these years he had never remembered that feeling, until he had—Uulamets’ thought—a damned boy pushing at him, making him remember too far back-To being alone; and the fire killing his parents; and uncle Fedya; and Uulamets’ father taking him deep into the woods when he was very small and giving him to an old woman, who was a wizard, and crazed, and very wicked and spiteful—

It was Sasha who wanted not to remember now, things far worse than uncle Fedya could ever think of, wishes for harm on someone, wishes to convince someone he was a failure and worthless, so he could wish he were dead—

“Worse than any beating, boy,” Uulamets muttered as they struggled with the undergrowth. “You should have lived with old Malenkova. Crazy as a loon and mean as winter.” Uulamets was thinking by then of Eveshka and how he had failed with her: he had truly meant to teach her in a better, kinder way; but that had been a mistake: she had been willful as Draga.

Even so he wished, quite dangerously, that he could save her

Because a damned boy held on to a heart that was going to ruin them both, against all advice.

“Stop it,” Uulamets said, “fool!” and turned with every intent to teach a boy a lesson—

Deserved, Sasha thought: but Uulamets flinched from hitting him in the face, grabbed him instead by his collar, still aching to beat him the way his teacher had him, for his own sake, and all the world’s sake, until he gained a different view of things and stopped being a shallow-minded, flittering boy—

I’m not, Sasha thought; and wondered, having had all those years dealing with Fedya Misurov, who did not think half so deeply, or deserve half so much respect: Why don’t you just take it from me? You could.

That made Uulamets want to hit him for a different reason, which Uulamets himself did not understand, except it misapprehended him, and made him out a good man: Uulamets did not want people liking him, or expecting things a wizard could not in good conscience owe anybody, not his daughter, not a student, certainly not a light-witted scoundrel like Pyetr Kochevikov—

“Who’s probably dead, damn you,” Uulamets muttered. “You’d better make up your mind to count him gone, because he’s your weakness, boy. You’re going to flinch when you shouldn’t, because you’re too soft, you’re too weak, and the one favor you can do me for the rest of this hike, boy’t , is to watch the woods around you, look at the leaves, think about the leaves and nothing but the leaves, hear me? Or if your friend is alive you’ll destroy every last chance we have to do anything for anybody.”

“Yes, sir,” Sasha said meekly, knowing what the old man in his experience was saying: no doubts, no quibbles, no holding back. He tried to think about the trees, the leaves, the sound of the wind: sometimes—Uulamets angrily pulled him back from it—about the ghosts and what their absence meant.

“Pay attention!” Uulamets said with a painful jerk at his arm. “Scatterbrain, think of nothing .”

He understood, he apologized, he slipped with Uulamets into nothing and beyond that into nowhere, while the light dimmed, the air grew chill, and rain fell as a light patter among the leaves. “Don’t wish not,” master Uulamets said. “Be patient. Make no noise.”

So one watched where one was walking, one admired the water drops, one thought of beads on a branch, the rim of beads on a new leaf—anything that touched eyes, touched mind, being totally here and wanting nothing , and thereby totally silent in the woods.

But there came a change in the woods. They walked through a curtain of brush into a dead region, trees so long dead their limbs were white and naked, their trunks only patched with bark.

Want nothing, Sasha thought: he had had that knack once, back home among ordinary people, for their protection. Want nothing, wish nothing away, simply watch and see and accept what came.

Tree after dead tree, a forest not only dead but long dead, their stream flowing between banks of barren earth, utterly lifeless—not so much as moss or leaves out of this tributary of the river, not so much as a lichen on a tree. Barren earth, dust, that the misting rain turned to mud-Master Uulamets believed he knew the way, and Sasha did not question that, only wondered how he knew—and recalled long ago when the ferryboat had traveled further, and Malenkova’s house, Uulamets’ own teacher—

Her house was here, beside the old road, he thought, and recollected days of trade and travelers—

He shied away from that thought as Uulamets’ anger warned him, because it was dangerous to think about their enemy.

Consider only the trees.

They walked farther and farther into the barren ground, amid what began to be an open, level strip along the stream, where no tree had grown, seemingly, when the forest was green: the vanished road out of the east, the route of traders in times too long ago for a boy to remember. Malenkova’s old house.

Tenanted again.

One wanted to wonder-—

“No,” Uulamets said. “Think about the rain. Think about the sky.”

“I—” Sasha began, and saw something through the gray haze of trees, distant, moving toward them, ghostly white. He wanted to know what it was.

Uulamets grabbed his arm and stopped him in his tracks, and all he knew was a muddle, as if wishes conflicted, his, Uulamets’, the god knew: his wits were too scrambled to make sense of it, but his eyes saw a desperate, white-shirted man coming toward them.

It looked—Father Sky, it looked like Pyetr, was Pyetr—

“Wait,” Uulamets said, and jerked his arm painfully the instant he saw blood on Pyetr’s shirt and moved to disobey. “Scatterwits! No! Look at it!”

Uulamets wished , with everything both of them had, and Pyetr—

—melted, headlong, into a bear-shape shambling toward them.

“No!” Sasha cried, Uulamets wished, and it melted to a black puddle that flowed into the ground.

“That’s our shape-shifter,” Uulamets said, still holding Sasha’s arm, wishing the thing back to whatever hole it had come from. “Know what it is and it can’t work its tricks. The power of names, boy.”

If it had taken Pyetr’s shape, Sasha thought, trembling now it was gone, if it did that, if it was one of their enemy’s creatures and not the vodyanoi’s, then their enemy knew who Pyetr was. Their enemy might have wished him—