R1 - Rusalka (5 page)

"Fool!" he said, pulling back at the sight of the fence, hearing The Cockerel's thief-bell start to ring, hearing doors beyond the stable bang open and a score of men shouting for weapons and the watch. "This is a dead end!"

"No," Sasha said, and he committed himself to the boy and kept going, across the scattered skirt of the haystack, around behind it and up to a corner where The Cockerel's fence failed to meet that of its neighbor.

Sasha squeezed through.

"Easy for you!" Pyetr gasped, and tore his shirt doing it, left skin from his right arm on the boards, but the sounds of pursuit reaching the stable lent him strength. He ignored the pain and ran, half-doubled, the hand that held the sword pressed against the stitch in his side, while Sasha Misurov led him a fox's course through the neighbor's garden, out the neighbor's gate onto the lane that ran behind The Cockerel.

The bell was ringing, the shouts continued, and by now Pyetr was running blind, not knowing whether it was his eyes that were fading or only the shadows where they were.

"Where are we going?" he panted finally, slowing, because his sense of direction told him they were going across the hill, not down it.

Sasha gasped, waving his hands, got out: "Dmitri Venedi-kov."

"No!"

"
Who
, then? Where?"

Pyetr gulped a mouthful of air. "The gate," he said. "The town gate. That's all there is left. I've got to go away for a while—"

The haste ebbed out of Sasha. He drew two or three breaths before he said, "What are we going to do, then? Where are we going to go?"

"We" was the fact. He realized that suddenly. There was no way, considering how the blankets had been piled, that he could have gotten into that corner with the blankets atop by his own efforts. The thieftakers would know he had had someone at The Cockerel helping him, and Fedya Misurov was only fortunate it was a Misurov who had raised the alarm, or
all
the Misurovs would be involved.

"I don't know," he confessed to the boy. "Let's just get to the gate, do you mind? Then we'll see what to do."

There was a stickiness on his side. He felt his shirt clinging to his skin and hoped that it was sweat that did that. The pain was less. Or the thumping in his ears distracted him from it.

He wandered a bit as they started off. He found his sword sheath and put the weapon away, to make them a little less conspicuous. By now dogs had added their barking to the noise a street away.

"We needed the horses," he muttered. "We could have gotten across town if we'd had time for the horses."

Sasha was doubtless scared out of words. Sasha said nothing, only walked beside him down one twisting lane and the next, downhill, while he tried desperately to think of sources for horses or clothing less conspicuous. Other thoughts kept edging in—thoughts like being caught, thoughts like himself being skewered and the boy who had helped him being run through on the spot or snatched up in the quarrels of the Yurishevs—

That the boy should slip them out of this by blind luck and the eel's course they had run getting this far—was much too much to ask. Pyetr had the most uncomfortable feeling that Sasha expected something extraordinary of him, something like the hairbreadth tricks he was notorious for in the town—

But that was a Pyetr Kochevikov without a terrible pain in his side. There was no joke about this, not in the least.

He felt of his bandaged side, rubbed his fingers and felt a slight dampness. It hurt less now than it had in the night. He thought that might be a bad sign.

And he was quite well out of tricks, out of friends, out of everything but the few coins in his purse—of which Sasha had kindly declined to rob him.

Then the wits began to work again.

"Wait, boy," he said, seized Sasha by the shoulder, set Sasha's back against a fence, and said, "I have an idea."

Then he hit Sasha across the jaw. Sasha bounced off the fence and started to slide to his knees, but Pyetr grabbed his shirt and hauled at him. "Sorry," he said.

"Help," Sasha Vasilyevitch cried, running breakneck for the gate. "Help me! Murder!"

The gate-guards stood up straight, snatched up their pikes and their lantern, and held up the light as Sasha ran up to them, with the thief-bell still clanging away up the hill.

"God," one said, seeing his face, catching hold of his arms.

"They're killing my uncle!" Sasha cried. "The murderer—his helpers, there's at least three of them! I'm Sasha Misurov, from The Cockerel, and my uncle Fedya—We were trying to catch this man, they found him in our stable—He ran and we ran after him before the watch could come and we caught up with him, but there were more of them—
They're killing my uncle, oh, please
—"

"Calm down, boy, calm! Where is he?"

"Up there!" Sasha pointed a trembling hand toward Ox Street. "My uncle, oh, they're killing him, please, run,
stop
them! There's at least three of them!"

The guards left at a run.

Sasha Vasilyevitch ran up to the tall gates of Vojvoda, lifted the iron latch of the small parley-gate in the shadow of the arch and shoved it open, terrified that Pyetr was not going to show up, that something disastrous could have happened since their courses had parted. Pyetr was bleeding, he had confessed it—Pyetr could have fallen, could be still back on Market Street, and he might be alone here, free of Vojvoda, but with no idea where he should go or what he should do after that. Pyetr was the one who knew, all of it was Pyetr's plan, except to tell the guards at the gate that it was Pyetr and not robbers—and if Pyetr did not come now he had no idea where he should go or how he should live.

But somebody came running up behind him just as he got the gate open, just as the bar swung up with a terrible clang.

"Move," Pyetr said, hoarse and panting.

Sasha slipped through into the dark of the road and it was Pyetr who had the presence of mind to shut the gate after him, after which the bar thumped down.

"It locked itself again!" Pyetr breathed. "That's luck!"

Sasha hoped that it was. He was wishing hard enough, much harder than he had ever wished to make Mischa come to grief.

He was shaking at the knees and wishing he had a heavier coat, here in the wind, and suddenly thinking that he wanted to be back in the kitchen of The Cockerel, he wanted to sit down next to the oven where it was warm and he could never do that again, never go home, never see his own bed again, never see the horses or the stable or any of those things that made up all his days—and he had trouble thinking to move at all, except that Pyetr took him by the elbow and pulled him along to the left, where the road ran along the wall.

Pyetr was breathing too hard to talk; Sasha was too lost to have any opinion: his lip was cut, his jaw ached, the guard had clearly been appalled at the sight of his face, and he did think that Pyetr might have spared him the second and the third blow.

«
^
»

"W
here are
we going?" Sasha asked when the north road had left Vojvoda well behind, when there was nothing around them but plowed fields and the night sky.

"South," Pyetr said.

"But we're going north!" Sasha said.

"That's the point. If you want to escape the tsar's justice you have to escape the tsar's territory. And you can't go the way they expect."

"But where are we going?"

"There are other tsars," Pyetr said between breaths. "All we have to do is travel far enough… Everything will be fine."

Pyetr had to sit down shortly after that. They had reached a point where they had a woods or a ridge or some large darkness in sight eastward: Sasha had no idea what that was, but they were out of sight of any lights at all; and Pyetr sat down on a large rock and held his hand to his side, his head hanging. Sasha squatted down to look at him closely in the dark, more afraid than he had been when he was lying to the gate guards, because Pyetr was bleeding again, he had no doubt of it now, Pyetr was growing weaker, and he had no notion what to do, without medicines, without clean bandages, and no hope of a place to get them. The north road only went to Belovatzd, that he knew of, which was only a village, and nowhere to hide, because it was closer to the tsar than Vojvoda was.

"I 'll be all right," Pyetr said, and made an effort to straighten, not entirely successful. "Time we got off this road. They'll be hunting us—if they have the stomach for it. Who knows, maybe a sorcerer helped us get out the town gates."

Sasha felt a chill settle about him when Pyetr said that. Pyetr laughed and said:

"God knows what the guards will tell—or what your fool cousin saw when I came out of that corner! Father Sun, the look on his face! I must have shape-shifted, my sorcerer friend must have turned me into a haystack—"

"Don't joke!" Sasha said. "The Field-thing could be listening."

"It should have a sense of humor."

"It's not funny."

"It ought to be. It's all moonflufF, boy, me 'witching old Yurishev, us shape-shifting our way through the gates. God, I used to play the devil around The Doe's kitchen when I was a kid, used to carry their wood for them, then drop down to the cellar where they hung the sausages…"

"You didn't!"

"I did. They kept saying how they had to have done something to set the house-devil off, because he was eating them out of their profits. So they must've figured it was since they hired me—and I
do
bet their profits came up when they let me go."

"You're a thief!"

"I was hungry, boy. I didn't
have
relatives. And in case you've ever wondered, the Little Old Man around The Cockerel's barn is a black and white cat."

Sasha shuddered to hear that kind of talk. "It's not lucky," he said. "Don't say things like that, Pyetr Illitch."

"Poor Sasha. There
aren't
any House-things. There's nothing in the bathhouse. The bannik won't get you, and it can't tell you any more than the fake wizards on Market Street."

Sasha got up, walked off and squatted down on the other side of the road, where he did not have to be near Pyetr Kochevikov.

The man was wicked. He had no fear. Aunt Ilenka had said it, and he had not believed it; and now he had Pyetr Kochevikov for a guide, if Pyetr was not going to bleed to death on the road before morning and leave him alone with everything that had gone wrong.

No wizards.

He only wished—

But that was the trouble. He could do too much by wishing, and he dragged himself back from that terrible wish he had, that something should bring Pyetr Illitch to his senses.

"There
aren't
any wizards," Pyetr said from across the road. "The bogeys won't get you."

"Stop it!"

"If the bogles are anything, they'd have come after me long since. It's not stealing to take what people are setting out for the cat—unless you count the cat."