“Yes, sir,” he said, pulled his bloodstained, dirty coat off the peg by the door, took the bucket and went out to do that.
It was several trips up and down the narrow track to the ferry landing, under the arch of dead trees—a clear sunny morning with bright edges to everything—a nip in the air, but a promise of warmth by noon: sunlight on the broad, tree-rimmed river that went—by everything Pyetr had sworn was true—down to great, golden-roofed Kiev.
Once their debt to Uulamets was satisfied, Sasha thought on his first trip downhill. Then Kiev. He tried not to think about the debt part of it, because he knew Pyetr would be angry with him when he knew he had bargained himself into an agreement with the old man—a very unlimited and vague kind of agreement, namely that he should help the old man, and the old man had not said how long this should be or what form this help should take-Yes, he had said, and spoken for Pyetr, too; and Pyetr was surely going to take exception to that.—Even if it was to pay for Pyetr’s life, Pyetr would insist there had been nothing wrong and Uulamets was a faker like the wizards in Vojvoda—
Pyetr might be angry enough to go off to Kiev and leave him; and that prospect, being left alone with the old man—
Sasha recollected smoke and fire and the terror the old man had put into him whenever he had flinched from the old man’s orders. He opened his eyes wider to the daylight and tried to drive that vision out of his eyes and the feeling out of his bones that there was something terribly dangerous and sinister about Uulamets beyond the obvious fact that he was a wizard.
The ferryman’s house he was sure had never been Uulamets’ proper post; no more than that boat, that very large, age-grayed boat which rode at its moorings in the river—had ever belonged to Uulamets … who therefore had taken this place. The god only knew what had become of the ferryman, or how long ago, or what the old man did here, in these woods so dead there was not even the sign of a rabbit—
Uulamets was at work in the root cellar when Sasha came back with the first bucket. He poured it in the barrel and went out again, not without looking to be sure Pyetr was still safely asleep and that nothing had happened, because he had a sudden, horrible imagination of Uulamets as a Forest-thing of particularly malevolent sort, who might for some reason known only to magical creatures be powerless so long as it was the both of them; but singly, and against a sleeping man—
It was a childish kind of fear. Duck the head under the covers and be safe from goblins. As if there was anything, he told himself, that Uulamets could not have done last night, when he had worked with knives—
He could not put it out of his mind, how Uulamets had started to pour the pain-draught on the floor, with that look of hateful satisfaction in the act—
No, not hateful. Malevolent. Hating. Wishing Pyetr to suffer
Sasha hastened his steps, filled the bucket and soaked his knee slogging uphill and up the sloping walk to the porch.
But there was nothing, when he opened the door, but old Uulamets poring over a book at the table, in the yellow light from the parchment windowpanes, and Pyetr still sleeping with the covers over his head, peaceful and unmolested.
He told himself he was a fool and trekked after the third bucketful, banishing thoughts of long-nailed demons and Forest-things. Uulamets was a wizard, absolutely: he had watched the color come back to Pyetr’s face last night, he had watched Uulamets hold his hands over the injury and seen Pyetr’s sweating, pain-twisted face settle slowly to ease.
No wizard in Vojvoda could do that… or there would be no people hurting who could afford the cure. Everyone in town would know it: people would flock to that wizard and make him richer than any boyar could dream—he would be the tsar’s own physician.
Uulamets could surely go down the river to Kiev and make his fortune with such skill-Could he not?
Then why did he sit in this hovel, beside a ferry crossing where no one came anymore, in a woods that had not a rabbit or a squirrel to populate it?
Bandits, he had called them.
But where were the bandits that everyone believed lived in this forest? And if they were off in some secret camp deep in the woods—how did they feed themselves with no travelers to rob and no game to hunt, except they lived as old Uulamets claimed he lived, by fishing and by gardening? That hardly seemed the life brigands would practice.
There was a lightness about the morning and a wrongness about the place which counseled Sasha«he might be in greater danger than the bright sun could warn him of, and he might well, if he were wise, wish himself back in Vojvoda, carrying buckets to his ponies that he very much missed this morning, or expecting the cat to walk the rail and wish him good morning—
—all the homely, ordinary things that just were not here, in this musty, dusty place on the edge of a river that saw no boats.
He had Pyetr, without whom he did not know what he would do. The thought of being alone with the old man appalled him for reasons he could not precisely lay a name to, and he was not so naive as Pyetr accused him of being: he knew which of uncle Fedya’s customers to avoid and how to give the slip to trouble.
But Uulamets, he thought, lugging the bucket the third time up the hill—but the way Uulamets looked at him with those eyes that did not let him look away, eyes that once fixing on him had made him fool enough to mumble yes when the old man asked would he pay the price he asked, not asking first what it was—
Because otherwise Pyetr would die and he would be alone here.
Pyetr could not leave without him, Pyetr could not be so cruel as that, Pyetr surely would owe him some gratitude—
—that because he was not wizard enough to heal him, he had made such a fool’s bargain with one who was.
By afternoon Uulamets had put him variously to scrubbing the log walk-up and the porch (more water to carry) and mending a loose plank and a broken shutter. By afternoon Pyetr was awake, sore and very weak, but avowing himself free of pain. He took a little tea, which Uulamets prescribed, and then got up, wrapped up in his ghastly rag of a shirt, and tottered outside for necessities, with Sasha’s help, scarcely steady enough to walk.
Pyetr had very little to say, except that the tea was good and that he felt better—and finally, before they reached the porch again, he said that they had best stay a couple of days before they were on their way again.
“We can’t,” Sasha said miserably. “—The ‘be on our way again,’ that is. The old man holds us to account for your doctoring.”
“Well, we’ll pay him.”
“We tried that,” Sasha said, realizing that Pyetr might have dropped many more things than that from his recollection of last night, and he stopped while they were still alone. “He’s a wizard. He says he doesn’t want money.”
Pyetr laughed, a weak, desperate sound. “All wizards want money, it’s what they do best.”
“Not this one.”
“The old man’s a good herb doctor. His stuff works. We pay him a couple in silver—I’ve got it—and we pay for our lodging and our board and maybe for a passage, if we can persuade the old goat to take that boat out—”
“He’s not the ferryman. I don’t think there’s been a ferryman here for ages. Not since the East shut down. And he won’t take money, Pyetr, he’s not interested.”
“Well, what does he want?”
It was not the question Sasha wanted at the moment nor the one he knew how to answer, and he shrugged. “I think he likes my cooking. I think maybe he just wants company for a few days—” That sounded entirely lame. “Maybe just some things cleaned and fixed. I told him I would. You need to rest, and I can scrub his floors and carry his water for him, that’s all he’s asked so far. That surely keeps us even for room and board.”