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…
CHAPTER 18
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.”