The sound decided her. She thrust her basket at Ded Grib. “Stay here, both of you,” she said to the mare and to the mushroom-spirit.
Barefoot, she dashed toward the glow of the low-burning fires, raising her voice to shout through the dark, “You! The camp! Wake up! Wake up! The river is rising!”
She half-ran, half-slid down the steep sides of the gully where they had made camp. The horses were picketed and jerking at their lines; they knew what was happening. Vasya cut their pickets and the beasts bolted for higher ground.
A heavy hand fell on Vasya’s shoulder. “Horse-thieving, boy?”
asked a man, his hand pinching, smelling of garlic and rotten teeth.
Vasya wrenched away. She might otherwise have been afraid of him, for the touch and the reek brought back raw memories. But now she had more pressing concerns. “Do I look like I am hiding a horse in my hat? I have saved your horses for you. Listen. The river is rising.”
The man turned his head to look, just as a wall of black water exploded from downstream, came racing past them. The hollow where the band had made camp was instantly awash. Men, half-asleep, were running everywhere in the darkness, shouting. The water was rising unnaturally fast, throwing men off their feet and frightening them by its very strangeness.
One man began calling orders. “First the silver!” he shouted. “Then the horses!”
But the water was rising faster and faster. A man was pulled down by the flood, then another. Many of the men made it to higher ground. But the one who’d been calling orders was still floundering in the wash.
As Vasya watched, the vodianoy, the river-king, shot out of the water directly in front of him.
The man couldn’t see the chyert. But he jerked back anyway, on some instinct older than sight, and nearly went under.
“Prince?” said the vodianoy. His laugh was the grinding of rocks in the flood. “I was king here when princes groveled in the mud of my
river and threw in their daughters to ensure my favor. Now—drown.”
The black water surged and knocked the man off his feet.
Vasya had taken refuge in a tree, while the current raged below.
Now she dove from a limb straight into the torrent. The water snatched at her with astonishing force, and she could feel the vodianoy’s rage in it.
In her veins was the same strength that had broken the bars of her cage in Moscow. She wasn’t sleepy now.
The leader of the camp came up for air, gasping. Men were shouting to him from above, cursing each other. Vasya swam three strokes, cutting across the current. The leader was a big man, but fortunately he could swim a little. She seized him under the arms, and on a last burst of strength, heaved him to shore. A stab of pain ran down her half-knitted ribs.
The man just lay in the mud, gaping at her. She could hear men converging on all sides, but she didn’t speak, just whirled and dove back into the water, leaving the man clinging to the shore and staring after her.
SHE LET HERSELF BE SWEPT downstream until she caught a rock in the middle and clung there, gasping.
“River-king!” she shouted. “I want to talk to you.”
The water rushed along, with broken trees borne on its flood. She had to clamber higher on her rock to avoid a huge limb spinning toward her in the current.
The vodianoy popped out of the water scarce an arm’s length away.
His grinning mouth was filled with needle-sharp teeth, his skin thick with slime and river muck. Water ran like diamonds down his warty skin and foamed and boiled around him. He opened his spine-toothed mouth and roared at her.
This is when I’m supposed to scream, Vasya thought. Then he laughs—and I cry out in despair, believing in my own death, and that is when he sinks his teeth into me and drags me down.
That was how chyerti killed people, by making them believe they were doomed.
Vasya spoke as composedly as one could, clinging to a rock in a current. “Forgive my intrusion.”
It is not easy to startle the river-king. His gaping mouth closed abruptly. “Who are you?”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Vasya. “Why were you trying to kill these men?” The water surged, struck her in the face. She spat it out, wiped water from her eyes, hitched herself a little higher.
She only knew where the river-king was by his black bulk against the sky, the shine of his eyes. “I wasn’t,” he said.
Her arms had begun to shake. She cursed her lingering weakness.
“No?” she demanded, breathless.
“The silver,” he said. “I was to drown the silver.”
“Silver? Why?”
“The Bear desired it of me.”
“What do chyerti care for men’s silver?” she panted.
“I know not. I only know the Bear bid me to do it.”
“Very well,” said Vasya. “It is done now. Will you quiet the water, river-king?”
The vodianoy rumbled with displeasure. “Why? Those men with their dust and their horses and their filth fouled my river. They left no offering, no acknowledgment. Better they drown with their silver.”
