Free R1 - Rusalka by C. J. Cherryh Page B

of them weaving in their steps. The gray boards and the gray trees blurred together in the twilight as if the barren limbs had grown to the house or the house had grown and died and weathered with the trees.
     
    The closed shutters showed no light. The porch posts leaned, mere gray wood spotted with lichen; the yard was grown up in weeds, slanting down toward more of the forest.
     
    But beyond those trees, they could see from the front gate, was the river, a landing, a bell post, and a boat as decrepit as the house.
     
    "God," Pyetr said in a painful whisper, "it's a ferryman's house. It's an old ferry. We've come back to the road again."
     
    Pyetr thought about bandits as they passed the gate and walked a bare dirt path that showed usage, headed for the long wooden walk-up to the porch. He thought of the chance of them being murdered, he thought of the terrible things that could happen to both of them, while he leaned against the wall by the door and listened to the boy batter away with his knocking.
     
    "No one's home," Sasha said in a voice which had begun to be as hoarse and as desperate as his own.
     
    Pyetr passed a glance up where the latchstring came down. "Evidently they don't mind visitors," he said, "and it's no time for niceties. Probably the ferryman's in back somewhere. Just pull the string. We'll invite ourselves. Country manners."
     
    Sasha pulled the string. The bar came up inside, and the door swung in when he pushed it.
     
    "Hello?" Sasha called out, for fear of startling someone sleeping and perhaps a little deaf. He stood there in the doorway, looking about him at the firelit shelves and the bed and the table and the general clutter of small pots and herb bunches and bits of rope and tackle, all casting shadows from the small fire in the hearth. Warmth and the smell of food gusted out at them. "Hello, anyone? We're looking for hospitality."
     
    "Or whatever we can get," Pyetr muttered at his shoulder, and pushed him across the threshold, himself in no good way to stand. Sasha flung an arm about his left and helped him across to the warmest place in the cottage, the hearthside, where someone's supper simmered in an iron pot.
     
    It smelled like fish stew. It smelled wonderful. Pyetr was intent only on sitting down there on the warm stones, but Sasha swung the pothook out a little to put his finger in and taste a little. It was indeed fish stew, with turnips.
     
    Pyetr rested back against the fireside with a groan and leaned his head back, saying, "All I own for a drink, boy. Do you find any?"
     
    Sasha felt a pang of doubt about that—kitchen-nipping being a sin of one magnitude and searching the house like a burglar being quite another.
     
    But Pyetr's condition was excuse enough for pilferage, he was sure. He filled the washing bowl from the water barrel by the door and washed the dirt off his own hands, spattering little pockmarks into the old dirt on the board floor. There was no cloth to dry his hands, and he wiped them finally on his muddy shirt, hearing in his imagination aunt Ilenka's stinging complaint of this cottage, its debris, its dust-But it was wonderful. It was with its rustic clutter rich as a tsar's palace in terms of things they needed; and he laid eyes on a bowl and took it back to the fireside, dipping up a little of the stew for Pyetr, and kneeling to put it into his hands.
     
    "I'm looking for the drink," he said. "Eat what you can." He thought then that if he was borrowing stew for two people, he ought to add a bit to it, so he pulled down a couple more large turnips from the strings, found a knife on the table and diced them up fine, added a bit more water, a little bit of salt—a touch of dillweed and savory were what it wanted, he decided, after one and the next tastings that amounted to several mouthfuls.
     
    He found the dill hanging in a bunch from a rafter, crushed it in his hands and tossed it in and stirred it; and took a bowl for himself before he swung the