7. People of the River, People of the Lake

7

PEOPLE OF THE RIVER, PEOPLE OF THE LAKE

THIS WAS WHAT THE PEOPLE on the water saw, as their boat settled into the current and began to drift along the River Wild, carrying them with it: a small, brown-haired girl in muddy clothes, waving her arms in the air as she ran toward them. One arm ended at the elbow, but there was no blood, and it didn’t seem to cause her any pain. One of the wood foxes sat on the ground behind her, laughing as she ran.

It was an unusual sight, even for the River Wild, which had seen many an unusual sight in its time. The man at the front of the boat pointed at Nadya, not throwing his net into the water. He said something, but the rushing of the river took it away as all the others turned to watch her running along the bank, their eyes wide and their mouths open in surprise.

Nadya couldn’t see, from her place on the shore, how the boat was steered; they seemed to have no oars or pole. But one of the women leaned over the side, long, impossibly dry braids nearly touching the surface of the water, and appeared to say something to the river itself, and the boat began to turn deliberately against the current and move toward the shore.

Nadya stopped running as it became clear that the boat was sailing toward her. She smoothed her hair with her hand and stood up straighter, trying to look less like she had been washed up on a riverbank, chased by a giant frog, and lost in the woods. It was unclear how well she succeeded.

The boat drew closer, and she got a clearer view of the people. There were four of them: two men and two women. The men had short, bushy beards, and the women had long braids, and all of them dressed like they had come out of a picture book about life from centuries before. Their clothing was brightly colored and rich with complicated embroidery, most of it showing fish and waterweeds and ornately shelled turtles.

Nadya relaxed a bit. People who decorated themselves with representations of turtles, but not with actual turtle shells the way she’d seen some people do, couldn’t be all bad.

The boat drew closer to the shore. The man at the prow leaned toward her, calling, “Hello, girl on the shore! What are you doing here? Did you lose your crew?”

Nadya blinked. “I came through the forest from the River Winsome,” she said, pointing behind herself to the trees. “I don’t know how I got there.”

The man looked at her, expression twisting oddly, and said, “This is not an age of heroes, but doors will open where and when they will. Was there a door?”

Nadya paused. “I thought I saw one in the pond, but that was a shape and shadow, not a door.”

“Shadows can be thresholds, under the right conditions. Were you sure?”

“What?”

“When you came through your door, were you sure?”

“Sure of what?” Nadya bit her lip, trying not to let her uncertainty show. “I didn’t come through a door. I fell into a shadow in the pond, and then I was on the riverbank. I’m sorry. I don’t know how I got here or where ‘here’ even is, but I’m not sure of anything. ”

That wasn’t quite true. She was sure that her name was Nadya, and that Artyom the fox was her friend, and that these people, with their clothes embroidered in turtles, didn’t mean her any harm. Their faces were too open and friendly, and their bearing too carefully unthreatening, for that.

The women exchanged a look as the men frowned. “It certainly sounds like you were door-swept,” said the man at the prow. “But the warning should have been given, if you were. The warning is always given, to guarantee the swept will be willing. We don’t want unwilling children.”

Nadya blinked slowly, fear growing in the pit of her stomach like a slow and dreadful weed. “Someone had carved ‘be sure’ into the back of one of the turtles at the pond,” she said, finally. “It was cruel and wrong. Turtles are our friends, and even if they don’t like you, they’re alive things, not toys! So I was trying to reach the turtle, to be sure it was all right, when I fell into the pond. I was sure the turtle needed me.”

The man looked to his companions. One of the women nodded encouragingly and said, “It sounds like she may not have been sure, but Belyyreka was sure enough for both of them. She belongs here.”

The man turned back to Nadya. Gentling his expression, he asked, “Child… what happened to your arm?”

“I was born without it,” said Nadya. “I never needed a second arm to do any of the things I wanted to do, but I had one, made of plastic, from my parents. A big frog came out of the other river and took it.” She was getting tired of explaining what had happened to her missing arm. She resolved to start telling glorious lies whenever someone asked her, until they got tired of it and stopped, and let her be.

“Ah,” said the man. “This is where we invite you aboard to do the day’s fishing with us, and promise to take you to the city when the work is done. Your fox may come as well.” He raised his voice, calling, “Fox! Do you want to see the city?”

Artyom yawned enormously and stood, flicking his tail as he trotted over to Nadya. “No, man,” he said. “The city is yours and the forest is mine. Human children are yours and have no place with me. I have returned her to you.” Then he looked at Nadya, brown eyes grave. “Nadezhda, these people will take you to the human city, where you can better learn the laws of this land. They will not harm you, but I will not be there. If you have need of me, or decide you miss my forest, only call my name, and I will come for you. But be sure before you do, for the river passage is dangerous to my kind, and I cannot come every time you call me.”

“I will be sure, Artyom,” said Nadya solemnly. The small fox flicked his tail and raced away, a tawny streak heading into the shadows of the trees. Nadya watched him go, and when he was no longer in sight, turned back to the boat, where the man was holding out his hand.

After a moment’s hesitation she took it, and he helped her step over the side, into the boat, which rocked a little but was otherwise surprisingly stable. Once inside, she could see that there were low benches built into the sides, places for the people to sit, and piles of nets and baskets.

“Inna, Galina, let Vasyl know we’re ready to resume,” said the man to the two women. They nodded in unison and moved to the side of the boat, leaning over together and whispering to the water. The boat, slowly, backed away from the shore and turned back toward the center of the river. Nadya blinked, wide-eyed and wondering.

“Is the boat alive?” she asked. “Are you telling it what you want of it?”

The shorter of the two women laughed. “No, not at all,” she said. “Vasyl is my friend. He chose me when he was smaller, and now he takes me as I ask him. But he is very large and sometimes I can be hard to hear, and so my sister’s voice aids my own.”

“Oh,” said Nadya, confused.

“It will all make sense soon,” promised the woman. She picked up a net and moved toward the side of the boat, her sister moving with her. The two men picked up nets as well. The boat steering on its own accord meant that none of them needed to spend their time steering, and they could all toss their nets over the side.

As they did, they began to sing. Nadya sat down on one of the low benches and listened, eyes drifting shut. The words were unfamiliar, but the tune felt like something she had known in childhood, something so familiar that she didn’t need to remember it to know it. The fishers sang and the boat sailed and Nadya listened.

And then, somewhere in the middle of the song, Nadya slept.

She woke to the boat shaking all around her, and a floor covered in fish. Most of them were silvery, but some were brown, or banded in pink and blue scales, like delicate pieces of art. Most were dead. A few flopped weakly, unable to launch themselves over the sides from where they were. The smell was surprisingly mild and distant, not as overpowering as she would have expected from dead, raw fish.

The pile nearest Nadya shifted positions. She sat up a little straighter, glancing around. The people who had been doing the fishing were chatting among themselves, packing their nets away. They weren’t singing anymore, or paying the slightest bit of attention to her. They didn’t seem bothered by the way the boat was shaking, and so she decided that she wouldn’t be either, and focused on the moving pile of fish.

They weren’t flopping or trying to breathe. They were just… sliding, like something was pushing its way up from beneath them. She frowned and leaned closer, then gasped as a small, beaked head pushed its way to the surface and looked at her with round yellow eyes.

“Hello, turtle,” she said, delighted by the appearance of such a familiar friend. It continued looking at her, not pulling away or trying to hide under the fish. “Did they sweep you up by mistake? Careless of them. Do you want help back into the river?”

The turtle cocked its head, seeming to consider, before replying serenely, “No. I am here because I would prefer to be here, and your help is not required.”

The fox talking had been like something out of a story. Of course a fox with no fear, in the middle of a flooded forest, would talk! More unusual if it didn’t. But a turtle in a fishing boat is not the same as a fox in a forest, and so Nadya stared for a long moment before she squeaked, “Can all turtles talk?”

“All turtles in Belyyreka can,” said the turtle. “I don’t know about the turtles on the other side of your door, Drowned Girl, but proper turtles understand proper grammar and how to use it.”

“I’m not drowned,” protested Nadya. “Drowned people are dead people or… or rusalki, and I’m not either of those things.”

“As you say,” grumbled the turtle, and vanished back under the mountain of fish. Nadya looked up, frowning, and saw that the prow of the ship was dipping down, down, ever farther down, until it broke the surface of the water.

Once there, it kept going. The fish began to slide, and the people were ready with their nets, throwing them over their catch, keeping it from going tumbling out into the river as the boat tipped more and more. Nadya grabbed her seat, finding small handholds under the edge, places she could hook her fingers and hold tightly on, keeping herself from falling. She shrieked as the boat stood on end, half in the water and half out, and began sinking rapidly, taking them all with it.

At the last moment, she thought to take a deep breath and hold it, so that when they slid beneath the surface of the water, she didn’t start to choke at once.

The boat kept going downward, not quite in a straight line, but leveling out. The fishers released their nets, which floated up a few inches before the weights on them caught and held them down. Then they began to sing again.

Their song, which had been bright and compelling above the water, was almost hypnotic here, beneath the water. It rose and fell with the currents around them, ebbing and eddying. Nadya didn’t understand how she could hear it so clearly, or how it could be so bright beneath the surface of the river, as bright, almost, as sunlight. Brighter even than the cloudy land above.

It wasn’t until they reached the chorus that she realized her mouth was hanging open and she was breathing in her shock, filling her lungs with river water that didn’t feel like water at all, but like the air on a misty morning, thick and cool, yes; still breathable. She coughed, choking just a little, and clutched her throat.

Inna turned to look at her, breaking off from the song and moving closer. “It’s all right, Nadya,” she said. “Breathe if you can breathe. The river won’t hold you responsible for taking a part of it into yourself.”

Nadya stared at her. “Are you… are you rusalki?” she asked, voice a squeak.

“No,” said Inna. “We are the people of Belyyreka, and you are one of us, door-swept and Drowned. The foxes of the forest and the turtles of the tides talk to you, and you hear them clearly. You are more sure than ever you knew or understood, and we are so delighted to be the ones lucky enough to be welcoming you home.”

She smiled, then, the sweet, melting smile of a new mother looking at a child in the orphanage, a child who had just, through the mysterious alchemy of paperwork, become her own. Nadya glanced around. The other three were still singing, and in the distance she could see more boats like theirs descending through the bright water toward the river bottom. She gasped.

The shape of the boats was as she had supposed when seen from above, but each of them was tethered, with a series of straps and ropes, to the back of a turtle larger than any she had ever seen before. She looked toward the front of their boat, resisting the urge to rush forward and check.

Inna smiled. “Yes, Vasyl is my friend. He chose me when I was just a Drowned Girl, like you. He was larger than our little one here.” She indicated the turtle still rummaging through their fish. “This one is still too small, I think, to want to bond himself to a human, however appealing. But there are other turtles at the shipyard who will be delighted to meet you, I think, and glad to have the opportunity. Drowned and unchosen are rare enough in a year without need of heroes that there’s little chance you’ll go without.”

“Don’t get the child’s hopes up before they’ve seen her,” called Galina. “Not all Drowned Girls find their companions.”

“Don’t mind my sister,” said Inna. “She’s Belyyreka-born, and needed no anchor to be sure she’d stay where the proper people are. So no one chose her, and now she sails with me, to aid my crew in their catches, and has no companion of her own.”

Nadya didn’t know what to make of that, or of the way Galina laughed and turned to poke her tongue out at Inna, leaving them both giggling like much younger girls. So she looked to the first man she’d met, whose name she still didn’t know, and begged for an explanation with her eyes.

He took some pity on her, because he came closer and sat on the nearest low bench, saying, “This is a new place, and like all new places, it will have new rules. We’re glad to have you, and we’ll do our best not to confuse you too badly.”

“This is… Belyyreka?” Nadya’s tongue stumbled over the new word, although not as badly as she might have stumbled over something that felt less Russian and thus less familiar. It was like a word she’d heard before, whispered in dreams, calling her to find it. The word felt like coming home.

“Yes,” said the man. “This is Belyyreka, and I am Borya, and I, like Inna, like you, was brought here by a door when I was very young. Only the very young are capable of uncomplicated surety, you see, and so the doors seek them when they are lost and need to come home. Sometimes people, like tales, begin where they do not belong. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” lied Nadya, who was well acquainted with adults asking questions when they already knew which answer they wanted to receive.

Borya looked at her, frowning like he didn’t quite believe her. Then he nodded and said, “Those who are born here, like Inna’s sister and my brother, they belong to Belyyreka. The only doors that come for them will be the ones who recognize that this is not their home. But those who are brought here, they need something to tie them to the great lake, or their original homes may call them back, whether they wish to go or no.”

Nadya blinked, very slowly. “So are you from Colorado?” she asked.

Borya laughed. “No,” he said. “I was born in a city of towers, by an ocean I hope never to see again. The water was salt and bitterness and it wanted nothing of the people who lived on the land. The sea teemed with merfolk, and they would never forgive us for the crimes we had committed against them when our world was much younger. The city was like a coat six sizes too big for me, and it never fit, and I could never be the person I was expected to become. So when a door appeared where no door belonged, I went through, and I never looked back.”

Inna looked away from the side of the boat and said, “I came from a city called Manhattan, where my parents had seven children and no time for any of us, but always time for making more children. I was always hungry and always lonely and always serving as a mother for the children younger than myself, even though I was scarce a child myself. I fell into the harbor one day while I was begging for bread, and I found myself washed up on the banks of the River Wild, where a fishing boat brought me in as part of their day’s catch.”

“Even as we’re doing now, with you,” said Galina amiably. “Drowned Girls and Drowned Boys go to the harbormaster, who knows all the answers to all the questions, and doesn’t think any of them are foolish in the slightest.”

That was a good thing for Nadya to hear. She had already had more than her share of being looked at pityingly by adults for asking questions that seemed perfectly reasonable and important to her, but turned out to be things that “everyone knew” and thus never needed to ask about. She liked the idea of no questions being seen as foolish, even if they were questions about the things that “everyone knew.” She liked that idea a lot.

“How many of us are there?” asked Nadya eagerly. It seemed there must be a great many, if two out of the first four people she’d met had come from other worlds, through doors, like she had.

“Quite a few,” said Borya. “More than there used to be, but not as many as some worlds have. The world I came from knew about the doors, and knew that they ran in both directions, and when children came through, we would try our best to send them back, lest their parents be sad at losing them, although the merfolk didn’t do the same; for them, when children washed up on their tides, those children were gifts of the storm, and they were kept and cosseted.”

“I think we came from the same world, Nadya,” said Inna. “At least, the name of Colorado is familiar to me, and I’ve never heard of two worlds so close together that they named things the same. Our world only knows the doors in stories and cautionary tales, and few people travel there from elsewhere.”

“Can they follow me here?” asked Nadya. “Carl and— My parents, can they find me?”

“No,” said Inna, with careful sorrow in her voice, and Nadya found that she was relieved.

They weren’t cruel to her, Carl and Pansy, were even kind in their slightly distant way, but she didn’t love them, and she knew they didn’t love her. What was love, anyway? Was it a form of possession? She had loved Maksim, very much, and that was why she had sent him away to a home where he could be happy and well cared for, all the days of his life. She liked to think that he had been happy with her, even as she had been happy at the orphanage, but she knew he’d be better off with a home of his own, where he never had to be hidden away to keep inspectors from seeing him and rejecting him as a wild animal, where the food was always fresh and the water always clean.

By that standard, the matrons must have loved her, or they wouldn’t have sent her away to America. But she knew they hadn’t. It wasn’t hurtful knowledge: her hair was brown, her right arm ended at the elbow, the matrons never loved her. Also by that standard, Carl and Pansy loved her more than anything, because they’d given her so many wonderful things, shoes like pillows and food so delicious that sometimes it didn’t seem real.

But things weren’t love. They didn’t look to her the way some of the smaller children at the orphanage had, eyes soft and faces full of light. They looked at each other that way, if rarely, and the other parents at her school looked at their children that way, but Carl and Pansy didn’t, because they didn’t love her. Things weren’t love, and she was a thing to them, a thing that required many other things to be content, but not entirely a person.

It wasn’t like that for the other adopted children in her school, whose parents looked at them with love, who didn’t know what it was to be a thing, but it was like that for her. Sometimes a thing could be one thing for one person and another thing for someone else. Something like the way rivers couldn’t be breathed anywhere else she’d ever been, and turtles couldn’t talk, but here, both those things were possible.

“I’m glad,” said Nadya. “I didn’t like the big frog who came to eat me, but everything else has been very good, and I think I want to stay in Belyyreka.”

Vasyl swam on, and the boat moved with him, pulled along by ropes and straps. The fishers moved around their catch, layering more nets, securing what they’d gathered, pausing only to free the small turtle before they tied it entirely down. As soon as Galina lifted him from the pile of fish, he swam upward from her hand, stubby legs thrashing against the water that seemed so much like air to Nadya but was clearly still water for him.

“Goodbye, Drowned Girl,” said the turtle to her, politely enough. He swam a circle around her head and then he was gone, shooting away into the current.

“Goodbye,” called Nadya. The boat sank lower, other boats coming closer, so she could see the majestic size of the turtles that towed them. Some were easily as large as cars, their shells broader than the span of a grown man’s arms. Others were smaller, and their boats were smaller as well, little more than coracle shells with a single fisher waving to their peers from the boat’s edge. All the turtles swam with single-minded purpose toward the same destination in the city below.

Nadya moved to the boat’s edge and leaned as far out as she dared, peering down at the bottom of the river.

They were moving toward a city.

It was made of stone, piled high and towering, gray and black and white and brown, slick and clean. Waterweeds grew up through the foundations, and a web of what looked like docks spread out in layers around each of the tallest buildings. It etched a lacy pattern in the water, impossibly delicate, too extended to have been possible without the water holding it up from all sides. There was something concretely natural about it, like even the parts that had been constructed had been built on the bones of what the river made on its own.

Nadya looked up. The surface of the water was so far above them now that it looked exactly like the sky.

Borya smiled at her. “This is why we need the turtles,” he said. “They change the shape of the distance. It compresses for them, because the rivers love them as the great lake loves us.”

“What?”

“The harbormaster will explain it all, I promise.” Borya looked to Inna. “Sing us home.”

“Of course.” Inna leaned over the side again. This time, the song she started was faster and jauntier, filled with interior rhymes that set an almost-galloping rhythm. The other fishers joined in, and Nadya found herself wishing she knew the words, that she might do the same.

Oh! to be a fisher on and under this great river! To sail a ship on turtle-back and see the world from both sides of the water! It would be a glorious thing indeed! The things they had said were fragmented and strange, but still, they stuck with her, making her think that perhaps this could be her future—a turtle for a companion, like Inna, and a good ship beneath her, carrying her to whatever destinations she desired. She didn’t yet know this place or these people well enough to know whether she wanted to stay there forever, but she didn’t find the idea unattractive in the shape it had to offer her.

Yes. She could be happy here.

Vasyl changed the angle of his swimming, going from a straight line to a spiral, gently winding his way toward the nearest of those tall, lace-wrapped towers. It drew closer with daunting speed, until the lacy docks looked less like decoration and more like the functional structures they were, bustling with people carting baskets of fish and strange vegetables and piles of nets, lined with little stalls and individual docking posts. The expected boats were tied up there, with space beside them for their turtles, who ate out of vast troughs of fish and greenery, occasionally lifting their massive heads to converse with the people passing by.

It looked very much like paradise to Nadya. She bounced in place, fighting the urge to jump off the boat and swim to the dock. Only the fact that water seemed to turn to air without warning here, and she didn’t really know how to swim, kept her where she was. Inna smiled indulgently.

“I felt the same way when I first saw Belyyreka,” she said. “Patience, child. You’re home now. The Drowned are never cast aside.”

Nadya tamped down her excitement as they pulled up to the dock, and Borya hopped out, tying up the boat before releasing Vasyl from his bonds, murmuring thanks to the great turtle as he swam up from beneath them and moved into position at his trough. Nadya swallowed. He was so big, bigger than any turtle she’d ever imagined could exist in the entire world. And he was beautiful, dark green with yellow streaks down the sides of his head, and big orange eyes that made her think fall must be the sweetest season.

“H-hello,” she said, as politely as she could manage.

Those big orange eyes fixed on her. “Hello, Drowned Girl,” said the turtle Vasyl. “Have you had a grand adventure?”

“I don’t think so,” said Nadya. “I had a journey, but I didn’t have an adventure, not really. I didn’t save anything important or find anything that had been lost.”

“You saved yourself,” said Vasyl. “I would think that is the most important adventure of all.”

Nadya, who had never thought of it that way, said nothing, only sat in weighted silence as the turtle continued, “And you found Belyyreka, the Land Beneath the Lake, which many say has been lost forever.”

“There’s no lake,” protested Nadya. “I didn’t see any lake at all. I fell into a pond and washed up in a river. Those aren’t the same as lakes.”

“But you did see the lake, if you looked up at all,” said Vasyl. “The surface of it stretches above the clouds, and the bravest of us can swim that high if they are quick, if they are clever and strong, if they desire to know what dry air tastes like in their throats. This whole land is a Drowned Land, and you are a Drowned Girl, for nothing breathes the air in Belyyreka, only different weights of water.”

Nadya blinked at the turtle, and when Borya came to help her out of the boat, she went without question or complaint, letting him lead her along the dock, away from the boat. Only as they were approaching a long, low building with lights burning in the windows—and how could anything burn there, at the bottom of a river? How could any of this be possible?—did she look at him and ask, “Are we really all drowned here?”

“Of course,” he said, voice soft. “What else would we be?”

Straightening, he yelled, “Harbormaster! A door-swept daughter for your custodianship!”

The door opened. A broad, smiling man with a beard like a bush appeared, blocking most of the light.

He gestured, and Nadya went inside.