Nine Layers of Sky Read Free Page B

chin so that he could look into her face.
    It was the last thing he wanted to do. He could see through the
rusalka
’s eyes: all the way to the back of the north wind; all the way to the end of the world. The
rusalka
bent her head so that the cold curtain of her hair fell across his face, and kissed him, freezing the blood on his lips and breathing arctic air into his mouth. He could feel the thin spine of her split tongue, traveling down his throat, scouring it clean of blood and sealing the vent in the wall of his chest.
    His lungs gave a convulsive heave. He knelt, gasping. The
rusalka
scooped up a handful of bloody snow and tasted it as though it were ice cream. A curious expression, of mingled greed and regret, crossed her face and then she sidled away, her image drawing the sunlight into itself until she was no more than a vivid shadow against the snow, and then she was gone.
    Ilya raised his head and cried aloud, because she had healed him and he would live, and this was the last thing he wanted to do.
    Some time after the
rusalka
had vanished, Ilya rose and brushed the snow from his frozen hands. When he looked across to the apartments, he saw that the stranger had gone. Uneasily, Ilya drew his coat closer about him and began to wander along the Neva, beside the eroded concrete fortresses of the tower blocks. A storm was whistling up out of the north. Ilya could hear the wind singing deep in the forests around the Beloye More, beyond the Arctic Circle. Patiently, he walked on, waiting for the storm to break. He felt as light and empty as air.
    The last time he had been so close to death had been ten years ago, up in the Altai, and that had been the last time, too, that he had seen a
rusalka.
He had been shot during a deliberately clumsy and obvious escape from an internment camp, and he really thought, then, he had been successful in trying to die. His enemies, however, were eternally vigilant. He had watched with his dying sight as the
rusalka
slipped down out of the trees to whisper healing into his mouth, her fingers water-soft against his skin, and a new moon rising through the bones of the birches. He had pleaded with her to have pity, but she had only smiled a cold, drowned smile and made him live.
    Since then the world had changed and Ilya had lost his way within it. He did not understand these new times: a day when there were no more heroes, but only the will of ordinary people. He had made and lost a fortune. If he wanted money these days, he had to work for it on the building sites or scaffolds of the city. It seemed to him that all heroes came to dust or blood or this half-life of his: enduring, like radiation. Yet he still could not resist taking advantage of the advances of this scientific age: medicine to ease sickness, drugs to ease the soul. He would have to seek out another dealer soon, to seek heroin this time, rather than a further futile attempt at death. He would go to find one of the runners who hung around Centralniye Station, and perhaps for a while he could continue pretending that he was nothing more than another casualty of the late twentieth century and not the last of the
bogatyri.
    There were no heroes anymore. Men born in the twelfth century were not supposed to see the dawn of the twenty-first. Nor were there supposed to be supernatural creatures that fed off love and blood, though sometimes Ilya watched the fanciful programs on the television and wondered whether such ideas might be gaining in strength, whether there might be a clue in this now long-standing rationalism to his own plight. Genetic modification or black magic? Behind their glamour, it sometimes seemed to him, the
rusalki
did not look so very unlike the small grey aliens that had become so popular nowadays. If one was to believe the TV, everyone in America seemed to be seeing them, and the thought made Ilya shudder.
    He walked on through St. Petersburg, up the wide channel of Nogorny Prospekt. He could hear the storm now,