Russka Read Online Free PDF Page B

path was grassy here. A few hundred yards more and it led to the right, then turned to the left. Another clump of pines appeared.
    Little Kiy felt happy. He was still excited by this adventure into an unknown land.
    He had wandered over half a mile when the path led into a thick screen of trees and became narrower. He pressed on: the trees closed in upon him. There was a faint, peaty smell.
    And suddenly, right beside him, was a dark pool.
    It was not large – about ten yards across and thirty long. Its surface was still, protected by the trees which concealed it. While he looked, though, a little gust of wind stirred a faint ripple on the surface. The ripple came towards him and lapped, with scarcely a sound, against the dark earth and clumps of fern by the water’s edge.
    He knew what it meant. He looked at the pond, and all about him cautiously.
    ‘In the still pool, the devils dwell.’
    That was the saying the people of the hamlet used. There were sure to be water maidens – rusalki – in there, and if you were not careful they would come out and tickle you to death. ‘So don’t ever let the rusalki get you, Little Kiy,’ his mother had warned him, laughing. ‘You’re so ticklish they’d finish you off in no time!’
    Keeping an eye carefully on the surface of the water, the little boy moved round the edge of the dangerous pool, and was glad when the path led him away from it. Soon the trees opened out into an oak grove. The path wound through them until it came to a large empty clearing. Tall grasses moved gently. On the right was a stand of silver birch. Kiy paused.
    How quiet it was. Above, the blue sky was empty, silent. Which way should he go?
    He waited a few minutes until a cloud drifted soundlessly above the clearing. He watched carefully, to make sure of its path.
    East lay straight ahead. He began to walk again.
    For the first time, now, he wished he were not alone. Several times he glanced around the clearing. Perhaps, he hoped, his mother might appear. It seemed to him natural that she should suddenly be there, where he was. But there was no sign of her.
    He entered the woods again and walked another ten minutes. There was no path at all: the short grass under the beeches did not seem to have been trampled into tracks of any kind by man orbeast. It was strangely empty. He paused, disconcerted. Should he go back? The familiar field and river seemed very far behind. He suddenly wanted to be near them again. But then he remembered the silent, hidden pool with its rusalki that lay beside the way, waiting.
    The trees grew close together, tall, frightening and aloof, soaring up and blocking out the light so that one could only see little fragments of sky through the screen of leaves – as though the vast blue bowl of the sky had been rudely shattered into a thousand pieces. He looked up at them, and again hesitated. But what about the bear? He would not give up. The little boy bit his lip and started to go forward.
    And then he thought he heard her voice.
    ‘Little Kiy.’ His mother’s cry seemed to have echoed softly through the trees. ‘Kiy, little berry.’ She had called him. His face lit up with a smile of expectation. He turned.
    But she was not there. He listened, called out himself, listened again.
    Only silence. It was as though his mother’s voice had never been. A gentle gust of wind made the leaves rustle and the upper branches sway stiffly. Had the voice been no more than a moan from the wind? Or was it the rusalki from the pool behind, teasing him?
    Sadly he walked on.
    Sometimes a thin ray of sunlight from high above would catch his fair hair as he made his way across the forest floor under the tall trees. And occasionally he felt as if other eyes were watching him: as if silent forms, brown and grey, were lurking in the distant shadows; but though he looked about him, he never saw anything.
    It was five minutes later that he nearly ended his journey.
    For just as he had paused once