C. Cherryh - Chernevog

“Damn stubborn old man,” Pyetr muttered after a fruitless time of standing there, during which the horses stamped and shifted and idly pulled leaves off the young birches. “It’s wet, it’s nasty, and he doesn’t like the company. —Come on, grandfather, dammit, ’Veshka’s in trouble and there’s something using your shape. I’d think you’d like to know that.”

There was a sudden chill in the air. A wind sighed along the sea of leaves.

That passed. Sasha let go the bream he had been holding, stood a moment in the quiet trying again to convince himself he truly wanted the old man to speak to him personally.

He trusted Misighi. That was the only advice he was willing to take where it regarded the welfare of the woods—which was their welfare, too: he trusted that the way he trusted the ground they walked on and the food they ate and the water they drank.

What harmed it, harmed them; when it was well, they were: that was the bargain they had made—using nature kindly, working with what magic agreed with it—like the Forest-things themselves.

That was where he had to stand. That was the safe magic.

“Watch him,” he told Pyetr, and got down his pack from Missy’s back, knelt down and bent back a couple of seedlings to give himself room, searching after rosemary and the herbs he recollected Uulamets using in his spells.

Chernevog wanted him to stop—a weak, a desperately frightened wish for his attention and his patience to hear him. “For the god’s sake,” Chernevog said, and Pyetr grabbed him by the shoulder, “—it may not be only Uulamets that answers.”

Doubt, Sasha thought, and stood up and looked Chernevog on the face with an angry suspicion what Chernevog was trying to do to them.

“Sasha,” Chernevog said, “Sasha, —oh, god—”

Dark and fire…

Hoof beats in the dark… inexorable as a heartbeat…

Eveshka, sitting at a hearth, drinking a cup of tea.

Sasha felt that sense of presence that had haunted him from home. He turned his head toward it and saw, like a bad dream, the bannik squatting in the charred skeleton of the bathhouse doorway, a dusky, spiky-haired shadow, like a sullen, bored child, staring at the steps beside his feet.

One did not want it to look up. One did not want to look it in the eyes.

Sasha thought with a chill. —It lied… it was always his…

But Chernevog tried to retreat behind them, fighting Pyetr’s help on his arm.

“No!” Chernevog cried.

The bannik stood up, frowning at them with eyes like dying ambers. Then it looked skyward, lifted its hand as something filmy white swept down on broad wings to settle on its wrist. The creature folded its wings and stared at them in its own moment of sharp attention. Then ghostly owl and ragged shadow of a boy faded together into the dark.

“What in hell was that?” Pyetr asked of Sasha. “That was the bannik! Wasn’t that the bannik?”

“It’s what showed up at the house,” Sasha said.

“It’s him,” Pyetr said. “Is it my eyes, or what’s it doing with the owl?”

“I don’t know,” Sasha said.

“He damned well does,” Pyetr said, and took a new grip on Chernevog’s shirt, wanting answers. “What kind of tricks are you up to, Snake?”

Chernevog said on a ragged breath, “I told you, I told you, and you won’t listen—”

Pyetr shook him. “Told us, damn right you’ve told us—one damned lie after another! Sound asleep, were you? Innocent as morning snow, are you?”

“I’m not lying!” Chernevog cried, and it sounded both desperate and fully in earnest.

Which meant nothing, with wizards. Pyetr shook him a second time, saying, “Bannik, hell! Call it back!”

“I can’t!” Chernevog said.

“Can’t, hell! That’s you. That spook’s you, Snake, don’t tell me it’s not.”

“It’s a shadow,” Chernevog said faintly. “A piece. A part. A fragment…” Chernevog shivered, put a hand on his arm, eye to eye with him in a twilight so deep that his eyes had no center, only dark. “The dead can fragment… That’s what ghosts are: pieces, fragments, sometimes a single notion—”

“You’re not dead!”

“I don’t know what made it, I don’t know why it happened, I didn’t know it could happen and I don’t know where I lost it—”

“Damned careless of you!”

“It’s the truth, Pyetr Ilyitch!”

He worried every time he believed Chernevog. He had memories aplenty to remind himself what Chernevog was, and had done, and still might do; and certainly enough to remind him why he wanted to kill this man; but he could not find the man he wanted to kill, that was the trouble: this one held to him, teeth chattering, and said things like,

“For the god’s sake don’t go on with this tonight. Don’t invite any damned thing that might be listening. Build a fire. Lay down lines. It’s not nature you’re dealing with: put some limits to this, don’t leave it to whatever comes.”

Sasha said, “He’s right.”

“Build a fire.” They were knee-deep in seedlings leshys had put there. “I don’t think we ought to be tearing up any trees, under the circumstances.”

“There’s the bathhouse,” Sasha said. “The furnace will be stone. There’s wood left—at least of the walls.”

“Cinders,” Pyetr muttered, but he was glad enough to hear words like fire and limits. The horses had wandered off from all this shouting, browsing among the seedlings. They both put their heads up and Sasha called to them, “Come on.”

No one, in this place, in this night, had any particular choice about it.

Wizardry helped make damp wood catch, in a furnace mostly intact. Its effect against the smoke was minimal so far as Pyetr could see, but a circle of sulfur and salt around the old walls would stay put against any chance or wizard-raised wind—and such of the walls as still stood, helped against the rainy chill.

Pyetr fed the fire and kept an eye on Chernevog while Sasha was outside the walls including the horses in the circle—bending birch seedlings, tying them with mending-cord, and wishing them well: on the whole, Pyetr approved of birch trees, and leshys, and whatever was alive, as opposed to dead; and particularly whatever opposed the sort of magic Chernevog dealt with.

Chernevog was sitting opposite him, against the fire-scorched wall, knees tucked up. His eyes were open, but he had not moved since he had sat down.

“There’s the canvas,” Pyetr said. “You could wrap in that, you know.”

Chernevog gave no sign he had heard. His thin shirt seemed scant protection against the chill in the mist.

Pyetr chucked a stick in Chernevog’s direction. If Chernevog was thinking of some mischief he had no inclination to let him do it in peace. “The canvas,” he said, “beside you. Or freeze. I’m sure I don’t care.”

He thought about the bannik, or whatever it was, and tried to wonder about Eveshka and what else it had shown them. He listened to Sasha moving around out beyond the walls, in the dark, and thought, Get back here, boy. I really don’t like this.

Chernevog said, suddenly, “I did love Owl.”

It sounded like an accusation. A just complaint, what was worse, but he did not want to argue grievances with the man, not here, where memory was so vivid. He kept his mouth shut.

Chernevog said, “I wanted Eveshka. I ‘d have given her everything she could have asked.”

“Shut up, Snake. You’ll make me mad if you go on.”

“She wanted you. I couldn’t understand that.”

“I can.”

Chernevog said, “I wish I’d done differently by you.”

“But you didn’t, Snake, you really made me mad. And you’re doing it again.”