Charlinder's Walk

by Alyson Miers

  "Do you think that's why she's my Anima? Because I'm descended from her?"

  "Your Anima takes the form of Eileen because she was someone who would understand you, and she was someone from whom you would willingly accept advice. The spirit guide doesn't have to take the form of a blood relation. Sometimes it isn't fully human."

  While Charlinder was left to contemplate Gentiola summoning an Animus with the head of a brown bear, she opened the door to a small closet under the staircase and brought out a flat muslin sack and ribbon. She emptied the herbs from the bowl and into the cloth, tied the ribbon around the open end, and handed the sack and journal over to Charlinder. "Eileen's memory is in the herbs, and I think you should keep it."

  "What'll I do with it?"

  "You probably won't succeed on your first try. But if you can concentrate hard enough, the recall is straightforward."

  "Thank you."

  "You're welcome. That's all I wanted to show you for now."

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Surprise

  He had to grant her this much; it was a powerful distraction that she'd just given him from the secret she'd recently shared. Not that the distraction was such a surprise; the Paleola village was so small that all of its residents were probably descended from most of its founders, but in all the years that Charlinder had been reading Eileen's writings rather than running hide-and-seek relays with the other boys, he'd never thought of this woman as someone who could be related to him. She was an influence. She was an educator. She'd never before been anything so intimate as an ancestor. Now he'd heard her voice, listened to her speak, seen a piece of her actual behavior first represented in her journal. He now knew what she looked like, and knew that his Anima took the form of his great-great-great-grandmother when she was not much older than he.

  It was such a fascinating display that, for the next several hours, the fact of Gentiola's having made the Plague didn't feel like such a pressing issue. He let that go while he thought about Eileen's exchange with Laura. It was a curious sensation to be reminded that, absent the true answer, there were more than two viewpoints that could possibly explain the Plague. Laura's insight was fascinating, for imagining that God wanted to cull His people for problems other than non-belief and sexual indulgence; in fact her reasoning bore some vital similarities to Gentiola's rationale, only she still depended on belief in God, and Charlinder was still of the mind that if a theory was useful, it would be defensible without faith. Even more intriguing to him was how Patricia's theory of a terrorist act gone out of control came factually closest to the actual event. It was neither the will of God nor a random enactment of nature: all that damage came from the work of a human being. She'd been mistaken in thinking the virus's progress had spun out of control. It had actually fallen short.

  Which brought him back to Gentiola. She wasn't trying to make Charlinder forget what she'd done, but she also hadn’t answered whether she might do it again.

  He continued to bring that question back to her over the next several days. First, she responded with, "Haven't I answered that already?" The second time, she pointedly changed the subject and kept Charlinder admirably occupied with a discussion on how the atheist Communist states hadn't really been secular societies because they turned the state into the new God.

  "...and you see, a secular culture is not one that has no religion, but that doesn't need it. The atheist totalitarian regimes did not encourage their subjects to think logically, or critically, or independently--only to parrot the party's dogma, which meant that the removal of theistic religion did more harm than good to the people's psychology..."

  Though it was a fascinating, stimulating talk, Charlinder was something short of deterred, and when he asked her for the third time in two days, she came the closest he'd yet seen to losing her temper.

  "Char, haven't I done enough for you?!" she retorted at the foot of a staircase.

  "If you don't want to extend your hospitality to me any longer, I'll leave."

  "That's ridiculous," she replied. "I don't have time to play games with you over a question I've already answered, as I have work to do."

  "What kind of work?"

  "I don't grow my whole life on this property, in case you haven't noticed. I depend on the villages for some things, which means I need to do magic for them. Let me know when you're ready to stop being difficult." And with that, she stormed off up the stairs.

  Since that approach was getting him nowhere, he resolved to think of a new one. Gentiola was noticeably frosty with him for the rest of that day. Thinking over it that night, he figured that he'd made it clear to her that he still wanted to know, so he could wait for her to bring him around to the subject when she was ready.

  She returned to her usual pleasant self the next morning, but over the next two days, appeared to have caught onto Charlinder's intention. She showed him some of the magic she performed for the nearby villagers. She engaged him in many more invigorating talks, but never brought the subject near the Plague. She showed him how she took care of her rabbits, but she did not encourage him to ask any more questions.

  "Your aura is different today, Char," Gentiola remarked on the third morning of this stage. He was starting to think that the question he posed didn't really have an answer. Perhaps it was comparable to asking a small child why she'd just done something naughty; that it was really just an accusation posing as a question. It was possible that Gentiola had shared with him the extent of her thoughts relating to the Plague, and there was nothing left to do but enjoy her company, until...when? If she would not give him a yes or no, then he had no reason left to stay. She gave no sign that he was about to wear out his welcome, but he would make no assumptions. While he didn’t like to admit as much, he had grown very comfortable with her hospitality and was in no rush to head back out to the wilderness. It was a bridge he would eventually have to cross.

  "Sorry, what's my 'aura'?"

  "It's a band of colored light around your body; I have one, too, in fact every living thing generates one," she explained. Her eyes were focused, while sipping her breakfast tea, at an area just above his head.

  "And what does this aura do?"

  "It doesn't make anything happen, precisely, but it carries some information. It describes your personality and talents, your health, your emotional state, it's all descriptive."

  "So, if the aura shows one's emotional state, then it's supposed to fluctuate from day to day?"

  "It is. Yours has been fluctuating since you arrived here, which is normal, but an aura doesn't normally change this much in one day."

  "What's so different about mine today?"

  "The biggest change is that all the red has disappeared." She took another slurp of tea. "That means all your anger's dissipated, which would be a good thing, except you don't even have a sliver of pink left, and that's worrisome."

  "I take it we all need a little bit of pink in our auras?"

  "In fact, is that...?" Gentiola peered quizzically at something around his ears, oblivious to his remark.

  "What do you see?"

  "I'm not sure. Probably nothing dangerous."

  Charlinder thought he probably should have seen something vaguely sinister about the fact that Gentiola could see something on him that illuminated such complex details about his mood. The worry was all cognitive, however; perhaps because he had already seen so many examples of Gentiola's abilities to see things and know things that mere mortals couldn't, that Charlinder didn't feel any alarm. In fact at that point he felt as though he was well beyond alarm at anything.

  Much of the day gave way to a near-forgotten emotion. He and Gentiola had seemingly run out of things to talk about. There was nothing to do on the estate in which Gentiola needed his help in the slightest. She showed no sign of tiring of his company, in fact she gave every impression that her hospitality could continue into the infinite. Yet, for the first time arguably since leaving home, he was at once comfortable, relaxed and bored.r />
  Gentiola spent much of the morning at work. Her services to her nearest neighbors were primarily weather-working and disaster-averting. She did magic to ensure that the local villagers' crops grew appropriately, that destructive weather and pests steered clear of them, that their men didn't get killed in hunting accidents and their women didn't die in childbirth. They, in return, supplied her with fabric, whatever food she didn't grow at home, and livestock when she needed it. Most of her pottery was bartered for magic, for example. She'd offered to let Charlinder watch her work, understanding there was nothing for him to do, but he declined; he didn't learn anything from watching her work except that he would never learn to do what she did. She understood. He enjoyed the sunshine in the garden while grooming her rabbits, trying to convince himself he was being of some use.

  "Remember those people who brought you to me?" she asked while he helped her prepare their lunch for the day.

  "I suppose."

  "They asked me for a protection spell to make sure no more crazy people enter their land," she said matter-of-factly.

  "Can't blame them for that."

  "And I told them you weren't crazy, just lost, so they said, then, make sure no one else loses their way in their part of the land. I told them I couldn't make them any promises."

  "So, have you tried that protection spell?" he asked.

  "I was working on it just now. If I did a spell against crazy people, then a few of their own might wander off and never be seen again, and the village wouldn't thank me for that. If they want to be spared from mental discomfort, I'm afraid that's a protection I don't want to provide, but I have to do something if they're going to keep me in laying hens."

  "I'm sure they just don't want to see another strange guy getting in their kids' faces," Charlinder suggested, though he suspected Gentiola wasn't really listening to him.

  "So eventually, I just gave up and said, okay, no one from farther away than Perugia or Verona can enter their territory. Strangers would have to go around their land." With a final shrug she said, "I'm sure they'll get over it before the spell wears off."

  "How long do these spells usually last?"

  "Several months, usually."

  "So, then, when the spells wear off after a few months, the locals need to come to you again for a renewal," he said.

  "Yes, they do. So I barter for more goods that way."

  "So, why don’t you just keep them protected against catastrophe all the time? And why just the locals? Couldn’t you use your abilities to make sure all survivors are safe from natural disasters?"

  "The world over?" she asked skeptically.

  "Why not?"

  "If I had the kind of power you’re talking about," said Gentiola, leaning in to peer closely at him, "then I would gladly do it for free, because if I were that powerful, I wouldn’t need to barter with anyone."

  "You have the power to destroy the world," said Charlinder, "and you can’t look after the few people who are left?"

  "I do not have the power to destroy the world," said Gentiola. "I never did. I had the power to construct the DNA sequence of a new microorganism." She looked down at the countertop, studiously keeping her face out of Charlinder’s view. "There is no 'just' in doing magic. You don’t 'just' move the Earth’s resources around whenever someone could use a bit of help. Every liter of water that runs in this house has a price."

  She didn’t stay in that mood for long; she perked up again once she had something to eat, and then she went right on behaving as though Charlinder didn’t need to know anything more. As the day went on and Gentiola had little use for him, he found himself at the door of the small room upstairs where she kept her memories stored in yarn. He realized that what he was doing was the very furthest thing from polite, but if he could find anything that gave any insight into what she might do in the future, then there was a reason.

  The rack full of mini-skeins stood in front of him. Their wooden tags were unhelpfully plain, so he had to grasp the yarn to identify the memory. He started with the eighth skein from the top left; it showed multitudes of people doing strange things that Charlinder could never do in his lifetime, but it had nothing to do with the Plague. He tried the next, and several more after that; none of them were the least bit helpful. He gave up the chronological sequence and made a random grab at a later memory.

  The room was full of glass: a complex network of tubes, oddly shaped bottles, and flat dishes interspersed with metal apparatuses. Gentiola, dressed much like he'd seen Eileen in the memory, though clean and untorn, stumbled into the room and grabbed a dish. She dropped it to the floor and smashed it under her strongly-shod heel. Next she took an angular-bodied glass bottle and threw it at the opposite wall, where it smashed to glittering grit. She grabbed the narrow end of a table piled high with equipment and turned it on its opposite end while the contents shattered in a frightened, traumatized round of soprano cacophony. She continued her rampage around the wood-walled, light-filled chamber until all the glass was smashed and all the metal was bent and distorted beyond its original function. She clung to the sill of the nearest open window and wailed like a drowning cat.

  Charlinder put it back before he saw any more. He took another, very delicately, by its wooden tag from earlier in the series. Upon holding the yarn, he saw this was a much calmer and more lucid memory. There was Gentiola in her crisp white jacket, standing in the room of light and glass. She tested liquids in the bottles, examined colonies growing in the dishes, and Charlinder knew, as surely as Gentiola had known at that time, that she would soon have what she needed and the danger would be past.

  It all felt just as intimate and shameful as he would expect from snooping in someone’s memories, but there was no useful information in what he saw. There was a pervasive, forbidding sense of distress in the previous one, but it all it told him was that she would not be able to develop another microorganism in the foreseeable future. She had plenty of time beyond that.

  "Oh, you beat me to it," said Gentiola. There she was, standing in the doorway; her voice nearly made him jump. Suddenly he felt like a ten-year-old squatting in a twenty-three-year-old’s body, but still not sorry for what he hoped to find. "You really shouldn't poke around in other people's memories," she pointed out, "but I can hardly fault you for curiosity, and I was just thinking, I really need to give you one of these before you go home."

  "You do?"

  "Yes, I do. If you go home with nothing but the words I've told you, then it'll just be one more story that gets passed around the bonfire." She picked up another skein from the board, later in the series than the one that showed her destroying inanimate objects. "I could hardly call myself a scientist if I didn't provide you with some evidence," she said, handing the skein to him by its tag. "Take this back to your room, give it a look, and if you find it useful, pack it up with your belongings," she instructed.

  "But this is your memory," he said. "Shouldn't you at least make a copy of it first?"

  "It's not something I'm likely to forget," she said. "And you need it more than I do."

  His eyes widened quickly, involuntarily, at this pronouncement. He needed her memory more than she did?

  "I wouldn't want your village to tear itself apart," she explained, "because they don't know what I did."

  "What does it show?" he asked.

  "You should take it back to the guest room, and look at it alone," she said. "And when you’re finished with that, why don’t you come to my bedroom?" she suggested, and sauntered out of the room with a subtle wiggle of her hips.

  While that was more than a little bit presumptuous of her, he could certainly take a look at the memory she’d offered. He went back to the guest room as she’d instructed, and grasped the yarn.

  There was Gentiola as Charlinder knew her--calm, loose-robed and intensely focused--standing in front of her globe. She coaxed out a bit of light from the great glowing sphere, and it became a cluster of faces. She whispered to them, blew it back to it
s source, and drew out another face. She repeated this ritual, over and over, with hundreds of faces, and to each group she whispered the same thing: "The Plague is finished now. You're safe."

  Charlinder let out a deep breath and enclosed the memory in his pack next to Eileen's journals. That would indeed be useful as evidence, but it still left the question of whether she might make another Plague in the future. He would just have to keep asking. There was no way around that.

  He did not expect to draw her out by refusing to go where she was, as it was obvious that she had far more capacity to keep him waiting than he had over her. Therefore, he went where she had invited him. Her bedroom was surprisingly spare; only a bed the same size as the one she'd provided for him, a simple carpet and a few nondescript pieces of furniture. She stood coyly in the middle of the room, looking pleased but in no way surprised to see him in her doorway.