Chernevog (v1.2)

by C. J. Cherryh

  Nothing else.

  “Papa, why did you bring me here? What do you want me to do, for the god’s sake? —Damn you, papa, come back!”

  The willows sighed together. Finally something else was there, a sense of direction, an ominous significance in the dark heart of the woods.

  Magic was there. She knew the feel of it, subtle and quiet and dangerous, wanting her to leave the boat, come ahead. It assured her of her safety, it offered her—

  God, she had left the house with the feeling of something wrong, she had thought she was going to deal with the leshys, but nothing after that had gone right. Papa showed up and papa left her here, papa said she had a baby and she had had no sense HI all of it happening until he had said that. She had not thought of children: she was so young in her own eyes, and she had never planned for children. But it seemed one had happened, all the same, and her whole life was moving at someone else’s whim, the way papa had done to her and Kavi had tried to do.

  Now an unplanned-for child did it, her own damned stupid fault.

  She had hardly even wished against the possibility, and babies did happen, given a chance. She was in a terrible situation that she now began to think had never been what she had believed—and papa-Papa steered her into this dreadful place, lectured her on making up her own mind and then ran off somewhere. Papa wanted, papa wanted, and her whole life turned on his wishes—and then he told her to choose. It was not Chernevog she had to deal with after all. Papa wanted this baby. Papa wanted something, and maybe it was good and maybe it was bad, one never knew with him— But a wizard-child was a disaster to her and a terrible danger to Pyetr. It was the end of their lives the way they had hoped to live them. No, dammit, someone had wanted this baby. It could not happen, it could not wreck her life this way, unless someone had wanted it against her wishes. “Papa,” she said, while the willows whispered against the deck and the hull, and tears spilled from her eyes. “Papa, damn you, what are you doing to me?”

  Often enough in his life Pyetr had waked ashamed of himself, and more than once dimly surprised to be alive, knowing he certainly had not deserved to be—both of which were the case at this gray edge of dawn. To his profound embarrassment he had the vodka jug still in his arms, and poor, faithful-to-duty Sasha had fallen asleep sitting up, with a book in his lap and a pen in his hand—while Chernevog slept wrapped in their canvas, not so far away.

  Pyetr capped the inkpot, took Sasha by the shoulder, saying, “It’s me, lad, go to sleep,” and, laying the book aside, pushed Sasha back among the blankets for whatever proper rest he could still get.

  He kept a wary eye on Chernevog, stirred up the fire and heated up a few sausages and the rest of the water for tea and shaving, by touch, in the dark of the dawn. He did not want to push the boy this morning, no matter his own fever to be off. Just shave, take his time, no use breaking their necks in the dark—no matter that he had this most uncomfortable cold knot in his stomach that breakfast was not going to warm, no more than the vodka had cured it last night; and no matter that he feared ‘Veshka was in some dire trouble: if it was Uulamets they had now to deal with, then ‘Veshka herself was in no danger und that trouble would certainly wait for them: it had waited all those years. If it was something more than that, then resting was Mill the wiser course this morning: it was foolhardy and it was useless to her to walk into it too tired to think.

  Speed when it counted and deliberation when needed: he much feared otherwise he had lost his edge, forgotten the lessons of a misspent youth and grown—well, to admit the fact, soft.

  He had come to rely too much on wizards and not enough on his own wits, that was the trouble. Sasha himself said that wizards were most susceptible to wizardry and magic (which seemed, the god only knew why, from Chernevog’s view and lately from Sasha’s, to be two different things). They were prone to delusion, and someone in this company had to use his head.

  Nature and magic. Moving pebbles, Sasha said. This pebble, by the god, did not intend to be easy.

  The tea boiled over, hissing in the coals: he nicked himself on the chin and grabbed for it.

  “Damn!”

  He burned his hand and the tea spilled. Sasha came out of the blankets, asking, “Pyetr?”

  “Just the damn tea boiling over.” His chin stung, his finger was throbbing from the scald. He took a stick and fished the pan out of the sodden embers. “Sorry. There’s sausages. No tea.”

  Sasha scrambled to his feet, looking at the lump of canvas where Chernevog was sleeping.

  One hoped, at least, that he was sleeping. Pyetr looked that way with sudden misgivings and a scalded finger. “Well, if that was his best, he’s lost a bit. And it’s no tea for him.” He sucked on the burn, shook the hand. “Hell, boy, accidents do happen, don’t they?”

  “They shouldn’t,” Sasha said.

  Pyetr looked at him.

  “Not against me,” Sasha said.

  Pyetr nodded toward Chernevog. “Think it’s him? Think we ought to make another batch of that tea?”

  “I honestly don’t know.”

  “Have your sausages. His can go begging. We’ll load him on with the baggage.”

  “Not my doing,” Chernevog said, from the canvas across the fire. “I could plead I wasn’t awake. But your clatter makes it unlikely.”

  “Tea,” Pyetr said.

  “Poison me and be done, damn you.”

  “Sounds like headache,” Pyetr said brightly, and suddenly cherished the thought of slinging Chernevog head downward on a horse. He fished a sausage out of the pan, said: “Breakfast, snake.”

  “Damn you.”

  He said to Sasha, “I think he’s sincere.”

  They could joke about pain—when his simplest wish for relief trod that boundary where wizardry stopped and magic answered. It had been so very long since it had mattered at all which did—and to cure a damned, piddling headache he had to remember past the pain what unassisted wishes were, had to retrace the earliest and most simple wish he had made, back even before Owl, long before Owl.

  Some petty wizard—perhaps his grandmother, who knew? Or not. He had lived with her. She had hated him, he hated her, he had grown cannier and she had wished him lost forever. He had wished her dead; and he had run and run-That was what wishes felt like—before Owl, before Draga: one simply trusted things to arrive in their own time, in then-own way, no second-guessing, no calling it back—that was what it felt like: fear and anger and damnably unpredictable consequences.

  His magic had drawn down lightnings, made the ground shake: and to cure his various pains he was reduced to a child’s feeble effort—simply trying to believe in certainties, while magic denied they existed and a damned, ignorant boy did it effortlessly.

  By their laughter, they realized how helpless he had become, and Sasha surely knew what coin he had in hand. Pyetr was still his hope, but even Pyetr confounded him. One could take the man for a fool, but that was subterfuge; he could take him now for hot-tempered and precipitate, but after everything was packed, Pyetr came to him and said he should ride a while, upright on the horse, though he did not, Pyetr added acidly, deserve any favors.

  It might be his wishes working; it might be some reason of Sasha’s; it might even be an ordinary man with notions of his own, more subtle than he could discover: Pyetr was not, one had always to remind oneself, a fool; and it did no good to work on one of them and not the other.

  So he said, when he was riding alongside Sasha’s mare, with Pyetr leading his horse, “I suppose you’ve both been thinking how to be rid of me.”

  Sasha gave him a suspicious look.

  “I don’t know what you want,” Chernevog said. “But I’ll agree to anything.” He added, not without a certain queasiness in his stomach: “There’s no trick in it, not at all.”

  “And a pig has wings,” Pyetr said shortly. Chernevog ignored him, asking Sasha quietly:

  “What will you do? Everything Uulamets wants? Forever? You could free yoursel
ves from him. You could have anything you want.”

  “Like you?” Pyetr jibed. But he was patient and prepared (his time, to deal with Pyetr: he said, directing himself to Sasha,

  “You probably realize you have me to trade—but that’s the worst thing you can do. You’ve won: you’ve put me in a terrible position, and you’ve won everything you could possibly want, if you’ll only listen.”

  “Are we down to serious bribes now?” Sasha asked.

  “Listen to me! Magic doesn’t know anything, it isn’t alive, it Isn’t dead, it just is, and the things that can give you magic don’t know what they want in this world without us to show them. If you’ve any sense at all you won’t give me up to them—”

  “I’d trade you,” Pyetr said darkly, “for a mouldy turnip.”

  “You’re not understanding me! They can use us the way we use them. I’m telling you the leshys couldn’t hold out any longer and you’re being fools if you think you can. Things like that go straight for weakness—mine; and ignorance—yours; and the god knows who else.”

  “I don’t use your kind of magic,” Sasha said. “I don’t want it. It can’t touch me.”

  “It can touch Uulamets. It can touch Eveshka. A rusalka’s whole existence is magical. It was sorcery brought her back. And it’s one magic. It’s all the same. Will you say you’ve nothing to lose?”

  “We don’t need you,” Pyetr said.

  “You’ll lose her. You’ll lose her first—Pyetr next; and yourself, inevitably…”

  Pyetr turned and stopped the horse.”You murdered my wife, you damned dog, you’re responsible for this desolation, you tried to kill me—and you want us to listen?”

  “Pyetr,” Sasha cautioned him.

  “He’s right,” Chernevog said. “Indeed, he’s right. All those things I did—and some you don’t know. But now I need you. That makes a difference.”

  Pyetr’s jaw dropped. Then he said, backing up a step: “I don’t think I ever heard anyone put it quite that plainly before. —God, Sasha, we’re dealing with an honest man!”

  “Sasha,” Chernevog said, “Alexander Vasilyevitch… you know what I’m saying. Nothing’s an accident. The leshys’ fading wasn’t an accident. I know what we’re dealing with. It cheats, and it lies, and it doesn’t give a damn for your wishes. But it does regard force. You have that. All you have to do is use it.”

  Sasha said nothing for a moment. The horses shifted restlessly.

  Pyetr said, “It’s a snake, Sasha. It always was, it always will be.”

  But Sasha was listening, Sasha was thinking. Chernevog said, so, so carefully, shivering between self-restraint and fear of denial, “Ask anything you want of me, Pyetr Ilyitch. There’s nothing I’ll refuse you.”

  “Get off my horse!”

  He slid down, stood eye to eye with Pyetr, felt Sasha’s fear wish him not—

  Maybe Pyetr realized a danger, too. Pyetr’s jaw set and he ducked past him, flung the reins over and swung up with an enviable skill.

  From that vantage Pyetr looked angrily down at him.

  Chernevog said, with all sincerity, “You could save your own life, Pyetr Ilyitch—you could stop all of this; you could stop it in a moment—but he won’t trust you.”

  Chernevog of course wanted him to ask Sasha how, and why he could rescue them, which was, Pyetr decided, good enough reason not to do it—for one thing because Chernevog was wishing at him and he thought it was time to worry about those wishes If he did one single thing Chernevog wanted; and for another because Chernevog plainly wanted to cause trouble between them, and he was not going to give Chernevog the satisfaction of seeing him worry.

  So he ordered Chernevog to walk, he and Sasha followed on horseback keeping an eye on him, and he thought again that, whatever ties wizards might have on each other, a good bit of rope would make sense.

  He said as much to Sasha. But Sasha said no, Chernevog did not want to escape them.

  All of which sat in the back of his mind and rattled from time to time. It was the hardest thing in the world for him to have a question and not ask it, and it did occur to him to wonder why If there was no truth at all to what Chernevog had said to him, Sasha had not bothered right then to dismiss it as a lie. He knew Sasha’s bad habits very well, one of which was taking all the blame for troubles, and another of which was a tendency—he had surely caught it from Uulamets—to keep his worry to himself, whether to save his friends anxiety or whether because he simply forgot he had not spoken out loud.

  So he rode beside Sasha with never a word, but, damn, it bothered him.

  “You can’t hear anything,” Pyetr asked Sasha, in the brief privacy they had as they stopped for water. Sasha splashed water into his face and down his neck, put his hands over his face and made one brief, futile try.

  It was worse, that cold feeling, the further they rode into this young forest, and worst of all when he listened for some answer from Eveshka. He was a fool not to tell Pyetr outright what he was feeling: he knew he was; but the look on Pyetr’s face, that both hoped and forgave him his failure—how could one say to that, I’m sorry, I’m scared, Pyetr, she’s lost, she’s gone and I don’t want to go on rattling that door, Pyetr?

  Pyetr would take that risk. He had no doubt of it.

  —Head over heart, young fool…

  What if it is Uulamets, god, what if it is Uulamets that’s after us? Eveshka said I think his thoughts, I do the things he’d choose—

  What if, the way Pyetr thinks, he wants us all—back? Is that what we’re following?

  “I can’t hear anything,” he said, and saw Pyetr sigh and shake his head. “Possibly,” he started to say, and Pyetr looked up and he had to go on, fool that he was, temporizing. “Possibly it’s her choice. She could have decided—” The idea struck him as he was talking, and he blundered into it without time to think it through: “—She could just have decided the leshys had a reason for not talking, so she isn’t going to, either. She might not trust what she hears from us. I’m not honestly sure—” He started to say—That I’d trust what I hear from her. It was true. But he swallowed it unsaid. And, oh, god, but Pyetr listened to what he surmised; he fervently wished he had kept his mouth shut.

  Meanwhile Chernevog was washing his face a little upstream from them, dipping up water with torn and surely painful hands. Perhaps he was listening, one way or another, to everything they said and half they thought. One could think very easily of pouring another cup of tea down him, the way Pyetr said, just sling him over a horse and silence him and his offers and his arguments—at least until they found Uulamets.

  “Time we got moving,” Pyetr said, dusted off his hands on his knees and got up, looking at Chernevog.

  But Pyetr stopped then, gave a deep breath, still staring ahead of him, and put his hands in his belt. “The snake wants me to ask you,” he said, “what he was talking about. I don’t want to, if you don’t want to say. But if it’s ‘Veshka’s safety—and there is something I can do, you understand, Sasha, it’s something I’d really like to know, myself.”

  Pyetr had never asked anything of him that way. Sasha did not want to talk about it, he did not want to discuss the matter with Pyetr and if Eveshka was in danger, he certainly did not want to let Pyetr make choices he did not understand.

  But it would not really matter to Pyetr. Not where Eveshka was concerned. And not, he was sure, if he were the one in trouble.

  “He’s saying,” Sasha replied in an almost whisper, “that whatever’s caused this is magical; and it’s not friendly to him. Whether that’s true I don’t know. He says if he uses his magic something can find him by it—that’s something I don’t know and his book doesn’t tell me. But he’s arguing that it might be using Uulamets and it might be after ‘Veshka—”

  “God.” Pyetr’s lips hardly moved.

  “Pyetr, I don’t know. What he’s saying—is if magic gets a wizard in its hands, instead of the other way around, then it can do things in the natur
al world it can’t do otherwise. He says that’s what it’s after, that if it gets him—it’s got a way to get at the rest of us.”

  “ Where do I come in?”

  “He wants to put his heart in your keeping. He wants to work magic again.”

  “He’s crazed!”

  “I don’t think he’s crazy, but I certainly don’t think he’s our friend. I can’t tell how much truth he’s telling. His book doesn’t give me any help. I don’t know magic, not—not the way he does. Even Uulamets didn’t.”

  Pyetr bit his lip. “Your magic, his magic—it doesn’t make a lot of sense, you know.”

  “ Every wizard works a certain sort of magic. A wizard’s born with it. But whatever you were born with, you just—don’t use us well when you grow up. Or you do it knowing more, and then it’s harder to know exactly what you want.”

  “And he does? —He’s not that smart, Sasha, heart or no heart, he’s not that damn smart. Look at the mess he’s in.”

  “That vodka jug… Uulamets said you only work a spell like the jug just once or twice in your whole life—and it is real magic, what I did. It’s not natural and maybe in most points it’s the same as sorcery. But I can’t do it twice. Uulamets is right— you grow up and you see how complicated things are and you’re not sure what’s right… “

  “Wizards have a bad habit of that.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Sasha, —just give me one plain answer. What’s this hearts business, what does he want to do?”

  “What he did with Owl. I don’t know what that would do to you.”

  “Or what he’d try to do. If he thought I could hold on to him he damn sure wouldn’t be offering.”

  “I don’t know. I’m not sure—” He caught himself doing it again and ran a hand through his hair. “I’m sorry, Pyetr. — God!”

  “I don’t understand this, I don’t damn well understand this. Magic that isn’t magic—”

  “I do use magic, Pyetr, it’s just not— magic, the way he does.”