spectral hog rootling around in the footings wouldn’t help matters.
I know a little bit about revenants, because my grandfather was one. He was a bear, and he spent a busy nine months killing livestock and breaking hedges until a man in a gray gown came down from the City and sorted him out. I watched him do it, and that was when I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up.
Granddad died when I was six. I remember him as a big, cheerful man who always gave me an apple, but he’d killed two of our neighbors—self-defense, but in a small community, that really doesn’t matter very much. The scholar sat up four nights in a row, caught him with a freezing Form (in quo vincit, presumably) and left him there till morning, when he came back with a dozen men, stakes, axes, big hammers—all the kit I tended to associate with mending fences. The only bit of Granddad that could move was his eyes, and he watched everything they did, right up to when they cut off his head. Of course, what I saw wasn’t my dear grandfather, it was a huge black bear. It was only later that they told me.
I don’t know if embarrassment can kill a man. I could have put it to the test, but I got scared and dosed myself with fonslaetitiae, which takes the edge off pretty much everything.
No chance, you see, of anonymity once I got back to the village. Old Mu the Dog—his actual name, insofar as I can transcribe it, is Mutahalliush—was mayor now; my last mental image of him was his face splashed with the stinking dark-brown juice that sweats off rotten lettuce, as he sat in the stocks for fathering a child on the miller’s daughter, but clearly other people had shorter memories or were more forgiving than me. Shup the tanner was constable; Ati from Five Ash was sexton; and the new smith, a man I didn’t know, was almoner and parish remembrancer. I gave them a cold, dazed look and told them to sit down.
I think it was just as bad for them. See it from their point of view. One of their own, a kid they’d smacked round the head with a stick on many occasions, was now a scholar, a wizard, able to kill with a frown or turn the turds on the midden to pure gold. We kept it formal, which was probably just as well.
The meeting told me nothing I didn’t know already or couldn’t guess or hadn’t heard from the carter, but it gave me a chance to do the usual ground-rules speech and impress upon them the perils of not doing exactly as they were told. It was only when we’d been through all that and I stood up to let them know the meeting was over that Shup—my second cousin; we’re all related—asked me if I knew how his nephew had got on. His nephew? And then the penny dropped. He meant Gnatho.
“He’s doing very well,” I told him.
“He’s a scholar? Like you?”
“Very like me,” I said. “He’s never been back, then.”
“We didn’t know if he was alive or dead.”
Or me, come to that. “I’ll tell him about his father,” I said. “He may want to—” I paused, realizing what I’d just been about to say. Pay his respects at the graveside? Which one? A revenant’s remains are chopped into four pieces and buried on the parish boundaries, at the four cardinal points. “He’ll want to know.” And that was a flat lie, but I have to confess I was looking forward to telling him. As he would have been, in my shoes.
Gnatho’s dad wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer when he was alive. Dead, he seemed to have acquired some basic low cunning, though that might have been the pig rather than him. It took me three nights to catch him. He didn’t come quietly, and God, was he ever strong. By the time I finally brought him down with posuiadiutorem, I was weak with exhaustion and shaking like a leaf.
Have I misled you with the word pig? Dismiss the mental image of a fat, pink porker snuffling up cabbage leaves in a sty. Wild pigs are big; they weigh half a ton, they’re covered in sleek, wiry hair, and they’re all muscle. Real ones have the redeeming feature of shyness; they sit tight, and if you make enough noise walking around you’ll never ever see one, unless you actually tread on its tail. If you do, it’ll be the last thing you ever do see. The kind, brave noblemen who come out and kill the damn things for us will tell you that a forest pig is the most dangerous animal in Permia, more so than wolves or bears or bull elk. Real pigs are a sort of auburn color, but Gnatho’s dad was soot black, with the unmistakable red eyes.
Once you have your revenant down, you talk to him. I stood up, my legs wobbling under me, and approached as near as I dared, even with a double dose of lorica. “Hello,” I said.
Paralyzed, remember? I was hearing his voice inside my head. “I’m the smith’s boy.”
“That’s right, so you are. You went off to be a wizard in the City.”
“I’m back.”
He wanted to acknowledge me with a nod of the head, but found he couldn’t. “What’s going to happen to me now?”
“I think you know.”
I sensed that he took it resolutely—not happy with the outcome, but realistic enough to accept it. “The pain,” he said. “Will I feel it?”
This is a gray area, but I have no doubts about it myself. “I’m afraid so, yes,” I said. I didn’t add, It’s your fault, for coming back. You don’t score points off someone facing what he was about to go through. “You’ll still be alive, so yes, you’ll feel it.”
“And after,” he said. “Will I be dead?”
I hate having to tell them. “No,” I said. “You can’t die. You just won’t be able to control your body any more. You’ll still be there, but you won’t be able to do anything.”
I felt the wave of sheer terror, and it made me feel sick. To be honest with you, it’s the worst thing I can think of—lying in the dark ground, unable to move, forever. But there you go. It’s not like you decide to be a revenant, and experienced professionals advise you as to the potential downside. It just happens. It’s sheer bad luck. Also, of course, it runs in families, and thanks to a thousand years of inbreeding, the Mesoge is just one big family. I really, really hope it won’t ever happen to me, but there’s absolutely nothing I can do to prevent it.
“You could let me go,” he said. “I’ll move far away, somewhere there’s no people. I won’t hurt anybody ever again. I promise.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “If my Order found out, it’d mean the noose.”
“They’d never know.”
Indeed; how could they? I would go back to the City, swear blind the pig was too strong for me, they’d send someone else, by which time Gnatho’s dad would be long gone (though they always come back; they can’t help it). And I’d lose my reputation as an infallible field agent, which would be marvelous. Everybody wins. And I sometimes can’t help thinking about my granddad, still awake in the wet earth; or what it would feel like, if it’s ever me.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s my job.”
We cut him up with a forester’s crosscut saw. If you aren’t familiar with them, they’re the big two-handed jobs. Two men sit on either side of the work; one pushes and one pulls. I took my turn, out of some perverse sense of duty, but I never was any good at keeping the rhythm.
I left my home village with mixed feelings. As I said before, once you’ve been through the experience you’ve been dreading for so long, you feel a certain euphoria; I’ve been back now, I won’t ever have to do it again, there’s a giant weight off my shoulders. But, as I walked up that horribly tiring long hill, I caught myself thinking: no matter how hard I try, this is where I started from, this is part of who I am. I think the revenant issue is what set me thinking that way. You see, revenancy is so very much a Mesoge thing. You get them in other places, but wherever it’s been possible to trace ancestries, the revenant always has Mesoge blood in him, if you go back far enough. God help us, we’re special. Alone of all races and nations, we’re the only human beings on Earth who can achieve a sort of immortality, albeit a singularly nasty one, born of spite and leading to endless pain.