reason, the Mesoge didn’t want to let me go—playing with its food, a bad habit my mother was always very strict about. One of the reasons we’re so damnably backward is the rotten communications with the outside world. A few heavy rainstorms and you’re screwed; can’t go anywhere, can’t get back to where you came from.
So, reluctantly, I embarked on a walking tour of my past. I have to say, the scholar’s gown is an excellent armor, a woolen version of lorica. Nobody hassles you, nobody wants to talk to you, they give you what you ask for and wait impatiently for you to finish up and leave. I bought a pair of boots in Assistenso, from a cobbler I knew when he was a young man. He looked about a hundred and six now. He recognized me but didn’t say a word. Quite good boots, actually, though I had to qualisartifex them a bit to stop them squeaking all the damn time.
The Temperance & Thrift in Nauns is definitely a cut above the other inns in the Mesoge; God only knows why. The rooms are proper rooms, with actual wooden beds, the food is edible, and (glory of glories) you can get proper black tea there. Nominally it’s a brothel rather than an inn; but if you give the girl a nice smile and six stuivers, she goes away and you can have the room to yourself. I was sleeping peacefully for the first time in ages when some fool banged on the door and woke me up.
Was I the scholar? Yes, I admitted reluctantly, because the gown lying over the back of the chair was in plain sight. You’re needed. They’ve got trouble in—well, I won’t bother you with the name of the village. Lucky to have caught you. Just as well the bridge is out, or you’d have been long gone.
They’d sent a cart for me, the fools. Needless to say, the horse went lame practically the moment I climbed aboard; so back we went to the Temperance for another one, and then the main shaft cracked, and we were ages cutting out a splint and patching it in. Quicker to have walked, I told him.
“I know you,” the carter replied. “You’re from around here.”
There comes a time when you can fight no more. “That’s right.”
“You’re his son. The collier’s boy.”
Most insults I can take in my stride, but some I can’t. “Like hell,” I snapped. I told him my name. “The old smith’s son,” I reminded him. He nodded. He never forgot a face, he told me.
Gnatho’s father, in fact, was the problem. Not resting quietly in the grave is a Mesoge tradition, like Morris dances and wassailing the apple trees. If you die with an unresolved grudge or a bad attitude generally, chances are you’ll be back, either as your own putrifying and swollen corpse or some form of large, unpleasant vermin—a wolf, bear, or pig.
“He’s come back as a pig,” I said. “Bet you.”
The carter grinned. “You knew the old devil, then.”
“Oh, yes.”
Revenant pests don’t look like the natural variety. They’re bigger, always jet-black, with red eyes. They glow slightly in the dark, and ordinary weapons don’t bite on them, ordinary traps can’t hold them, and they seem to thrive on ordinary poisons. Gnatho’s dad had taken to digging into the sides of houses—at night, while the family was asleep—undermining the walls and bringing the roof down. That wouldn’t be hard in most Mesoge houses, which are three parts fallen down from neglect anyway, but I could see where a glowing 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
