The Twilight Watch (15 page)

W
HERE DO WE
get the idea that milk straight from the cow tastes
good?

It must be something we learn in junior school. Some memorable
phrase from the textbook
Our Native Tongue
, about how
wonderful milk tastes, straight from the cow. And the naïve city
kids believe it.

In fact, milk straight from the cow tastes rather peculiar. But
after it's been left to stand in the cellar for a day and cooled off
– now that's a different matter. Even those poor souls who lack
the necessary digestive enzymes drink it. And there are plenty of
them, by the way: as far as mother nature's concerned, adults have
no business drinking milk, it's children who need it . . .

But people usually don't pay much attention to nature's opinion.

And Others pay even less.

I reached for the jug and poured myself another glass. Cold,
with a smooth layer of cream . . . why does boiling make the
cream – the best part of milk – so smooth? I took a big gulp. No
more, I had to leave some for Sveta and Nadiushka. The whole
village – it was quite big, with fifty houses – had just one cow. It
was a good thing there was at least one . . . and I had a strong
suspicion that the humble Raika had Svetlana to thank for her
magnificent yields. Her owner, Granny Sasha, already an old woman
at forty, also owned the pig Borka, the goat Mishka and a gaggle
of miscellaneous, nameless poultry, but she had no real reason to
feel proud. Svetlana just wanted her daughter to drink genuine
milk. That was why the cow was never ill. Granny Sasha could
have fed her sawdust and it wouldn't have changed a thing.

But genuine milk really is good. Never mind the characters in
the ads – they can arrive in a village with their cartons of milk and
that jolly gleam in their eyes and say 'The real thing!' as often as
they like. They're paid money to do that. And it makes things easier
for the peasants, who stopped keeping any kind of livestock themselves
long ago. They can just carry on slagging off the 'democrats'
and the 'city folk' and not worry about raising cows any more.

I put down my empty glass and sprawled back in a hammock
hanging between two trees. The locals must have thought I was
a real bourgeois. Arriving in a fancy car, bringing my wife lots of
strange foreign groceries, spending the whole day lounging in a
hammock with a book . . . In a place where everybody generally
spent the whole day roaming about, searching for a drop of something
to fix their hangovers . . .

'Hello, Anton Sergeevich,' someone said over the top of the
fence – it was Kolya, a local drunk. He might as well have been
reading my thoughts – and how had he remembered my name?

'How was the drive?'

'Hello, Kolya,' I greeted him in lordly fashion, not making the
slightest attempt to get up out of the hammock. He wouldn't
appreciate it in any case. That wasn't what he'd come for. 'It was
fine, thanks.'

'Need any help with anything, around the house and garden?'
Kolya asked vaguely. 'I thought, you know, I'd just come and
ask . . .'

I closed my eyes – the sun, already sinking towards the horizon,
glowed blood-red through my eyelids.

There was nothing I could do. Not the slightest thing. A sixth-or
seventh-degree intervention would have been enough to free
the poor devil Kolya from his hankering for alcohol, cure his
cirrhosis and inspire him with a desire to work, instead of drinking
vodka and thrashing his wife.

What if I had defied all the stipulations of the Treaty and made
that intervention in secret? A brief gesture of the hand . . .And then
what? There wasn't any work in the village. And nobody in the city
wanted Kolya, a former collective farm mechanic. Kolya didn't have
any money to start his own business. He couldn't even buy a piglet.

So he'd slope off again to look for moonshine, getting by on
money from odd jobs, and working off his anger on his wife, who
drank as much as he did and was just as weary of everything. It
wasn't the man I needed to heal, it was the entire planet.

Or at least this particular sixth part of the planet. The part with
the proud name of Russia.

'Anton Sergeevich, I'm desperate . . .' Kolya said pathetically.

Who needs a cured alcoholic in a dying village where the
collective farm has fallen apart and the only private farmer was
burned out three times before he took the hint?

'Kolya,' I said, 'didn't you have some kind of special trade in
the army? A tank driver?'

Did we have any paid professional soldiers at all? It would be
better if he went to the Caucasus, rather than just dropping dead
in a year's time from all that cheap moonshine . . .

'I wasn't in the army,' Kolya said in a miserable voice. 'They
wouldn't take me. They were short of mechanics here back then,
they kept giving me deferrals, and then I got too old . . . Anton
Sergeevich, if you want somebody's face smashed in, I can still do
that all right! Don't you worry! I'll tear them to pieces!'

'Kolya,' I asked him, 'would you take a look at my car's engine?
I thought it was knocking a bit yesterday.'

'Sure, I'll take a look,' said Kolya, brightening up. 'You know,
I . . .'

'Take the keys.' I tossed him the bunch. 'And I owe you a bottle.'

Kolya broke into a happy smile:

'Would you like me to wash it too? It must have cost a lot . . .
and these roads of ours . . .'

'Thanks,' I said. 'I'd be very grateful.'

'Only I don't want any vodka,' Kolya suddenly said, and I started
in surprise. What was this, had the world gone mad? 'It's got no
taste to it . . . now a little bottle of homebrew . . .'

'Done,' I said. Delighted, Kolya opened the gate and set off towards
the small barn in which I'd parked the car the evening before.

And then Svetlana came out of the house – I didn't see her,
but I sensed her. That meant Nadiushka had settled down and was
enjoying a sweet after-lunch nap. Sveta came over, stood at the
head of the hammock and paused for a moment, then she put
her cool hand on my forehead and asked:

'Bored?'

'Uhuh,' I mumbled. 'Sveta, there's nothing I can do. Not a single
thing. How can you stand it here?'

'I've been coming to this village since I was a child,' Svetlana
said. 'I remember Uncle Kolya when he was still all right. Young
and happy. He used to give me rides on his tractor when I was
still a little snot-nose. He was sober. He used to sing songs. Can
you imagine that?'

'Were things better before?' I asked

'People drank less,' Svetlana replied laconically. 'Anton, why didn't
you remoralise him? You were going to – I felt a tremor run
through the Twilight. There aren't any Watch members here . . .
except you.'

'Give a dog a bone and how long does it last?' I answered churlishly.
'I'm sorry . . . Uncle Kolya's not where we need to start.'

'No, he's not,' Svetlana agreed. 'But then any intervention in
the activities of the authorities is prohibited by the Treaty. "Humans
deal with their own affairs, Others deal with theirs . . .".'

I didn't say anything. Yes, it was prohibited. Because it was the
simplest and surest way of directing the mass of humanity towards
Good or Evil. Which was a violation of the equilibrium. There
had been kings and presidents in history who were Others. And
it had always ended in appalling wars . . .

'You'll just be miserable here, Anton . . .' said Svetlana. 'Let's go
back to town.'

'But Nadiushka loves it here,' I objected. 'And you wanted to
stay here another week, didn't you?'

'But you're fretting . . .Why don't you go on your own? You'll
feel happier in town.'

'Anybody would think you wanted to get rid of me,' I growled.
'That you had a lover here.'

Svetlana snorted.

'Can you suggest a single candidate?'

'No,' I said, after a moment's reflection. 'Except maybe one of
the holidaymakers . . .'

'This is a kingdom of women,' Svetlana retorted. 'They're
either single mothers, or they're here to give the children some
fresh air and exercise while their husbands are slaving away. That
reminds me, Anton. There was one strange thing that happened
here . . .'

'Yes?' I asked, intrigued. If Svetlana called something 'strange' . . .

'You remember Anna Viktorovna called to see me yesterday?'

'The teacher?' I laughed. Anna Viktorovna was such a typical
schoolmistress, she should have been in the old Soviet film
The
Muddle
. 'I thought she came over to see your mother.'

'Both of us. She has two kids – a little boy, Romka, he's five,
and Ksyusha, who's ten.'

'Good,' I said, giving Anna Viktorovna my seal of approval.

'Don't try to be funny. Two days ago the children got lost in
the forest.'

My drowsiness suddenly evaporated and I sat up in the hammock,
grasping a tree with one hand. I looked at Svetlana:

'Why didn't you tell me straight away? The Treaty's all very
well, but . . .'

'Don't worry, they got lost, but then they turned up again. They
came home on their own in the evening.'

'Well, that's strange,' I couldn't resist saying. 'Children who stayed
in the forest for an extra couple of hours! Don't tell me – they
actually like wild strawberries?'

'When their mother started giving them what for, they told her
they got lost,' Svetlana went on, ignoring me. 'And they met a
wolf. The wolf drove them through the forest – and straight to
some wolf cubs . . .'

'I see . . .' I murmured. I felt a vague flutter of alarm in my
chest.

'Anyway, the children were in a real panic. But then a woman
appeared and recited some lines of verse to the wolf, and it
ran away. The woman took them to her house, gave them some
tea and showed them to the edge of the forest. She said she
was a botanist and she knew special herbs that wolves are afraid
of . . .'

'Childish fantasies,' I snapped. 'Are the kids all right?'

'Absolutely.'

'And there I was, expecting foul play,' I said, and lay back down.
'Did you check them for magic?'

'They're completely clean,' said Svetlana. 'Not the slightest trace.'

'Fantasies. Maybe they did get a fright from someone . . . perhaps
even a wolf. And some woman did lead them out of the forest.
The kids were lucky, but take a belt to them . . .'

'The young one, Romka, used to stammer. Quite badly. Now
he speaks without the slightest problem. He rattles on, recites
poetry . . .'

I thought for a moment. Then I asked:

'Can stammering be cured? By suggestion, you know, hypnosis?
. . . Or some other way?'

'There is no cure for it. Like the common cold. And any doctor
who promises to stop you stammering with hypnosis is a quack.
Of course, if it was some kind of reactive neurosis, then . . .'

'Spare me the terminology,' I asked here. 'So there is no cure.
What about folk medicine?'

'Nothing, except maybe some wild Others . . . Can you cure
stammering?'

'Even bedwetting,' I muttered. 'And incontinence. But Sveta,
you didn't sense any magic, did you?'

'But the stammer's gone.'

'That can only mean one thing,' I said reluctantly. I sighed and
got up out of the hammock. 'Sveta, this is not good. A witch.
With power even greater than yours. And you're first-grade!'

Svetlana nodded. I didn't often mention the fact that her power
exceeded my own. It was the main thing that came between us
. . . that could really come between us some day.

And in any case, Svetlana had deliberately withdrawn from the
Night Watch. Otherwise, she would already have been an
enchantress beyond classification.

'But nothing happened to the children,' I went on. 'No odious
wizard pawed the little girl, no evil witch made soup out of the
little boy . . . No, if this is a witch, why such kindness?'

'Witches don't have any compulsion to indulge in cannibalism
or sexual aggression,' Svetlana said pompously, as if she was giving
a lecture. 'All their actions are determined by plain egotism. If a
witch was
really
hungry, she might eat a human being. For the
simple reason that she doesn't think of herself as human. But otherwise,
why not help the children? It didn't cost her anything. She
led them out of the forest and cured the little boy's stammer as
well. After all, she probably has children of her own. You'd feed a
homeless puppy, wouldn't you?'

'I don't like it,' I confessed. 'A witch as powerful as that? They
don't often reach first-grade, do they?'

'Very rarely.' Svetlana gave me a quizzical look. 'Anton, do you
have a clear idea of the difference between a witch and an
enchantress?'

'I've worked with them,' I said curtly. 'I know.'

But Svetlana wasn't satisfied with that.

'An enchantress works with the Twilight directly and draws
power from it. A witch uses accessories, material objects charged
with a greater or lesser degree of Power. All the magical artefacts
that exist in the world were created by witches or warlocks
– you could call them their artificial limbs. Artefacts can be things
or elements of the body that are dead – hair, long fingernails
. . . That's why a witch is harmless if you undress her and shave
off all her hair, but you have to gag an enchantress and tie her
hands.'

'For sure nobody's ever going to gag you,' I laughed. 'Sveta, why
are you lecturing me like this? I'm no Great Magician, but I know
the elementary facts, I don't need reminding.'

'I'm sorry, I didn't mean to upset you,' Svetlana apologised
quickly.

I looked at her and saw the pain in her eyes.

What a brute I was! How long could I go on taking out my
insecurities on the woman I loved? I was worse than any Dark
One . . .

'Sveta, forgive me . . .' I whispered and touched her hand. 'Forgive
a stupid fool.'