“We?” the plump, light-haired witch sitting beside Ernesta asked in surprise.
“We as in the Inquisition,” Ernesta explained. “Anton, unfortunately we are unable to give you any more information. None of our sisters know anything about the Two-in-One and the Sixth Watch.”
“We too have terrifying stories that we try to forget,” a witch at the next table said in a squeaky voice. She was one of the few who were not disguising their age with sorcery, and by human standards she looked about a hundred years old. “And the story of the Two-in-One, sweetheart, is one of those.”
“Do you know something, Mary?” Ernesta asked.
“About the Two-in-One?” Mary shook her head sharply, disturbing the sparse bunches of gray hair that had been arranged like curls to decorate her bald cranium. “No, no, sister . . . I know about Thomas with the Matches, about the Little Spindle and . . .”
“Don’t tell us about that in the presence of outsiders, sister,” Ernesta told her gently but firmly. “We value your stories, sister. But tell us later.”
Mary nodded and even put her wrinkled hand over her mouth in a comical gesture. I actually felt a strange respect for this ancient witch who made no attempt to conceal her age.
“By the way, sister, have you not forgotten something?” Ernesta asked. “And I don’t mean about the Two-in-One.”
“What could I have forgotten?” Mary asked indignantly.
“Well . . . to take a look at yourself in the mirror before you left your room,” Ernesta said, twitching her shoulders. “To powder your nose . . . Or splash some water from an onyx chalice on your face.”
Mary frowned at first. And then she turned as white as chalk. She lowered her eyes and peered into the polished silverware on the table.
The witches around her started giggling quietly. They might all be sisters, but first and foremost they were women.
Mary raised her hands to her face and stood up. She took her hands away.
She was no longer an old crone, but a blindingly beautiful young woman, with blond hair and blue eyes.
“Thank you, my sisters,” Mary said in an icy voice. “Thanks to all of you who smiled at me this evening . . .”
“Sit down, Mary,” said Ernesta. “Everyone knows how eccentric you are. I thought you had deliberately come to the meeting looking like that. Sit down and don’t disgrace yourself.”
Mary sat down, casting a dark glance at Ernesta.
I seized the opportunity to speak.
“To get back to the question of help. We need your representative, either appointed or approved by the head of the Conclave. By the Grandmother of Grandmothers.”
“And there we have a problem, for which you are directly responsible,” said Ernesta.
“Arina,” I said with a nod. “Yes, that’s right. I shut your Great Grandmother away in the Sarcophagus of Time. In my defense, I can only say that I intended to while away eternity together with her.”
“You joker,” Ernesta snorted. “I won’t lie and say that I’m grieving for Arina. As you have probably noticed, we’re rather cool with each other.”
“How could I not notice?” I asked, twirling a little silver spoon in my fingers.
“And therefore we reacted positively to the request from Gesar and Zabulon,” the witch said with a smile.
“But?” I asked. “You have the word ‘but’ stuck on the tip of your tongue. Spit it out quickly, before you choke on it.”
“But we cannot choose a new Great Grandmother,” Ernesta sighed. “Since the previous one is still alive.”
“Remove her,” I said. “Can you not demonstrate some flexibility here?”
“Can we not demonstrate flexibility?” Ernesta queried, raising her left eyebrow and gazing at me intently. “We can. Flexibility is our middle name. How else could we have survived in a world full of coarse, bloodthirsty men? But do you know how we choose the Great Grandmother?”
I shook my head, sensing that I wouldn’t like what I was about to learn.
“The Grandmother of Grandmothers must be acknowledged by the Shoot,” said Ernesta.
“Hooray!” I exclaimed sincerely. “I was afraid it might be something rather more . . . exotic.”
“No, Anton. It’s nothing more than the Shoot. Here it is.”
She casually lifted up the napkin lying over a pot that was on the table in front of her. I half rose to examine what the napkin had been covering.
I had noticed the pot before and had assumed that it contained some kind of food. But it turned out to be a flowerpot. With a wooden thing sticking out of it.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“The Shoot,” Ernesta said with a smile.
“But from the look of it, I’d say it was a wooden—”
“The Shoot,” she repeated emphatically. “The symbol of the eternal life and vigor of our community.”
“From the way the Shoot looks, I’d say your community is a little withered.”
“Do not judge on appearances,” the witch parried. “In the hands of the Grandmother of Grandmothers the Shoot starts to blossom. And that is the uniquely clear and evident confirmation of her position. In combination, of course, with a certain degree of authority and Power.”
“All right,” I said. “So have you chosen someone?”
“The Shoot did not blossom,” Ernesta said. “According to tradition, this has happened several times—when a clearly unworthy Grandmother of Grandmothers was selected, when the voting was carried out under duress, and once when an attempt was made to choose a leader while the previous incumbent was still alive.”
“Is there no way you can remove someone from the position?”
“Only by poisoning the jam,” Mary said ominously. “Good old arsenic . . .”
“While Arina is still alive, we cannot elect anyone to replace her,” Ernesta said with a shrug.
“Then what do you want me to do?” I asked. “Why did you invite us here?”
“We hope that the Shoot will allow us to choose a leader,” Ernesta said. “If the candidate is—”
“Oh no!” I interrupted. “Don’t even think about it!”
“Then the world will perish,” the witch retorted. “We are not joking, Gorodetsky. We are offering your daughter the position of Grandmother of Grandmothers.”
“Nonsense,” I said. “Total and absolute rubbish.”
“Why?”
“I know a little bit about your rules,” I said spitefully. “A future witch has to receive a gift, an initiation from a genuine witch, and it has to happen in early childhood, even adolescence is already too late . . .”
I stopped, looking at Ernesta’s smile. I’d suddenly remembered something.
After Arina kidnapped Nadya, Sveta and I had fought to get our daughter back. And then Arina had given Nadya a gift, supposedly as an apology . . .
“But the initiation has already begun, Anton,” said Ernesta. “Ten years ago Arina, the Great Grandmother herself, granted Nadya the ability to work with plants—the very cornerstone of witchcraft.”
“You’re insane!” I exclaimed. “She’s only fifteen!”
“Is it really a matter of age?” Ernesta asked in surprise. “Arina is not the oldest among us.”
“My daughter is a Light One,” I reminded her, though I knew I had already lost.
“Almost fifteen percent of witches are Light Ones,” Ernesta told me obligingly.
“She’ll age rapidly and become . . . become ugly,” I said in a quiet voice.
“Like us,” Ernesta said with a nod. “She will have to live behind a mask, and if the men she loves are Others, they will know that they are not kissing a young woman, but an old, withered one. All that is true. This is the price. But I thought we wanted to save the world.”
I looked at my daughter.
“Dad, of course I agree,” Nadya said.
She was very calm, her face set in an expression of imperturbable benevolence.
“N
adya, the process is irreversible,” I said. “And very rapid. You’ll grow old in just a few years. Well, ten or twenty at the most. Right now that seems like an eternity to you, but it isn’t. You’ll see that ten years fly past in an instant. I don’t know of course, maybe Kesha or someone else . . . but after all it’s easier for Others to live with Others . . . and only witches live with ordinary people, because they don’t know who they’re really kissing . . .”
The hall was silent. And the silence was deafening.
My daughter looked at me as if she was waiting for me to finish.
“You won’t even be able to have a child,” I said. “No, that’s not right, you will be able to, but only in the first few years after you become a witch . . . Dammit, you’re still only a child yourself!”
“Dad, I realized immediately why the witches had invited us to the Conclave,” Nadya told me in a soothing voice, as if she were the grown-up and I were a frightened little child. “I called Innokentii and we discussed everything. We’ll get married as soon as the Two-in-One has been dealt with. Of course, I’ll have to have a child as soon as I can. We might even have time to have two children. I know we’re not mature enough, especially in the psychological sense, but I discussed everything with Mum too, and she said you two would raise your grandchildren, so that we could continue with our education . . .”
I stood there with my mouth wide open, gulping in air, looking so pitiful that not even the witches could gloat.
“Everything will be all right, Dad,” Nadya said, getting up. She stood on tiptoe and kissed me on the cheek, then walked out from behind the table and stood in front of Ernesta. “I’m ready,” she said. “What do I have to do?”
My daughter was going to become a witch.
My daughter, an Absolute Enchantress, a clever, beautiful young girl, was going to become a twisted old crone.
Before she even reached thirty, she would be a repulsive old woman, constantly hiding behind spells of disguise.
And there was nothing I could do about it. Ernesta was right and Nadya was right—the fate of the entire world was at stake . . .
“Sisters, are we willing to accept Nadya Gorodetsky as one of us?” Ernesta asked.
The witches replied with a drone of approval.
“Do we agree to the Absolute Enchantress Nadya Gorodetsky becoming the Grandmother of Grandmothers, our leader and commander?” she continued.
“This is out of order,” Mary suddenly declared. Despite the enchanting appearance she had assumed, her voice was still squeaky and senile. “Arina was Russian and Nadya is Russian. It’s not correct to appoint a leader from the same region twice in succession!”
“There has only ever been one Great Grandmother from Africa!” shouted a dark-skinned woman at the back of the hall.
“As if we get treated any better . . .” another indignant voice called out.
“Belgium has never . . .”
“Quiet!” Ernesta exclaimed, raising her voice. “There are many of us and we all have ambitions, grievances, and aspirations. But understand this—if Nadya Gorodetsky does not become the Great Grandmother now, then Arina will remain the Great Grandmother forever. Until the end of time. And the entire world will perish!”
The witches fell silent.
“Arina has hung on too long as it is,” Mary croaked.
“And so I propose as an exception, that Nadya Gorodetsky be elected Great Grandmother,” Ernesta declared solemnly. “Do you support this proposal?”
This time there were no protests.
There was something surprisingly simpleminded, almost primitive about this procedure. Like the election of an ataman by the Cossacks, when they used to ask everyone to shout if they liked the ataman or if they didn’t.
“Nadya, hold out your hand and place it on the Shoot,” Ernesta said.
I watched this obscene and insane spectacle—my daughter setting her hand on an ancient wooden dildo. And I said nothing.
“Hold it tight . . .” Ernesta said in a surprisingly hesitant voice.
She closed her hand around the wooden Shoot.
Nothing happened.
“In the old days they didn’t bother with half measures,” Mary muttered, but stopped when she caught Nadya’s eye. Nadya snatched her hand away from the Shoot and wiped it on her dress.
“You did hold it, didn’t you?” Ernesta asked, as if she hadn’t witnessed the entire process with her own eyes. “But then . . .”
She turned toward me.
“I understand,” I said. “There’s nothing you can do.”
Ernesta shook her head.
“I’m sorry, señor. Very sorry. We wanted to help. We . . . we love life.”
I looked at the gathering. At two hundred witches, cloaked in magical disguises, concealed behind veils of enchantment, pretending to be the beautiful women they once were, or perhaps had never been.
But kind or malicious, they really did love life. In all its manifestations.
This love of life drove them to commit monstrous atrocities. They indulged in depraved, lewd debauchery; they dissected infants and copulated with animals; they poisoned cattle and sucked out mothers’ milk; they pounced on solitary travelers at night and forced them to gallop across the fields and run wildly along the roads. They were only slightly less mad than March hares. They were the very essence of Mother Nature, of the planet Earth itself—nature is also pitiless and remorseless, capricious and derisive, guileful and bloodthirsty.
They were witches. Naive and cruel children, trapped in old women’s bodies. There is no male equivalent of the witch; the warlock of old folk tales is quite different. To be a witch, you have to be able to give life. Without that you can never learn how to take life away so lightly.
“I’m really sorry too,” I said. “But don’t distress yourselves, ladies. We’ll think of something.”
Nadya came back to me and I hugged her.
“Sorry, Dad,” she whispered. “I looked pretty stupid, right?”
“Not stupid, but funny,” I replied.
“You used that word instead of ‘absurd,’” Nadya said. “I can tell.”
Ernesta clinked a spoon against a wineglass—in the silence the sound was as alarming as a phone call in the middle of the night.
“Is there anything else we can do for you, Señor Gorodetsky?” she asked. “We could partially lower our defenses, so that you can open a portal from here.”
“Are you throwing us out already?” I asked, holding out my hand and imagining its shadow on the table. It had to be there, didn’t it, the shadow cast by the crystal chandeliers? And it didn’t matter if I couldn’t see it. It existed. The shadow of my fingers, reaching down into the Twilight . . .
“No, but . . .” Ernesta replied, sounding rather bewildered and looking at my hand.
I shuffled my fingers, feeling the chill of the Twilight at their tips.
“Dad, what are you doing?” Nadya asked in a whisper.
“Hitting switches, fixing glitches,” I said, tapping my fingers on the table. “Never mind the baffled witches.”
“I don’t understand.”
“That’s okay,” I said, tapping out the rhythm with my fingers. Three short beats, three long ones and another three short ones. Impulses of Power surging into space, into the Twilight.
“Who are you?” Ernesta suddenly asked, frowning and looking past me. “This is a private event.”
Her voice gradually became quieter and quieter, as if someone was turning down the volume on a music player, and her eyes opened wider and wider. She was obviously staring at someone standing behind me.
I looked around and nodded to the Tiger.
“Sorry for bothering you. We didn’t agree on the signal, but I thought you’d understand.”
“Witches,” the Tiger said in a low voice, running a thoughtful glance over the geriatric gathering. As the witches recovered their wits (ah, what a shame I hadn’t seen how he appeared) the atmosphere in the re
staurant turned . . . well, not to panic, but more to tense anticipation. “I’ve never liked witches.”
“Why not?” I asked in surprise.
“They . . .” The Tiger pondered for a moment, as if trying to find the words for something he had always known, but had never needed to express. “They harass. Badger. Pester. Hassle.”
“I admire your range of vocabulary,” I said. “What exactly do they harass?”
“The Twilight,” the Tiger replied simply. “Ordinary Others ask. Witches demand.”
He frowned and gestured with his hand, as if he regretted what he had just blurted out.
“I need your help,” I said.
“Yes,” said the Tiger, nodding. “I’m very surprised that you didn’t ask sooner.”
“You didn’t suggest it so I decided it must be too difficult. Or impossible.”
Perhaps I imagined it, but I thought I saw an expression of entirely human anguish cross the Tiger’s face.
“Not impossible. Difficult.”
“They can’t choose a leader,” I said. “They can’t even elect Nadya, as long as Arina is alive in the Sarcophagus of Time.”
“There are two things I can do,” the Tiger declared, looking me in the eye. “I can destroy the Sarcophagus. Dissolve it in eternity. That probably means Arina will be killed.”
“And the second thing?” I asked.
“We can try to get her out,” said the Tiger. “Only it will be up to you to talk to her. I can only bring someone out of the Sarcophagus if they wish to come out. But in this case . . . in this case there may be unforeseen consequences.”
“Such as?” I asked.
“I’m not sure,” the Tiger said with a frown. “I . . . I can’t see the future clearly. Both situations are vague, but the one in which we bring Arina back is extremely hazy.”
“Anton, if I understand the position correctly,” Ernesta added quickly, “we are quite happy with the first option. Arina will be handled peacefully and we can choose a Grandmother of Grandmothers, who will not be your daughter. It all works out perfectly!”
“Dad!” Nadya exclaimed, looking at me indignantly. “Will you . . . will you agree to that?”
Sixth Watch Page 31
