The Circle the Ants Would Not Cross

Ordinary fire leaves ash. But there is a kind of fire after which not even an ant dares cross the line it has burned. By pure chance I heard this story not at the inn but in a field, when the carter and I lost our way after sundown and strayed off the road. The horse suddenly stopped dead and would not go a step further. Before us blackened a round patch of earth, even, as if someone had covered it with a giant bowl and burned it out from the inside.

The old woman riding with us on the cart went so pale that even in the dusk you could see it. - Don't drive the horse, - she said. - He's wiser than we are. Once, here, the earth opened itself to a stranger. We did not yet know that she had recognized the place not only with her eyes but with her body.

Long ago she had been a little girl from near Chyhyryn, living with her brother in a house at the very edge of the village, where the gardens ran up against the then still wild steppe. Now she was an old weaver, and her hands remembered the thread, the small cuts and the wax. But what she remembered most was not the linen. She remembered the black circle.

The old woman kept silent a long while as the carter searched for a way back onto the road. And then she began to tell. One summer night she and her brother woke not from noise but from silence. A silence so heavy it was as if someone had clamped shut the muzzles of every dog in the street. The children looked out the window. Over the steppe, far from the houses, five or six fires were moving slowly. They did not tremble like oil lamps in people's hands.

The fires drew together, then apart, as if leading some ancient, silent dance around an invisible centre. People carrying fire walk crookedly, but what is not human always loves a perfect circle. Suddenly the fires merged into one tall pillar of flame that did not crackle and threw no sparks. For a single moment, at the very base of that pillar, the children saw the black figure of a woman. She knelt, slowly running her hand over the grass, as if tracing an invisible furrow.

Then the steppe flared with blinding light, and everything vanished. Only the silence lay down on the earth again. In the morning the children woke their parents, but they only waved it off: you dreamed it, or the herdsmen were burning dry grass. The children quickly carried the tale of the night's doings around the village, but the old wisewoman who lived next door, on hearing it, said nothing.

She asked not a single question, only took her staff and walked out to the field ahead of everyone. The children ran after her. There, where the fires had danced in the night, they found the thing that makes the weaver's shoulders tighten to this day. It was not a scorch mark from a fire, not a crooked patch of char. On the green grass lay a perfect black circle, as if someone had traced the earth around a giant clay bowl.

Inside it the earth was dry, black and smooth as the bottom of a stove. It was ice-cold, as if everything living had been sucked out of it, leaving only emptiness and darkness. But the children did not understand at once that this was no mere burnt ground. First they saw the ants. The insects crawled toward the black boundary but did not cross it. They came right up to the edge, froze, as if striking an invisible wall, and recoiled. This place had not simply burned out.

It was now cut off from the world of the living. The old wisewoman looked at it and said quietly: "That was no fire eating the grass. That land was fenced off from people. Someone was drawing a door there." She threw a dry blade of grass into the middle of the circle. The blade did not fall to the ground. For a moment it hung in the air, turned black and crumbled into fine dust, though there was no wind on the steppe. They came back from the field in silence.

But silence, too, knows how to carry news. By evening every house knew about the black circle, and then the village began to remember what it had once preferred to keep quiet about. In the village they began to whisper about the old widow who lived beyond the gardens. She was quiet, never looked people in the eye, only listened to the earth. No grass grew by her threshold, and at night the smell of burnt grain and wax drifted from her house.

People said she was not simply grieving for her dead husband - she was waiting for a fiery guest. And then people began to recall the little things they had once waved away. How she asked for ash "for the garden". How she traded wax from old candles for dried apples. How children kept losing their combs, and every morning there was a fresh little pit at the crossroads.

To call a perelesnyk, who brings warmth and the voices of the forgotten, it is not enough simply to light a fire. You must cut off a piece of the world for him from the living. She carried out into the steppe ash from other people's stoves, grain from three homesteads, wax from a funeral candle, earth from the crossroads and hair from someone else's child's comb. All for a place that, for one night, was to stop being human.

The witch wanted not merely to remember what she had lost, but to bring it back. But such guests never come alone. And they never take only what has been laid out for them. Something went wrong that night. Maybe a child's gaze fell where it should not have fallen. Maybe the fiery guest heard not only the call but the fear as well. Or maybe something else came along with him - something that has neither voice nor face, but always walks behind unclean fire.

And the black circle closed not after the rite but in the very middle of it, as if the earth itself took fright at what had stepped onto it. From that time on, the place no longer accepted life. After that night the widow was seen only once. She sat on her threshold, and round black marks darkened her palms, as if she had been holding red-hot coals. She did not speak, only listened. And then she vanished...

They say there is a fire after which ash remains. And there is a fire after which a boundary remains. And as long as not even an ant dares to cross it, a person had better not ask that land what else it holds.