Witchy Winter

by D. J. Butler

  “We will carry you.”

  “Bebezhigooganzhii of the underworld, carry this man!”

  The third horse entered the drum, becoming hide lacing that connected the two skins and bound the entire drum together. Nathaniel plucked at one of the laces and heard the thunder of running hooves.

  “Bebezhigooganzhii, I ask you to carry me!”

  “We will carry you to the four corners of the world on which you stand.”

  “Bebezhigooganzhii of the loon in the north, ever watching, carry this man!” At this last invocation, the manidoo stepped aside.

  The final horse hurled itself into Nathaniel’s arms, nearly knocking him down with the force of its arrival. When he looked at the drum again, Nathaniel saw a leather shoulder strap that had been the fourth horse.

  “Bebezhigooganzhii, I ask you to carry me!”

  For a moment, the four horses raced in a circle around Nathaniel again. “We will carry you to worlds below, to worlds above, and to all the worlds that are.” Then they sank again into the wood and skin of the drum.

  “Come,” Waawoono’s manidoo said. “It is time.”

  Nathaniel slung the drum’s strap over one shoulder. He placed his left hand on the top side and his right on the underside and began a slow rhythm. The rhythm was aimless at first, but then in the thicket of bass and baritone notes and tenor clicks Nathaniel found he could make with the instrument, he began to see the path of a song. He opened his mouth.

  I ride upon four horses, to heaven I ride

  I ride the sacred smoke-path, horses by my side

  I walk the endless star-fields, my vision is wide

  I seek the land of spirits, to heaven I ride

  He knew not whence the words came; he opened his mouth, and they filled it. The melody was old and simple, scarcely more than a drone, and he thought he could hear a second voice harmonizing with him. The manidoo? Waawoono?

  As he sang, Nathaniel raised his foot, found the lowest step nearly hidden in the brightness of the fire, placed his weight upon it, and climbed up.

  The step held.

  It was pure smoke, nothing but scented air and light, but beneath his bare foot it was unyielding. Nathaniel took a second step, and then a third.

  I call the stars to witness, I will not hide

  I call the winds to see me, as up I glide

  I call the sky to answer, and the gods beside

  I call the night to open, to heaven I ride

  On the fourth step, Nathaniel hesitated. Looking up, he saw Waawoono’s manidoo. The angelic being seemed now to stand among the stars, at the top of seven steps, and again held out a beckoning hand toward Nathaniel.

  “Come,” the manidoo said.

  Nathaniel looked down.

  Through a haze of smoke, he saw the lean-to of pine boughs, and the tiny fire within. He saw Ma’iingan at the edge of the circle of small light, stone knife in his hand, looking upward; Nathaniel couldn’t see the Indian’s face. He saw Landon and George, staring at him.

  Nathaniel blinked.

  Smoke filled his nostrils. He clung to the wooden column that held up the tobacco-curing barn. Wedges had been hacked from that column by an ax, as if in multiple spots someone had begun to fell the column, and each time decided not to; Nathaniel had the toes of each foot curled into one such divot, and the fingers of his left hand in a third.

  Pain lanced through his side from his broken rib.

  With his right hand he reached up, toward another carved wedge and, just beyond that, a crossbeam.

  Nathaniel’s hand slipped. He fell—

  and blinked.

  “Come,” the manidoo said. “This is only the beginning of the road, and we must ride faster.”

  My drum is made of horses that never died

  My bones I leave behind me, I’m iron inside

  Spirits my father and mother, spirits my bride

  I am a man of spirits, to heaven I ride

  His own words meant nothing to him, but the words and the monotonous melody filled Nathaniel’s breast with courage, and he took the remaining steps at a run, pounding louder and louder on his horse-drum as he did so.

  At the height of the seven steps, Nathaniel sprang onto a shimmering path—

  which suddenly vanished.

  Nathaniel found himself standing in a space that was circular, and the confines of which were hard to see. Were those standing stones, irregularly spaced like the teeth in a dotard’s mouth? Were they moss-covered trees? Beyond some sort of pierced and crumbling boundary, and high above him, lay the stars. He still saw the silver-golden path of the sun and moon, and on it the constellations—there was the Bather. The Sweat Lodge. But he glimpsed them as if through gaps now, as if he were watching a familiar scene, but through a keyhole.

  The Loon was gone. The other constellations moved backward through the sky.

  “Where am I?” he cried.

  “You are in the place where all healing begins.” The voice belonged to the manidoo, though Nathaniel couldn’t see the spirit he thought was to be his guide. “The Pit of Heaven.”

  “What, a hole?” Nathaniel gripped his drum tighter. The trembling within it, and the faint distant echo of horses’ hooves, comforted him a little.

  No answer.

  “Waawoono?” he cried. “Ma’iingan?”

  No answer.

  “Landon? George?”

  He was abandoned.

  But he wasn’t alone. As he called George, he saw a shadow emerge from the serrated shadow wall encircling him and lurch forward.

  “Bebezhigooganzhii, help me!” he called.

  His drum shook as if something inside were trying to escape, but then fell still.

  A second shadow detached itself from the circle. Then another, and another. He saw them mostly by the remote stars they blocked out. As they drew nearer, he grabbed for the knife he usually carried in his pocket, and remembered he was naked. He held his drum in both hands before him, as if it were a shield.

  The drum trembled. From fear?

  Scritch.

  The rasp of a Lucifer being struck, and then a yellow light burst into being. It was so bright against the darkness, Nathaniel shielded his eyes behind the drum, but not before he noticed that the match appeared to be a long, thin bone, with burning ooze at one end.

  A finger bone? But longer than the finger bone of any child of Adam.

  “Well,” a deep voice rumbled. “What have we here?”

  The light grew brighter. Reluctantly, Nathaniel lowered the drum to see. The holder of the Lucifer match shook it to extinguish its flame, and then dropped it to the ground.

  The earth was littered with bones. The bones of men, though many of them seemed far too large, and there were animal skulls and hooves lying among the tibias and femurs.

  The stronger light came from a torch, in the other hand of the person who had struck the match. The torch—Nathaniel looked at it closely—appeared to be a thigh bone with a skull fixed on the end of it. The skull burned, and through the flame he saw two dark eye sockets, a triangular gap where a nose might once have been, and a grinning jaw that hung at an impossible angle.

  The person holding the torch was a giant.

  He was maybe half again as tall as Nathaniel, and he had bright orange hair. The giant’s face shifted as if Nathaniel were seeing it through running water, but the twisting features seemed familiar.

  He turned slowly and found himself surrounded by four of the creatures. Four to match the number of horses in his drum? Four for the four corners of the earth? Four because…some other reason?

  He thought he knew the second face, similarly flowing. The third was a complete stranger. The fourth was the Earl of Johnsland, though gigantic, red-haired, and swinging fists the size of whole hams.

  Nathaniel turned back to the first giant. “What is this place?”

  “Ah, the riddle game.” The giant grinned, a distorted, sloppy mockery of a smile. “Very well. This is an old
place. It was old when the children of Adam found it, and had long been visited by people the children of Adam have now mostly forgotten. It’s neither under the hill nor on its slopes, not quite in your heart and not fully in your nightmares. Few come. Fewer leave.”

  “I know you now.” Nathaniel swallowed, his throat dry. “You’re the Emperor, Thomas. And you…I think you’re the Necromancer, Oliver Cromwell.” Naming the giants didn’t give him any better sense of why he would encounter them, these men in particular, in giant form, here. He also left out the fact that one of the four completely baffled him.

  “We are,” the Giant Emperor agreed, “and also we are not.”

  “Your cryptic words reveal nothing.”

  “They reveal everything.” The Giant Earl shrugged. “Though we never promised they would.”

  “Give the lad his third riddle,” the Giant Necromancer said. “If nothing else, it will entertain us.”

  Thomas tried to find the song that had brought him here in his heart, and couldn’t. He gripped his horse-drum tightly, but found it vibrating like a piano string.

  “Why am I here?” he asked.

  “That’s an easy one.” The Giant Earl grinned. “You’re here to die.”

  Nathaniel took a step back from the Giant Earl—

  and the Giant Stranger, the one whose face he didn’t know, grabbed him by both arms, pinning him and raising him off the ground.

  The Giant Necromancer stepped forward at the same time, batting with a cupped hand and knocking the drum from Nathaniel’s grip. The drum fell with a distressed neigh, and rattled among the accumulated drift of bones.

  “No!” Nathaniel cried.

  The Giant Emperor seized Nathaniel by the throat and pulled. Nathaniel’s head, still screaming, pulled away from his body. His spinal column came with it, plucked neatly out of his body as if the giants were deboning a fish.

  Nathaniel’s screaming stopped and he died.

  * * *

  Dead, Nathaniel lay on the floor and watched.

  The giants pulled his skull from the skin of his head, dropping brain, tongue, and eyeballs to the ground. Eyes no longer facing the same direction, dead Nathaniel continued to stare—unable now to blink—as the giants dismembered him.

  They took surprising care not to damage his flesh and skin much. Having torn off one leg, the Giant Earl then peeled the meat and skin off the bone with great delicacy, as if he were peeling a grape. The Giant Necromancer worked more quickly, yanking the bones from Nathaniel’s other leg in a single furious pull.

  When they were done, Nathaniel’s flesh and organs lay in a pile.

  His bones lay intermingled with the bones of all the others who had died in this strange no-place. Nathaniel himself couldn’t have picked out which bones were his.

  Then the giants left.

  He lay a long time, watching the new constellations appear through the windows in the darkness around him.

  * * *

  No sun ever rose.

  Nathaniel noticed the passage of time by the movement of the stars through his windows of vision, but he didn’t keep track. More than a year had passed, to judge by the movements of the Moose around the sunless and moonless path of the sun and moon. More than a hundred years.

  A single giant returned. A giantess, in fact, eight feet tall and with bright orange hair to match her fellows. She wore a short skirt and a purple shawl with golden suns. She moved slowly with her gaze fixed on the floor, kicking aside bones that didn’t suit her and stooping to pick up and examine a few. She apparently found these unsatisfactory too, tossing them back to the floor and cursing under her breath.

  Nathaniel’s eyes, disconnected and pointing separate directions, must be adjusting to the darkness.

  When the giantess came to the pile of flesh parings and boneless meat that was Nathaniel, she stopped. Shaking her head, she clicked her tongue with disapproval. “This’ll ne’er do.” Her voice was the shrill whine of the highland Appalachee, but Nathaniel knew her face. Where had he seen her before? Why did she seem so familiar?

  She left, and time passed again.

  Vaguely, Nathaniel remembered that somewhere else he was in a tobacco-drying barn. Had fallen, he thought. Had he died? He had been injured. Perhaps his wounds had taken his life.

  The giantess returned, dragging a pot with one hand and clenching tucked under her other arm a sheaf of long, brown, dried leaves. She stuffed the leaves into several skulls, wrapped more leaves are long thigh bones, and carefully stacked the bones in layers of alternating directions, with the skulls in the center.

  She struck a Lucifer match—definitely once a finger—and lit the bone fire.

  Nathaniel tried to say something, but without bones to hold his flesh together, all he could do was make his lips tremble slightly, and add a thin stream of slobber to the puddle of gore in which he lay.

  The giantess raised her cauldron onto a platform of bones and set it over the top of the fire. She dropped the last of her leaves inside the pot. Nathaniel smelled the sweet odor of burning tobacco. She wandered again across the landscape of bones, bending to collect a thigh bone here, a skull there, and bringing them back to drop them into the cauldron.

  She approached Nathaniel again and squatted, bring her face down close to his. In the light of the tobacco-leaf fire, he now saw that her eyes were different colors. One of them was ice-white, a shocking color in an iris.

  “Don’t you worry your pretty little head none,” the giantess said. “From here, it gits better.”

  Nathaniel wanted to thank her.

  He also wanted to scream.

  He could do neither, so he trembled like an aspic in a tornado.

  The giantess left.

  Time passed.

  The four giants returned, shambling in through the star-windows and sniffing as they approached the fire.

  “Fee!” shouted the Giant Earl.

  “Fie!” cried the Giant Stranger.

  “Foe!” roared the Giant Necromancer.

  “Fum!” bellowed the Giant Emperor.

  “I smell the blood of an Ophidian!” they howled together.

  The Giant Earl reached into the pot, grimacing. He pulled a skull from the cauldron, and hanging below the skull a long, curving spinal column. Liquid smoke wisped from the bones and fell toward the floor like autumn leaves. The giant blew on the skull and spine to clear it of the last of the smoke and then strode toward the pile of Nathaniel.

  The bones in his hand gleamed in the firelight, the dull, dark gleam of forged iron.

  The Giant Earl scooped up Nathaniel’s brain and stuffed it through the eye socket into the iron skull. Then he took Nathaniel’s face-meat and the skin of his head, including his hair, and stretched it around the skull. Nathaniel’s eyes, still lying on the ground, watched as his lips, once again wrapped around a skull, trembled in fear.

  The Giant Earl reattached Nathaniel’s tongue in its place and then lifted from the floor a mass of flesh that Nathaniel couldn’t identify. The giant stabbed the iron spinal column down into the mass and tweaked the meat, and Nathaniel recognized it as his torso.

  The giant left Nathaniel’s eyes on the ground.

  Also, one of Nathaniel’s ears seemed to be missing.

  The Giant Earl then held the torso and head like a scarecrow, or an enormous puppet, while the other giants took their turns. The Giant Stranger pulled iron arm bones from the cauldron, attached them to the meat puppet at the shoulders, and then pulled on the flesh of Nathaniel’s arms like long gloves. The Giant Emperor similarly attached the legs, and stood working them awhile in delight, pumping Nathaniel’s knees as if he were a dancing marionette. The Giant Necromancer attached the finer bones of fingers and toes, and then the Giant Earl held the reboned body draped over his arm as if it were a suit of clothes, and they all inspected their work.

  The Giant Necromancer twisted one finger around to get it right, and quickly switched two misplaced toes.

  The G
iant Stranger disconnected and reconnected the elbow of one arm, so it would bend.

  “Still isn’t right, is it?” The Giant Earl scratched his chin thoughtfully.

  “Eyes,” the Giant Emperor muttered. “How do you expect him to go anywhere if he hasn’t got eyes?”

  “Do we want him to go anywhere?” the Giant Stranger asked. “He could stay right here.”

  The Earl, the Stranger, and the Necromancer nodded as if this were a sage suggestion.

  “No,” the Giant Emperor said. “This boy has work to do.”

  “What’s his work, then?” the Giant Earl asked.

  “He’s a healer.”

  “He’ll want his eyes.” The Stranger bent and rummaged among the bones on the floor. Nathaniel watched him come closer and closer, until the enormous hands closed, each over one eyeball, blocking out his vision.

  Soft, squishing sounds.

  Then he could see again, and he was seeing from out of his own skull. He tried to raise a hand, and couldn’t. He tried to speak, and couldn’t.

  “Still something missing,” the Giant Earl said.

  “The children of Adam have two ears, don’t they?” the Giant Stranger asked.

  The giants looked at each other.

  “It’s been such a long time,” the Giant Necromancer said.

  “I don’t remember,” the Giant Emperor said.

  The Giant Earl shrugged.

  “Yes,” the Giant Stranger said. “He’s missing an ear. Come on, then, let’s find it.”

  Nathaniel found himself flung over the shoulder of the Giant Earl. He watched over the giant’s rump as the four of them rummaged among the bones and carnage on the floor.

  “Not here,” said the Earl.

  “Lost,” the Emperor echoed.

  “Might have eaten it,” the Giant Necromancer suggested.

  The Earl draped Nathaniel over his arm again and the giants stood looking at him and scratching their heads.

  “Well, it just won’t do,” the Giant Stranger said.

  “We could just throw him away,” the Giant Emperor said. “I don’t see that we need him at all.”