The Witches’ Kitchen

by Cecelia Holland

  “No,” Corban croaked. “I’ll go.” His voice was getting better; he cleared his throat. Picking up his red and blue cloak, he went out of the tower and down the ladder.

  They went into the hall through the big front door. A great fire burnt on the hearth, spreading heat throughout the room. A small crowd of people stood up at the end where the high seat was, and when Corban went through the door, the German captain behind him, he could hear the voice of the hall porter babbling away. “It’s been since he came here, Your Eminence. I—I—there were things missing. Things moved. Doors left open. Someone—one of your people, Eminence, one of yours—thought he saw something, one night when he woke late—something passed between him and the fire, he thought, and yet nothing was there:”

  Corban went up through the crowd toward him. Beyond the yammering porter he saw the tall frame of the Bishop, with his smooth bald head and hanging jowls and gorgeous goldencrusted coat, sitting crookedly in the high seat.

  The porter was still speaking. “I thought—we all thought it was him, you know, what was left of him, dead up there—” His voice rose in a wail. “That’s why we wanted you to bring him down, to bury him, and get rid of him, but now—now—”

  Corban had reached his side, and the porter saw him and recoiled, turning the color of a dead fish. He made a sign with his fingers. Corban was looking all around him, his eyes dazzled by the colors, his mouth watering at the smell of food. They had meat here, great roasts in puddles of fat and blood, crisp-skinned fowl with their legs in the air. Mobs of faces watched him from around the table. The jumble of voices cluttered his ears with an excited murmur. He had been alone so long the mere sound of other people’s voices was like music. He went up to the table and put his fingers on the patterned cloth, soft with deep color.

  The Bishop was watching him impassively, his eyes unblinking. He said, “I remember you. You are the so-called wizard, Corban Loosestrife.”

  “Yes,” Corban said, and was glad to hear his voice come smoothly out.

  “Now, come along, man, you can’t have us believe you lived for a month on air and rainwater.” The Bishop hitched himself up a little, shifting his weight to the other side; the high seat was piled up with cushions for him, and yet he could not get comfortable. He said, “Someone helped you. Who was it?”

  Corban said, “I have seen no one since I went into the tower.”

  “How did you survive, then?”

  “The food was there; I ate it. Water came; I drank it.”

  Somebody off to his left whispered, “Holy Mary.” There was a quick rush of talk quickly hushed. Poppo’s face darkened, his eyes narrowing.

  “You lie. Someone helped you. You are one like her whose hall this was, that foul witch Gunnhild. By the grace of God we have rid Denmark of her and her kind—by the power of Christian light and truth and order. True God against a crowd of idols—it was this porter, wasn’t it, who fed you? One of her men!”

  Corban remembered about the test of hot iron; he thought Poppo cared nothing about god, but only held to the faith because it gave him power. He said, “He didn’t help me. Gunnhild and I are enemies, anyway.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Poppo said.

  Corban shrugged. “Believe what you wish.” Benna like a warm cloak around him enclosed him.

  Poppo studied him up and down. “What I believe may cost you your life. We should have stoned you at Jelling, that time. Yet Bluetooth would not listen, and look what came of it. Who are you? You don’t look like much to me. They say you were the apprentice of a witch in Hedeby, before Bluetooth came to God, is that true?”

  “Apprentice,” Corban said, “is too great a word. I served her. You are right, I am not much.”

  “You served a witch, a creature of Satan? You admit you serve the devil?”

  Corban grunted at him. “Make it whatever you wish. You Christians pick god out of the world and throw it in a little ball into the sky, out of your way, so you can do what you like. This you think makes you superior.”

  Poppo lurched forward in the high seat, leaning over the table, his eyes blazing. His cheeks were sunken like a starvling’s.

  “You dare talk of God, you devil-worshiper, you pagan pig. I tell you, we are cleansing Denmark of you, all you ancient necromancers. We’ll sweep this witches’ kitchen bare and build a clean white church here—let in the bright daylight against your messy dark blood cult, and as for women such as your witch, all such witches, all these women, God abhors them, and we shall drive them into the wilds like the hell-wolves they are!”

  Corban felt Benna leave him like a gust of warm wind, the cool dull air rushing in against him in her place, and then on the opposite side of the table, while Poppo was shaking his fist to match the thunder of his rant, his hat flew off his head, and the cup before him leapt up into the air and dumped its contents all over him.

  A great gasp went up from the people looking on, who scrambled up off the benches, shrinking away. Then abruptly Corban felt her return, warm around him, clinging to him.

  Everybody was gawking at him, including the Bishop, his face shiny with the wine dripping down his cheeks, his eyes black with rage. He bellowed, and someone quickly brought a cloth, and someone else came up and helped clean him. Corban could not keep from smiling. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the German captain put his hand on the hilt of his sword; if Corban was going to die anyway, he could at least enjoy the Bishop’s humiliation.

  Poppo flung down a towel. Between his teeth, he said, “How did you do that?”

  “I didn’t do anything,” Corban said mildly. “I stood here. All of these people here saw me do nothing.” She was laughing; he could feel her quivering. The onlookers were whispering among themselves, heads turning, but everybody watching him. “Perhaps you slipped.”

  Poppo said, “Kill him.”

  The porter groaned, the sound startlingly loud in the sudden silence. Corban met the Bishop’s gaze. He heard the snick of a blade coming out of a scabbard; he thought that in a moment he would be with Benna.

  The porter said, “If you kill him he’ll never leave.”

  Behind him, somebody else said, “What about the King?”

  The Bishop’s eyes widened slightly, and shifted from Corban to some space beyond him. His lips pursed. Nobody else moved. Finally Poppo waved one hand.

  “We will be merciful. Put him back in the tower. Guard it night and day. I want to know who feeds him.” He leaned back, his face slack and his eyes half closed. Wine glistened in the seams of his neck. His grimy white robe wore a broad pink badge all across its front. “I will send word of this to the King.”

  Corban slept. Benna went to the hall, kicking over the guard’s jug as she went. All this time she had been trying to keep from being noticed, but now she saw that was how she could get Corban out of the tower. The trick was to do it without getting him killed.

  She gathered up sand and stones, and found where the Bishop slept, in a great cupboard in the hall, and put the stones into his shoes and between his blankets. He slept with his mouth open, and his breath smelled bad. She remembered him ordering Corban’s death; she wondered if she could defend Corban against men with swords and thought not.

  Going into the hall, where the other men slept bundled onto the benches, she looked for food for Corban, and sprinkled sand into everything else, the jugs of wine, a half-eaten savory. She threw Poppo’s cushions from the high seat into the filthy rushes, and then saw a piece of paper spread out on the table and went to look, thinking it was a picture.

  It was a picture, lines and marks in some order, but she puzzled over it for a long while before suddenly she made sense of it. It was a view from far overhead of this country, the long wall of the Danewirk with the big gate marked, Hedeby at the end of its chain of lakes, the river itself.

  She stood there a while, too tired now, to think about this. A pot of dried-up ink and a quill lay beside the picture, and she thought of drawing over it, but th
at would require mixing up the ink again, and all she wanted now was to go back and rest. Moving things wearied her more and more, and she had done too much this day, flying so furiously at the Bishop. She was beginning to realize she would not last like this, not long. In some time to come she would be gone.

  Finally she gathered her strength, took the food for Corban, and made her way out of the hall again. The guard was standing by the bank, fuming over his spilled jug, and beating his arms around himself in the cold. She yanked at his hair as she passed, and he gave a cry, and whirled around, frightened.

  She went up into the tower and laid her gifts down beside Corban. For a moment she hovered over him, loving how he looked when he slept, soft and young, his eyelids soft; she loved to kiss his eyelids. Now, she thought, she even had what he was looking for, the reason for the night-ship, the quick and stealthy visit. He stirred, his mouth moving. She bent to kiss him, and sank gratefully down into his sleep, into the world he had made for her in his mind.

  Corban prowled around the little room. Now that he had been out of it, if only for a few moments, it seemed intolerably small and bare. He felt Benna leaning against him; she wanted memory, but he could not keep from thinking about Poppo.

  What she had said of the map nagged at him. He had to get out of here. He thought, again, Help me get out of here.

  She nudged him. To her the memories were real, and Poppo only a shadow. She had drawn him pictures of the tower, of the bar across the door, the ladder on the ground. She could not budge the bar, and when he saw what the effort took from her he was afraid to let her try again. Now there was the guard, night and day. But he had to get out.

  In his mind, she said, I’m doing something. Wait.

  He felt her warm and snug against him, wrapped around him like a cloud. He forced himself calm, and leaning on the window remembered building the hide boat, all that one summer when Ulf did not come, and Conn and Raef were still little, that whole long golden summer.

  She had made a picture of the boat, before they built it; that was when he understood her power, when he saw what she had drawn coming true under his hands.

  He remembered one morning when the sun was coming up, and the two little boys had just run out of the house, and he stood on the ledge of the doorway and saw how the sun cast their shadows ahead of them onto the mist, rimmed in rainbow light. He remembered suddenly what he had forgotten for years, how the rainbow streamed around them both in a single halo.

  He thought of them with a sore heart, thinking, I brought them into this. Benna poked him, annoyed.

  Later the next day, as he stood by the window, he heard his name called in a high piercing faraway voice. He leaned out, looking up into the pitch of the sky. Up there a hawk was circling and circling. Corban stood at the window watching, and on an impulse, he thrust his arm out the window.

  The hawk swooped down and landed on his fist. Her talons bit, and he gasped, both at the pain and at the weight of her. Her head turned, the long narrow helmet of skull behind the massive curved beak, the bone curving, flaring back to cup the remorseless eye.

  She said, “That’s for what you did to Eric. I’m glad I found you, anyway. Maybe now your boys will stop hounding me.”

  He drew her into the window frame, and she stepped delicately from his bleeding wrist onto the broad stone sill. She picked with her beak a moment at the speckled feathers of her breast, used one dark talon to scratch her cheek, and turned calmly toward him.

  “My greeting to my sister,” she said. “I’m pleased we meet once more.”

  Benna leaned against him, soft, alert. Corban said, “Where are my boys? How are they?”

  “They are good enough. I left them on your dragonfly, sailing along the coast. I’m to meet them at Hollandstadt. When I am done here we will go back to Jorvik, where Sweyn is raising an army—something he is rather better at than I would have expected.” She cocked her head to one side, seeing him in her left eye. “Your daughters, also, are in Jorvik, with the rest of them. They were run out of that place of yours in the west by the local people.”

  “My daughters,” he said, startled, and against his shoulder felt something move, warm, twisting; he glanced at the empty air behind him. Benna, too, had thought them safe away on the island; all this time, they had been imagining them on the island still.

  They had imagined the island itself was still there, unchanged, as they remembered it; now they saw that it was all lost.

  He wondered, for an instant, if he had ever really been there, if it had not always all been in his mind.

  “The word that Sweyn wants men is getting up to the Orkneys and even to Ireland.” The cool dry voice of the hawk brought him back. “Some of those men will answer him, with their ships, even if he has no money. He’ll have a fit army soon. Bluetooth can see him coming, and is gathering a fleet of his own at the Limfjord. Sweyn will have a task worthy of the King he imagines himself to be.”

  “What about Palnatoki?” Corban said.

  “I have not seen sign of him. I will look.”

  “Mark this, then,” Corban said. “Bluetooth is blind in one eye. In that eye is the righteous Bishop. He has been meeting German people here, and making a map of Hedeby.” Benna was pushing on him. His mind bent away from this, back toward the two little girls, living among strangers in Jorvik. “My children, Who cares for my children? Where is my sister?”

  “Your kindred in Jorvik have the two little girls,” the hawk said. “I have to go. The light is failing me already.” She paced to

  the outer edge of the windowsill; over her shoulder, she said,

  “Hold fast, Corban. We shall come for you, soon enough.” Leaning out into the wind, she spread her wings, the broad flight feathers fanning apart at the tips, and sailed off onto the breast of the air. She sank into a deep glide, but then tilting her wings slightly curved her path, circling back toward him, and was rising again, her wings utterly still, the flared pinions pressing delicately into the air. She passed by Corban again ten feet away but now above the window, her legs drawn back against her body, her head thrust out, her wings glinting in the last sunlight. She rose away from him, into the still bright sky, and swept off to the west.

  He turned from the window, holding his bleeding wrist in the other hand, and thought of his little girls, somewhere in Jorvik, alone. Of Mav, wherever she was. He felt Benna warm and shuddering against his shoulder; walking around and around the tower room, he kept his mind full of memories of the little girls, and almost heard her weep.

  C H A P T E R E I G H T E E N

  In the morning through a dense lifting fog Conn and Raef rowed up the river toward Hollandstadt. Between the city and the sea lay a bleak salt marsh that seemed endless. The fog lifted, and the sun was bright when they finally reached the harbor. Hollandstadt disappointed Raef, hardly a city at all, compared to Hedeby and Jorvik; Tisconum’s village had been bigger. When he and Conn rowed into the pond, only five or six ships were moored up there, slow round merchant ships, and a single dragon, its high curled prows carved into snarling heads and covered with shining gold.

  They hauled the dragonfly onto the narrow stretch of beach and drifted with elaborate innocence toward the great dragon, drawn up nearer the city. Raef ran his gaze over the ship’s long sleek lines, the smooth flare of its waist, the gilded rowlocks down the side; he thought it would be as fast as the dragonfly, maybe, under oars. Several men lounged around it, mending a sail and playing with bones and drinking.

  Conn nudged him with an elbow and said, under his breath, “This must be somebody important.”

  Raef grunted. He wanted to get away from here; the men by the big dragon were beginning to watch them. He was hungry, and he could smell fresh bread baking. His feet longed to travel up the beach to the little town and its offerings. He pulled on Conn’s sleeve, and they turned back up the shore; a short bank marked the beginning of the dry land, and they stepped up into crushed broken saw grass and then the trampled dust
of Hollandstadt. Raef glanced over his shoulder at the golden dragon.

  “I wish we hadn’t come in here.” The long narrow channel through the estuary felt like a trap to him. He began thinking about the marsh, worrying out another way through.

  Conn said, “Pap’s likely all the way across Denmark, she said. At the other end of the Danewirk.” He waved his hand at the great grassy hill that rose above the marsh and stretched away into the distance. “When she comes back, we have to be ready to do something.” The hawk had gone to scout the country.

  “What?”

  Conn shrugged, his face serene. “When it happens, it happens.”

  “There,” Raef said. “There’s bread.”

  They had walked into the center of the little town. The largest building, a long low hall, faced the shore; behind it was a wide open ground, with a forge at one end and three domed stone huts on the other. In front of the huts was a woman with a basket selling bread, and Conn bought three loaves. They stood there stuffing themselves. Two girls in white headdresses, their aprons crusted with flour, came out of the hall with trays of golden rounds of dough; they opened a door in the front of one of the domed huts and slid the trays inside. From twenty feet away Raef felt the blast of heat from the oven.

  He said, “We should buy some meat. For the hawk.”

  Conn said, around a great mouthful of bread, “She’ll find herself something to eat. Let’s get some ale.” But his eyes turned to the forge, where someone had begun hammering iron.

  Raef said, under his breath, “I think we should get out of here.” His mind probed and poked at the dense marsh between them and the open sea, threaded through with its narrow, twisting, vulnerable channel.

  Conn said, “Come on.” He crammed the last of the bread into his coat and strode off toward the forge.

  This stood between two three-sided slant-roofed wooden buildings, their open sides facing. The yard between them was full of horses tethered in lines. Conn and Raef went in past a heap of black charred chunks of wood that spilled from a tipped-over cart. In the center of the place, away from all the buildings, a bed of coals shone in a high stone bowl. A boy was working the bellows attached to the edge of the bowl, sending out a rhythmic stream of squeaks and wails. Next to the fire, a half-naked man bent over rump to rump with a slab-sided black horse, one of the horse’s feet up in his lap, and trimmed off slices of hoof with a curved knife.