She cradled the scared girl and was singing a lovely, soft song in a strange language when Harwood approached.
“Miss Weede? Miss Ellena?” he asked.
The old woman stopped singing and looked up at him. The abject coldness in that one good eye chilled him. In it he saw a steel will, an authority and power born of dignity, and for a moment, he both admired and feared her.
“Yes?”
“I brought food. Water. For you and the girl.”
The old woman looked skeptically from Harwood to the basket and back again. “Why?”
“I… I think you’re innocent of the charges against you.”
Those lips, still full, still somehow beautiful, smiled painfully. “I assure you, I am not.”
Harwood blinked. He wasn’t sure what to say, and while his mouth worked open and closed in attempting an answer, she continued.
“However, your kindness is appreciated, Mr. Harwood. It will not be forgotten.”
Flustered, he said, “Please, take the basket. Innocent or not, you need water. The girl—she needs to eat.”
Ellena looked up at him. Unlike her adoptive mother’s, her eyes were soulful and scared, an endless blue like sky and water and the blended place where they met. Perhaps Mother Martha was guilty of witchcraft, but surely the girl—
“The trees remember. The wind remembers. The water and land and sky remember. And I, too, will remember, when those who came before come again, to save us.”
Perhaps the old woman was crazy. She let the girl take the basket, though, and smiled fondly down at her little blond head as Ellena devoured a biscuit and drank from the waterskin.
He left quickly. Martha had begun to hum, and Harwood could have sworn he’d heard a low humming in reply, carried by the wind through the rustling leaves of trees.
* * *
On the morning of their execution, the sun rose with reluctance, taking its time to fire up its glow; the waiting dawn was a bleak fog of chill and colorless countryside. The oaks and pines and maples surrounding New Ipswich stood back and waited, patient but seething, a gray-green army gathered on the hillside.
The place where the elders of the village had been executing condemned Heathens lay just beyond their fields and farms but before the edge of the forest. It was a barren spot where neither shrub nor grass would grow; it was said that the blood and rotting bodies of the condemned had soured the ground, and in that hard spattering of dirt, they had erected a gallows.
“Mother, I’m scared,” Ellena whispered as they bumped along over the rocky path. The dust from the road kept getting into her nose and throat and mixing with the tears on her cheeks. She and her mother had been bound and put in the back seat of a convertible 2021 Volkswagen which Joseph Abbott and Creedence Burnell had found out on the old toll road one day. It had wheels but no engine, and that was right in the eyes of the New God, as it was to be a ceremonial vehicle pulled by their mules.
“No fear,” Mother Martha whispered back through her cracked lips. “You’ll see; all will be as it should. You remember the words, in case you need them?”
The girl nodded. “Are you sure they’ll come?”
Her mother didn’t answer. They had crested the hill and now the gallows were in full view. The villagers had found pictures in old books from the ruins of the library, and they had cobbled together a serviceable set-up from scraps of old telephone poles. Frayed wires served as a noose. Ellena saw that and could take in little else. She imagined what it would feel like, having those wires tighten around her little throat, imagining her air cut off and the bones in her neck snapping and—
The mules brought the car to a sudden stop, rocking the passengers within.
Rough hands grabbed and pinched and yanked them from the car. Ellena recognized two of the men to whom the hands belonged: Liberty Baker’s father, Obedience, and Prudence Pickering’s uncle, Jeremiah. The men shoved her toward the gallows and her stomach wrenched itself into a knot. Her mother, whose ankle had been broken with a hammer when she refused to elaborate on Ellena’s involvement in magick rituals, was dragged toward the gallow steps by Cotton Pratt, whose wife once came to the glen to buy a poultice for the bruise he had given her. When Martha fell, they kicked her and dragged her to her feet again.
It hurt Ellena’s heart more to see how they treated her mother than to suffer any personal indignities at their hands. Her mother’s moon was waning from abuse at the hands of monsters, and it wasn’t fair! Ellena hated them. She hated them! And her hate was strong because she was strong, because her moon was waxing. If they did manage to string her up, it would take a long time to kill her, and she was scared that it would hurt for all that time, but she wouldn’t cry because her anger wouldn’t let her.
The wind blew and the trees rustled. We won’t let them hurt you. It is our promise. We won’t let you fall.
On the stage of the gallows, Ellena was shoved to the ground near the prostrate form of her mother. The other villagers had gathered before them to watch. Ellena clutched her hands into little fists. They were judging her and her mother—there, Chastity Parke, who had come for a potion to stop the baby growing inside her, and there, Zebede Ratcliffe, who had once come, hat in hand, to beg Mother Martha to remove a curse on his land and put it instead on his neighbor’s. Perhaps they felt guilty; more likely, they were afraid of being called out. They shouted to drown out whatever they felt, and their cruel words were sharp slivers of metal in her ears.
“Now, Mother? Will you say the words?” she whispered.
“Not yet,” Martha replied.
The trees rustled impatiently.
“Why? Why not now?”
“Silence!” Elder Barrow said from a pulpit built near the gallows. “Your sin has bound you thus, and your magick has no power here.”
“Soon,” Martha whispered as Obedience Baker and Jeremiah Pickering yanked her to her feet.
Ellena looked up at her, confusion holding her tongue.
“I am speaking!” Elder Barrow roared, and Ellena couldn’t help flinching. “You will respect the law.”
“Your law has no bearing on us,” Martha said. Despite her injuries, her voice was loud and clear and silenced the shouting of the crowd.
Elder Barrow glared at her, his face red. “Martha Weede, you stand accused of witchcraft and corruption of another’s soul. You have been tried and found guilty, and now you are condemned to death according to the Eighth Law. Have you anything to say for yourself or your ward?”
Martha stared silently above the heads of the villagers to the line of mountains, hazy in the distance. Ellena knew she was clearing the altar in her mind.
“By the power vested in the court of New Ipswich, your sentence shall be carried out this twentieth day of MidSummer beneath the gaze of our New God.”
Mother Martha finally began to speak the words, and the dawn sky grew dark again. The stone-colored clouds elongated into sharp blades across the sky. The villagers of New Ipswich looked up and muttered anxiously to each other. The Elders looked worried, too, but their uneasy gazes were fixed on the villagers, not Martha and Ellena.
“I said, your magick has no power here!” Elder Barrow shouted, his red face turning berry-purple. To the men holding Martha up, he added, “Cut out her tongue.”
It was the first time Ellena had seen her mother look afraid since she had been arrested. She struggled against the iron grasp of her captors as another man she did not know approached her mother. He punched the old woman in the face and then squeezed her throat until she opened her mouth to gasp for air.
“Stop!” the girl cried out, terrified for her mother. “Don’t do this, please! Stop this!”
Elder Barrow’s expression didn’t waver, except to allow a tiny, almost imperceptible smile. He would not be moved. If anything, he would enjoy the pain and suffering of helpless women on his stage of paraded sins, and her anger swelled.
Ellena rose to her feet but before she could do anything to help
her mother, Zebede Ratcliffe had jumped the gallows stage and taken hold of her. His grip was strong; it hurt her ribs. She turned her head to other faces she knew in the crowd, the ones who looked just as surprised and horrified as her mother. “Please, somebody—help her!”
No one moved or spoke as the man used a pair of pliers to take hold of the old woman’s tongue. Once he had a good grip on it and had pulled it over her lips, he let go of her throat and drew a knife from his belt. Then he cut Martha’s tongue out at the root.
The old woman screamed, but the sound was drowned by a gurgle as blood spilled from her mouth and over her chin, splattering the metal tools. The lump of bloody muscle was tossed aside, and all three men stepped away from Martha, letting her sink to the ground beside Ellena. The old woman did not cry, but her eyes were wet and shining and large with pain. She extended a hand to her daughter and the girl took it and held it.
The old woman tried to speak, but managed only to send fresh waves of blood over her chin and neck.
All around them, the trees rustled angrily. Now, they whispered. Say the words… say them now…
“Now?” the girl echoed, and her mother nodded. Martha had only a moment to squeeze her daughter’s hand before Elder Barrow was barking orders and the men were on her again, dragging her toward the wire noose.
Ellena turned her head. She didn’t want to see. She had to concentrate, and her time was running out; once they were finished with Mother Martha, they would turn their hate on her.
She began to speak, softly at first while they were distracted with hanging her mother, then louder as the angry fire in her bellowed outward.
“Rí agus Banríon na Foraoise páirt a ghlacadh linn inár n-am gá! Cuimhnigh dúinn le linn na bhflaitheas agus cuirimid naimhde a mharú!”
* * *
And so we came. Though it was not our custom to get involved in the affairs of mortal men, we had grown fond of our little Martha and her girl-child. They had long been good to us and protected our trees from axes and fire. They had looked after the Little Ones and fed them when the forest buried itself beneath the snow. Further, we had grown tired of the village’s endless persecution of those they called Heathens, those who sought the old ways and invited us back into the world we had once ruled.
We are endless like the water, and immortal. We move with the wind. Our memories are longer than those of the trees or rocks.
And we keep our promises.
So I led my people, the people of the woods, made of elements and stars and ancient magick, into the village of New Ipswich. My soldiers called blue fire up from the places outside the earth to burn their homes and fences of dead wood. They froze their monuments until rust engulfed the metal and devoured it, like the Plague of Invisible Mouths, and razed them to the earth.
As the wind carried us along the streets, I spread my fists and the earth opened. Thick roots of the nearby trees sprang from deep within the ground, wrapping around Joseph Abbott, Chastity Parke, Cora Rawlins and other fleeing forms and yanking them back into the hole. The displaced dirt rushed back in to bury many of the villagers alive. We watched as their clawing, scrabbling forms sank beneath the dirt. Cora’s mouth gaped open and then filled with dirt and she was pulled under.
The roots, however, had laid claim to Joseph and Chastity. The dirt, hard now like stone, held both at the waists while the roots tightened around their necks and ribs and crushed their bodies. They dangled limply toward the earth like starving plants, and the roots, with a taste now for blood, sought more villagers to ensnare.
I commanded thorny vines to loose their hold on the woods and snake through the village, spearing eyes and lungs and hearts. Some, glowing pale green and blue with rage, took hold of villagers’ limbs and tore bodies apart.
Blood washed the dirt streets and the moans and wails and screams of Mother Martha’s enemies mixed with the howl of our savage winds. We spared the children, who ran away into the woods. Little Ellena had asked for that, and we obliged. The men and women of the village, able-bodied farmers and strong-backed workers—the breeders of the new human race—we slaughtered and left where they fell.
We made our way to the gallows.
Creedence Burnell, Obedience Baker, and Jeremiah Pickering huddled on their stage, watching with frozen, horrified faces the carnage swirling around their village. The limp, mangled body of our little Martha hung from their gallows pole like a broken branch from a dead tree. I cut Martha’s wire-rope with a gesture and she fell, a lump of rags and beaten flesh. Then I sent others to sweep around Ellena in whirling dervishes of wind and protect her. She stood very still among them and covered her eyes with her hands.
Those three men of the village cowering before us were not like the men of old, who in facing our wrath stood firm and stoic with their weapons drawn, ready to greet death. These wept and begged, and then they fell like kindling when we caused their gallows to splinter and spear their eyes and throats.
The village elders had fled to their New Church. Decades ago, they had built it from sheets of tin and metal and iron, from old shipping containers and scraps of ships and cars and trucks. Electronic circuitry, long dry, formed an arch over the doorway. Cell phones lined the windows like frames of blind eyes. Braided electrical cables had been furnished as architectural embellishments. Taking in so much of the technology of the New God, I couldn’t help but remember the fear that had once driven us into the ground and the deepest shadows of the forest.
And then I remembered the anger.
My army at my back, we burst through the doors.
The village elders we found huddled near the altar, clutching each other behind the 72-inch flatscreen television which formed its front face. Some prayed to their New God. Others looked ready to fight.
Ellena was right; they brandished iron. They had also fashioned crude weapons from remnants of steel and tin and other alloys of metal. They had charged up their generator, and the metal prongs of their soul-cleansing device sparked almost like magick.
“W-What are you, woman?” Elder Barrow asked in a voice part bluster and part terror. “What manner of Heathen devil are you?”
We did not answer. Instead, we swept toward the altar.
They swung their weapons and the prongs of metal vibrated and sizzled with electrical sparks, but we were practiced in avoiding their machines. Zebede Ratcliff thrust at us with his iron spear. I gestured with my fingers and his head turned all the way around, snapping his neck. Cotton Pratt, who beat Martha worse than he had ever beaten his wife and daughter, swung at me with an iron axe. I flew out of its way, and with a nod, raised him above the ground and dashed him against the stone floor. We crushed them, broke their bones. We used the old magick, the substance of our souls from the dimensions we in ancient times called home. The secrets of that substance were many, perhaps too many for most whose bodies and minds had so short a memory.
Elder Barrow fell to his knees. “Oh, ancient goddesses and gods, forgive me! Please forgive me! I didn’t understand before, but now—now I see!”
“You will never see again,” I said, and a fog overtook his eyes. He cried out, clutching at his face, whimpering that he was blind. I considered slitting his throat. Instead, I caused his right hand and arm to shrivel and curl up to the elbow, as well as his left foot to the ankle and his testicles.
He might not have the memory of trees, but I would make sure he remembered who he had angered that day.
When the bodies of the Heathens’ enemies lay in a bloody heap on the altar like the sacrifices of old, their remnants of technology scattered about them like a halo, we looked around. One man was left, cowering in a corner. When he saw us, he didn’t beg. He didn’t fight.
He simply looked up at us, nodded, then closed his eyes and said, “Please be merciful and make it quick, Ancient Ones.”
“Jonah Harwood,” I replied. “You will let the girl return to the house in the glen and live as she has lived, and you will protect her. You will all
ow no harm to come to her as it did to her mother. Do this, and we will let you live.”
Harwood opened his eyes. They shone with relief and surprise. “Yes, yes, of course. Of course I will. I will protect her until my dying day.”
“Then we will remember you,” I said, and at that, we returned to the trees.
* * *
Ellena tells that story to her children, and her children’s children. Sometimes, Grandpa Jonah tells it, though his eyes don’t sparkle quite the same way when he does. Sometimes, when he finishes, he stares out the window of the little house in the glen and worries that the cities of the Faithful will hear about the little village where the Heathens won, that they will come out and try to make things return to the way they were.
More often than not, when he looks out that window, he sees us, and the anxious lines in his face soften a little, and he turns back to the children and smokes his pipe and tells them about the rainforests his family once tried to save.
He has no need to worry, because we are still here, among the trees, watching. We still sing the songs in the old language and speak through the rustling of the leaves. We have memories that go on, longer than that little house in the glen will stand, longer than bones will hold up those who live in it. We remember.
And we keep our promises.
HOME:
A MORGANVILLE VAMPIRES STORY
Rachel Caine
“Oh, shit, no they didn’t,” Shane Collins said. “Tell me that’s not a coffee shop going in across the street.”
Hex Life Page 9
