by Paul Kearney
The fire sputters in the heavy drops which are cascading down from the trees above. Jaelle bends over it, and blows on the guttering flames, and passes her hand over them as though she is stroking a cat. The light flashes, startling me. It blows out blue and green, and catches in the wood at last, rising bright and clear.
It is dark enough now for it to cast shadows. In the bright yellow light of it Jaelle meets my eyes and smiles, and shakes her hand as though it hurts her.
Old Job turns up and he has a billhook which he uses as quick and deft as a knife, and he slashes and hacks at some green wood and stabs it into the ground. A spit, all white wood and grey bark, in its own way a little sculpture.
Soon there is a can of water hanging over the fire, and I can just begin to see the sense of what Luca was saying earlier. I always thought that firelight in a wood was a fine thing, one of the best things. But here and now it is more than that. It is all that makes it possible to look into the prospect of the night ahead. Without it, the misery would be overwhelming.
I hear hacking and chopping in the wood out of the light. More of the men come in with bundles of firewood, and they dump them before walking away again. The women pile them up next to the flames, and some of the greener limbs begin to ooze bubbled sap with the heat, while from the more rotten wood the insects begin to crawl like rats leaving a sinking ship. Beetles and woodlice and all manner of crawling life, all scurrying away from the flames.
But I am so glad of it. I take off my coat the way most of the others are doing and hold it before the flames. Not to dry it – that would take too long – but simply to warm the wetness it holds.
There is very little talk. I hear them speak in their own language, and wonder if I shall ever have to learn it. Un, deux, trois… I hope not.
‘It’ll clear afore morning,’ a voice says beside me. It is Queenie.
She seems to have appeared out of nowhere. The rain has soaked her and covered her in bright-lit drops. She looks as though she is dressed in gems, and her face is shining with water. She appears much younger than she did trudging along through the day and unlike the rest of us, she doesn’t so much as shiver once. I can see Jaelle in her face, and Luca too. I wonder who their father is, and if he is out here with us somewhere in the gathering January dark.
‘You has many questions, little one. I sees ’em in your eyes,’ Queenie says, and sits down before the fire, waving a hand for me to follow.
She has a smell about her, thick and musty. It reminds me a little of the smell of the attic, but is more powerful than that. As I take my place beside her, so the others seem to fade away A long burning stick is lifted from our fire to light another, and I am sure the woman who takes it bows to Queenie as she backs away.
‘This is Badon Hill,’ Queenie says. ‘It is our place, as Whitehorse Hill belongs to the Roadmen. All this part of England is as deep in magic and myth as the mind of a child. The great battles of the long ago past was fought here, in the White Horse Vale, and before that, the stones was raised and the old signs was carved into the earth itself. Avebury, down to the south and west of here – it were the heart of worship once, and the sun was bowed to. But before even that, men knelt to the moon, for the moon is tied to the making of life, and the cycles of the Great Mother.’
Queenie looks at me, and for a second it seems almost as though the weight has fallen from her face, and she is as lean-boned as Luca.
‘You is part of that now, child. With the first running o’ your blood, you is become a woman. And the moon moves in you, even as it does in Luca there. Just in a different way, is all.
‘In the oldest of stories, the Great Mother was a mare, a she-horse. She gave birth to the stars theyselves. But men took the horse and used it in their wars, and made the stallion their symbol, forgetting the old truth of it. So the Roadmen, as they would become, carved the white horse on the very face o’ the hills to mark their power.
‘And the people that worshipped the moon, they faded into the shadows o’ the world. Men bowed to the sun for the seeming power of it, but even that was twisted into the worship of the Christ-man, who came later.’
Her face tightens, becomes angry.
‘And his followers conquered all with their lies, leaving the Old World in the darkness, ’til it was nothing more than myth and memory.
‘Beltane, they stole and made into the feast o’ their god’s death and rebirth, twisting the ancient truth. Samhain, they took to pray for their dead, and it became Hallow’s Eve. Imbolc and Lughnasa, they names for their saints. All this was taken from us by the followers o’ the Christ-man, until only a tithe of what was once known across the whole o’ the wide western isles is kept. By such as us. A people as is vanishing, year on year, until it comes down to a last few, wandering the downs and scratching for a way to get by.
‘That is all we are now, child. But it don’t mean that we do not still hold the truth in ourselves, the knowing of what is at the heart of it all.’
‘How do you know all these things?’ I ask Queenie, awed.
‘They was passed down, mother to daughter, from the time we first came to this land.’ She looks up at the sky, and smiles. ‘There was some of our folk as wandered here from the ancient east when the stones was still buried in the grass, waiting for men to wake them. We been here ever since, longer than those as calls themselves English. When the first of our kind arrived the soldiers of the Eagle was still half a world away, and the trees was like a green sea from Chester to Dover.
‘But we keeps ourselves to ourselves, and our blood pure. Most of us anyways. It’s true we dwindle, year on year. There ain’t many left now. And fewer still as has the gift that Job and Luca has been given.’
Here Queenie pauses. She looks into the fire and I think I see a shade of sadness cross her face.
‘That takes a special kind o’ making. The skin o’ the wolf is not just there for anyone to wear.’
She falls silent. I sit and wait in my steaming clothes while the others go about their business around the camp. There are three fires now, for everyone is soaked and needs to dry out. The men are fashioning wooden frames to hang their wet things upon. I see Luca patiently sharpening the end of a stake, while beside him Job is slashing at the dead bracken and gathering it together for bedding. He looks across the fires at Queenie and then at me for a second, and I can’t help but wonder why he despises me so. It is as plain as day across his face.
‘There is another line of power, some of it belonging to our people, some of it not,’ Queenie goes on at last. ‘A different gift that runs only in the womenfolk. There was a great Queen once of this country, in ancient days, who rose up against the soldiers of the Eagle and tried to cast them out. Her name was Boudika, and she had it, though she weren’t of our kind, not entire.’ She sets a hand on my knee and taps the healing scab there lightly. ‘I suppose to you, little one, a witch is someone in a pointed hat who rides a broomstick.’ She chuckles.
‘I suppose so.’ I think of Hansel and Gretel, and any number of other fairy tales.
‘Are you a witch?’ I ask her.
‘I am.’
That takes me aback. Queenie watches me, and the firelight is yellow in her eyes. She is smiling.
‘So… can you cast spells?’
‘I can.’ Her eyes widen, and a frightening change comes over her face. She raises a hand and stabs the fingers out in a star.
There is a burst of laughter behind me, and Jaelle rubs the top of my head. ‘Ma, what are you playing at?’
Queenie grins.
‘She’s just funnin’ with you Anna. You got to take a pinch of salt with what Ma comes out with sometimes.’ She leans down and kisses Queenie on the cheek, and Queenie pats her face.
The air blows out of my mouth. I breathe again. ‘You were just joking.’ I am both relieved and oddly disappointed.
But Queenie is grave now. ‘I was and I wasn’t. There’s such things as witches, Anna, but they ain’t what you be
en taught in your books and stories. They are those as has the old magic o’ the earth buried deep in them. They don’t need no spells, or black cats or gingerbread houses. In them is the same power which was put in the stones by the ancient peoples. In the faraway lands they helped build the great pyramids, and some of them was queens o’ Egypt. That is my blood, and Jaelle’s too.
‘And it is in you, child.’
I am dumbfounded. ‘Are you saying I’m a witch?’
She nods, and takes a hold of my hair and tugs on it a little, swaying my head.
‘I knows some of the old names of the womenfolk your power might be from. Cassandra and Clytemnestra for two. Medea for another. Your mother was a witch, Anna, from a line as old as mine. I smells in it your blood.
‘If you goes back far enough, you’ll find a single woman at the dawn of the world, walking cross Africa with the first men to hold flint in their hands and crack fire out of it. She is mother to us all. Epona, the Bronze folk called her, but she has as many names as there are tongues spoken across the Old World. We is part o’ that line. We partake in that power. And you can’t deny it.
‘You has bled now, and are a woman, and that power is waking in you.’
‘I don’t know what any of this is about,’ I say. ‘I don’t know why the Roadmen are after me, or why you have taken me in.’ I pull my wet coat closer about me, suddenly cold despite the fire. There is something in my pocket which scratches at my fingers, a twig or something. ‘I don’t know why they had to kill Pa,’ I say miserably.
‘He was your protector, so he had to be done away with,’ Queenie says. Her face hardens. ‘With him gone, you was cut adrift in the world. The Roadmen wants to end this line, Anna. It is a rival for their own powers. ’Tis a struggle that has been going on for as long as there are women and men loving and hating one another.’
‘It’s about good and evil?’ I ask, thoroughly confused.
‘’Tis more complicated than that.’ She sighs. ‘And simpler too, like the coming and going o’ the seasons. Winter gives way to spring. Summer dies and in the dying it turns to autumn. The world is made new by it, but sacrifices got to be made to make it happen.
‘Most folk know nothing of this; it passes them by like the rain on the window. But for us, out here, it is everything.’
‘I ran away to keep out of the workhouse,’ I tell Queenie. ‘That’s all I know.’
She looks closely at me, and finally nods. ‘Happen that’ll do for now. I done said enough for one night. That pretty little head o’ yourn must be fit to bust with all this.’ She sets her hand upon my head and shakes it again. ‘Right now, you needs to get dry, and eat. This life is hard for those who ain’t born to it.’
It is. Harder than I thought. It is all very well to daydream about campfires, and stars by night, but I see now – I feel now – the weary labour of it, and the effort it takes just to make a way through the day.
‘Get some sleep, little one. I shall watch over thee, and soon there will be food to eat, and the fire will be hot and high, and we will talk some more, perhaps.’
PERHAPS IT WAS a spell, perhaps not. But I do sleep, despite the bustle of the camp, for I am bone-weary.
Queenie’s words run through my head and conjure up strange pictures, half-dreams and imaginings.
In my sleep I see a vast, dun-coloured plain covered with yellow grass and dotted with strange, swollen trees. A tiny group of people is walking across it, skin burnt black by the sun. They are tall and very thin and near naked, and they carry long flint-tipped spears. A woman walks out in front of them, and she has eyes blue as cornflowers in her dark face and breasts flat as empty pockets, but the men all defer to her and she looks at the shimmering horizon and strides on tirelessly, the dust of the hot earth rising round her feet.
Then the world changes, and it is the familiar one of long grass-covered slopes and broad-leafed trees, and rivers wide and brown.
Another plain, but this one is rich and green. Men are at work upon it, hundreds of them, and the haze of woodsmoke rises into the air. They are dragging huge stones from the riverbank, crowds of them heaving and sweating and carrying earth and setting down a roadway of rolling logs. The great megaliths inch forward over the grass towards a circled mound which is bristling with timber scaffolding. They scar the earth as they are hauled onwards, and the skin of the world is ripped away to reveal white chalk and brown clay, and the sharp edges of broken flint.
Strangely, I hear the beat of hooves on the turf, but there are no horses here. And the men chant at their work in a language that is wholly unknown and achingly familiar, as if it were words I should know, or once used myself.
The sun is gone, and all is in darkness. I am in a forest now, and when I look up I can see the limbs of the trees black against a star-bright sky. And there is a moon in it, bright and full. The forest is thick and untended and the trees within it are giants of their kind. Oaks with trunks wider than a dinner-table. Great ash with wrinkled bark. Berry-bright rowan, and holly dark and shining under the moon.
Things move in the wood, padding from shadow to deeper shadow. I see eyes reflecting back the were-light, and I can smell them. A great wolf looms out of the darkness and lopes towards me on soundless paws, but I am not afraid. It comes so close I can feel the heat of its breath, and I run my fingers through the harsh prickle of its fur, and that touch is pure delight in my palms.
The wolf lies down at my feet and I lie with it on the fallen leaves and the deep-smelling earth, and I feel the heat of it down the entire length of my body and I grasp its fur in my fists and pull it close. Above us, the moon is quicksilver-bright against the branches of the ancient trees.
19
‘THEY’VE GONE,’ OLD Job says.
‘Is you sure of that?’ Queenie demands.
‘Damn it woman, if I says they is gone then it is so. There ain’t a hair nor a scent o’ them between here and Coxwell village. Luca – you tell her.’
I open an eye. The fires are blazing high and everyone is gathered about them. Job and Luca stand before Queenie, who sits on the frayed carpet of her bedroll as if it is a throne.
‘It’s true, far as I can make out,’ Luca says. ‘I went north as far as the river, but there ain’t nothing to be seen.’
‘Tracks?’ Jaelle asks them. She is seated on Queenie’s right.
‘Some, but they was old – yesterday’s. Could be they is in the deeps o’ Badbury Forest, but if they are, they found some way to get there without so much as bending a blade o’ grass.’
‘They’ll not go near woods, not at this time o’ year,’ Queenie says, batting the idea aside with a wave of her hand.
‘Maybe they gave up,’ Jaelle says.
‘Maybe. But it don’t feel like that.’ Queenie ponders. ‘All right. We stands watches tonight, as usual. Tomorrow we heads north to the river and crosses at Radcot Bridge. ’Tis time to be away from the Downs and the open country. Where there’s more common folk around, they is more cautious.’
‘’Tis a lot o’ trouble for a black haired bundle who don’t know her arse from a hole in the ground,’ Job growls.
‘I’ll judge if that be so,’ Queenie says, very quiet. She and Job stare at one another. Then Queenie points at Luca. ‘You want him to be the last of his kind?’
‘You know that ain’t it,’ Job says. His grey beard twitches.
‘My way is the only way,’ Queenie goes on, her voice lowered so that I can hardly make it out. ‘So she’s young – well I was no older. Does you remember that, Job?’
‘You was one of us. She ain’t. She’s a city brat, spoiled and soft. She’ll not stay with this life, no matter how you works it.’ The old man turns away and mutters something inaudible.
‘What are you two on about Ma?’ Luca asks.
‘Never you mind boy. The moon is rising fat and white. ’Tis almost time you wore the other face.’
Luca nods. ‘I feel it coming. I been bottling it in for hour
s.’
‘Job?’
The older man runs his fingers through his beard, not meeting her eyes. ‘Aye, ’tis time all right. Mayhap that’s why the Roadmen give up the chase. They was on our backs most o’ the morning, and then they drew off, like…’
He kneels down beside Queenie. I try so hard to look asleep, and watch them through slitted eyes, the firelight flashing out in white wands. I know that I am not supposed to hear any of this.
‘I don’t feel it like I used,’ Job says in a whisper to Queenie, and there is something like a sob in his voice. ‘My days is near done, sweetheart. You knows it too.’
Queenie strokes his face. ‘’Tis the price that is paid.’
Job clears his throat. He flashes a look at me and I lie, breathing soft, eyes closed now. But my heart is hammering fast.
‘Does she have no idea what she’s about?’
‘Not yet.’ Queenie’s voice is suddenly a sharp hiss. ‘And don’t you be thinkin’ o’ telling her.’
‘She’ll be all right.’ It is Luca’s voice. ‘She got more heart than many a grown man I’ve run across. I’ll look after her, Ma.’
‘You’re a good boy, Luca. See that you does.’
After that, I hear the sounds of them settling down again, the clink of metal and click of wood, water being poured. I lie puzzling it out in my head with the firelight a golden bloom on my closed eyes. I wish I understood more. But I suppose it has only been a few days.
I remember my strange dreams, and I am quite sure they were not my own. They feel more like someone else’s memory.
I would lie on – I am almost dry now, and not hungry at all. But I have to go to the toilet, and try as I might that urge cannot be wished away. I open my eyes and yawn and stretch, and make a great business of showing I am awake. I find Queenie and Jaelle smiling at me. Of Job and Luca there is no sign.
