Witches: Wicked, Wild & Wonderful

by Paula Guran

The kite inquired of heaven and earth:

  IS THERE A GREATER MAGICIAN THAN I?

  In a confusion of datelessness, the years shriveled and fell like the leaves . . .

  But though the date of her arrival was uncertain, the date of his arrival was exactly remembered.

  It was in the year of the Scorpion, on the day of the blooming of the ancient acacia tree in Thirty-Third Plaza, that only put forth flowers once in every twenty-sixth decade. As the sun began to shine over the towers and bridges, he appeared under the glistening branches of this acacia, seated cross-legged on the ground. The fretwork of light and shadow, and the mothlike blooms of the tree, made it hard to be sure of what he was, or even if he was substantially there. He was indeed discernible first by an unearthly metallic music that sewed a way out through the foliage and ran down the plaza like streams of water, till a crowd began to gather to discover the source.

  The music came from a pipe of bone which was linked, as if by an umbilical cord of silver tubing, to a small tablet of lacquer keys. Having observed the reason for the pipe’s curious tone, the crowd moved its attention to the piper. Nor was his tone at all usual. The colors of his garments were of blood and sky, the shades, conceivably, of pain and hope. Around his bowed face and over his pale hands as he played hung a cloud of hair dark red as mahogany, but to which the sun rendered its own edging of blood and sky-blue rainbows.

  When the music ceased, the crowd would have thrown him cash, but at that moment he raised his head, and revealed he was masked, that a face of alabaster covered his own, a formless blank of face that conveyed only the most innocent wickedness. Although through the long slits of the eyes, something was just detectable, some flicker of life, like two blue ghosts dwelling behind a wall. Then, before the crowd had scarcely formed a thought, he set the instruments of music aside and came to his feet, (which were bare), rose straight and tall and pliant as smoke rising from a fire. He held up one hand and a scarlet bird soared out of his palm. He opened the other hand and an azure bird soared out of that. The two birds dashed together, merged, fell apart in a shattering of gems, rubies, garnets, sapphires, aquamarines, that dewed the pavement for yards around. With involuntary cries of delight and avarice, men bent to pick them up and found peonies and hyacinths instead had rooted in the tiles.

  “Then stars spun through the air, and he juggled them—ten stars or twenty.”

  “Stars by day—day-stars? They were fires he juggled from hand to hand.”

  “He seemed clothed in fire. All but the white face, like a bowl of white thoughts.”

  “Then he walked on his hands and made the children laugh.”

  “A vast throng of people had congregated when he removed several golden fish from the acacia tree. These spread their fins and flew away.”

  “He turned three somersaults backwards, one after another with no pause.”

  “The light changed where he was standing.”

  “Where did he come from?”

  “That is speculation. But to our chagrin, many of us saw where he proceeded.”

  Into the crowd, like the probing of a narrow spear, the presence of the enchantress had pressed its way. They became aware of her as they would become aware of a sudden lowering of the temperature, and, not even looking to see what they had no need or wish to see, they slid from her like water from a blade. She wore violet sewn with beads the color of green ice. All her face, save only the eyes, was caged in an openwork visor of five thin curving horizontal bars of gold. Her hair today was the tint of tarnished orichale.

  She stood within the vortex the crowd had made for her, she stood and watched the magician-musician. She watched him produce silver rings from the air, fling them together to represent atoms or universes, and cast them into space in order to balance upside down on his head, catching the rings with his toes. Certainly, she had had some inkling of the array of mages who had been called to Qon Oshen against her. If it struck her that this was like some parody of their arts, some game played with the concept of witchcraft, she did not demonstrate. But that she considered him, contemplated him, was very evident. The crowd duly grew grim and silent, hanging on the edges of her almost tangible concentration as if from spikes. Then, with a hundred muffled exclamations, it beheld the Magia turn without a word and go away again, having approached no one, having failed to issue that foreboding commandment: Follow me.

  But it seemed this once she had had no necessity to say the ritual aloud. For, taking up the pipe and the tablet of keys, leaving seven or eight phantasms to dissolve on the air, five or six realities—gilded apples, paper animals—to flutter into the hands of waiting children, the masked, red-headed man walked from under the acacia tree, and followed her without being requested.

  A few cried out to him, warning or plea. Most hugged their silence, and as he passed them, the nerves tingled in their spines. While long after he had disappeared from view, they heard the dim, clear notes of the pipe start up along the delicate arteries of the town, like new blood running there in the body of Qon Oshen. It seemed he woke music for her as he pursued her and what must be his destruction.

  Men lingered in Thirty-Third Plaza. At last, one of the Mhey household spoke out in a tone of fearful satisfaction:

  “Whatever else, I think on this occasion she has summoned up a devil to go with her.”

  “It is Saturo,” responded a priest in the crowd, “the demon-god of darkness and fire. Her evil genius come to devour her.”

  In alarm and excitement, the people gazed about them, wondering if the town would perish in such a confrontation.

  She never once looked back, and never once, as those persons attested which saw him go by, did he falter, or the long sheaves and rills of notes falter, that issued from the pipe and the tablet of lacquer keys.

  Taisia-Tua reached her mansion gates, and they swung shut behind her. Next, a carved door parted and she drew herself inside the house as a hand is drawn into a glove, and the door, too, shut itself firmly. In the space of half a minute the demon, if such he was, Saturo, if so he was called, had reached the iron gates. Whole families and their guards had been unable to breach these gates, just as the rocket had been unable to disunify the architecture. Locust the thief had wriggled in by tricks and incantations, but the law of Balance in magic may have decreed just such a ludicrous loophole should be woven in the fabric of the Magia’s safeguards. Or she may have had some need for one at least to spy the sole enchantment she dealt inside her rose-red walls.

  He who was supposed to be, and might have been, Saturo, the demon-god of flame and shade, poised then at one of the gates. Even through the blank white mask, any who were near could have heard his soft, unmistakable voice say to the gate:

  “Why shut me out, when you wish me to come in?”

  And at these words the gate opened itself and he went through it.

  And at the carved door he said: “Unless you unlock yourself, how am I to enter?”

  The door swung the slender slice of itself inward, and the demon entered the mansion of the witch.

  The mirrors hung and burned, and fleered and sheered all about him then, scaled over each other, winking, shifting, promising worlds that were not. Saturo paid no attention to any of them. He walked straight as a panther through the house, and the myriad straight and savage images of him, sky and snow, and the drowning redness of his hair, walked with him—but he never glanced at them.

  So he arrived quickly in the room where the rose spun and threw off its fiery tears. And here the enchantress had already seated herself on the pillow of silk. Her face, in its golden cage, was raised to his. Her eyelids were rouged a soft, dull purple, the paint on her skin—a second skin—dazzled. Each of her terrible clawlike nails crossed over another. Her eyes, whose hue and character were obscured, stared. She looked merciless. Or simply devoid of anything, which must, therefore, include mercy.

  Saturo the demon advanced to within two feet of her, and seated himself on the patterned floor in
front of her. So they stared at each other, like two masked dolls, and neither moved for a very long while.

  At length, after this very long while had dripped and melted from the chamber like wax, Taisia-Tua spoke to the demon.

  “Can it be you alone are immune to my wonderful magery?”

  There was no reply, only the stare of the mask continuing unalleviated, the suspicion of two eyes behind the mask, unblinking. Another season of time went by, and Taisia-Tua said:

  “Will you not look about you? See, you are everywhere. Twenty to one hundred replicas of yourself are to be found on every wall, the floor, the ceiling. Why gaze at me, when you might gaze at yourself? Or can it be you are as hideous as that other who broke in here, and like him do not wish to be shown to your own eyes? Remove your mask, let me see to which family of the demons you belong.”

  “Are you not afraid,” said Saturo, “of what kind of face a demon keeps behind a mask?”

  “A face of black shadow and formlessness, or of blazing fire. The prayers of the town to be delivered from me have obviously drawn you here. But I am not afraid.”

  “Then, Taisia-Tua Magia, you yourself may pluck away the mask.”

  Having said this, he leaned toward her, so close his dark red hair brushed her suddenly uplifted hands, which she had raised as if to ward him off. And as if she could not help herself then, the edges of her monstrous nails met the white mask’s edges, and it fell, like half an eggshell, to the floor. It was no face of dark or flame which appeared. But pale and still, and barely human in its beauty, the face looked back at her and the somber pallor of the eyes, that were indeed like two blue ghosts haunting it. It was a cruel face, and kind, compassionate and pitiless, and the antithesis of all masks. And the moment she saw it, never having seen it before, she recognized it, as she had recognized him under the acacia tree. But she said hastily and coldly, as if it were sensible and a protection to say such things to such a creature: “You are more handsome than all the rest. Look into the mirrors. Look into the mirrors and see yourself.”

  “I would rather,” said Saturo, who maybe was not Saturo, “look at you.”

  “Fool,” said the enchantress, in a voice smaller than the smallest bead on her gown. “If you will not surrender to your vanity, how is my magic to work on you?”

  “Your magic has worked. Not the magic of your spells. Your own magic.”

  “Liar,” said the witch. “But I see you are bemused, as no other was, by fashion.” At this, she pulled the gold cage from her face, and the orichaic wig from her hair—which flew up fine and electric about her head. “See, I am less than you thought,” said Taisia-Tua. “Surely you would rather look at yourself?” And she smeared the paint from her face and wiped it clean and pale as paper. “Surely you would rather look at yourself?” And she threw off her jewels, and the nails, and the outer robe of violet, and sat there in the plain undergown. “Surely you would rather look at yourself?” And uncolored and unmasked she sat there and lowered her eyes, which was now the only way she could hide herself. “Surely, surely,” she muttered, “you would rather look at yourself.”

  “Who,” said he, quieter than quietness, and much deeper than depth, “hurt you so in the north that you came to this place to revenge yourself forever? Who wounded you so you must plunge knives into others, which certainly remained the same knife, plunged again and again into your own heart? Why did the heart break that now enables these mirrors not to break? Who loved himself so much more than you that you believed you also must learn to love only your own image, since no other could love you, or choose to gaze on you rather than on himself? True of most, which you have proven. Not true of all. What silly game have you been playing, with pain turned into sorcery and vanity turned into a spell? And have you never once laughed, young woman, not even at yourself?”

  Her head still bowed, the enchantress whispered, “How do you know these things?”

  “Any would know it, that knew you. Perhaps I came in answer to praying, not theirs, but yours. Your prayers of glass and live-dead men.”

  Then taking her hand he stood up and made her stand with him.

  “Look,” he said, and now he leaned close enough she could gaze into the two mirrors of his eyes. And there she saw, not another man staring in forever at himself, but, for the first time, her own face gazing back at her—for this is what he saw. And finding this, Taisia-Tua, not the rose, wept, and as everyone of her tears fell from her eyes, there was the sound of mirror-glass breaking somewhere in the house.

  While, here and there about Qon Oshen, as the mirrors splintered, inverted images crumbled inside the eyes of young men, and were gone.

  Iye Linla yawned and cursed, and called for food. The sons of Mhey came back to themselves and rolled in a riotous heap like inebriated puppies. A priest bellowed, an aristocrat frowned, at discovering themselves propped up like invalids, their relatives bobbing, sobbing, about the bed. Each returned and made vocal his return. In Twenty-First Plaza, an artist rushed from his house, shouting for the parchment with the bloodstain of his genius upon it.

  By dusk, when the stars cast their own bright broken glass across the sky, the general opinion was that the witch was dead. And decidedly, none saw that wigged and masked nightmare lady again.

  For her own hair was light and fine, and her skin paler yet, and her eyes were gray as the iridium lake. She was much less beautiful, and much more beautiful than all her masks. And in this disguise, her own self, she went away unknown from Qon Oshen, leaving all behind her, missing none of it, for he had said to her: “Follow me.”

  A month of plots and uneasiness later, men burst in the doors of the vacant mansion, hurling themselves beneath the grinning toads and the frigid cats of greenish jade, as if afraid to be spat on. But inside they found only the webs of spiders and the shards of exploded mirrors. Not a gem remained, or had ever existed, to appease them. No treasure and no hoard of magery. Her power, by which she had pinned them so dreadfully, was plainly merely their own power, those energies of self-love and curiosity and fear turned back, (ever mirror-fashion), on themselves. Like the reflection of a moon, she had waned, and the mirage sunk away, but not until a year was gone did they sigh with nostalgia for her empire of uncertainty and terror forever lost to them. “When the Magia ruled us, and we trembled,” they would boastfully say. They even boasted of the mocking kite, until one evening a sightseer, roaming the witch’s mansion—now a feature of great interest in Qon Oshen—came on a scrap of silk, and on the silk a line of writing.

  Then Qon Oshen was briefly ashamed of Taisia-Tua Magia. For the writing read: LOVE, LOVE, LOVE THE MAGICIAN IS GREATER, FAR GREATER, THAN I.

  Theodora’s Goss’s mysterious Miss Emily Gray and her young pupils employ mirrors in magical ways. We’ve been raised knowing about the evil witch/queen’s magic mirror in “Snow White” and Alice traveling through a looking glass. Most of us think—at least fleetingly—of bad luck when we break a mirror. Covering mirrors after a death is (or was) a common custom in many cultures and religions. There is lore connecting the soul to one’s reflection as well as the ability to glimpse the dead. Witches and others are said to be able to see the past and present, or divine the future through mirrors and other reflective surfaces. Mirrors—in jewelry, sewn onto clothing or set in windows—have also been used to repel evil, but they can also captivate. Mirrors reveal the truth, but can also deceive.

  Lessons with Miss Gray

  Theodora Goss

  That summer, we were reporters: intrepid, like Molly McBride of the Charlotte Observer, who had ridden an elephant in the Barnum and Bailey Circus, and gone up in a balloon at the Chicago World’s Fair, and whose stagecoach had been robbed by Black Bart himself. Although she had told him it would make for a better story, Black Bart had refused to take her purse: he would not rob a lady.

  We were sitting in the cottage at the bottom of the Beauforts’ garden, on the broken furniture that was kept there. Rose, on the green sofa with t
he torn upholstery, was chewing on her pencil and trying to decide whether her yak, on the journey she was undertaking through the Himalayas, was a noble animal of almost human intelligence, or a surly and unkempt beast that she could barely control. Emma, in an armchair with a sagging seat, was eating gingerbread and writing the society column, in which Ashton had acquired a number of Dukes and Duchesses. Justina, in another armchair, which did not match—but what was Justina doing there at all? She was two years older than we were, and a Balfour, of the Balfours who reminded you, as though you had forgotten, that Lord Balfour had been granted all of Balfour County by James I. And Justina was beautiful. We had been startled when she had approached us, in the gymnasium of the Ashton Ladies’ Academy, where all of us except Melody went to school, and said, “Are you writing a newspaper? I’d like to help.” There she was, sitting in the armchair, which was missing a leg and had to be propped on an apple crate. It leaned sideways like a sinking ship. She was writing in a script that was more elegant than any of ours—Rose’s page was covered with crossings out, and Emma’s with gingerbread crumbs—about Serenity Sage, who was, at that moment, trapped in the Caliph’s garden, surrounded by the scent of roses and aware that at any moment, the Caliph’s eunuchs might find her. She would always, afterward, associate the scent of roses with danger. How, Justina wondered, would Serenity escape? How would she get back to Rome, where the Cardinal, who had hired her, was waiting? Beside him, as he sat in a secret chamber beneath the cathedral, were a trunk filled with gold coins and his hostage: her lover, the revolutionary they called The Mask. We did not, of course, insist that everything in our newspaper be true. How boring that would have been. And Melody was sitting on the other end of the sofa, reading the Charlotte Observer, trying to imitate the advertising.

  “Soap as white as, as—” she said. “As soap.”

  “As the snows of the Himalayas,” said Rose, who had decided that her yak was surly, and the sunlight on the slopes blinding. But surely her guide, who was intrepid, would lead her to the fabled Forbidden Cities.