By These Ten Bones

by Clare B. Dunkle

  “I didn’t want you to know,” he whispered. “Not you, most of all. I’m something horrible, Madeleine. I don’t mean to be. I know what you think of me now.”

  Maddie felt tears come to her eyes. But it was silly to cry, she told herself firmly. This was something crying wouldn’t mend.

  “No, I don’t think that,” she answered slowly. “I’m not sorry I know, Paul.” She slipped out of the house and left him alone, still staring up at the ceiling.

  9

  All that rainy day, Maddie and her cousins sat on the floor of her uncle’s empty forge and peeled rushes while the short black chickens scratched through the peelings and clucked over small bugs. It took a knack to strip the fibers from the pulp so that it would give a good light when soaked in fat, but even the little children knew how to do it. Soon they would need these lights. Darkness was coming, the time of year when the days were short and stormy. Maddie felt that those dark days were already here.

  As she sat there, working mindlessly, absorbed in horrifying thoughts, a voice in her head kept laughing at her. You wanted to know all about him, it taunted. He was so exciting and mysterious. Well, now you know the mystery, don’t you, you and your stupid curiosity.

  You’re in trouble, she told herself fiercely as she split and peeled the rushes. This is real trouble, big trouble, and it’s bigger than you are. It belongs to big, worldly men like Father Mac and Black Ewan. But as she worked, she imagined what the men would do about it. It was just like the old Traveler had told her. Paul would be dead that same hour.

  “I’ll bet you’re glad the wood-carver’s back,” remarked Bess as she shooed away a chicken.

  “Why?” asked Maddie absently.

  “You know why,” prompted Bess with a grin, but Maddie shook her head.

  That evening, Maddie swept Lady Mary’s dusty corner as the old woman ate fish soup.

  “If a werewolf’s not a wolf, what is it?” she wanted to know.

  “Why do you ask a question like that?” demanded Lady Mary. “Because of your book about them,” answered the girl. “Who can tell, I might meet up with one.”

  Lady Mary finished her supper. “I doubt it,” she remarked, “if you stop chasing shadows. I was just rereading that book, as a matter of fact.”

  She picked up a small volume from one of the stacks and handed it to Maddie, watching the girl turn the brown vellum pages and run her finger over the black strokes of the crowded letters. “I should have taught you to read Latin,” she sighed.

  Maddie looked up from the puzzling page. “Bless you!” she laughed. “As if I could read anything!” She handed back the book.

  “But no one else asks the questions you ask,” observed Lady Mary. “You’d like to read, I think. What is a werewolf? It’s closer to being a flea or a louse than a wolf. Fleas, lice, and werewolves are all parasites. They live on a host. A werewolf is a spirit or being of some kind that lives with a person. On the night of the full moon, it takes over entirely, making the person do what it wants. It’s related to the undead. It may even be the same type of parasite, except that the undead inhabits a corpse.”

  “But if it’s there all the time, why doesn’t it always make the person do what it wants?”

  “The undead seems to do that,” admitted Lady Mary. “It walks whenever it pleases at night. But the werewolf inhabits a living human, and the human has to stay living. If a werewolf were a werewolf every night, how long would its person survive? A few nights, maybe. Then it would die of exhaustion or be caught and killed, and with its host dead, the werewolf inside it is dead, too. Unless it becomes one of the undead. My book isn’t sure.”

  Maddie thought about Paul in his fever, half delirious even now. He must be sick around every full moon. That deathly pale face, those long white fingers. A poison was drying up his blood. He couldn’t survive it night after night. It would be too much for him.

  “How does a person become a werewolf?” she asked. Lady Mary was reading her book.

  “Oh, it’s classic,” she replied absently. “It comes from a bite, just like the mad dog’s bite that makes others go mad. It’s like a very strange illness.”

  “Then what’s the cure?” demanded Maddie.

  “The cure?” murmured the old woman. “A werewolf is killed, and his body is burned, just like a mad dog. Or the werewolf is burned from the start, burned to death, taking care of both requirements at once.”

  “But that’s no cure!” gasped Maddie in horror.

  “It’s a good idea. It prevents new victims from becoming werewolves—assuming the poor burned fools were werewolves to start with.”

  “So there’s no way to heal a werewolf,” concluded the girl bitterly.

  “I honestly don’t know if the book tells,” answered Lady Mary. “I’m still rereading it. I don’t see why you’d be so upset about it,” she added with a smile.

  Maddie felt numb and miserable. “Why wouldn’t I be upset to know that some people find out burning to death is their only cure?”

  Lady Mary’s smile slipped, and a shadow appeared in her eyes. Maddie felt cold at the sight of it. “I know just how you feel,” whispered the proud old woman. “You’d better be going now.”

  Maddie came home through the dim, wet twilight to find Paul asleep. She stood by the settle to look at him. Bone-white and thin. Sick with an illness that had murder as its goal and burning as its only cure.

  She heard Black Ewan’s dogs barking excitedly, and Little Ian’s dog joined in. Men’s voices hailed each other in the darkness. Her mother jumped to her feet, dropping her knitting, as James Weaver ducked under the doorpost and unwrapped his wet blanket from his shoulders.

  “Ah, wife,” he said, kissing her, “have you any food for a hungry man?” He spotted the sleeping Carver. “What ails the lad now?”

  “His fever’s back,” replied Fair Sarah, taking eggs from the basket and meal from the chest. “He wandered for two days out of his mind before Father Mac found him by the loch. It’s a mysterious illness. The boy never seems to grow stronger.”

  The next morning was Sunday, and the townspeople were all in Mass together. Father Mac reminded them of the reasons they had to thank God. The grain was out of the fields, the men were home safe, and Lachlan was well again. But some were bent on other business that morning. They had no time to waste on thankfulness.

  Carrying her basket to Lady Mary after Mass, Maddie walked by a knot of bystanders. Black Ewan was among them.

  “Maddie, come here,” he called. “You’ll not take another bite to that fiend yonder. If she wants her food, she can come out and face us.”

  The girl hesitated. Black Ewan had been telling her what to do her whole life. He was the one who made sure that everyone worked and everyone received a share.

  “She’ll be waiting for her breakfast, surely,” she pointed out. “It’s late already.” But the farmer took the basket away from her.

  “Horse, call the others,” he ordered. “It’s time we talked about this, and today’s a good day for it. We can use our rest to some purpose.”

  The people crowded around Black Ewan right where he stood on the open ground at the edge of the bog. The sky was dark and overcast, and the hills on either side kept appearing like black shadows through the silver bands of clouds. Gulls screamed and wheeled in the sky above them, fishing the choppy waters of the loch.

  “I’ve spoken my mind to the new lord about Lady Mary,” announced Black Ewan. “I’ve told him I believe that the woman is a witch. He admitted to me that she isn’t his kin and that she was only a friend of his late wife. He will hear any charge we bring against her and carry out the proper penalty.”

  “Which means,” translated Father Mac in his booming voice, “that the new lord is tired of keeping her, and now that his wife is dead, he’d rather give this castle and town to one of his strong men. It’s wasted on an old woman.”

  “He says he’ll try her fairly,” retorted Black Ewan. “What’s in
his mind is up to him, not us.”

  “He’ll try her with fire and torture,” countered the priest. “He’ll wring a confession from her one way or another. It’s up to this town not to bring a false charge against an old woman just because you’re tired of feeding her.”

  “We’d never mind the feeding if she acted like everyone else,” protested the farmer. “We feed the widows gladly, and the old ones, too. Old Peggy, and Jeannie Ian, and Tom’s Ma, we haven’t kept food from you, have we? But Lady Mary’s not like the others. And you know she’s never in church.”

  “Just because she doesn’t come to church doesn’t mean she’s a witch,” replied the priest. “Lady Mary has odd notions about God, it’s true. She comes from the city far away, and all kinds of strange ideas are the fashion there. But I’ve visited her many times and had talks with her. She’s expressed no interest in witchcraft.”

  “She wouldn’t tell you, Father,” argued Black Ewan. “It’s the fruits that give her away. A bad tree bears bad fruit, and that’s what we have from her. Think back on her time here with us. Many a misfortune has befallen us, and strange things have happened. That creature from the loch tearing up the wood-carver for one thing, and the smith’s dead baby for another.”

  “Are you going to blame every strange thing on her?” demanded Father Mac.

  As the debate went on, the mothers began to dispatch children on errands. Supplies arrived, and the women sat down to spin or knit. Colin the Smith brought glowing embers in a pot, and he and Little Ian built a fire. Horse and Gillies added lengths of wood from a rotted tree. The damp splinters steamed and smoked. Soon a bright blaze crackled up.

  “There was the time she told me to get my stinking cow out of her way,” recalled Little Ian, “and that same cow was struck by lightning within the week.”

  “And when we went to search the castle when the Water Horse came,” remembered Gillies, “she said she’d rather see a Water Horse than us.”

  “So she’s contrary,” admitted Father Mac. “But if being contrary meant being a witch, half of us here would be charged and hanged.”

  Tom’s Ma stood up, an ancient, tottering crone.

  “They told me when I was a little girl that a Bible witch talked to dead spirits,” she mumbled, her lips sunken around her toothless gums. “This witch does, too. She told me about what some dead Greek said about the spots before my eyes. Now, where’s she learning stuff like that if she doesn’t talk to spirits?”

  “She read it in a book,” said Father Mac patiently. “How do you know what King David said, or what St. Paul said? They were dead, too, before you were born.”

  “I don’t know what the good saints have to do with some dead Greek,” barked Tom’s Ma, and the assembled townspeople murmured together.

  “James, you should speak,” urged Black Ewan. “Fair Sarah, tell about your daughter’s birth.”

  “I was bad off,” said Maddie’s mother shortly. “Lady Mary helped me with her potions, and I lived.”

  “But you never had children after that,” observed the farmer. “And who are you to say that it wasn’t those potions that took them from you?”

  “And who are you to say it was?” demanded Fair Sarah in a temper. She raised her distaff, and Black Ewan took a hasty step back. Every man was afraid of being struck by a woman’s distaff. It had magical powers all its own.

  The barrage continued throughout the day. Person after person recalled livestock that were cursed, crops that were blighted, and one strange event after another. Maddie stared at the roaring fire and pondered the charges. Lady Mary wasn’t like anyone else, and she had no patience with God or her neighbors. But Maddie doubted very much that the old woman would have harmed the smith’s unborn child, and she knew the hissing creature that had stood at her door was no Water Horse. She wondered what she should do. She couldn’t defend Lady Mary without revealing Paul’s secret, and the wood-carver himself wasn’t present. The sick young man had wandered over to investigate the assembly, but Fair Sarah had sent him back inside, out of the wind. Maddie could see him appear from time to time in her doorway, too far away to hear.

  As the cloudy afternoon wore on, the gathering began to take on an air of unreality. The wood fire blazed with a friendly glow, and the children held wet sticks in it to watch them spark, or hunted for eggs to cook in the hot ashes. Little Ian brought out the last of his stock of the water of life and shared it around as they talked. The voices got louder, and the arguments grew more heated. The stories became wilder.

  At last, as the dark day tended toward twilight, out came the witch herself. Lady Mary stomped up the path from the castle in a rage, her fine velvet cloak over her shoulders and a small book in her hand.

  “You good-for-nothing!” she cried when she saw Maddie. “Do you think I want to wait all day for my food? I don’t care if you idiots want to hold some drunken revel, but you remember your obligations first!”

  Black Ewan stepped forward to face her. “You’ve taken food out of our mouths long enough,” he said sternly. “We know you for what you are, you witch, and we’re sending you to the new lord to be tried.”

  “So I’m responsible for all your troubles, I suppose?” scoffed Lady Mary. “Everything from tooth-ache to hangnail. Don’t look to me for your evils. You’re evil enough by yourselves. I won’t stand here arguing with the likes of you. Maddie, bring me my food when they’ve drunk themselves to sleep.” She turned to walk away, but Horse and Gillies blocked her path, and the people crowded around.

  “Let’s see that book first,” proposed Black Ewan. “Let’s see what prayer book you were reading on the Lord’s Day.”

  “This book?” Anxiety flickered across the old woman’s face. “This is no business of yours.”

  “We make it our business, witch,” said Gillies, and he plucked it from her.

  “No!” she cried, trying to grab it back.

  “Father, it’s in the Pope’s tongue,” announced Black Ewan, looking at it. “Tell us which of the psalms she was singing.”

  Father Mac advanced to take the book and turned to the first page.

  “‘Here begins a treatise on demonical inhabitations,’” he translated, his voice revealing his surprise, “‘concerning the possessed man, the malicious lunatic, the werewolf, and the undead.’”

  “A spell book! A book of the black arts!” exclaimed the farmer. Father Mac was absorbed in examining the text. He didn’t answer the charge.

  The whole town was around the old woman now, talking and exclaiming. “Damned witch!” shouted Little Ian, and someone flung a handful of mud onto her velvet cloak.

  “Filthy witch!” cried several voices, and the crowd surged forward.

  “Get her to safety, Black Ewan,” called Father Mac. “I hold you responsible.”

  People were shouting and cursing, and Lady Mary was shouting back. Her face was red, and her white hair had come loose from its neat bun and straggled around her face. Black Ewan half-carried, half-dragged her down to the castle, Father Mac’s arms around her protectively. Some of the crowd ran to supply themselves with weapons and rocks, but they didn’t use them. For the moment, they were unwilling to hit their parish priest.

  Father Mac and Black Ewan disappeared into the castle with her. They were intent on the relative safety of the Hole, the simple cell chiseled out of the rock and reached by a trapdoor in the floor of the lowest story. The crowd milled around outside, robbed of its victim. The men had drawn their knives, and women who had patted Maddie’s cheek since she was old enough to walk were shrieking out terrible threats.

  “Burn her goods!” shrieked Jeannie Ian, and the idea caught on at once.

  “Burn out the witch, burn the books of the black arts,” echoed a half-dozen voices. Excited boys raced back to the fire by the bog for burning sticks and embers. Townspeople came and went through the castle doorway, bringing her furniture outside. They pulled out the bench, smashed up the table, and threw linen down in a heap o
n the gravel shore. Maddie saw one of Lady Mary’s tapestries and her little embroidered footstool on the pile. Then the fire caught, and the flames went up with a hungry roar.

  Maddie raced up the stairs and into the hall. The small brown book about werewolves! She had to find it again. Her cousin Hector went by with a handful of books, and Maddie grabbed him, sending them toppling to the floor. “Get out of the way!” he said crossly as she bent to shuffle through them. He kicked the one she reached for, sending it spinning away from her hands.

  What am I doing? she thought in a frenzy. Father Mac had that book! He had it back near the houses, by the other fire. She turned and raced out again, skinning past men carrying a heavy chest down the stone steps, past Tom’s Ma and Old Peggy arguing over a sewing kit. She ran to the fire by the bog, searching the ground for the book. Stools, distaffs, and baskets of wool lay abandoned on the ground where they had talked. Someone had dropped a half-knitted sock in the mud.

  Black Ewan walked by on his way from the castle. Maddie saw him bend down and pick her book out of a clump of grass. Then he tossed it onto the glowing embers.

  Maddie tried to retrieve it, but the heat forced her back. The book about werewolves. Paul’s only hope for a cure. The pages curled and blackened and became licking flames, their secrets lost forever.

  “That didn’t belong to you!” she cried out in disappointment. The farmer just patted her on the shoulder.

  “Maddie, you don’t understand,” he said, steering her toward the houses. “This is a problem for your elders.”

  Just like Paul, thought the girl bitterly. A problem for my elders. “And that’s how elders solve problems, is it?” she challenged. “They throw them into the fire.”

  “We take care of our own,” he replied. “We attack before we’re attacked. One day you’ll have people to protect, and then you’ll understand.”

  I do have people to protect, thought Maddie. I have people to protect from you.

  They came around the corner of Black Ewan’s house. Colin the Smith knelt there, hammering on Mad Angus’s fetter. The smith had taken off the padlock and was pounding an extra link into its place, forming an unbroken chain between the two prisoners so that the Englishman couldn’t escape.