Under My Hat: Tales from the Cauldron

by Jonathan Strahan

I did not turn. I was braced for the jar of the spade on wood, or possibly metal—a coffin either way—but the sound that came up when I finally did hit something had me instantly throwing the instrument away and dropping down to half sit, half kneel on the edge of the oblong hole I’d worried out of the earth. Reaching, groping, my hand came up gripping a splintered bone.

  Great-Grandmother! I flung myself face down, clawing with both hands now, frantic, hysterical, not knowing what I was doing. Fingerbones … something that might have been a knee, an elbow … a skull—no, just the top of a skull … I don’t think I was quite sane when I heard the voice.

  “Grandson, stop … stop, before you really do addle my poor old bones. Stop!” It was a slow voice, with a cold, cold rustle in it: it sounded like the wind over loose stones.

  I stopped. I sat up, and so did she.

  Then Father—home early, due to some small war blocking his road—was beside me, as silent as I, but with an unfriendly hand gripping the back of my neck. Great-Grandmother wasn’t missing any bones, thank Dran and Tani, our household gods, who are twins. The skull wasn’t hers, nor the fingers, nor any of the other loose bones; she was definitely whole, sitting with her fleshless legs bent under her, from the knees, and her own skull clearing the top of my pit to study me out of yellowish-white empty eye sockets. She said, “The others are your Great-Aunt Keshwara. I was lonely.”

  I looked at Father for the first time. He was sweating himself, pale and swaying. I realized that his hand on my neck was largely to keep me from trembling, and to hold himself upright. “You should not have done this,” he said. He was almost whispering. “Oh, you should never have done this.” Then, louder, as he let go of me, “Great-Grandmother.”

  “Do not scold the boy, Rushak,” the stone rustle rebuked him. “It has been long and long since I saw anything but dirt, smelled anything but mold. The scent of fear tells me that I am back with my family. Sit up straight, young Da’mas. Look at me.”

  I sat as properly as I could on the edge of a grave. Great-Grandmother peered closely at me, her own skull weaving slightly from side to side, like a snake’s head. She said, “Why have you awakened me?”

  “He’s a fool,” Father said. “He made a mistake, he didn’t know.…” Great-Grandmother looked at him, and he stopped talking. She repeated the question to me.

  How I faced those eyeless, browless voids and spoke to those cold, slabby chaps, I can’t tell you—or myself—today. But I said my sister’s name—“Jashani”—and after that it got easier. I said, “Borbos, the witch-boy—he’s made her sleep, and she won’t wake up until we give in and say he can marry her. And she’d be better off dead.”

  “What?” Father said. “How—”

  Great-Grandmother interrupted, “Does she know that?”

  “No,” I said. “But she will. She thinks he loves her, but he doesn’t love anybody.”

  “He loves my money, right enough,” Father said bitterly. “He loves my house. He loves my business.”

  The eye sockets never turned from me. I said, “She doesn’t know about these things … about men. She’s just good.”

  “Witch-boy …” The rusty murmur was all but inaudible in the skeletal throat. “Ah … the Tresard family. The youngest.”

  Father and I gaped at her, momentarily united by astonishment. Father asked, “How did you …?” Then he said, “You were already …” I thanked him silently for being the one to look a fool.

  Great-Grandmother said simply—and, it might have been, a little smugly—“I listen. What else have I to do in that hole?” Then she said, “Well, I must see the girl. Show me.”

  So my great-grandmother stepped out of her grave and followed my father and me upstairs, clattering with each step like an armload of dishes, yet held firmly together somehow by the recollection of muscles, the stark memory of tendons and sinews. Neither of us liked to get too close to her, which she seemed to understand, for she stayed well to the rear of our uncanny procession. Which was ridiculous, and I knew it then, and I was ashamed of it then as well. She was family, after all.

  In Jashani’s chamber, Great-Grandmother stood looking down at the bed for a long time, without speaking. Finally she said softly, almost to herself, “Skilled … I never knew a Tresard with such …” She did not finish.

  “Can you heal her?” The words burst out of me as though I hadn’t spoken in years, which was how I felt. “She’s never hurt a soul, she wouldn’t know how—she’s foolish and sweet, except she’s very smart, it’s just that she can’t imagine that anyone would ever wish her harm. Please, Great-Grandmother, make her wake up! I’ll do anything!”

  I will be grateful to my dying day that Jashani couldn’t hear a word of all that nonsense.

  Great-Grandmother didn’t take her empty eyes from my sister as I babbled on; nor did she seem to hear a word of the babble. I’m not sure how long she stood there by the bed, though I do recall that she reached out once to stroke Jashani’s hair very lightly, as though those cold, fleshless fingers were seeing, tasting …

  Then she stepped back, so abruptly that some bones clicked against other bones, and she said, “I must have a body.”

  Again Father and I stared stupidly at her. Great-Grandmother said impatiently, “Do you imagine that I can face your witch-boy like this? One of you—either one—must allow me the use of his body. Otherwise, don’t waste my time.” She glowered into each of our pale faces in turn, never losing or altering the dreadful grin of the long-dead.

  Father took a long breath and opened his mouth to volunteer, but I beat him to it, actually stepping a bit forward to nudge him aside. I said, “What must I do?”

  Great-Grandmother bent her head close, and I stared right into that eternal smile. “Nothing, boy. You need do nothing but stand so … just so …”

  I cannot tell you what it was like. And if I could, I wouldn’t. You might ask Father, who’s a much better witness to the whole affair than I, for all that, in a way, I was the whole affair. I do know from him that Great-Grandmother’s bones did not clatter untidily to the floor when her spirit—soul, essence, life-force, tyak (as people say in the south)—passed into me. According to Father, they simply vanished into the silver mist that poured and poured into me, as I stood there with my arms out, dumb as a dressmaker’s dummy. The one reasonably reliable report I can relay is that it wasn’t cold, as you might expect, but warm on my skin, and—of all things—almost sweet on my lips, though I kept my mouth tightly shut. Being invaded—no, let’s use the honest word, possessed—by your great-grandmother is bad enough, but to swallow her? And have it taste like apples, like fasteen, like cake? I didn’t think about it then, and I’m not thinking about it now. Then, all that mattered was my feeling of being crowded to the farthest side of my head, and hearing Great-Grandmother inside me saying, dryly but soothingly, “Well done, Da’mas—well done, indeed. Slowly, now … move slowly until you grow accustomed to my presence. I will not hurt you, I promise, and I will not stay long. Slowly …”

  Sooner or later, when he judged our anguish greatest, Borbos would return to repeat his demand. Father and Great-Grandmother-in-me took it in turns to guard Jashani’s chamber through the rest of that day, the night, and all of the following day. When it was Father’s turn, Great-Grandmother would march my body out of the room and the house, down the carriageway, into our orchards and arbors; then back to scout the margins again, before finally allowing me to replace Father at that bedside where no quilt was ever rumpled, no pillow on the floor. In all of this I never lost myself in her. I always knew who I was, even when she was manipulating my mouth and the words that came out of it; even when she was lifting my hands or snapping my head too forcefully from side to side, apparently thrilled by the strength of the motion.

  “He will be expecting resistance,” she pointed out to us, in my voice. “Nothing he cannot wipe away with a snap of his fingers, but enough to make you feel that you did the best you could for Jashani before you yi
elded her to him. Now put that thing down!” she lectured Father, who was carrying a sword that he knew would be useless against Borbos, but had clung to anyway, for pure comfort.

  Father bristled. “How are we to fight him at all, even with you guiding Da’mas’s hand? Borbos could appear right now, that way he does, and what would you do? I’ll put this old sword away if you give me a spell, a charm, to replace it.” He was tired and sulky, and terribly, terribly frightened.

  I heard my throat answer him calmly and remotely, “When your witch-boy turns up, all you will be required to do is to stand out of my way.” After that Great-Grandmother did not allow another word out of me for some considerable while.

  Father had not done well from his first sight of Jashani apparently lifeless in her bed. The fact that she was breathing steadily, that her skin remained warm to the touch, and that she looked as innocently beautiful as ever, despite not having eaten or drunk for several days, cheered him not at all. He himself, on the other hand, seemed to be withering before my eyes: unsleeping, hardly speaking, hardly comprehending what was said to him. Now he put down his sword as commanded and sat motionless by Jashani’s bed, slumped forward with his hands clasped between his knees. A dog could not have been more constant, or more silent.

  And still Borbos did not come to claim his triumph … did not come, and did not come, letting our grief and fear build to heights of nearly unbearable tension. Even Great-Grandmother seemed to feel it, pacing the house in my body, which she treated like her own tireless bones that needed no relief, though I urgently did. Surrounded by her ancient mind, nevertheless I could never truly read it, not as she could pick through my thoughts when she chose, at times amusing herself by embarrassing me. Yet she moved me strangely once when she said aloud, as we were crouched one night in the apple orchard, studying the carriageway, white in the moon, “I envy even your discomfiture. Bones cannot blush.”

  “They never need to,” I said, after realizing that she was waiting for my response. “Sometimes I think I spend my whole life being mortified about one thing or another. Wake up, start apologizing for everything to everybody, just on the chance I’ve offended them.” Emboldened, I ventured further. “You might not think so, but I have had moments of wishing I were dead. I really have.”

  Great-Grandmother was silent in my head for so long that I was afraid that I might have affronted her for a second time. Then she said, slowly and tonelessly, “You would not like it. I will find it hard to go back.” And there was something in the way she said those last words that made pins lick along my forearms.

  “What will you do when Borbos comes?” I asked her. “Father says you’re not a witch, but he never would say exactly what you were. I don’t understand how you can deal with someone like Borbos if you’re not a witch.”

  The reply came so swiftly and fiercely that I actually cringed away from it in my own skull. “I am your great-grandmother, boy. If that is not all you need to know, then you must make do as you can.” So saying, she rose and stalked us out of the orchard, back toward the house, with me dragged along disconsolately, half certain that she might never bother talking to me again.

  My favorite location in the house has—naturally enough—always been a place where I wasn’t ever supposed to be: astride a gable just narrow enough for me to pretend that I was riding a great black stallion to glory, or a sea-green mordroi dragon to adventure. I cannot count the number of times I was beaten, even by Mother, for risking my life up there, and I know very well how foolish it is to continue doing it whenever I get the chance. But this time it was Great-Grandmother taking the risk, not me, so it plainly wasn’t my fault; and, in any case, what could I have done about it?

  So there you are, and there you have us in the night, Great-Grandmother and I, with the moon our only light, except for the window of Jashani’s chamber below and to my left, where Father kept his lonely vigil. I was certainly not about to speak until Great-Grandmother did; and for some while she sat in silence, seemingly content to scan the white road for a slim, swaggering figure who would almost surely not come for my sister that way. I ground my teeth at the thought.

  Presently Great-Grandmother said quietly, almost dreamily, “I was not a good woman in my life. I was born with a certain gift for … mischief, let us say … and I sharpened it and honed it, until what I did with it became, if not as totally evil as Borbos Tresard’s deeds from his birth, still cruel and malicious enough that many have never forgiven me to this day. Do you know how I died, young Da’mas?”

  “I don’t even know how you lived,” I answered her. “I don’t know anything about you.”

  Great-Grandmother said, “Your mother killed me. She stabbed me, and I died. And she was right to do it.”

  I could not take in what she had said. I felt the words as she spoke them, but they meant nothing. Great-Grandmother went on. “Like your sister, your mother had poor taste in men. She was young, I was old, why should she listen to me? If I am no witch, whatever it is that I am had grown strong with the years. I drove each of her suitors away, by one means or another. It was not hard—a little pointed misfortune and they cleared off quickly, all but the serious ones. I killed two of those, one in a storm, one in a cow pen.” A grainy chuckle. “Your mother was not at all pleased with me.”

  “She knew what you were doing? She knew it was you?”

  “Oh, yes, how not?” The chuckle again. “I was not trying to cover my tracks—I was much given to showing off in those days. But then your father came along, and I did what I could to indicate to your mother that she must choose this one. There was a man in her life already, you understand—most unsuitable, she would have regretted it in a month. The cow pen one, that was.” A sigh, somehow turning into a childish giggle, and ending in a grunt. “You would have thought she might be a little pleased this time.”

  “Was that why she …?” I could not actually say it. I felt Great-Grandmother’s smile in my spine.

  “Your mother was not a killer—merely mindless with anger for perhaps five seconds. A twitch to the left or right, and she would have missed … ah, well, it was a fate long overdue. I have never blamed her.”

  It was becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish my thoughts—even my memories—from hers. Now I remembered hearing Uncle Uska talking to Father about waking Great-Grandmother again, and being silenced immediately. I knew that she had heard them as well, listening underground in the dark, no soil dense enough to stop her ears.

  I asked, “Have you ever come back before? To help the family, like now?”

  The slow sigh echoed through our shared body. Great-Grandmother replied only, “I was always a fitful sleeper.” Abruptly she rose, balancing more easily on the gable than I ever did when I was captaining my body, and we went on with our patrol, watching for Borbos. And that was another night on which Borbos did not come.

  When he did appear at last, he caught us—even Great-Grandmother, I think—completely by surprise. In the first place, he came by day, after all our wearying midnight rounds; in the second, he turned up not in Jashani’s chamber, nor in the yard or any of the fields where we had kept guard, but in the great kitchen, where old Nanda had reigned as long as I could remember. He was seated comfortably at her worn worktable, silky and dashing, charming her with tales of his journeys and exploits, while she toasted her special chamshi sandwiches for him. She usually needs a day’s notice and a good deal of begging before she’ll make chamshi for anybody.

  He looked up when Great-Grandmother walked my body into the kitchen, greeting us first with, “Well, if it isn’t Thunder-wit, my brother-to-be. How are those frozen brains keeping?” Then he stopped, peered closely at me, and began to smile in a different way. “I didn’t realize you had … company. Do we know each other, old lady?”

  I could feel Great-Grandmother studying him out of my eyes, and it frightened me more than he did. She said, “I know your family. Even in the dirt I knew you when you were very young, and just as
evil as you are now. Give me back my great-granddaughter and go your way.”

  Borbos laughed. It was one of his best features, that warm, delightful chuckle. “And if I don’t? You will destroy me? Enchant me? Forgive me if I don’t find that likely. Try, and your Jashani slumbers decoratively for all eternity.” The laugh had broken glass in it the second time.

  I ached to get my hands on him—useless as it would have been—but Great-Grandmother remained in control. All she said, quite quietly, was, “I want it understood that I did warn you.”

  Whatever Borbos heard in her voice, he was up and out of his seat on the instant. No fiery whiplash, no crash of cold, magical thunder—only a scream from Nanda as the chair fell silently to ashes. She rushed out of the kitchen, calling for Father, while Borbos regarded us thoughtfully from where he leaned against the cookstove. He said, “Well, my goodness,” and twisted his fingers against each other in seeming anxiety. Then he said a word I didn’t catch, and every knife, fork, maul, spit, slicer, corer, scissors and bone saw in Nanda’s kitchen rose up out of her utensil drawers and came flying off the wall, straight for Great-Grandmother … straight for me … for us.

  But Great-Grandmother put up my hand—exactly as Borbos himself had done when I charged him on first seeing Jashani spellbound—and everything flashing toward us halted in the air, hanging there like edged and pointed currants in a fruitcake. Then Great-Grandmother spoke—the words had edges, too; I could feel them cutting my mouth—and all Nanda’s implements backed politely into their accustomed places. Great-Grandmother said chidingly, “Really.”

  But Borbos was gone, vanished as I had seen him do in Jashani’s chamber, his laughter still audible. I took the stairs two and three at a time, Great-Grandmother not wanting to chance my inexperienced body coming and going magically. Besides, we knew where he was going, and that he would be waiting for us there.

  He was playing with Father. I don’t like thinking about that:

  Father lunging and swinging clumsily with his sword, crying hopelessly, desperate to come to grips with this taunting shadow that kept dissolving out of his reach, then instantly reappearing, almost close enough to touch and punish. And Jashani … Jashani so still, so still …