by Diana Rivers
How we got back to Alyeeta’s clearing that day was a wonder to me. It was nothing like following Pell. I puzzled if Jhemar got much use of it, though she diligently scratched some marks with charcoal on a piece of bark, and noted the angle of the sun whenever she was able. If she could make any sense of this way, she was certainly more skilled in the woods than I could ever hope to be. Alyeeta, in the lead, went silently. She would ride a little way, stop, look about, cock her head and listen as if to some inner voice. Then she would proceed, sometimes in the same direction and sometimes changing course. When at last I asked what she did, she answered with impatience, “Easy enough for any fool to see—I picture my home and try to feel which way it draws me.” I had to trust that she could find her path back in this way, else we were lost in this forest that “fed on men and horses.”
So we zigged and zagged this way and that. After a while, I simply sat my horse and watched the day flow by, not caring if we rode up or down or stopped or went on. The woods soon lost their taint of evil and seemed full of spring music. Suddenly, for no reason I could comprehend, I felt a rush of joy in my heart for the first time since Kara’s death and my own terrified departure.
As I had not the guiding of us nor even the skill to mark the way, and we went mostly silent, I had much time to think as we rode. I decided I would let Alyeeta teach me all she knew of healing and of shielding from pain and of such matters, but that I had not the wits for reading nor for writing. The trying of it bent my brain painfully. Besides, I saw no use in it. No one in my village knew more than a few words of this sort. They lived well enough without it. I would waste no more time on this effort and determined to tell Alyeeta so quite clearly. I had even resolved to do it that very day, as soon as Jhemar had left.
Even so, it was not till long after Jhemar had ridden on, not till I was seated by Alyeeta’s fire with a cup of tea in hand, and she was standing with her back to me searching her shelves for some books, not till then that I found the courage to say, “Alyeeta, teach me whatever else you think I should know. I will work with it and do my best. But spare me this struggle with the written word. I have no mind for the learning of this, and see no use in it. Besides, no one in my family ever had such skills.”
She set down what she was holding with a hard crack and whirled around to face me, making a sound in her throat like a growl or a snarl. “Goddess be my witness!” she shouted. “They want to stay as dumb as the dumb beasts they live among and be no better treated. With such thick headedness how can they ever hope to build this new world they will need?”
Alyeeta came to sit before me. She gripped my wrists with such force the tea shook in its cup. Her eyes bored into mine, trapping me. I could neither move nor look away. In a voice that seemed to come from the very walls themselves, she said, “Tazzia, you will learn to read and write. If I teach you nothing else this time around, I will teach you that. I will free you from this prison of ignorance you live in. After that, all other knowledge will be open to you. And when, Goddess willing, there is peace again in this poor land, you will teach others of your kind. It is not for you alone we do this. Never speak to me of it again, only set your mind to the doing of it.” I was trembling with the force of her passion and could find no answer.
When at last she released my eyes and my wrists, she sat back and said in a gentler tone, “If you find it so hard to learn, I must not be a good teacher. We will have to look for new ways. As to being a dirt-child, the child of peasants, believe me they learn as well as any other sort. That is what the Highborn would have you believe, that peasant children are some sort of witless animals. Not so, their own daughters are just as hard to teach or just as easy.
“Before the time of the Witch-kills, when Witches still had some power in this land, there were Witch convents. I was mistress of one such. Before the time of the Witch-kills, Witches were all educated women. We learned in the convents, and we taught there. It was the only place a young woman could get some schooling, poor as well as rich, Witch and non-Witch alike. Along with Witchcraft, which we taught only to those with the gift, and healing, which we shared, we had knowledge of all the herbs, a knowledge of plants and animals and of all the natural world, even a knowledge of the stars and the heavenly bodies and the paths on which they moved. We Witches are all scattered now. Who are we to leave it to, this great store of knowledge? Young women in the Zarn’s cities have no place left to learn, but I will pass on to you as much as I am able, and you, in turn, will pass it on to others. In that way everything will not be lost.”
As I saw her face age and soften, I knew she was looking back into that other time. For the first time, I wondered with a shiver just how old Alyeeta really was.
All was silence for a while. I sat very still with my tea cooling in my cup, not wanting to draw her attention back to me. Suddenly she seemed to return to the present. She said, as if we had just been speaking, “As to uses, child, think of it, you could not even read an edict that spelled out your death though it was nailed up before you on a tree. That does not leave you well prepared even to save your own skin, much less to build a new culture. And that is what you will be forced to do. You might have preferred to remain the healer in your little dirt village, but it is no longer your choice. Ready or not, you have been shaken out into the world.
“Now, give me your cup, for it has all grown cold. And smile a little. You look to be made of stone. Come, come, am I as bad as all that?” Her face was suddenly friendly and warm with smiles.
“Alyeeta, you frighten me, as you well know,” I answered curtly, not wanting to be so quickly melted.
“Ah, so you are afraid of me, Little One. Well, no doubt that is to be expected, but it will soon wear off. Let me tell you, it is a two-edged blade, this fear. I am afraid of you as well, and that will not change. There are not many things that frighten Alyeeta the Witch, of that you may be sure.”
I was about to object when she raised her hand to silence me. “Listen to me well, Tazzia. You and your kind, you are something new in the world, something never seen before. Star-cursed or star-blessed, you may all be young fools, but still untrained you have powers we Witches only dream of. The Zarns should be trembling in their beds. There is a thunder rumbling under the earth that will shake their power. Not all their edicts can save them. They will hunt you down as best they can, they will even kill some of you by whatever tricks they can learn, but most of you will survive.” She paused, shutting her eyes as if looking inward. Suddenly she threw back her head and laughed, a strange, wild cackle like the old crone she sometimes played at being. “Well indeed, well, well, well. So that is why She sent me to the market at Hamishaire. Three times that morning I threw the pebbles, and three times the pebbles told me the same thing, to set up my little booth at the edge of the market. Whether we wish it or not, Tazzi, our fates are bound together by the will of the Goddess.”
There was silence again. I sensed her looking out to some far place, or perhaps deep into the future. When she finally spoke, it was as if another Alyeeta spoke through her with the strange, hollow voice of an oracle. “When your powers are trained you will make changes in this land, great changes, but perhaps it will take your daughters or your daughters’ daughters to tie them all together. I will not live to see the end of whatever is started here, but I will see a good beginning and have my part in it. It is no wonder the Zarns do not lie quiet in their beds, and that they send their armies out to hunt for you. Danger, they see red danger before them and think to cut you down, but they will not succeed. They cannot read you well enough.” Alyeeta’s face had changed again. She jumped up. There was a mad look on her with the firelight leaping in her eyes, and her hair rising around her head like snakes uncoiling. She gestured wildly with her hands as she shouted, “Fire and blood and change, that is what I see!” She shouted this three times as if casting a spell, then seemed suddenly to come back to herself.
As if freed from her own spell, she sat down again quietly and sa
id in a brusque but friendly way, “Well, you said I frightened you, and now, no doubt, I have frightened you even more. Enough of this. Let us set to teaching and learning, but first let us eat. Sometimes I forget the body must be fed. Look about if you like while I start the pot. This is to be your home for a while.”
***
And so began my new apprenticeship, exciting, painful, confusing, sometimes bright and tearing as a flash of lightning, but never dull. The one sure, predictable thing about Alyeeta was that she was never predictable. That much I could depend on. All else was in the hands of change and chance.
There was that side of Alyeeta that was mocking, belittling, and seemed altogether devoid of sympathy or kindness. To try to do her bidding at those times was like trying to dance on knife blades that move and twist underfoot. When such a mood came on her, I would go to sit by the stream. Sometimes I went with her little pony, Gandolair, turning to him for shelter and for comfort, and soon we became fast friends. Luckily, she did not often show that side to me, or if she did it was not for long. Otherwise I might have tried to find my own way back through the Twisted Forest.
There was another part of Alyeeta that had a depth of caring, of compassion, a well of love and gentleness the likes of which I had found only in my mother. And beyond that, when she spoke of the Witch-kills, I sensed a core of grief and loss and pain in her greater even than my own. That I counted as a bond between us. In spite of that, I soon learned that she could not resist a clever, wicked word, not even if it left me cut and bleeding, could no more resist than a child can resist offered sweets. If it went through her mind and seemed witty, it had to come out of her mouth. Later she might make a careless apology in passing, something almost as hurtful as the first cut. Many times I came close to tears. Then I had to grit my teeth and try to forgive her so we could continue our work.
As a teacher, Alyeeta was as relentless as Pell in her own way. There was a passion in her to pass on what she knew, though the powers of the star-child and the Witch were differently shaped. Pushing and insisting, she often grew impatient with me as if it were almost too late already. There were times when I saw myself running as fast as I could with a hound snapping at my heels, surely not the best way to learn, as I tried to tell her. Then, abruptly, just as I was about to rebel, she would relent, flash me her compelling smile, touch my hand, and beckon me into her best chair while she made me a cup of tea. She might even cook me a special treat for which she knew I had a fondness.
Of all of it, the thing that most distressed me about Alyeeta, frightened me in fact, was her bitterness, her terrible, unrelenting bitterness, most of it directed toward “those humans” as she called all non-Witches. She had contempt for them as well, as if they were a different sort of creature from her altogether. I never knew where I stood in that naming and cursing, on which side of the line, or if she forgot at those moments that we were not the same thing. Oh Alyeeta! At times I thought her house was the place I most wanted to be in the whole world. At others I wished myself well out of her sight and her power. Yet I did not leave. Looking back, that is what comes clear to me. I did not leave, though surely I was free to. No, I was far too curious, too bound by that curiosity. I think I was bound in other ways as well, though I did not understand that then.
And truthfully, there was much to stay for. There was far more praise than impatience. Except for shielding, anything to do with healing I learned quickly. It was so different from learning from Tolgath. There, I was only to do as she did. With Alyeeta there were reasons and theories and a while body of knowledge attached to each thing she taught, as well as magic and power, a going outward as far as the stars as well as a going deep inside.
Only in my war with written words nothing had changed, nothing improved. It was like struggling to peer through a fog. For brief moments the eye strains at a hint of this or that shape, a branch, or maybe a piece of roofline before it is all swallowed again in a thick white blur. So it went on for days till I finally went to Alyeeta in despair, head splitting and tears running down my face. “Please, Alyeeta, please let it go. However much I try I cannot open my head to it.”
I cringed, expecting a torrent of mockery and insistence. Instead, I saw a look of pain in her eyes. She drew me to her and pressed her fingers to my forehead. Under that cool touch the ache subsided. “There are other ways,” she said, almost in a whisper. “Other ways, though I did not wish to use them.” I thought she sounded sad and very tired. Much later, at the turning of the night she cast a spell, a spell complete with candles and incense and strange repeated words.
How to explain that moment, that mix of amazement, fear, and awe, that sudden flash of lightning illuminating all the landscape, ripping through the fog. It was an ordinary morning two days after Alyeeta’s little spell. I was trying one more time, though with scant hope, to make some sense of this cursed writing. Suddenly those meaningless tracks and scratches in the dirt became letters. The letters became words. All of it hummed and buzzed with meaning as thick as a hive of bees, hummed like the secrets of a spell cracked open before my eyes. The letters swam in my tears. I threw back my head and howled. I had been blind and suddenly could see.
Rushing to the shelves, I snatched down the first book that came to hand. When I opened it the words jumped out at me, jumped off the page shouting their meaning. I turned page after page, laughing and crying in that torrent of words. Then I dropped the book and ran out to find Alyeeta.
She turned instantly. Her back had been to me as she bent over, planting in her little garden. “Alyeeta, Alyeeta!” I shouted as I ran out to her. With no explanation I pulled away her hoe, threw it down, and grabbed her hand. “Come, come, please come,” I cried, tugging fiercely at her. Though she grumbled and tried to resist she had little choice. Once inside I grabbed up that first book and began shouting the words as they jumped out at me. Then I dropped that book and pulled out another and then another, reading faster and faster in a sort of frenzy or fever. The power! The power of it, a fire blazing in the wind. Had Alyeeta not shaken my shoulders I might have gone on snatching down books and shouting words out of them till there was not one book left standing on the shelves. “Stop! Enough! Tazzi, Tazzi come back! You are like one possessed!”
When my wits cleared I saw Alyeeta staring at me with such concern that I sobered instantly. Blinking and shaking my head, I looked in amazement at the books scattered about the floor and piled at my feet. Alyeeta, seeing me safely back, said with her usual mockery, “Well, girl, this is no doubt a miracle to rejoice in, but it seems a trifle greedy. Perhaps you could begin by eating up one book at a time.” Only later did I realize how precious, how valuable, how absolutely irreplaceable these books were to Alyeeta, books all written by hand with such painstaking care, treasures that in my frenzy I had scattered over the floor.
Together we replaced them, each in its special place, all but the first one. With that one we sat till darkness came, heads bent and almost touching, drinking tea and, together, teaching me to read. When night fell we lit the lamp and went on, not even stopping to eat.
Have I already said Alyeeta was unpredictable? Sometimes she seemed to me perversely contrary. Suddenly, without a word, she shut the book. Annoyed at this interruption, I looked up to see her staring at me so strangely my stomach clenched in fear.
“Alyeeta, what is it?” I whispered. “What is it?”
She looked at me a moment longer in that strange way, then said as if making a solemn pronouncement, ‘Books are good and fine for what they are, but remember that not all knowledge or learning will fit between the covers of a book. Remember that life itself is lived elsewhere.”
I stared back at her, my eyes hard. My new game had been spoiled. I felt as if I had been snatched back from flying and dashed to the ground. Anger flared up in me. “Alyeeta, are you never satisfied?” I shouted. “You told me to learn to read and write, forced me to do it, in fact. Now the way is open for that. What more do you want? By the Goddes
s, Witch, what more do you want?!”
“Much more,” she snapped back in her mocking tone. Then, before I could think of a sharp and mocking answer, she said again, “Much more,” almost in a whisper, said it with such sadness that it stopped my tongue.
I looked at her in surprise. She was staring down at the floor. I was completely mystified and at a loss for words. When she spoke at last, it was so softly I had to lean forward and strain to hear her. “Books have been my friends and company for a long while. I know about books. I live with them. I have for years. But I am also a woman of flesh and blood. Books are not enough...there is more to life...” When her words ran out there was a silence again in which I scarcely dared to breathe. Then she looked straight into my eyes, took a deep breath herself and said, “Tazzia, I would like to be your lover.”
This was so unexpected that I gasped in surprise. I was too astonished to speak. I could not imagine it, what with the great difference in our ages, our knowledge, even our origins. What would she want with me, a green girl, as she so often said, or for that matter what would I want with her? Even as I thought this a shiver of desire ran through me. With that I felt the pull and power of her wanting. I saw it in her eyes and so set myself to resisting. Suddenly I felt that power withdraw, felt Alyeeta close in on herself. She turned away and shut her eyes to not compel me with them, waiting silently, even bowing her head, as if she who had such power was herself the supplicant there. I took so long to answer that she was forced to speak at last. There was a quaver in her voice when she asked softly, “What think you, Little One? Can you say me yes or no, or do you need more time to think on it?”
