The Burning Time

by Robin Morgan

  “Oh aye. Aye, t’is … nae. Dinna see.”

  “Small wonder. I am not being very clear. Well, for example, look at the really big fragments. Life. Death.”

  Petronilla listened intently, fascinated. No one ever talked with her the way this woman did.

  “Life feels natural and real for us,” Alyce went on, thinking aloud as she spoke. “We feel alive, simply. Breathing, for instance. Without any conscious effort. Natural. And death is certainly natural. Also unarguably real. I imagine that being dead is simple and effortless, too—once you are dead. It is the transitions—being born, dying, becoming dead—that are hard.”

  There was a pause. Then Petronilla spoke, her voice hardly audible.

  “Lady Alyce?”

  “Yes, my dear?”

  “Do ye believe … do ye think that …”

  “What is it? Go ahead, you can ask me anything.”

  “Be there life after dying?” the younger woman blurted out. “The Church tells us the soul goes … but now I dinna know. Be there eternal life? Or something?”

  Alyce put down the wool she was carding and looked into the clear, light blue of Petronilla’s questioning eyes.

  “What do you think, Petronilla?”

  “Dinna matter what I think, M’am, because I dinna know. But you know. You know so many things. And the Church says … eternal life and such. But only for Christians. That Wiccans and all other souls—that you—be burning in Hell for all time. Yet Jesus went down to Hell and saved … but see, now I know the priests lie about things, so I dinna … so you tell me. What do Wiccans say?”

  Alyce stared into space for a moment, then turned back to her companion.

  “Well. For the Celts—and for Wiccans—there has never been a hell, or the idea that any afterlife could be a punishment. But different Wiccans say different things about what else it might be. Some still see it as the Celts did—an Otherworld, a place of spirits—called Lough-Derg or Tir na Noc, where the shades of those who have died exist not so differently from the way they did when they lived. That is why the Celts buried their dead with coins and cookpots and ornaments, even weapons. Then some think the afterlife is a sort of paradise or heaven that is like an orchard miraculously in leaf and bloom and fruit, all at once. Others believe there is no afterlife, nothing but the freedom and peace of forever sleep.”

  “You. What about you? T’is that what you believe? The orchard?”

  Alyce looked down at her lap, fingering a gossamer curl of angora fleece lustrous as new cream.

  “Me? No. I believe there is no orchard, Petronilla. I believe there is nothing at all, in fact—which is why life, every moment, is so holy. To feel, to be, the heat that we are. In form—bone, muscle, pulse—right now. How splendid. But I also think …”

  “Aye?” Petronilla asked eagerly, hunched forward on her stool.

  “I like to think that nothing ever really gets completely … wasted. So sometimes I like to think that whatever is left of us, all of us—tissue of flesh and tissue of fleece—goes back into creating something else, under the earth or through the fire or in the air or on the water. You know, the way compost enriches the soil? And then … why then I can let myself wander off nicely daft and begin to think that the rest of what was our living selves—that heat, that spark of us—somehow gets used, too. In—oh, invisible currents. Winds. Or humours we cannot see. Off up … toward the moon, mayhap? Or the heart of the sun?”

  “Souls?”

  “Mmm, no. More like … motes of wheat chaff. Or dandelion puffs. Or mayflies.”

  “D’ye think we recognize each other there? Me and Sara, like? Or you and me?”

  Alyce laughed softly.

  “No. I think if there was a ‘there’ at all, it would be so different a place that it would exist beyond even the one inhabited by our poor imaginings of The Sidhe or the faerie folk—imaginings based on who we are ourselves. But since no one has gone scouting there and returned with a report, there is no way to know, now, is there?”

  “So then even you dinna …”

  “Oh very much me: I do not know. Anyone who claims certainty is trying to convince others of something no one can know. I do not doubt there are honest Christians and other believers who are sure they will live eternally and be conscious while doing it—an exercise I personally find tiring. In truth, that certainty too often turns into promises of porridge tomorrow to keep folk starving submissively today. If the soul existed, I should think it would not be for harvesting by others. No. In my heart, Petronilla, I think there is nothing after we die. Nothing but what small good we may have done whilst alive.”

  “And children. Those of us who have ’em.”

  “And children,” Alyce repeated, a shadow crossing her face. “Aye. Those we loved, who loved us and will remember us, for a little while.”

  Petronilla sat still, her brow furrowed in concentration, taking all these thoughts in.

  But Alyce sighed and picked up her wools. Then, deliberately, she changed the subject back to Samhain. Striving for a merrier mood, she was soon jauntily listing the three worst habits she intended to strip from herself with the death of the Old Year.

  “First, my weakness for overeating candied ginger.… Hmmm. Second, being a scold to William.” Her expression darkened. Then she thrust up her chin, brightening again. “Last—most serious of all—” this with a straight face “—dressing up as a lady.”

  And laughter descended on their work.

  XIII

  THE DYING OF THE YEAR

  SO THE DAYS PASSED, in conversation and silence, dreaming and action, external and internal harvests. Meanwhile, light leaked from the afternoons and darkness arrived earlier and lingered later, tarnishing the cold pewter dawns.

  Early in October, Alyce had been brought word that the Church had intensified its campaign against heretics on the Continent. Harsh winters, drought, and failed crops had stirred the need to blame someone or something fearsome for bad fortune—and priests fed the people’s panic rather than their stomachs. Townsfolk in Germany and France had begun slaughtering cats as the agents of evil. With entire villages bereft of felines, the rat population quickly quadrupled, spreading filth and disease, furthering the panic. This the priests blamed on Jews, Moors, and especially witches, claiming that Wiccan spells had brought plague in revenge for the killing of their animal Familiars. Since any person who accused another of witchcraft was usually rewarded by a full purse or fell heir to the property of the accused, denunciations grew in frequency and popularity, as did indictments. Executions by burning at the stake were now weekly—in some villages daily—public entertainments.

  Lady Alyce had for years built a correspondence with the members of certain covens in France, Germany, and Italy—covens sometimes flourishing quietly on landed estates like her own, or in convents presided over by sympathetic or even participating abbesses. From parchments sent surreptitiously to her by these sources, Alyce learned that members of The Craft in Europe were fleeing from one place to another. Some had gone into hiding; others had attempted to disguise themselves and pass for Christians. The poor could rarely manage such escapes, so they fell victim with the greatest frequency.

  Alyce Kyteler kept such information to herself, thinking that to share it would needlessly grieve and terrify her people, and believing that the Celtic spirit, recently deployed with such ferocity against the Bishop, would continue to protect them at home in Ireland. Yet since de Ledrede had not acted on his rumoured departure, she maintained an air of vigilance.

  His exit was taking too long. She suspected that if he did not leave, he would again eventually move against her and The Craft. She further assumed that if he did so, he would not repeat his tactical error of relying on Irish hierarchy or absent English landowners near Kilkenny, but would circumvent both local and national powers, soliciting help from abroad. She reasoned that if this came to pass, she might expect some Irish support but not enough, and would need to devote all her s
trength to fighting him. This meant that she should send those Wiccans who were identified with and dependent on her—certainly William, and her immediate Coven and their relatives—safely out of the country, perhaps to Wales. But uprooting her people from the land was an idea almost too painful to contemplate.

  Such were her midnight thoughts of dread as she tossed and turned, to Prickeare’s aggravation, through sweat-long hours of waiting for the first light.

  In the daytime, however, she kept up her façade. She oversaw work on the last of the harvest, laughed with her women, prescribed a salve of hot peppers for John Galrussyn’s painful joints, taught the children their letters and numbers, began tutoring Petronilla in herbery, and planned the nearing Samhain Sabbat. And waited.

  Quietly, she had one of the large salting tubs lugged into a separate cellar chamber, and then kept that chamber locked. Down there, alone, she spent hours every week, soaking linen shirts and jerkins in wine and salt, then hanging them to dry inside the chamber. Thus cured and stiffened, such garments could stop an arrow. She was making crude armor. She couldn’t have said precisely to what end, but the making and storing of it felt reassuring.

  The blow fell late in October. A weary herald who had ridden hard all the way from Dublin stumbled in one morning with a message for Lady Alyce. The scroll was from the Lord Justice, Roger Outlawe.

  It confirmed her deepest fears.

  He wrote that the Bishop had appealed over the heads of the national authorities, by writing directly to his master, the Pope. Outlawe was now notifying her that Papal Orders had just arrived from Avignon, forcing the Irish leaders—secular as well as religious—to allow de Ledrede to mount heresy trials. He had not yet formally granted such permission to the Bishop, but shortly he would have no choice. Clearly, the Lord Justice wrote with some bitterness, the Church managed to trump the State on spiritual matters, even when such matters had nothing to do with the spirit but were, as he put it, about grinding Irish sovereignty into the dust. He warned Alyce that he had heard the Bishop was planning to bring men-at-arms to her Samhain Sabbat and arrest all participants. As kinsman to her son, he advised her to empty her treasury, pack as many chests with gold and jewels as the horses could carry, and flee with young Will at once. Surprisingly, he cited England as the preferable destination, for three reasons. First, despite the English being obviously detestable, they faithfully observed amnesty for nobles, and he grudgingly allowed that they tended to keep their word. Second, although Bishop de Ledrede was English, he was apparently in ill repute at home—due to an old, still-notorious, financial scandal—which might favor a compassionate reception for two fugitives from his persecutions. Last, Edward, the English Crown Prince, was rumoured to be sympathetic to The Craft, possibly even—in private—a Seeker. The Lord Justice recommended against Alyce fleeing to Wales, adding dryly that despite being generally loyal to The Craft, Wales was a wild place filled, regrettably, with the Welsh, “who think themselves more Celtic than we, and resent us accordingly.” In a postscript, he made it clear that, after this warning, Alyce could expect no further help from him. He directed her to burn his letter and cease all contact. If she failed to do so, he wrote, he too would be placed in danger.

  He need not have worried. As she watched Roger Outlawe’s letter blacken, flare, and curl to ash in the flames, Dame Alyce was already making plans.

  The following morning, she summoned her people to assemble in the great cellar of Kyteler Castle after dark that night.

  They trooped in, solemn as mourners in a funeral cortege. With an intuition bred through generations of suffering, the serfs sensed at the bone what their mistress would tell them. Huddling together, they squatted and knelt in the light of sputtering candles and torches—fragile beings yearning to loom above their helplessness as hugely as did their shadows, which gestured with menace from the damp stone walls.

  Lady Alyce was selective in telling them items of news from the reports on the Continent plus some information from the Lord Justice’s letter, though she left its author unnamed. Telling them not to fear, and assuring them that she would as always care for their welfare, she announced her plans.

  Regretfully, there would be no Samhain Sabbat two days hence. Instead, in the morning, William would be sent to study in England. Members of her immediate Coven and their families would shortly be resettled on one of the le Poer estates up north. She had already sent word to Lady Megan and had been assured in return that her people would be looked after. She herself would remain at Kyteler Castle, where she would oversee the digging of entrenchments, fortifications against siege, and preparations for battle—physical, spiritual, and legal—with the Bishop. Over the next days, each peasant would receive specific orders regarding resettlement. She then asked if there were any questions.

  To her distress, Will, perched beside Robert de Bristol on the stone cellar stairs, was the first.

  “Why do I alone go to England? Why does everyone else—”

  “William!” his mother snapped, “Not here. We have discussed this! We can talk about it again later. Not now.”

  Sullenly, he sat down again, muttering about mothers.

  Annota Lange came next.

  “Your Ladyship,” the widow began, heaving herself to her feet, “If we dinna hold our Samhain, then why be we sent away? I canna grasp it.”

  “Because, Annota, this Bishop will hold trials with false evidence, trials that could bring about your death. Simply for being a member of The Craft, whether we celebrate a Sabbat or no. Your death. Do you not understand?”

  “Aye, I understand well enough, not being simple in the head, M’am. But will he not seek your death, too, m’Lady?”

  “My death is not your concern. But yours is mine.”

  “Ach, I have died before,” Annota said with a wave of her hand, “when my man Seamus went from the ague. And again when my fair girl Grainne perished in childbirth. M’am, t’is not my place to question your plan. But—” she turned to the assembly,” ye all know me for an old woman who says what she thinks.” There were fleeting grins of acknowledgment, and the widow proceeded.

  “I must be saying the truth, Your Ladyship. T’is not a good plan. The peasants at the le Poer estates will not welcome us willing-like, to share their wee bits of land. Also, we be marked—known as your people. The Bishop will pursue us wherever we be in Eire. And if t’is not safe here for the Coven, then t’is not safe here for our Priestess. T’is a brave plan, oh aye. But not a wise one. Forgive me, m’Lady. But I must say my truth.”

  “And so you have, Annota,” her mistress replied, a bit brusquely, “Your care for my safety touches me. Yet my plan must be followed.”

  “But why, Your Ladyship? Canna ye give us some better reason?”

  “Because.… It is my plan. That is all you need to know.”

  “No.” All heads turned. It was John Galrussyn, struggling to stand, with the aid of his son Sysok. “Your Ladyship, I fear we need know more.” The oldest of the elders present, his raised voice commanded respectful attention. He spoke with deference to his mistress, but in words that rang with his own authority. “Ye been teaching us to ask questions for many summers, M’am—so why not now? Ye be needing our understanding this one time … Your Grace.”

  Alyce sighed. “John,” she said, “It is simple. Someone must stand up to this … invasion. I have decided that someone is me. The Bishop thinks to terrify Ireland into the narrowest of Christian paths. He knows that if he can best me, many will follow. But in me he chose the wrong victim. I have the power to fight back. I must honor that power. And so I shall. Yet any who might be more vulnerable to his trials and his tortures must be sent clear out of the way of this battle, safe—so as to preserve The Craft. Craft knowledge must not be lost. Preservation of The Old Ways is the most important task—more than any material concern—and I place this charge in the hands of all of you, my Coven. Though perhaps you are right about the le Poers. Perhaps I should send you to Wales, after a
ll. There you will find support for The Craft, and you—”

  “And our Priestess? She should not be sent clear and safe away?”

  “From my own ancestral lands? I refuse to be driven off my own lands by a foreign, upstart, tradesman monk! Centuries of Kyteler bones are interred here. Be hounded from my home? Never!”

  Old John was not cowed by his Lady’s ferocity.

  “Be it about the survival of The Craft, then? Or—pardon me, Your Ladyship—be it pride and stubbornness about your lands? Which is at stake? For all here know that there be more knowledge of The Craft—ritual and herbery, lore and legend, cure and spell and Mystery—in your head than in every one of ours all together, and in most of the books ye might teach us to read.”

  Alyce was growing impatient.

  “What is it you are saying, John? Out with it.”

  The old man looked around the room. He knew what beat unsaid in the hearts of his neighbors—and knew it fell to him to do the voicing of it.

  “My Lady. Ye be a peaceable woman. Your men-at-arms are few. So I ask ye, with all respect, where will ye get an army? I mean, where will outside aid come from?”

  “I shall … I have assurances that the Lord Justice stands ready to help.” She faltered for only a breath before regaining her firmness. “Again, you need not seek out such worries.”

  “Aye M’am, but the worries seek us out. Before, ye had the powers of Eire on our side—the Lord Justice and Archbishop and Seneschal and such fine folk. But now people be getting afeared. And this time we be dealing with foreigners, mayhap. The Bishop might call for English troops. Even French.” An indignant murmur hummed round the room. “T’would do no good to set needfires to signal for help, if that happened. We be thinking that Kyteler Castle canna be defended for long. And sure not without a grand army. Even then, not all of great Finn’s legions could protect this castle if the Pope sends his men against ye. I think—pardon, m’Lady, but … I think we all must flee. You too, Your Ladyship. With us under your protection. You especially. I do. I think it.” He leaned against Sysok, panting slightly, weary from his outburst.