She didn’t know how long they had lain there when she heard the thump of hooves on the hard ground and a horse and rider topped the hill. Her first thought was of Kyrellin and she shook Olin roughly, but as the horseman drew near, riding very close upon them so that they had to look up at him as they rearranged their rumpled clothing, they saw with relief that it was only a messenger. He grinned down at them knowingly and addressed Olin.
“Wellain has fallen while you—slept. Kyrellin has sent me to say that he would be glad of her company at the evening meal.”
From the look of the Great Hall, it was hard to tell that a struggle had taken place. Almost all was in order except for a decorative urn lying broken in a corner. On a dais a huge table was laden with food and watched over by a harried-looking servant who must have been left behind by the former inhabitants. Kyrellin sat drinking from a gold-chased cup, taking his ease at the head of the table as if he were rightful lord here. It should have been a cheering sight, for she was tired and hungry, but in the streets she had passed through, she had seen soldiers looting deserted dwellings, setting fires in the streets, reeling drunkenly about. Though she had been conducted here by a special route, she had seen one corpse, eyes turned back whitely, hands clutching emptiness, a smear of blood across belly and groin.
She forced herself to concentrate on where she was instead and saw that Kyrellin wore an unfamiliar garment, dark and rich with winking threads of silver worked through it. He made a welcoming gesture toward the table and indicated the chair beside him. “All this is ours to enjoy.” He drank rapidly, noisily from the goblet as if he would drown himself in it.
“I want none of it.”
Kyrellin shrugged and went on eating. The pungent smells of the food made her feel dizzy. After a time she sat down at the far end of the table and took food with the air of one who steals it, eating quickly. They ate in silence, not a festive meal despite the richness of the surroundings. Kyrellin continued to drink deeply.
“Now let them run to Lutin with the news that the Wolf has returned,” he said. “Let them be afraid.”
“Don’t vaunt to me,” she said pushing her chair back with a violence that overturned it. “Hiding behind magic to play your dirty games.” He walked unsteadily toward her, hand lifted as if to strike. “Are you certain you want to touch me—suppose your hands fastened on my throat and you found yourself unable to let go in your rage?”
He paused, his hands falling lifelessly. He looked around at the walls, knowing they would fall and crush them both. “And even if you killed me, the Power is destroyed. So it seems the only freedom I have left is the freedom to say what I like, and you will control your anger, or choke on it.”
He threw the golden cup and swore so loud and vile an oath that the servant darted behind a wall-hanging. Graye held her breath, having no idea what would happen next, but when a moment had passed without violence, she began to feel hope.
“Let me go. Nothing good can come of this alliance.”
Kyrellin’s voice was low, but the outburst seemed to have cleared his mind.
“You know I can’t.”
“Since I can be no further use to you tonight, call my jailer. I’m feeling tired.”
He sat down, signaled the poor servant to replace the cup he’d thrown from him. She didn’t like the look of calculation that had replaced the bleary drunkenness. “I named young Olin to that post, did I not? Young, yes, but perhaps not so untried as once he was. I’m told he has grown to enjoy his duties.”
She shrugged. “Perhaps. But it was you who gave him power over me.”
“It’s not his power over you that worries me.”
She smiled, slowly and unpleasantly. “Why should you care? You can’t touch me, in any case.”
“Yes, I remember. You are safe…in the eye of the storm. I wonder…do you know of a man in my army who is called Hamel? Hamel the Boar he is called. Not a very handsome specimen, I suppose, but he considers himself quite handy with the ladies.”
She visualized the man he spoke of, heavy, swarthy, vaguely distorted with his head slightly twisted on his short, thick neck, small porcine eyes close-set and gleaming. “Think of him as your jailer. If I can’t touch you, he can, and I would be glad to suggest amorous games to him if his imagination were to fail.”
Her voice caught in her throat when she tried to speak. “You would not,” she managed to stammer at last.
He smiled but it was with a haggardness that showed how weary he was of the day’s fighting. “Of course I would. Think of that before you make yourself disagreeable again.”
* * * *
A corpse lay white and naked in a heap of blackened shards, the skin a little bloated. One of his eyelids had been eaten away by vermin, leaving the eyeball bulging obscenely. As Graye sat among the ruins, she heard a rustling in the debris and looked to see the hand of the corpse scrabbling for a purchase on broken stone. She watched horrified as it began to inch forward, wormlike, pulled by first one clutching hand and then the other, the swollen face lolling to one side. The jaw had dropped loosely and from the darkly open mouth came a single echoing word,
“You—oo—oo.”
She scrambled to one side of the bed in a convulsive movement, tangled smotheringly in the bedcurtains, fought free and lay there trembling in the dark. She kept herself from crying out to Olin who was outside her door because she was afraid she would see Hamel slouching in through the door in answer to her call. After a few minutes she struggled free of the bedclothes and stood in the chill moonlight of the bedchamber. It was practically empty, having been cleared out by the fleeing family and then looted by Kyrellin’s men. She went to the door and listened—gentle snores—Olin asleep at his post. She pushed against the door, already knowing it was barred from the outside.
Driven by memory of the dream she estimated the position of the bar and tried to get her mind around it. She heard it move against the door, old, dry, light wood, but in the use of the greater Power the lesser had atrophied. She moved the bar a little further, her head throbbing. She forced herself, thinking that those snores in the corridor might be Hamel’s in a few days. She was clammy with sweat when the bar slid back enough to let the door swing free; she had just enough strength left to go through it.
The chill air cleared her head as she set out, walking among rocky hills gleaming with frost under the moon’s witch-light. There was a village huddled beside the fort’s broken walls, but she avoided that, and beyond, the land was barren and thinly settled. She was at first only anxious to put as much distance as she could between herself and Kyrellin, but when the sun rose, she began to think of such necessities as food and water. There was ice here and there trapped in the hollows of rocks, liquefying as the sun rose, but all the food she found were some half dried berries in a stand of spidery black bushes. The plant lore passed on by Aunt Maev judged these as edible so she stopped for a sparse meal.
Evening’s light picked her out sharply on the barren terrain, a lone figure still moving with some strength, though that was waning. The wind was cold. She huddled in the lee of a cairn of rocks piled up by earlier peoples to mark who knew what feat of valor. She knew she would have to find real food tomorrow, or her journey would end before it was well begun. She wondered why she hadn’t stolen provisions before leaving, or a horse, but it was too late for such regrets. If she managed to reach another settlement, her small magic would convince the villagers to give her food and lodging; it seemed odd to have to rely on those old tricks. She stood looking out over the barren, rock-strewn landscape for some time, as if deciding whether or not to travel on.
She was still standing there when she saw four mounted men top the ridge above her. That they began to shout and lash their horses told her she had been seen. She began to run, dodging patches of loose rock and straggling stands of brush. If she could g
et over the next hill there was a chance she might find a hiding place in the broken terrain. When she paused at the crest of the hill, her breath wheezing, an open meadow of dry grass stretched away before her. Without any reason except habit she continued to run, but the dulled sound of hoofbeats across turf built from behind and the sweat-gleaming bay shoulder of a galloping mount blurred into her vision to one side, passed by, the rider reining sharply in front of her. She was so tired she didn’t know why she didn’t fall, but she stood holding her side and trying to breathe as the other riders joined the first. She didn’t know their names but she had seen some of them before.
Looking around she saw that her last burst of speed had brought her very near an eroded outcropping of rock, crowned with several boulders. She edged toward it.
“Is this the witch?” asked the man on the bay. He had a round, ruddy face and a great deal of curling hair spilling out from the edges of his helmet.
“This is the one,” said a gaunt man whose uniform fit like clothes on a scarecrow.
“Stand away,” she said. “You know I have Magic.”
The red faced man slid down from his horse. “This witch is too saucy; I’ll have to teach her to defer to her betters.”
“Touch me and I’ll have these stones down around your ears,” she said and made a theatrical gesture toward the boulders that balanced so precariously. The ruddy man backed away so rapidly he caught his foot on a branch and fell.
The others laughed uproariously an the gaunt man spurred his horse in close to Graye and reached down to hoist her up behind him when he realized that nothing was going to fall on him.
Graye was stunned for a moment or two and then realized that instead of using her own magic to roll down a pebble or two and perhaps startle them enough to make her escape, she had attempted to bring down the larger stones.
* * * *
It was dawn by the time they returned to the Hall. Light from nearly melted candles in high sconces did nothing but nibble timorously at the heavy gloom of the place, and Kyrellin half drowsing in a tall chair seemed a part of that gloom. “You didn’t find it so easy to escape me,” he said, almost an anonymous voice from where he sat, half in shadow. But the voice was flat, emotionless.
“What I was running from, no one escapes,” she said.
“I don’t trust you when you admit defeat.”
“I don’t. It’s just that something is settled, that’s all. Time moves only from the known into the unknown, though not always without some struggle, some irrevocable loss.”
“I liked you better when you argued; these riddles are beyond me and there’s nothing amusing about them.” He cleared his throat nervously. “In any event I’ll be rid of you soon. Tomorrow we ride on Lastegarde.”
“Then it is you who will renounce the Power, and the Wolf of TorCaerme will take up the shepherd’s staff. Pardon me, but I doubt it.”
“Do you think I loved hauling you along all this time, swallowing your insults. Don’t you think I’m tired of hearing about your innocence and my guilt?”
She nodded. “You’re right. Responsibility must be the first step.”
“The first step to what—damn you!”
“To control.”
“You control nothing here. I make the terms. I can send you to your cell, I can choose your jailer, visit on you any indignities I please.”
She was silent.
“Speak up, is that not true?” She did not have to speak. Both of them knew it was true and also, that now it didn’t matter.
* * * *
The walls of Lastegarde rose from morning mists as if they floated on clouds. The sorrel moved at a lope and now Graye managed to follow the movement without thinking. Though before she had accompanied Kyrellin in a state of numb horror, today things interested her. She wondered what the men along the top of the wall were thinking. They didn’t jeer or toss down bits of debris as those in the other forts had. She could imagine what tales had ben passed along until they had grown out of all proportion.
When she approached Kyrellin she saw that he was in heated conversation with his highest ranking officers. He looked angry when he mounted as if he were, for once, accepting counsel from others, but doing it grudgingly. His huge black horse grabbed at the bit and he jerked back on the reins, making the monster half rear, rolling white-rimmed eyes. The walls grew more solid out of cocooning mists, sunlight a wall of polished brass behind them. A desultory arrow struck the dust ahead of them. Graye didn’t think the defense would be wholehearted. Perhaps Lutin and his family had already fled.
Olin tossed the sorrel’s rein to Kyrellin and he looked at it and then at her in a distracted way. “Lastegarde,” he said, “just beyond the reach of my hand. If you could understand how I’ve held this moment before me, a lamp to scatter shadows when they lay deep.”
“Let those walls fall then,” she said. “For my murdered kinsmen, if vengeance is truly what the dead want.” She held out her hand, but Kyrellin refused to take it.
“You don’t want vengeance or sovereignty or lands or anything as wholesome as that. You want the Power for its own sake.”
“I want to know it, if it’s a part of me. All we gave to it was our mutual hatred. We won’t know if it’s capable of more than pure destruction until we’ve tested it.”
“And in your testing, if you took us both in to the dark and lost us there?” She did not answer and with an oath he tossed the rein to her. “You’re no longer chained to the beast-lord. I give you your freedom. At least leave me the dignity of fighting as a man fights.”
Since nothing was happening the archers on the wall began to fire, raising a thin cheer when one of their shafts nearly found its mark.
The gates are opening,” shouted a soldier. “They’ve become impatient with us; they’re sending out their forces.”
“Don’t be a fool,” said Graye. “It’s not in your nature any more than in mine to settle for what is safe and familiar through fear alone.”
She thrust out her hand again, not knowing what would come of this alliance, not even needing to know. Kyrellin didn’t look happy about it, but light was glinting off the arms of a troop massing just beyond the opened gate. He joined hands with her. Before them was a rending noise, shrill shouts, confusion. Walls were beginning to come down.
OLD DEB AND OTHER OLD COLONY WITCHES, by William Root Bliss
Originally published in The Old Colony Town and Other Sketches (1893).
“After you pass Carver Green on the old road from the bay to Plymouth,” said one of these women, “you will see a green hollow in a field. It is Witches’ Hollow, and is green in winter and summer, and on moonlit nights witches have been seen dancing in it to the music of a fiddle played by an old black man. I never saw them, but I know people who saw witches dancing there. In a small house near the hollow, a little old woman lived who was a witch; she went by the name of Old Betty, and she danced on the green with the devil as a partner. There was an old man who lived in that neighborhood by himself; he was kind to Betty, giving her food and firewood. After a while he got tired of her and told her she must keep away. One day he caught her there and put her in a bag, and locked the bag in a closet, and put the key in his pocket, and went away to his work. While he was gone, she got out of the bag and unlocked the door. Then she got his pig, dog, cat, and rooster, put them into the bag, put the bag in the closet and hid herself. When the man came home the animals in the bag were making a dreadful noise. Ah, ha! Old Betty, there you are!’ said the man. He took the bag and dashed it on his doorstone, and the old woman laughed and cried out, ‘You hain’t killed Old Betty yet!’”
Another story told by the old women was of two witches who lived in Plymouth woods, near the head of Buzzard’s Bay, who never went out in the daytime; but in the evening twilight they walked out “casting s
pells.” They cast a spell on a boy, compelling him to follow them home. Putting him to bed in a lower room, they went up a ladder into the loft. At midnight the boy saw them come down the ladder, go to the oven, and take out a quahog shell. Each witch rubbed it behind her ears and said “Whisk!” when each flew up the chimney. The boy got up and rubbed the shell behind his ears; immediately he went up the chimney and found himself standing outdoors beside the witches, who were sitting astride black horses in the yard. On seeing the boy one of them dismounted, went into the house and returned with a “witch bridle” and a bundle of straw. She flung the bridle over the straw, and out of it came a pony. The boy was put on the pony’s back, and away the three cantered across a large meadow, until they came to a brook. The witches cleared the brook at a leap; but the boy, when he cleared it, said to his pony, “A pretty good jump for a lousy calf!” Those words broke the spell; the pony vanished, the boy stood alone with the bridle and the straw. He now ran after the witches, and soon he came to an old deserted house in which he heard the sound of fiddles. He peeped in a window and saw a black man fiddling, and the two witches and other old women dancing around him. Frightened, he ran down the road until he came to a farmhouse. He knocked on the door, was admitted, and the next day the farmer carried him to his parents.
The old women who told the witch stories said that their grandmother had been personally acquainted with two witches, in the last century. One of these was named Deborah Borden, called at that day “Deb Burden,” who was supposed to have caused a great deal of mischief in Wareham, Rochester, and Middleboro. It was thought to be necessary for farmers to keep in her good graces lest she should cause a murrain to come upon cattle, lest the rye refuse to head, and the corn to ear. She was a weaver of cloth and rag carpets. Woe to the unlucky housewife who worried Deb or hurried her at her looms! I will let one of the sisters relate her story of this sorceress. It is not probable that the relator had ever heard of Robert Burns’ story of Tam O’Shanter and his gray mare Meg; but a running brook filled the same place in that story and in this:—
The Witch and Warlock MEGAPACK ®: 25 Tales of Magic-Users Page 62
