Kissing the Witch (6 page)

It is a tale of hair.

Y
OU SEE ME NOW
reduced to a skull; I have shed all the trappings of flesh, skin and mane. You’ll look much like this when
you’re dead too. How slight our differences become, between lives. In my last life I was not a horse, but a woman like you. Or rather, a woman quite unlike you. Where you hunger for
attention, I sickened of it. You want to be queen over the wide world; I hid away from it.

When I was a girl I used to live in a tower. It was a misshapen tree of stone, hidden in a forest; it was mine. The woman who built it was not my mother. Sometimes she would say that she had
found me growing in a clump of wild garlic; other times, that she had won me in a bet; other times, that she had bought me for a handful of radishes. Once she claimed that she had saved me, without
saying from what.

I remember nothing of my early childhood except the odd glimpse of rust on a gate, butter in a churn. I knew what a town was, and a plough, and a baby, though I couldn’t remember ever
having laid eyes on these things. The woman said there must have been a time when my eyes were not clouded, but from the day I fell into her hands I was blind as a mole. Before there was ever a
tower, we lived in a stone hut in the woods, near an old mine.

The only thing I had from the time before, the only thing I owned that the woman had not given me, was a comb made out of an antler. I liked to sit beside the window of our cottage so the air
brightened a little in front of my face. With the comb I used to form my long hair into a sheet, then into coils as slick as the stream that wound through the woods.

The woman was my store of knowledge, my cache of wisdom. Which was odd, since she had so little to say, and what she spoke was never above a whisper, for fear of disturbing the birds and the
beasts. She taught me you only have the right to kill a creature when you know its names and ways. She walked out in all weathers, and never shrank from the cold. Sometimes she spoke of her
childhood in a country so frozen that people could walk on water. When she murmured of such things under her breath, it was as if I could see them.

As the years pulled me towards womanhood my body swelled, my spirits whirled. My hair began to grow faster; one day I could sit on its sharp ends, and another day again, I could cover my knees
with it. I felt its weight pulling at the back of my head; it lolled like curtains over my cheeks.

I was never warm enough; too little of the day ever reached down through the trees to our cottage. Once when the woman came back with a bowl of milk from a sheep that had strayed into the woods,
I said, I wish I could live up there in the light, in a high tower.

What do you want light for if not to see by? she asked.

All I could answer was: I like the feel of it on my face.

As ever, the woman did what I asked, without asking anything in return, but it was the first time she had not understood me.

With her weathered hands she brought stones from the old mine and took mud and leaves and built a little tower behind our hut where the thorn-bushes grew. When I shook my head out of the first
window she had made, my hair spilled down. The woman laughed as she walked by; I felt the pull of her hand like a fish through the rapids of my hair. Higher, I crowed.

So she fetched more stones from the old mine and built another room on top of that, and then another, till the round wall hoisted itself up almost as high as the trees. At last the woman climbed
down the steps; I heard her wipe the crust of mud from her hands on a tree. She complained that the tower was all askew, but when I stood at the base and stretched my arms around its jagged girth,
I knew it was just what I needed.

We went back to our old life, except that as I shelled nuts and chopped roots in the highest room of the tower the light was white against my face. The woman came and went, bringing limp rabbits
from her traps and the odd handful of berries. We didn’t talk much, she and I. Often a whole day would go by with no need for naming things.

But the time I first bled I had a nightmare of the hunt. The wood was full of men who were also stags and also the dogs that chased them. My hair was caught in a tangle of hedge, my clothes
shredded by the thorns. There was no safety. There was no cover. There was no door to the tower, when in my dream I stumbled through the thorn-bushes and found it at last, clubbing my fists on the
stone walls to be let in. I woke only when the woman came upstairs, pulled my hands from the stones, and took me in her arms as she had never done before. She held me till I slept, whispering in my
ear all the names of the herbs.

The next day the trees were no friends of mine. They slouched on the edge of our clearing, wrapping their arms round themselves and hissing in the wind. I stood in the door of the hut and shook,
in spite of my coat of rabbit skins. Even my hair, wound round and round my shoulders, couldn’t keep me warm.

By the time the woman came back from her plot of beans and potatoes, I had climbed up the narrow stone steps and sat by the window. Even if I’d had my sight, the woman always said there
was nothing but treetops to see. I shook my hair off my shoulders now; it slid over the dusty sill.

The woman climbed up and stood behind me. I could tell her heavy step on the stone, the smell of sheep’s wool on her back, wild garlic on her fingertips. I told her, I’m afraid of
the forest.

But the forest is what we eat, she said. What we wear. What we burn.

I told her, I can’t rest for fear of the wind and the wolves and the hunting horn.

Do you think I’d let you be hurt? she asked. Trust my ears to hear the horn, and my fire to scare the wolves, and my arms to keep out the wind.

But I trusted nothing but stone. Block up the window below me, I begged her, and the window below that, and all the windows there are except this one.

Though she must have thought me mad, she did it. Every night now I slept safe by the highest window among the tossing leaves. The woman preferred her heap of furs at the bottom of the tower; she
had no taste for heights.

The door at the foot of the tower could still open, but why would I climb down, when the woman brought me anything I needed? Sometimes to save her legs I leaned out of the window and let down a
basket on a rope I had woven of old rags; she said my stray hairs, knotted into it, glinted like gold thread.

I sat in the high room and chopped radishes, singing to amuse myself. I sang of the moon and a prince and a ring. The woman called up from where she was skinning a fox. Where did you hear of
such things?

In the stories.

What stories? she said. I never told you such stories. Who’s been telling you stories?

I must have heard them in the time before.

She said, You have never even seen a man.

No, I answered, but I can imagine.

I could hear the weight of her feet stomping into the woods, and I sang on.

Crude rhymes, but they pleased me, as I let the chopping knife drop and set to loosening and combing and replaiting my hair.

And then like an answer to my songs he came. It was late one night, the time when I felt least the gap between sight and lack of sight. At the end of the verse a voice came up from the forest
floor. Who is it who sings so beautifully? it asked. Come to the window that I may see your face.

I sat like stone. By the time I dragged my feet to the window and called down, there was no answer. But still I felt that I was being watched, so I shrank back into my room.

When at first light the woman climbed up with berries for my breakfast, I asked had she slept sound through all the noise of the wolves. She hadn’t heard a thing.

The next night I was ready for him.

I had only just finished when his voice rose from the darkness. Will you come down to me? he asked.

I cannot. I’m afraid of waking the woman.

Is she your mother, that you fear to wake her?

No mother nor nothing to me, I said.

There was a long silence, so I thought he had gone. I was about to call out after him when he asked, more hoarsely, May I come up to you?

For a minute it seemed impossible, and then I remembered the rope. I knotted it round a sharp stone in the wall and threw it down, bracing myself for his weight.

The prince was all I had imagined. His hand grasping mine at the window was strong as a willow; his neck smelt of lavender, and the shirt on his back was clean as water. His voice was rough, but
musical, and his lips against my cheek were soft as rabbits’ whiskers. I laughed and tried to pull off his hunting gloves, but he held my hands still. I asked him, What do I sound like?

He said, I was so stirred by your song, I knew I would have no peace till I saw you.

I asked him, What do I look like?

He said, I was so moved by the sight of you at the window, I knew I would have no peace till I touched your face.

I tried to ask, What do I feel like?, but his mouth was stopping my mouth.

We were in accord by sunrise. If he heard me sing it was safe to call up to me. If he sounded the horn he wore in his belt I would climb down to him. If he brought me a gold ring I would give
him my hand.

The next day, the woman brought me a basket of peas from her plot, and we shelled them together. She was snappish; she hadn’t slept for the howling of the wolves. I nodded and shut my eyes
to make a deeper darkness. I couldn’t stop smiling.

What ails you today? she asked in her habitual whisper.

Nothing, I sang out. Nothing you need know, or maybe something you never will.

The bowl crashed against the wall; I could hear peas race across the stone. There is nothing I do not know, the woman bawled. Everything you think you know you have learned from me.

I tried to answer but she put her cold leathery hands over my eyes. You see nothing, she said; you are helpless as a lamb still wet from the ewe. Yet you have deceived me.

I bowed my head under the weight of her palms.

I have used up my years to keep you warm and fed, she said in my ear.

I answered, The fruits of the forest are free for all. I have given my days to keep you from loneliness.

The birds and the beasts are more faithful, she shouted. I have worn out my arms piling stone on stone because you begged me to keep you safe from the wind and the wolves and the hunting
horn.

You should have known better than to give me what I asked for, I whispered, tears creeping down my face. Now the wind is scented with lavender, and the wolves howl because they cannot have him,
and when he blows his royal horn, I will go to him.

There was a long silence. Nothing less royal, she said at last, smashing something down on the slab between us.

She guided my hand over the pieces of horn, common horn. The horn was mine, she said. I knew I would have no peace till I found you a prince. As she spoke her whisper deepened into a hoarse,
musical voice, a voice I knew.

I pulled back and threw the sharp fragments in her face, calling her witch, monster, carrion, all the words she ever taught me.

When her footsteps had died away I heard the heavy bar fall across the door at the bottom of the tower. I waited till my pulse had stopped roaring. Not a sound. Did she mean to leave me to
starve till I begged for forgiveness, she who had been the worst deceiver? I scrabbled in every corner of the room for my coil of rope, but she must have carried it away with her.

I wept into my hair. I wept enough to fill up another whole body, until the plaits grew heavy and matted. Weighing them between my hands, I realized that my hair was my own to do what I would
with. The small paring knife was slow in my hand, but it sawed through the plaits one by one. I had never cut my hair before; I expected something like pain or blood, but all I felt was lightness,
like a deer must feel at the shedding of antlers.

Knotted together, end by end, the plaits made the strangest rope; it flowed over my hands like a giant snake. I speared it on a jagged stone and let myself out of the window. I was lightheaded,
shivering, with nothing between me and the wolves but the paring knife in my belt. I walked to the edge of the clearing, hands out before me, till they met the first tree. A little way into the
woods I came on some berries I recognized; they were sour but not poison. I wouldn’t starve for all her rage.

I must have slept a little because when I woke it was night; silky blackness pressed on my eyelids. My face was scored by the bark of the tree I leaned on. Steps in the clearing; I stiffened.
She was at the base of the tower, sobbing. Let me in, she called hoarsely. Let me climb up on your hair. Her voice was so deep, I had to remind myself that there was no prince.