Witches: Wicked, Wild & Wonderful (55 page)

I have watched Grinnan a long time now, in success and failure, in private and on show. At first I thought he was too smart for me, that I was trapped by his cleverness. And this is true. But I have seen others laugh at him, or walk away from his efforts easily, shaking their heads. Others are cleverer.

What he does to me, he waits till I am weak. Half-asleep, he waits till. I never have much fight in me, but dozing off I have even less.

Then what he does—it’s so simple I’m ashamed. He bares the flesh of my back. He strokes my back as if that is all he is going to do. He goes straight to the very oldest memory I have—which, me never having told him, how does he know it?—of being sickly, of my first mother bringing me through the night, singing and stroking my back, the oldest and safest piece of my mind, and he puts me there, so that I am sodden with sweetness and longing and nearly-being-back-to-a-baby.

And then he proceeds. It often hurts—it
mostly
hurts. I often weep. But there is a kind of bargain goes on between us, you see. I pay for the first part with the second. The price of the journey to that safe, sweet-sodden place is being spiked in the arse and dragged kicking and biting my blanket back to the real and dangerous one.

Show me your boy-thing,
the mudwife would say.
Put it through the bars.

I won’t.

Why not?

You will bite it off. You will cut it off with one of your knives. You will chop it with your axe.

Put it out. I will do no such thing. I only want to wash it.

Wash it when Kirtle is awake, if you so want me clean.

It will be nice, I promise you. I will give you a nice feeling, so warm, so wet. You’ll feel good.

But when I put it out, she exclaimed,
What am I supposed to do with that?

Wash it, like you said.

There’s not enough of it even to wash! How would one get that little peepette dirty?

I put it away, little shred, little scrap I was ashamed of.

And she flung around the room awhile, and then she sat, her face all red crags in the last little light of the banked-up fire.
I am going to have to keep you forever!
she said.
For
years
before you are any use to me. And you are expensive! You eat like a pig! I should just cook you up now and enjoy you while you are tender.

I was all wounded pride and stupid. I didn’t know what she was talking about.
I can do anything my sister can do, if you just let me out of this cage. And I’m a better wood-chopper.

Wood-chopper!
she said disgustedly.
As if I needed a wood-chopper!
And she went to the door and took the axe off the wall there, and tested the edge with one of her horny fingertips, and looked at me in a very
thoughtful
way that I did not much like.

Sometimes he speaks as he strokes.
My Hanny,
he says, very gentle and loving like my mother,
my goosle, my gosling, sweet as apple, salt as sea.
And it feels as if we are united in yearning for my mother and her touch and voice.

She cannot have gone forever, can she, if I can remember this feeling so clearly? But, ah, to get back to her, so much would have to be undone! So much would have to un-happen: all of Grinnan’s and my wanderings, all the witch-time, all the time of our second mother. That last night of our first mother, our real mother, and her awful writhing and the noises and our father begging, and Kirtle weeping and needing to be taken away—that would have to become a nightmare, from which my father would shake me awake with the news that the baby came out just as Kirtle and I did, just as easily. And our mother would rise from her bed with the baby; we would all rise into the baby’s first morning, and begin.

It is very deep in the night. I have done my best to be invisible, to make no noise, but now the mudwife pants,
He’s not asleep.

Of course, he’s asleep. Listen to his breathing.

I do the asleep-breathing.

Come,
says Grinnan.
I’ve done with these, bounteous as they are. I want to go below.
He has his ardent voice on now. He makes you think he is barely in control of himself, and somehow that makes you, somehow that flatters you enough to let him do what he wants.

After some uffing and puffing,
No,
she says, very firm, and there’s a slap.
I want that boy out of here.

What, wake him so he can go and listen at the window?

Get him out,
she says.
Send him beyond the pigs and tell him to stay.

You’re a nuisance,
he says.
You’re a sexy nuisance. Look at this! I’m all misshapen and you want me herding children.

You do it,
she says, rearranging her clothing,
or you’ll stay that shape.

So he comes to me and I affect to be woken up and to resist being hauled out the door, but really it’s a relief of course. I don’t want to hear or see or know. None of that stuff I understand, why people want to sweat and pant and poke bits of themselves into each other, why anyone would want to do more than hold each other for comfort and stroke each other’s back.

Moonlight. Pigs like slabs of moon, like long, fat fruit fallen off a moon-vine. The trees tall and brainy all around and above—
they
never sweat and pork; the most they do is sway in a breeze, or crash to the ground to make useful wood. The damp smell of night forest. My friends in the firmament, telling me where I am: two and a half days north of the ford with the knotty rope; four and a half days north and a bit west of “Devilstown,” which Grinnan called it because someone made off in the night with all the spoils
we’d
made off with the night before.

I’d thought we were the only ones not back in their beds!
he’d stormed on the road.

They must have come very quiet,
I said.
They must have been accomplished thieves.

They must have been sprites or devils,
he spat,
that I didn’t hear them, with
my
ears.

We were seven and a half days north and very, very west of Gadfly’s camp, where we had, as Grinnan put it,
tried the cooperative life for a while.
But those boys,
they were a gang of no-goods,
Grinnan says now. Whatever deal he had tried to make for Freckled-Milk, they laughed him off, and Grinnan could not stand it there having been laughed at. He took me away before dawn one morning, and when we stopped by a stream in the first light he showed me the brass candlesticks that Gadfly had kept in a sack and been so proud of.

And what’ll you use those for?
I said foolishly, for we had managed up until then with moon and stars and our own wee fire.

I did not take them to use them, Hanny-pot,
he said with glee.
I took them because he loved and polished them so.
And he flung them into the stream, and I gasped—and Grinnan laughed to hear me gasp—at the sight of them cutting through the foam and then gone into the dark cold irretrievable.

Anyway, it was new for me still, there beyond the mudwife’s pigs, this knowing where we were—though I had lost count of the days since Ardblarthen when it had come to me how Grinnan looked
up
to find his way, not down among a million tree-roots that all looked the same, among twenty million grass-stalks, among twenty million million stones or sand-grains. It was even newer how the star-pattern and the moon movements had steadied out of their meaningless whirling and begun to tell me whereabouts I was in the wide world. All my life I had been stupid, trying to mark the things around me on the ground, leaving myself trails to get home by because every tree looked the same to me, every knoll and declivity, when all the time the directions were hammered hard into their system up there, pointing and changing-but-never-completely-changing.

So if we came at the cottage from this angle, whereas Kirtle and I came from the front, that means . . . but Kirtle and I wandered so many days, didn’t we? I filled my stomach with earths, but Kirtle was piteous weeping all the way, so hungry. She would not touch the earth; she watched me eating it and wept. I remember, I told her,
No wonder you are thirsty! Look how much water you’re wasting on those tears!
She had brown hair, I remember. I remember her pushing it out of her eyes so that she could see to sweep in the dark cottage—the cottage where the mudwife’s voice is rising, like a saw through wood.

The house stands glittering and the sound comes out of it. My mouth waters; they wouldn’t hear me over that noise, would they?

I creep in past the pigs to where the blobby roof-edge comes low. I break off a blob bigger than my hand; the wooden shingle it was holding slides off, and my other hand catches it soundlessly and leans it against the house. The mudwife howls; something is knocked over in there; she howls again and Grinnan is grunting with the effort of something. I run away from all those noises, the white mud in my hand like a hunk of cake. I run back to the trees where Grinnan told me to stay, where the woman’s howls are like mouse-squeaks and I can’t hear Grinnan, and I sit between two high roots and I bite in.

Once I’ve eaten the mud I’m ready to sleep. I try dozing, but it’s not comfortable among the roots there, and there is still noise from the cottage—now it is Grinnan working himself up, calling her all the things he calls me, all the insults.
You love it,
he says, with such deep disgust.
You filth, you filthy cunt.
And she
oh
’s below, not at all like me, but as if she really does love it. I lie quiet, thinking, Is it true, that she loves it? That I do? And if it’s true, how is it that Grinnan knows, but I don’t? She makes noise, she agrees with whatever he says.
Harder, harder,
she says.
Bang me till I burst. Harder!
On and on they go, until I give up waiting—they will never finish!

I get up and go around the pigsty and behind the chicken house. There is a poor field there, pumpkins gone wild in it, blackberry bushes foaming dark around the edges. At least the earth might be softer here. If I pile up enough of this floppy vine, if I gather enough pumpkins around me—

And then I am holding, not a pale baby pumpkin in my hand but a pale baby skull.

Grinnan and the mudwife bellow together in the house, and something else crashes broken.

The skull is the color of white-mud, but hard, inedible—although when I turn it in the moonlight I find tooth-marks where someone has tried.

The shouts go up high—the witch’s loud, Grinnan’s whimpering.

I grab up a handful of earth to eat, but a bone comes with it, long, white, dry. I let the earth fall away from it.

I crouch there looking at the skull and the bone, as those two finish themselves off in the cottage.

They will sleep now—but I’m not sleepy any more. The stars in their map are nailed to the inside of my skull; my head is filled with dark clarity. When I am sure they are asleep, I scoop up a mouthful of earth, and start digging.

Let me go and get the mudwife,
our father murmured.
Just for this once.

I’ve done it twice and I’ll do it again. Don’t you bring that woman here!
Our mother’s voice was all constricted, as if the baby were trying to come up her throat, not out her nethers.

But this is not
like
the others!
he said, desperate after the following pain.
They say she knows all about children. Delivers them all the time.

Delivers them? She
eats
them!
said our mother.
It’s not just this one. I’ve two others might catch her eye, while I feed and doze. I’d rather die than have her near my house, that filthy hag.

So die she did, and our new brother or sister died as well, still inside her. We didn’t know whichever it was.
Will it be another little Kirtle-child?
our father had asked us, bright-eyed by the fire at night.
Or another baby woodcutter, like our Hans?
It had seemed so important to know. Even when the baby was dead, I wanted to know.

But the whole reason!
our father sobbed.
Is that it could not come out, for us to see!
Which had shamed me quiet.

And then later, going into blackened towns where the only way you could tell man from woman was by the style of a cap, or a hair-ribbon draggling into the dirt beneath them, or a rotted pinafore, or worst by the amount of shrunken scrag between an unclothed person’s legs—why, then I could see how small a thing it was not to know the little one’s sex. I could see that it was not important at all.

When I wake up, they are at it again with their sexing. My teeth are stuck to the inside of my cheeks and lips by two ridges of earth. I have to break the dirt away with my finger.

What was I thinking, last night? I sit up. The bones are in a pile beside me; the skulls are in a separate pile—for counting, I remember. What I thought was: Where did she
find
all these children? Kirtle and I walked for days, I’m sure. There was nothing in the world but trees and owls and foxes and that one deer. Kirtle was afraid of bats at night, but I never saw even one. And we never saw people—which was what we were looking for, which was why we were so unwise when we came upon the mudwife’s house.

But what am I going to do? What was I planning, piling these up? I thought I was only looking for all Kirtle’s bits. But then another skull turned up and I thought, Well, maybe this one is more Kirtle’s size, and then skull after skull—I dug on, crunching earth and drooling and breathing through my nose, and the bones seemed to rise out of the earth at me, seeking out the moon—the way a tree reaches for the light, pushing up thinly among the other trees until it finds light enough to spread into—seeking out
me,
as if they were thinking, Here, finally, is someone who can do something for us.