"Don"t be so blasted silly!" came the hoa.r.s.e croak from outside: "Come and do it yourself! Get sc.r.a.ping: I"m not nursemaiding this lot. We need you . . ." And there was a gurgle, a mew, a glug less than a foot away. They were waiting for me, they needed me to look after them! Perhaps without the incentive of their responsibility I might have succ.u.mbed, let the now-choking smoke take my last breath, but the knowledge that I was needed gave me the spur that fear and exhaustion had blunted.
With the last of my strength, from the crouching position in which I found myself, I charged that hole in the wall; my head was through, one shoulder.
Breathing the fresh air outside aided my efforts; I twisted, sc.r.a.ped, shoved, tore and wriggled and with a final heave fell free of the inferno behind me, to lie gasping on the steep bank outside, my head lower than my heels, bruised, battered and exhausted, smoke pouring from the gap behind me.
"Come on then, Thing," they all cried. "Come on; we"re not free of her yet . . ."
We crept stealthily to the edge of the wood, me carrying Pisky"s crock, and hid behind a great bramble-patch. The hut was ringed by fire, except for the back part where we had escaped, and even now flames ran around the corner to eat the dry gra.s.s at that side. Not only ringed but crowned, for hungry tongues of fire leapt like bears licking for honey up among the thatch and all around was the choking smoke. The noise was indescribable: although we hid in comparative safety some hundred yards from the hut, yet the clamour, both of shouting villagers and their barking dogs, the crack and crackle of burning wood and the screaming of our Mistress seemed but a foot or two away. The men were gathered in a semicircle about the hut, most armed with clubs, billhooks or scythes, but even as we watched they were retreating step by step from the heat of the fire, hands before their faces. And what of my Mistress? Thoroughly sickened by the mad screaming we heard, I almost determined to go back and try to get her out through the hole in the back wall, but Corby grabbed my sleeve in his beak.
"Wait! She"s not done for yet . . ."
True enough: as we watched there was a sudden change to the quality of the flames. One moment they were hot-tongued, roaring with insatiable desire, the next they were cool and pretty, green and blue, burning with a delicate flame that decorated rather than consumed. The hut now looked as if it were dressed for an autumn Maying, the scorched timbers and charred thatch hidden by the green leaves and blue flowers of the flames, and as we watched the whole place blossomed as the thatch burst asunder. The sudden flowering created a seed-pod burst as the witch, our Mistress, black and ripe and full, thrust from the roof, borne astride by her faithful Broom.
I picked up Pisky and with one accord we fled deeper into the forest as She swooped and shrieked among the villagers who cowered and ran from her as though she were a hornet, stinged and deadly. There was a path that twisted and turned away from the holocaust behind us, and at first the fluttering Corby was well ahead, with Moglet running behind, but before long they lagged back, crippled wing and foot hampering, so I stopped, gathered Moglet in my arms with Pisky"s crock slopping water over all of us, perched Corby on my shoulder, pocketed the tired Puddy and scuttled as fast as I could, not even sure why I was except that somehow we all knew we had to get as far away as possible as quickly as we could. The trees grew denser and I halted, out of breath and lost, and in that moment they came again, those terrible pains near the seating of our pebbles so that I cried out and doubled up. I heard Puddy"s moans and Moglet"s mew, Corby"s screech and Pisky"s demented bubbles and realized that we were still in terrible danger.
"She wants us," breathed Moglet. "Wants us still . . ."
"Watch it," said Corby. "She"s not going to let us escape if she can help it . . ."
"Help, help, help!" bubbled Pisky.
"What can we do?" I was screwed up in agony. "Oh, the pain . . ."
"Lake," said Puddy. "Head hurts . . . Left and down: hates water."
His words stuck in my fuddled, paining brain: "Lake . . . hates water . . ." Of course: clever toad. All witches avoid water like the plague and the stretch of lake lay to our left: I could see a glint of water in the direction Puddy had indicated. Gathering the others close once more, my stomach still contracting with pain, I crashed heedlessly through the bushes towards the stretch of water, tumbling at last down the steep bank to land us all splash! in the murky waters among the sear reeds and drowned twigs that littered its edge.
Not for nothing was this called the Dead Water, for nothing grew on or in it except the nastiest weeds. Even frogs, desperate for cool in the summer, eschewed its water, while in spring the shallowest puddle seemed preferable for their sp.a.w.n. Long ago the lake had been fished-out and even restocking had failed, for the villagers said it was cursed by the drowned souls of a party of young men and women who had gone out on a raft for a dare on Beltane"s Eve countless years ago and never returned. The raft had been found the following morning, caught in reeds at the edge, but of the dozen or so-the superst.i.tious said thirteen-that had essayed the water there was no sign. Of course the villagers had gone out and dragged the depths with hastily made rope nets but these yielded nothing, and one intrepid fellow who had ventured the depths at the end of a line had burst to the surface with tales of huge snake-like leeches that had curled for him out of the watery dark and of a ring of dead bodies silently dancing among the tangled weeds of the deep, their white faces and open eyes full of the horrors of the drowned, and worms and bubbles rising from the open mouths that cried of devils and black magic.
Certain it was now that no one would venture out on this black smoothness and I had seen none but the rash, unfearing wild pig ever drink from its waters when I had been out early for herbs.
Even now, stranded as we were among the shallows, me sitting in but two inches of water, Pisky bubbling up in his crock, which was bobbing up and down where I had dropped it, I had all the others clutched and clinging to my head and shoulders with beak, claw and damp feet rather than touch the waters.
"Pick me up, pick me up!" panicked Pisky.
"Help!" moaned Moglet.
"Let"s up-an"-orf," croaked Corby.
"Not healthy," pondered Puddy.
All at once, of course.
I struggled to my feet, as much to escape their din as anything else, but then looked down with horror at the breeches I always wore, on our Mistress"s instruction. I was damp from the waist down from sitting in the water and on the wet leather fat blue-grey worms crawled with open mouths, burrowing blindly for my naked skin. I struck out, brushing them back into the sc.u.mmy water, only to feel them immediately fasten on my bare ankles. Stumbling to the bank I lay back against the sloping earth thrusting with panic at the evil things that still clung and sucked at my skin. Unexpectedly I was helped by Corby who fluttered from my shoulder and pecked at the slimy things with his beak, wiping them off into the sludge as a bird will clean his beak on a twig.
At last I was free and turned to struggle to the top of the bank when the pains struck us all again and we screeched and tumbled back towards the water.
Desperately I clung to a gnarled tree root that jutted out above the water, my feet frantically scrabbling for a hold on the greasy earth, Pisky"s bowl jammed under my chin, the others hanging on as best they could. Something made me look up and there a great bat-like shape blotted out the hazy light from a wisp- clouded harvest moon that rocked unsteadily through the trees, and with despair I realized that our Mistress had found us and was flying over our hiding place on Broom.
"She"ll get us!" I screamed. "We"ll never escape!"
This time I knew She would at last kill us and then throw our bodies into the black waters of the lake, and I could not think at all, only feel as the cramps clutched at me again and my terrified friends clawed and clung till I could feel the trickle of blood from torn shoulder-skin. I felt a sudden rush of stinking air as our Mistress swooped down on us and the smell of singed cloth overwhelmed even the stench of sc.u.mmy water: a burning fragment from somewhere had landed on my arm and there was a smoulder of cloth which I beat at frantically as the witch misjudged her landing and soared away to approach from an easier angle.
I heard Puddy trying to say something, urgently for him, agonizingly slow for the rest of us in those few moments when everything-pain, fear, drowning, burning, death-was rushing upon us like a great, irresistible storm wind that will snap and crack even the most pliant tree in its fury.
"Can"t get us surrounded by water . . ." but even as I understood and acknowledged what he was saying I knew I could not wade out into that lake of desolation and stand, helpless, while my flesh was sucked away from my bones by the unseen horrors that lurked beneath.
"Island somewhere," came Corby"s hoa.r.s.e voice, stirring into a sort of incredulous hope. "If you could wade out, Thing . . . Think it"s over there to the left someways . . ."
I do not remember scrambling up the bank, scurrying through the thin belt of trees that lined the sh.o.r.e, searching ever for a darker shape on the waters, ducking automatically from the swooping thing that held off only because of the branches that hid us from full view. I do remember at last seeing a dark lump that rose from the water some hundred yards out and recall too the fear and pain that accompanied my wild splashings through the shadows; I remember that at one stage the water sucked greedily at my waist, at another my foot turned on a treacherous stone and slime rushed headlong into my open mouth, but that at last my feet found dry ground and I staggered free of the clutching waters to fall to my knees, shedding cat, bird, toad and fish"s crock, and lie p.r.o.ne, crying my exhaustion.
The islet on which we found ourselves was only a scratch of ground barely ten feet long and half that wide with a stunted tree and a p.r.i.c.kly bush for company: I looked back and the bank seemed an immeasurable distance away. Had I really crossed that stretch of water? I shivered with wet and cold and beside me Corby ruffled and rattled his feathers and Moglet tried to wipe herself dry against my ankles, mercifully leech-free: I supposed my wild splashings and the speed of our progress had hindered the creatures" blind seekings. For the time being, too, we were witch-free, but a ma.s.sy heap of clouds raced up on the increasing wind that rattled the branches of the stunted tree above me and whispered in the bush to my right, fluttering the ivy that clung to the ground round our feet. I bent and straightened Pisky"s bowl which was dangerously tilted and heard him mutter and cough as he rushed around backwards: "Horrid black stuff: chokes the lungs, black water does, not good for my gills. Oh, deary, deary me! If my great-grandfather could see me now . . ."
I put out my hand and stroked Moglet"s damp fur. "Are we all right now?" she asked anxiously, purring a little to rea.s.sure us both.
Corby and Pisky were conversing in low tones. "Notice them trees?" I heard the bird mutter.
"And the ivy," said Puddy. "Should help."
"Wouldn"t be a bad idea to form a ring, though," said Corby. "Can you remember any of that stuff? You know . . ."
"A little."
They turned to me.
"Best get into a circle and hold fast to each other: dip a finger in Pisky"s bowl and touch his fin and toad here can do the same with a toe t"other side. Now, Thing dear, before it is too late . . ."
Hastily we arranged ourselves: me with Moglet and Pisky on either side, Corby and Puddy opposite. I did not question how or why for obviously these two knew something I did not.
"Now then, all close your eyes and empty your minds," said Corby urgently.
"Let old Puddy and I do the thinking here, for this is what we knows. Go on, sharp about it! Listen to nothing save our words, our thoughts . . ."
"And don"t let go," murmured Puddy. "Keep in touch . . ."
For a moment there was nothing as I knelt with closed eyes, listening to Corby muttering and Puddy coming in now and again with a single word, almost like the priest and congregation I had heard sometimes from outside the little church in the village. Then, as now, I did not understand what was being said, for it seemed to be in a language I had never heard, and yet in spite of this I felt a sort of strength flow back into my limbs and a string of hope seemed to circle between our points of contact; fingers, claws, paws and fins. I felt Pisky quieten under my touch and Moglet had ceased her trembling.
And then the pictures came into my mind.
A sunlit grove, whispering leaves, white berries, bearded faces with sad, dark eyes, a flashing knife and with all these an instinctive knowledge of great secrets, of ancient ways; between the mutterings something deeper and even more secret came from my left hand where Moglet"s race-memory wandered back to an even earlier time where the dominant figure was female and the secrets were held only by women . . . On my right hand a golden sun, silk- embroidered cities, a great wall that wound like a snake; from somewhere else there was a rumble as the Sea-G.o.d stirred and cones of bright fire erupted on the hillsides bringing cliff and temple tumbling together; tall candles, a man kissing the cross-hilt of a sword- "Hold fast, hold fast to that which is great, that which is good," came the message between us. "Keep your eyes closed, closed . . ."
Perhaps if I had not been reminded they were shut I should not have opened them just to see- "She"s coming again!" I screamed, jumping up and breaking the circle, and the others scattered as the great bat-like figure swooped down on us again, howling imprecations, only to veer at the last moment to avoid the tree, whose twisted branches defied a landing.
"A circle again, you dumb idiots!" yelled Corby, but the spell was broken and we were in disarray, all concentration gone, running hither and yon in the small s.p.a.ce afforded us like rats terrier-struck in a pit. Again and again the figure dived down on us and in the end we stopped trying to escape and cowered between the p.r.i.c.kly bush and the stunted tree clutching at anything to stop ourselves being scooped up off the island, up, up into her clutches.
Up? Or down? For suddenly it felt as though the island had turned upside down and we now hung by fingertip and claw from the strands of ivy as flies on a ceiling; I had Pisky"s bowl under my chest and so great was the illusion of being topsyturvy that I remembered being amazed that the water from his crock did not pour all down my front.
But still She did not land, could not reach us, and I glanced up, or down, I was not sure which, and saw her hovering some twenty feet above, or below us, and I almost did not recognize her. She had grown incredibly old and ugly and was naked except for a few shreds and tatters that hung from her shoulders.
And her belly-her belly was a huge, monstrous puffball of growth that rocked and swelled in front of her. Even as I watched in terrified fascination it seemed as though it were being struck like a great gong from within, a soundless blow that yet brought an answering scream from my Mistress.
"It is time!" she shrieked. "I give birth to my son, my monster, who shall rule you all! But I need blood, blood for him to suck, blood to bring him alive, and I will have it!" and she raised her arms and chanted a spell I remembered: the fire-bringing one, only this time much stronger and more vindictive than I had heard it when she had used it once or twice to relight our fire when the wood was too damp to do anything but smoulder. As we gazed up at her we saw her body redden with reflected flame and I glanced down to see flickers and sparks among the fallen leaves at my feet. Springing up I stamped frantically but all the time the ground was growing hotter and the stones started to glow like the embers of a fire, even as a tongue of flame licked the trunk of the twisted tree and ran up into the branches like a squirrel. Tearing off my cloak I flapped despairingly at the flames, and beside me Puddy and Moglet were leaping up and down squealing at the pain from singed paws; Corby had fallen on his back, feathers browning, and poor Pisky"s bowl was steaming as he gasped away his life on the surface.
Then something inside me snapped, and I behaved like a mad thing, for the dreadful pains were twisting my guts again and I came outside myself with pain and stood like a creature of no substance and all substance and I was nothing and everything and had no power and all power. Stretching out my hands I gathered the flames into them and cooled them and rolled them into a living ent.i.ty in my palms. Throwing back my head I stood as firm as a pillar of stone upon the ground beneath and opening my mouth I cursed the witch that hovered and swooped above us. Using no language and all language I cursed her into h.e.l.l and eternal fire, I cursed the monster she bore and wished it non-born; I cursed them living and dead and forbade earth, air or water to receive their bones. Then, gathering all my strength, I took the ball of fire that yet clung to my hands and flung it straight up into her face.
While I had been cursing her, she had dipped and wavered and I could see her shocked mouth and suddenly wary eyes. But as soon as the ball of fire left my hands she swerved away on Broom and then seemed to redouble her strength, as I collapsed like a p.r.i.c.ked bubble on the stony ground, whimpering for the pain in my burnt hands. But at least the fire on the island was out, and the stones once more blessedly cool. The others clung to me and I felt Puddy spit into my burning palms and mutter something and at once they were soothed.
"Good try," croaked Corby, "but I"m afraid she"s coming back . . ."
We all looked up at her then, waited for her to come down the inevitable last time, the time when we would have no strength, no reserves left. We were all brave now, I think, for there comes a time when death must be faced, and it is only the manner of the dying that matters. And as she rose to a greater height the better to gain momentum, then turned and bore down on us like a meteor, I felt strangely calm.
Like a meteor? With flames streaming out behind her? Even as I wondered, as I dared surmise, there was a sudden mew of excitement from Moglet, Pisky stopped going backwards and I do not think I heeded Corby"s expletive or Puddy"s awed croak. She had swerved her face and body from the ball of fire I had thrown but it had landed on the tail of Broom, where the bunched heather and twigs were already tinder-dry and needed only that final spark.
Down, down she came, either not knowing, or not caring in her madness that Broom was on fire, but then it added its scream to hers: "Mistress, Mistress, I burn, I burn! Put me out, put me out!" And it wavered in its course, bucked like an unbroken horse and twisted off course so that she pa.s.sed us by yet again, missing the island by a hand"s-breadth and soaring back into the blackness above. By now her bearer was truly on fire and I saw her lips move, one hand to belly, the other beating at the flames behind her. She must have been reciting the Flame-Cooler spell, for I saw the fire falter, turn for a moment blue and green and then steady, but at the same moment there was a rip of lightning to the east and a crack of thunder that momentarily deafened us, and I saw that her travail was beginning.
Desperately she tried to control her bearer, to quench the flames, to catch us, to give birth at one and the same time, but she could not do it and Broom in its insensate agony bore her away from us to the centre of the lake, to try and quench its tailing flames in the dark waters. Just as desperately she screamed imprecations and beat it with her fist, raising it by sheer willpower. By now she was afire also and the tattered remnants of clothing flamed and sparked.
Even from where we stood, mesmerized by the drama that had suddenly made us spectators instead of victims, we could smell the sickening stench of burning flesh. In spite of my fear, my misery, my hatred of the evil tyrant who had kept us thralls to her pleasure for so long, I could not help a tremendous surge of pity: if then it had been within my power to quench the flames, to end her misery, I think I would have done so.
But the Power was now Another"s, a greater force than mine, with perhaps a greater pity also, for at that moment there came a great fork of lightning that blinded us with its light and for a moment illuminated the whole world in which we stood. The same fork split our Mistress from breastbone to groin and a great gout of night-blackened blood ribboned into the air, and out from the gash emptied a twisting, tumbling manikin with mortal face and body and the claws and wings of a bat. It mewled and screeched and clawed at the air like a falling cat and its mother, our Mistress, stretched and grabbed at the hideous creature with hungry arms and it turned and bit her and scratched and sucked at the black blood that ran down her thighs and dripped, hissing, into the lake. It crawled up her legs and up to her b.r.e.a.s.t.s but, scorning the empty, flapping dugs, reached up for her throat and fastened there, sucking the last of the life-blood from scorched and blackened flesh. At last she realized just what she had sp.a.w.ned and beat at it with her fists: in vain, for it clung now like a lake-leech so that she, greasy hair now spitting and bubbling with the flames, her Broom and her manikin were one, sinking indivisible to destruction.
In a last effort she pointed Broom at the sky and they shot up like some huge, rocketing pheasant, but even as I thought they might escape another bolt of lightning struck them. For an instant time stood still, they hung in the air as though pinned to the night, and then-and then they plummeted slowly down, a dying, screeching, moaning, blackened bundle. And the waters of the lake rose to greet them, to eat them, to drown them, to exterminate them. There was a fearsome hiss as the burning ma.s.s. .h.i.t the water which fountained into black fingers around them, fastened and drew them down, and then for a moment it seemed as though a ghostly ring of dancing figures ringed the yawning chasm that received them- "Hang on lads," warned Corby. "And la.s.ses. Here comes trouble . . ."
Huge waves, displaced by the falling bodies, were rearing and racing across the empty waters and instinctively I clung to the stunted tree, Corby and Moglet in the branches above me, Pisky"s crock in my free hand, Pisky in my pocket. Then we were deluged with evil slime, weed and black water till I was sure we would drown; there was a moment"s respite as the wall of liquid surged past us to beat against the banks and, frustrated, fall back so that we were subjected to the process in reverse. At last, choking and gasping, my mouth and eyes were free, but then came an immense pulling and we all clung for dear life as the waters rushed away from us to the centre of the lake, where it seemed a great whirlpool sucked all down into a vortex.
For a moment the last of the waters swirled about our feet, and then came a great rumble like thunder and I felt as though the soles of my feet had been struck a blow that drove them up into my hipbones, just like jumping off a roof in the dark, not knowing where the ground was. They stung with pain and instinctively I lifted them off the ground as a second jolt, slighter than the first, disturbed the island.
Then all was quiet.
We shook ourselves, moved all our legs, arms, wings, fins, joints and muscles to make sure they worked and felt hastily all over to make sure none of the leeches from the dark water were left behind. Just as we were rea.s.sured there came a great wind that thrashed the branches of the trees on the bank and buffeted us and tugged hair, fur and feathers the wrong way. On its heels came the rain: cold, hard, freezing us in a moment. But as we gasped and chattered with the chill the quality of the downpour changed and it was soft and warm. The rain came down like a torrent and we stood beneath a waterfall, and if we were wet before we were now drenched. But it was a cleansing, gentle rain, washing away all dirt, all grime, all fears and tears in its caress and even Moglet, who hated the wet, stood and steamed and licked and steamed again, and I emptied Pisky"s crock three times, until the water felt like silk.
And then it stopped, as suddenly as it began, and the moon shone bright and sweet, a curved lantern high above us, and the stars p.r.i.c.ked out one by one and, wet as we were, we collapsed where we stood and slept like dead things until dawn.
The Gathering: Three-
Four- Five- Six- Seven
The Escape
We awoke to a beautiful morning, and a different world.
One by one we crept back to consciousness, stretched stiff joints, yawned, opened our eyes. And all, without exception, let out some exclamation of surprise: in fact my initial awakening was to an uncharacteristically unladylike screech from Moglet.
"Spiced mice! Marooned . . ."
Sitting up and surveying our position I was as inelegant as Corby: "Cripes!"
while Puddy was puffing and panting and Pisky, who could see nothing at all except the sky, was rushing around in circles bubbling "Lemme see! Lemme see! Lemmelemmelemmesee . . ."
I lifted him up automatically, tilting his crock and murmuring soothing thought-sounds. Slowly I stood up and gazed at the scene around us. As I said before, it was a beautiful morning, the sun shining on the colouring of the leaves; the breeze, what there was of it, was from the south, birds sang their thin autumn songs and all in all the world seemed a promising place. The woods stood around us on the bank as though there had been no storm of the night before, no rain; the island was the same island, the stunted oak still holding its leaves, the p.r.i.c.kly bush discovered as a holly with cl.u.s.ters of berries lightening to crimson, and the dark, secret ivy still clinging to the ground at our feet . . .
It was everything else that was different.
Before we had been surrounded on all sides by black, thick, sc.u.mmy water, now the island on which we stood was still an island, but an island on dry land. We were about ten feet above the dried-up bed of a lake which had disappeared in the night. The ground beneath our perch was hummocky, pebbly, undulating, bare, but it was not a lake, not a pond, not even a puddle: it was dry, dry as a bone. Wildly I turned about. The bank was the same distance away, the bare expanse on which our islet stood was lake-size, but there was no water, no leeches, no nothing! I gazed down at the lake-bed: no sc.u.m, no mud; I looked out over the bare expanse to the lake-middle: stones, sandy soil, bones-bones?-bleached and bare, a heap of rocks in the middle like a sunken cairn, but still no lake, no water . . .
Slowly I sat down again. "What-What happened?"
There was a moment"s silence, then Puddy delivered his opinion.
"Earthquake."
I looked at Corby.
"The old lad may be right; summat happened, sure enough. Seems the land here rose and the lake drained away when old Mistress went to perdition."
I remembered the thump to the soles of my feet, the roaring noise, the vortex.
Pisky bubbled: "My great-great-great-grandmother told me of somesuch: when there is great evil the land and the sea conspire to destroy it.
Earthquakes can happen undersea as well as on land and can swallow whole cities . . ."
Moglet said: "And you called out a spell, Thing; you said neither earth nor air nor water could receive Her body . . ."
"But my feeble curses couldn"t have made any difference! Besides, I didn"t realize what I was saying at the time."
"Doesn"t really matter what did it," said Corby thoughtfully. "There was more"n one thing on our side. The oak, f"r instance: even has a sprig of mistletoe in the crook of that branch . . ."
"Holly and ivy," said Moglet.
"What do you mean?" I asked. "And where is the water?" But they did not answer. I persisted. "What do you mean, holly and ivy and oak and mistletoe?
What"s that got to do with it?"
Puddy tried to explain. "It"s what one"s used to: G.o.ds and suchlike. Forces.
Good and evil."
I remembered him chanting with Corby and turned to Moglet. "Holly and ivy?"