The Witches’ Kitchen

by Cecelia Holland

  It was a hard, dangerous trip, and maybe Ulf had lost interest. Or he was dead, and with him was gone also the knowledge for getting here, and the last link between this place and that old world was cut.

  If so, Corban was glad. He could turn now wholly to his life here, and not have his mind drawn constantly back toward Jorvik and Hedeby. He went back to his camp and lay down, cradled his head on his arm, and thought sweetly a moment about his wife, lying in their bed, the house they had made. But when he slept, he dreamt over and over of the great shark rising out of the sea to devour him.

  In the morning Benna with the little girls went up into the woods, to the pond, and drew water. Coming back out of the trees, onto the high peak of land above her house, she stretched her gaze out over the bay around her, but there was still no sign of Corban.

  She stood a moment looking down past the cove, toward the long strait between the island and the bay’s eastern shore, straining her eyes, searching for him. They had gone fishing; he had said they might not come back for a few days. For an instant she let into her mind the thought of being without them, of being alone here, forever, and quickly shut that off. They would be back, if not today, tomorrow. She stared, down the strait a moment longer, as if she could bring them to her with her eyes.

  Aelfu came after her, carrying the baby. Benna hauled the two buckets of water down to the house, walking in between the house and her little patch of garden, past the new boat on its stout wooden crutches. The long lapped boards of the hull were nearly all attached, and the boat lay like a great fish in its cradle, smelling of wood. Under the swelling keelson was a basket of treenails, like owl pellets; that was how they stuck the boards on. The boat drew her. She had dreamed that it sang to her. Aelfu called out, breathless, and Benna stopped and took the baby from her. Leaving one bucket of water behind, she continued on down to the house. Aelfu ran on down ahead of her, skipping.

  The day was warm and calm. She had already picked berries enough to keep the girls happy, and she had grubbed out all the bad plants in her garden; she had nothing to do but sit in the sun and draw, and let Aelfu and Miru make mud cakes and dig in the sandy dirt.

  She drew on anything that would take a picture, on shaved hide when she could get it, on split wood and shells and bark. Settling down now beside her house, she picked up a flat rock she had found, and took her brush.

  She thought of Corban, sailing over the sea, and drew a sturgeon, leaping up out of the water as she had seen one sometimes do, the long body bent like the arc of the rainbow. With short strokes of the brush she put on its stripes of horny armor, making it a warrior fish, and its long mustaches. On one side of the sturgeon, near its spread tail, she put the shore of the island, three rows of lines, meaning the water, the surf, the land. On the other side, below the long gaping jaw of the fish, its manic eye, she laid down more lines, for the far shore.

  She stared at it a moment, enjoying the strong arch of its body. Without thinking she took the brush and with a few quick marks gave the sturgeon Corban’s face, above the mustaches.

  This startled her, somehow, and she was gazing at it, wondering, when the girls began to fight. Aelfu had made a little figure of packed mud and set it down on the sand; Miru promptly grabbed it up and in her baby fingers broke it. Benna got quickly between the girl and the baby, turned Aelfu’s eyes to the drawing of the sturgeon, and said, “Where should I put this? You decide.”

  “She broke my woman,” Aelfu said.

  Benna hauled Miru up into her arms; the baby was heavy and squirmed, wanting down. Benna said, “You can make another. Don’t let her get near it.” She remembered when she had made pictures, as a child, and her sisters had ruined them: She had beaten them, screaming, pulled out their hair in handfuls. Leaning down, she got Aelfu by the chin and tipped her frowning face up.

  “It will be better the next time.”

  “You always say that,” Aelfu cried. “It never is.” She stamped her foot. Evilly she glared at Benna’s fish. “We should throw yours into the water. That’s where fish belong.” Her eyes glinted. She watched her mother narrowly, to see how Benna took this.

  “Very well,” Benna said mildly. “I think you’re right. Let’s go—you carry the stone, and I will carry Miru.”

  Aelfu’s eyes widened. After a moment, she bent down and studied the stone, and then, lifting it, tramped away toward the shore.

  Benna followed her, jouncing the baby on her hip. From her dooryard the land sloped down through grassy hummocks to the shore of the cove, a jumble of tide-washed rocks, covered with seaweed and barnacles, wisps and rags of blown sand in among them. The tide was out. As they came down onto the sand, swarms of tiny crabs darted away toward their holes. Holding the rock with both hands, Aelfu marched straight across the beach to the edge of the water; she turned once and looked back to see if Benna would stop her, and then,, standing to her articles in the little waves, she hurled the rock outward. It splashed into the bay only a few feet away.

  Aelfu said loftily, “You can get it out if you want.” She brushed her hands together.

  Benna said, “Let it stay there.” The picture was already gone. The soft black stuff she drew with came right off in water. Aelfu was frowning; Benna thought she had given her something to think over, and anyhow she was no longer angry with Mint. The baby got carefully up onto her feet and padded off across the sand, and Aelfu followed, reaching for her arm, saying, “Hold my hand, now, Miru, or you’ll step on a crab.”

  Benna straightened. From here she could look straight across the narrowest part of the strait, to where the river came down into the bay. The last winter’s flood had brought down a lot of old wood, two big trees now stranded in the shallows along the far beach there, their roots reaching out everywhere like a mass of wooden arms. Here, at its northern tip, the island came almost within a stone’s throw of the mainland, and on the thin yellow beach above the river’s mouth, above the beached driftwood, she could see people, two men, it seemed, standing there, staring back at her.

  She knew who they were; they came from a village nearby, where she had even been, once or twice, with Corban. Then those people, men and women, had stared at her, murmured, laughed, until her skin went hot and she could not lift her gaze from the ground. They lived here, she thought, over and over. They lived here, and she and Corban were strangers and did not belong.

  They never really bothered her and Corban—any of their family—and Corban got on with them well enough, but she was glad to have the water between them and her home.

  Then suddenly Aelfu cried out, “Look, Mama!”

  Benna straightened, turning around to aim her eyes where the girl pointed; the breeze fluttered her hair into her face, and she drew it back with one hand. Her heart skipped, and she shouted out joyously, “Corban!”

  Down the brisk blue water, the little boat was bobbing into sight, the sail cupped over the fist of the wind. Even from here she could see him, by the tiller, black-haired, his shirt flapping. Her heart swelled. She took in a deep breath, as if she had not breathed until now.

  “Papa,” Aelfu cried, leaping up and down. “Papa!”

  “Corban,” Benna said again. She bent and gathered Miru up. She cast another look over her shoulder at the two people watching her from the shore, but now with Corban coming she had more important things to do, and she took Aelfu by the hand and went to meet her husband.

  C H A P T E R T W O

  “There they are,” Tisconum said. “That is their house, anyway.” With the young outlander beside him, he saw the house as if for the first time, and again realized how strange it was, that bump there in the meadow, squat and angular, its tilted slabs of roof all grown up now in green grass.

  He had brought Miska as close as he dared come, up to the very edge of the shore, with only the narrow arm of the water between them and the island. Across the ruffled surface of the water, up above the round indent of the cove, he could see the whole green clearing, not just the hea
vy-roofed house with its half-buried walls of woven branches, but the other strange things around it.

  “There’s one of the women,” he said, and pointed with his chin, polite even at this distance; he knew them for long-sighted.

  Miska grunted; he took a step closer, thrusting his head out, squinting, bold and rude.

  “The talk was that they were white as birches. I knew that wasn’t so.”

  Tisconum grunted at him. Miska clearly did not see as well as Tisconum did, and Tisconum from here could only see her shape. She was standing on the shore on the point, just above the mouth of the cove, holding the baby in her arms. For a moment Tisconum had the uncomfortable sensation she was staring back at him. He pulled his gaze from her; carefully, knowing what to look for, he searched along the shore and found the other child, running across the sand.

  Miska made another harsh grunt. He said, “She sees us. But she isn’t afraid.”

  Tisconum looked back at her; she had bent to put the child in her arms down on the sand. The lanky outlander beside him turned to look up and down this shore; they were on a thin stretch of beach like a lip above the mouth of the river. Miska squatted and put his fingers into the water, and then tasted them; his eyebrows jumped.

  He straightened. He said, “Can we get closer?”

  “No,” Tisconum said.

  “I saw a dugout on the riverbank there.”

  “No,” Tisconum said sharply. “I don’t go into their water. You won’t either, if you’re wise.” He snorted, doubting Miska was ever particularly wise.

  Miska frowned across the strait; his hand rose to the pouch hanging around his neck. He was slab-chested, gaunt, longlegged, almost as tall as Tisconum, who was tall. He said, “Look—what is that? Hah!”

  Tisconum lifted his head. Out there on the shore the woman had turned, suddenly, cast her arm up, looking away down the strait between the island and the shore of the bay.

  “Yes—there he comes.”

  Up the strait the little boat rushed into sight, skimming the water, its wing spread on the air. The wind was blowing hard out of the southwest and the tide was flooding in, the dark blue water spangled white where the wind ripped off the tops of the waves. The boat bobbed and jerked along, spinning a thin white trail across the water behind it, borne like a feather in the stream of the wind.

  Miska muttered something under his breath and clutched at an amulet bag hanging from a thong around his neck. Pleased, Tisconum folded his arms over his chest. He said, “They have many magical things. There is a box that makes fire, too. Stone that is not stone.”

  Miska stared out at the boat. His arm had fallen to his side. “We have much power, too, my people.” His voice sounded half smothered.

  Tisconum made a derisive sound in his throat. He hated all Miska’s clan, who called themselves the People of the Wolf. They had no such power as Corban. They lived a long walk away to the west, off in the deep woods. Even there they were newcomers, although they acted as if they were first in everything, barging into old hunting grounds and wanting to fight all the time.

  They had come from the west, only a few summers before this, although their name had gone ahead of them, and Tisconum had heard of them long ago. Ever since they arrived in this country their headman, Burnt Feet, had been pushing steadily into councils and gatherings. Now he had sent this shoot of a boy to see about the white people, who were Tisconum’s business, not anybody else’s, Tisconum’s to decide about.

  “Why is Burnt Feet interested in them, anyway?” He asked. “They do no harm, they’re just odd. And very few.” He stepped back from the little lapping wave before him The tide was running high, drowning the beach. He felt, for an instant, the whole great dark cold salty bay reaching out for him, and backed hastily up onto the dry ground behind him.

  The boat skipped toward him, up past the mouth of the river, into the narrow water, where it fell off the wind. A single man sat behind the wing; as the boat glided up on the current, its wing flapping, he stood and went to the stick in the middle and took the wing down. It was Corban, Tisconum saw, and hoped he would not notice them standing here.

  If he did notice, the man in the boat made no sign. Sitting in the middle of the boat, he ran out paddles to either side and let the tide help him float in toward the shore, using the paddles to steady and steer.

  Miska let out his breath in a sigh. Tisconum gave him a sharp look. The young man’s face shone, intent. He said, “I want to do that.”

  “It’s all different from our way,” Tisconum said, exasperated. “It’s all magical, and who knows what it means. Come on. I don’t want to stay here, the tide’s coming in, the marsh floods, we’ll be cut off.”

  Miska did not move, still staring hard across the water. The woman had waded out to meet the boat. The man leapt over the side; for a moment he and she stood together, to their waists in the water, their faces touching. On the shore behind them the two children screamed and jumped. The wind took their voices off like the cries of gulls.

  Miska said, “Is this all of them?”

  “No,” Tisconum said. “There are two boys, old enough for the fire ceremony, although, of course, these people—” He waved that off, remembering belatedly that Miska’s people had no fire ceremony either. “They were born here. All the children were born here. And there is another woman.”

  Over there, now, the man and the woman were walking up out of the water. The woman had hold of the man’s sleeve, tugging at it, talking to him, and near the edge of the water he turned to her and stripped the shirt off.

  Miska let out a cry. “He is white.”

  Tisconum laughed, pleased. “You had to see for yourself, didn’t you. They are all like that. One of the boys has hair white as owl down. And there is a pale ring in their eyes. You can see into their eyes as if into water.” He smiled, glad to see Miska clutch again at the bag of charms around his neck. He glanced over at Corban, squatting down on the sandy beach to greet his little children, while his woman went up to the house with his shirt.

  “They’re demons,” Miska said. He gripped the bag tight. “They’re evil. It’s disgusting.”

  Tisconum snorted at him. “Come along. You’ve seen them now, haven’t you? What else do you want?”

  At last Miska followed him away. They wound back over the black soggy ground, clumped with tall rushes, alive with crabs. Tisconum was wondering again how many more nights he would have to keep Miska in his house; he wished Burnt Feet had stayed where he belonged.

  “How did Burnt Feet hear about them?” he asked.

  Miska had been walking along with his head down, frowning at the ground in some effort of thought Now he darted a glance at Tisconum. “Everybody knows about them. As far west as the Great River country, people speak of them.”

  Tisconum frowned, unsurprised. “Well, then, why does he suddenly care about them now? They’ve been here for years.” Longer, he almost said, than the Wolves themselves. They came to higher, drier ground, where jumbled rocks broke out of the drifted leaves; the trail pinched down, and Miska walked behind him

  “How did they come? In the boat?”

  Tisconum grunted. He wanted no more questions. Especially not obvious ones: Corban and his people had in fact reached the island in a boat, not this one, but a much bigger one, moving up from the world-water, from out past the islands, where the land ended.

  So far, though, nothing much had happened with them. Corban and his family were quiet and peaceful, making no trouble, although all around the great bay, in the villages here and there, people muttered darkly of ruined fishing and how no one could go out to the big island anymore. Tisconum had moved slowly, cautiously, to take control of the situation and determine what good could be had of it, and so far his way had worked. Through care and patience he had won Corban’s trust—had even taught him to give presents, among them the big clamshells from the heart of the bay, which made the best beads. Of course there were always people who saw evil in everyth
ing, but Tisconum had them quiet now. And he needed Burnt Feet out of it.

  He stretched his legs, walking faster; they had come in under the trees of the forest. Above all he did not want Burnt Feet or Miska to come face to face with Corban, perhaps with better presents than Tisconum’s. Quickly he led the young outlander back toward his town, on the higher ground behind the marsh.

  Miska let Tisconum lead him away, but in the next dawn he came back, alone.

  The forest here was not like his homeland. There were more pines, especially nearer the water, and the great bay, spreading inland with its scatter of islands, made everything seem much more open and wide. The smells were different. The pines and the inland forest sweetened the air, but over it all lay the keen salty tang of the bay and the stinks of rotting stuff cast up along the shoreline. He had tasted the water and it was brine, impossible to drink.

  He was close to the world-water, of which he had heard only legends. Something in that made his skin tingle, just to think.

  The ground was squelchy and black. Flowers he had never seen grew under the trees. He recognized some of the birds screaming and singing in the trees around him but not all, not that sudden screech, not the weird, high, beautiful warble.

  He walked away from Tisconum’s village meaning never to go back again. Everything he had carried here from home he had brought with him. He stowed this pack between the humped roots of a tall pine tree, and went down the streambank toward the place where the day before he had seen a dugout.

  The log boat was still there, and even had a paddle stowed inside. He dragged it down the stream to the bay.

  The sun was just coming up. The dark water spread out flat and calm before him, giving off drifting wisps like smoke rising into the air. The haze obscured the island a little so that it seemed not to emerge from the water but to float above it. The light of the rising sun began to slide along the surface of the water, and the haze thinned before it. The tops of the trees on the island blazed. The wind rose in his face, suddenly warmer.