Grayling's Song

by Karen Cushman

  Pook was silent a moment and then shuddered. “Ah, I see.” He looked up at the sky and said softly, “This Pook has soared with eagles. No other mouse can say that. It is now content to stay on the ground.” He flapped his wings twice and settled down to nap on Grayling’s shoulder. She shifted to settle his weight, for a raven was much heavier than a mouse.

  Midafternoon they came to a crossroads. To the south the ground rose in green curves up and up. Along the top of the rise marched a line of soldiers. Faint sounds of feet trudging and weapons clanking echoed. Grayling swallowed hard and looked away.

  A town could be seen to the north, but the grimoire sang them west. “Makes no matter,” said Auld Nancy, dropping to the ground beneath an ancient elm and mopping her red face with her skirt. “I can go no more, neither to the west nor to the north, not up nor down.”

  “Auld Nancy,” said Grayling with alarm, “are you unwell?” The old woman was so forceful that Grayling believed nothing but grave illness could stop her.

  “Nay, I am but spent and weary. I am older than I look.” Gray wisps poked out from the woman’s wimple, the hairs on her chin trembled, and the skin on the backs of her hands was coarse and freckled. It was difficult to imagine that she could be older than she looked. Grayling’s heart thumped once. What would become of them if Auld Nancy could not go on?

  With a whoosh and a whoop, Pansy, grown pale and haggard, dropped down beside Auld Nancy. Grayling looked at the heavy clouds above and then at her companions on the ground. Despite the need for hurry, they would go no farther. What should she do? What would Hannah Strong do? Nay, what would she bid Grayling do?

  “I will find wood for a fire,” Grayling said, “and a bit of a clearing off the road where we can rest.”

  “And I,” said Desdemona Cork, as fresh and lovely as if she had just woken, “am footsore and hungry. I will go now and find me some supper.”

  Auld Nancy glared at her. “Selfish wench! You would leave the rest of us to eat grass like sheep? Even enchanters, haughty and sly and thoughtless as you are, must have a care for others now and again. ’Tis the rightful thing to do.”

  Desdemona Cork huffed and blew a strand of dark hair from her face. She stared at Auld Nancy for a moment, blinking her eyes and frowning, and then said, “’Tis not that I do not care about other people, but I find I rarely notice you.” She shrugged a lovely shrug.

  “Notice us? Notice me?” Auld Nancy pointed a gnarled finger at the enchantress. “I am shower breeder, cloud pusher, fog mistress, ruler of the elements, and I can call down rain, constant rain, upon your head now and forevermore! Would you notice me then?”

  There was a long pause. Grayling held her breath. Finally Desdemona Cork said, “I agree to provide supper for us all. Will that satisfy?”

  Auld Nancy nodded.

  “How will you do that?” Grayling asked.

  Desdemona Cork twitched her shawls. The air sparkled and smelled of roses. Of course, thought Grayling. Enchantress.

  Traffic was sparse, but now and then horses and carts passed by, and merchants and farmers, peddlers and soldiers and other folk heading from here to there and there to here. A fine gentleman on a gray horse drew near, heading east. Desdemona Cork twitched her shawls, and before Grayling could puzzle out how, the enchantress was seated before the gentleman on the horse, no longer headed east but instead north into town. Such a useful skill to have, enchanting, thought Grayling. If I could enchant someone, she wondered, what would I have him do? Bring me cool water? Brush my hair? Roast me a chicken?

  Grayling watched until Desdemona Cork and her admirer disappeared. “Do you think she will come back?” Grayling asked.

  “More important, will supper come back?” added Pansy.

  So Pansy did have some wits after all. Grayling gave the girl an encouraging smile, but Pansy was once more looking down at her feet, her lips plumped in a pout.

  Light rain began. Pook the raven woke, shook drops off his wings, and turned mouse once more. “’Tis quite an experience for this Pook, the shape shifting,” he said. “The tingling and trembling leave it breathless and most exceedingly tired.” He climbed into the pocket of Grayling’s kirtle and began to snore. She smiled. I myself have enchanted a mouse, and I find I like the company.

  While Auld Nancy and Pansy rested under the shelter of the tree, Grayling headed into a thick grove to gather fallen wood for a fire. The trees grew close together, and the air was damp and chill. In her valley, the trees reached out to embrace and caress her; here they grabbed at her skirt and pulled her hair. Grayling pushed her way through, picking up small branches and twigs as she went. The air grew darker and colder, and she shivered.

  The trees thinned out at last and gave way to a small clearing where a goat feasted upon the remains of a garden. Behind were the tumbled ruins of a hut. A breeze stirred the leaves on the trees with a rustling like the ghostly whispering of dark secrets. Prickles ran down Grayling’s back. She peered over her shoulder and around. No one was here. Still she was uneasy, as if she were being watched. She’d been foolish to venture so far from the others.

  “You, girl, here, to me!” Grayling jumped. The call had been more growl than voice. An old woman stood at the edge of the clearing, half hidden in the trees.

  “What has happened? Who has done this?” the woman asked. “Was it you, or be you here to release me?” She broke off in a fit of coughing as Grayling went closer.

  Before she had taken ten steps, Grayling could see that the woman was not hidden in the trees. She was tree, all the way to her chest. Her battered old face reflected both horror and hope, and she waved her arms—not yet branches—in distress.

  Grayling’s heart stopped and then hammered. Belike the woman was witch or wizard, and the smoke and shadow had come for her grimoire and left her turning tree! Did the evil force loiter still? Grayling could almost feel her own feet hardening and her ankles tingling. She dropped the gathered wood and, trembling and stumbling, crashed her way back through the woods. Behind her she could hear the woman shouting, “Come back, ye hag-born wench! A plague on ye, Mistress Do-nothing! The devil take ye!”

  Right she turned, and left, and right again. Where were the others? Where was the road? Which of these trees had been a person, a person like her, like her mother, now a horrid creature of roots and wood and sap? Gasping and heaving, she burst through the forest onto the road where the others awaited.

  “An old woman,” she said, once she could speak again. “Tree to her chest.” It was the stuff of nightmares. Was that how her mother looked now? Or was she tree entirely? Was there any turning back from bark to flesh?

  “Aye,” said Auld Nancy, “as I told you, I have seen many such. Wise men and cunning women, magicians and wizards, gone to trees. ’Twas a pitiful sight.”

  Pitiful and ominous and frightful. Grayling dropped down next to Auld Nancy, sitting close enough to feel the comforting warmth of the old woman’s body. Seeing the woman becoming tree had made their venture more frightening and more dangerous. Would the smoke and shadow come for them, too, if they meddled? Grayling’s toes tingled. What would it feel like, turning into a tree? Would it hurt? Would your feet and your legs know what was happening?

  The rain fell harder, and travelers bustled or scampered or huddled within their cloaks. Auld Nancy wobbled to her feet. “Thundering toads!” she shouted to the drenching skies. “I be discomforted enough! Rain, away!” she cried, shaking her broom. And the rain stopped.

  Suddenly murmurs swirled in the air like dandelion fluff. Witch! Weather witch! She who commands the rain! A young woman with a basket full of kittens quickly backed away, but others pushed forward, eager to secure a favor.

  “Our hedge witches and hags are gone,” one said, “and we know not where. Will you serve? I wish a warm wind to dry my field.”

  “Have you other spells?” asked another. “I would curse my brother-in-law.”

  “The miller!”

  “My pig-h
eaded horse!”

  Auld Nancy said over and over, “We are not that kind of witch,” and Grayling pulled her sleeves from grasping hands and shook her head no no no. If she had the magic they thought she had, she would see these pestering folks bewitched away, Or turned to stone, or frogs, or geese.

  “Make way! Make way!” Blue-coated soldiers in tall buckled boots and iron helmets, with war hammers and sharp swords at their waists, marched toward them, followed by a man mounted on a fine black horse. His sun-darkened face was crisscrossed with angry scars, his mouth was hard and tight, and his nose . . . his nose was silvery, stiff, and shiny. Like metal. Nay, it was metal! His nose, lost no doubt in some battle or duel, was now made of metal, fastened to his face with a black leather band. A metal-nosed warlord with a band of bullies. Grayling shuddered and backed away.

  He pointed to Auld Nancy, Pansy, and Grayling. “Take these three and chase the rest of the rabble away,” he directed his troops in a voice, thought Grayling, that could freeze fingers and toes on a summer day. “I have need of their magic.”

  “We are not that kind of witch,” Auld Nancy said again. The soldiers poked at them with their swords and waved branches of holly and bay to protect against evil in case the three women were indeed that kind of witch. Grayling could sing to the grimoire, Auld Nancy make weather, and Pansy—well, what could Pansy do?—but they could not overpower a troop of men with horses and weapons. And Desdemona Cork was gone.

  A soldier prodded Grayling toward a wheeled cage woven of hazel branches and banded with cold iron, hitched to two tired-looking horses. She kicked at him, but he swung at her with a switch of holly sprigs. The toothed leaves caught her beneath her right eye and left a jagged cut. She yelped as she was shoved into the cage, and her basket was lost behind her.

  There came a trembling in her pocket. “Not now, Pook,” Grayling whispered. “Anon, but not now.” But indeed the mouse leaped from the pocket, shook himself, and became a goat, eyes bulging and beard a-waggle. With a furious bleat, the goat disappeared, and a raven, cronking, soared into the sky.

  The soldiers stared at Grayling a moment and then backed away, waving their holly branches fiercely. Auld Nancy snorted. “We are not that kind of witch,” she repeated.

  Grayling held the hem of her skirt to her bleeding cheek. “Auld Nancy, be there nothing you can do to stop this folly?”

  “I can stop and start rain, send clouds scudding away. I have at times even called snow, but how might that be helpful?”

  “What if you smote the metal-nosed man with lightning? Were he struck, the rest might run.”

  “Lightning,” said Auld Nancy with a shudder. “I have never been adept with lightning.” There was a long pause. Grayling felt a niggle of hope. Finally Auld Nancy said, “I will try, although I fear my skills, while dazzling, are imprecise. I once set fire to a lady’s wig, which she cast off, revealing herself bald as an egg.”

  “Auld Nancy, please.”

  Auld Nancy began to chant in a rumble so low Grayling had to struggle to catch every word.

  O spirits of the storm,

  Let wind meet clouds

  And fire meet earth.

  Let a storm spring forth

  And shafts of fire come down

  To assault our enemy and strike him low.

  I call wind and water, earth and fire.

  So might it be.

  Dark clouds filled the sky, crashing and slamming into each other, and rain poured down. As Auld Nancy chanted on, jagged streaks of lightning split the sky. Great shafts of blinding light struck a cart full of cabbages, two hay wagons, and a signpost, and set them ablaze with tongues of fire. The soldiers’ horses whinnied and scuffled. Thunder crackled, but the rain doused the fires, and the warlord with the metal nose, untouched and unharmed, laughed a laugh that chilled Grayling’s heart.

  “Take them,” he shouted, and the soldiers, hiding behind each other, succeeded in pushing Auld Nancy and Pansy into the cage with Grayling. They closed a wooden door, fastened it with a lock of iron, and turned away.

  The company started toward the town, the metal-nosed man on the fine horse in the lead, followed by the horse-drawn wheeled cage carrying Grayling and her companions. After a while they turned off the road onto a broad trail that led up and up and up. The wheels thump thumped on the rough and rutted path and clattered over a bridge. Grayling slumped in a corner of the cage as they shook and jounced on the rough road, wondering where they were headed and why.

  VI

  he company slowed as they passed beneath a towering arch of stone as dark as the start of a nightmare. Night had fallen when they came to a stop. Candles shone from the windows of a great house, but the yard was lit only by the sliver of moon that escaped the clouds.

  Grayling stood and pressed her face against the branches that served as the bars of their cage. She could see little in the moonlight, but she could hear the bustle of their arrival. Horses clopped and whinnied and huffed, footsteps rang on stone or squelched in mud, soldiers called back and forth to each other, and no one paid attention to the prisoners.

  Thus ends the first day of our trek together, thought Grayling, captured and caged like dancing bears. If only Desdemona Cork had not left them! She could have enchanted the soldiers—perhaps even the man with the metal nose, if such could be enchanted. The captives would likely be in a fine house right now, supping on partridge and elderberry wine, instead of in a cage in the cold with their bellies woefully empty.

  Then there was silence, until a man’s voice said, “You stay here and guard them.”

  “Why me? Be you afeared of them witches?” another voice asked.

  Scuffle, scuffle, Grayling heard, and then there was quiet again except for the snuffling and spitting of the man who had lost the scuffle.

  Auld Nancy moved to Grayling’s side. “I found a bit of spider web for your cheek,” she whispered. She clucked in concern as she gently applied the web to Graylings’s cut with her warm hand.

  “You,” said a voice both cold and stony. “You witches, I have use for your magic.”

  “We,” said Auld Nancy with an impatient sigh, “are not that kind of witch.”

  The voice came closer, and so did the speaker, the warlord with the nose of metal. He thrust his face against the branches of their cage and shouted, “I need witch magic, and but for you three, I find no witch, no magician, no wizard abroad in the land!”

  “Aye, we know,” said Auld Nancy. “’Twas an evil force took them, and we think we can set it to rights if you would but free us.”

  “Free you? Nay! I need gold, and I need more armed men. You will use your spells, your curses, your powers, whatever you possess, to see that I get them.” A tiny ray of moonlight shimmered off the tip of his nose, and Grayling shuddered. “I need the Earl of Whetstone’s soldiers to turn and run. And the earl himself I wish gone—whether he dies or leaves the kingdom or just, whoosh, disappears, it is up to you, but I want him gone.” He slowly paced the breadth of the cage and back, his steps echoing through the courtyard like funeral drums. “I want a cloak of invisibility, a binding spell, and an assortment of poisons that act quickly and surely.”

  Auld Nancy stamped her foot. “You do not listen. We do not have such powers and cannot—”

  The man slammed his hand against the branches of their prison. “You will do as I tell you, or you will remain caged like monkeys until the flesh falls off your bones.” He stalked off, shouting over his shoulder, “You will have no food nor drink until I get what I want. And if you remain stubborn, I will have you disemboweled, one by one.”

  There was a short silence, and then, “I’m frightened,” Pansy said with a snuffle, “and terribly hungry. What do we now?”

  “At the moment, there is nothing to do,” said Auld Nancy. “We are at that man’s mercy, may maggots build nests in his hair!”

  Grayling considered their situation. Likely her mother would know what to do or rather what to tell Grayling
to do, but her mother was partway to being a tree. Roots and rutabagas! Grayling herself would have to think of something. In frustration she shook the sides of the cage.

  “Gray Eyes,” said a voice from above. A raven had landed on the roof of the cage. “Gray Eyes,” it repeated, “this Pook is with you. Is there aught he can do?” With a cronk and a shaking of his feathers, the raven became a mouse again. He fell through the bars of the cage and landed with a tiny ooof! at Auld Nancy’s feet.

  Auld Nancy studied him. “Can you not change into something useful—a strong knife, mayhap, or a torch?”

  “Or a joint of beef?” asked Pansy.

  Ignoring them both, Pook asked again, “Gray Eyes, is there aught that this Pook can do for you?”

  “Certes,” said Grayling, wiping her eyes on her sleeve. “I wish to be gone from here! How will you make that happen?”

  After a moment of silence, the mouse said, “There are two things this Pook might do. One, turn himself into a mad bull and tear down this cage. Two, this mouse can remain a mouse and chew through it.”

  “Oh, Pook, you can help me! Which will you do?”

  More silence. “This mouse is compelled to tell the truth. He does not in fact know how to change into a mad bull, so he shall immediately commence chewing. A hole large enough for you to climb through should take”—the moon reflected in the mouse’s tiny eyes as they shifted this way and that around the cage—“a month or so.”

  “A month? Oh, mousie, a month? ’Twill not do. We will be long dead ere a month has passed.” Grayling slumped against the cage.

  “Nay, mistress, do not despond,” said the mouse. “Trust this mouse and wait here.” And he skittered away. Grayling smiled through her tears. Wait here? Where else?

  The three sat together on one side of the cage. Grayling huddled against the warmth that was Auld Nancy, comforted by the familiar aroma of sweat and smoke and sausages. The others dozed, but Grayling, plagued with visions of disemboweling, could not rest.