by Ellen Datlow
It gets darker, and darker. The forest is a night-in-day, which now falls.
Oh, they’re off the beaten track, well off now. Even the skinny path to the hen-keeping Widow’s has been missed.
Ghilane thinks suddenly, madly, as she runs, Why have I come this way?—I shouldn’t have done that. But where else could she go? It’s instinct. She had seen, more than all the other times, near-murder stark in Bergette’s white face, her viper-poison eyes, so, like the hunted stag, the ermine, the boar, Ghilane runs to her only hope of safety…
Which isn’t safety. How can it be?
Not till she reaches the Tree does Ghilane stop, gasping, holding the stitch in her side.
Then, run out, she drops on her knees, bows her head, and waits for Bergette to come and beat her up among the leafy shadows.
The Tree is half an oak. Or rather it’s two trees, a hornbeam and an oak, which have rooted so close they’ve grown together and become the Tree.
In all the forest-night of dark, these trees are green already with an early summer not much present in the rest of the woods. The leaves aren’t full-blown, but they’re still massed all over the two trees, frills of the oak, and the hand shapes of the hornbeam, with its strange yellow sprays like catkins hanging down. The Tree has been able, two in one, to pierce the roof of the forest. And down from there pours a fountain of green-gold sunlight, splashing and sparkling to the ground, where it breaks like scattered flames.
Slowly, despite everything, Ghilane looks up and watches the Tree. She takes in the coiling grapevine which will get purple grapes in fall-of-leaf, and the old honeycomb caught up between two boughs. She sees here, there, where a twist of ribbon has been tied on by others she’s never met here. And on an apron-lap that opens from the trunks just at the right spot, offerings have been placed—some over-wintered apples, a crust of a fresh loaf.
All the birds that fly and bell about the forest visit the Tree, but they seldom disturb the offerings. Now they’ve gone quiet. It’s as ominous as when Bergette stopped her song.
And then Bergette is there. With one hand she grabs Ghilane’s hair and wrenches back her head, and Ghilane screws tight her eyes to save them—
And then, Bergette lets her go.
“What’s this weird place?” asks Bergette.
Startled at the interruption to violence, “I don’t know,” lies Ghilane, who knows.
“It’s a bad area. Trust you to drag us into it.” And she cuffs Ghilane, but forgetfully now.
Bergette’s eyes have gone to the altar in the Tree.
“Don’t! Don’t!” cries Ghilane, as Bergette fists up two of the apples that have been offered to the god of the forest, and begins to bite into them, first one, then the other.
But Bergette just grins, and goes on biting.
They don’t often get an apple, or anything nice. Useless Mother has no garden plot, and those that do don’t bother to bring anything like that when they “visit.”
Ghilane stands up and waits for the god who is sometimes in the Tree to demonstrate his anger.
Why doesn’t he do it?
Would Ghilane be glad if he struck Bergette? Oh yes, yes. But even so, Ghilane goes up to the Tree. She leans close as she’s done before, and whispers, “Don’t be angry. She’s ignorant, that’s all.”
“Am I now.” Bergette pulls Ghilane away from the Tree and punches her just above the waist.
While Ghilane lies on the ground, trying to breathe again, Bergette slings the part-eaten apples hard against the Tree’s trunk, so they squash.
“Filthy pagan thing!” screams Bergette at the Tree. “What’s to be frightened of? What’s to give things to? Nothing there.”
Then she wheels round and runs off—terrified—into the forest.
Ghilane can’t follow even if she’d like to. She isn’t lost, anyway, she knows where she is. It’s Bergette who is lost.
Ghilane finally gets up and goes back to the Tree.
She stands looking up and up into the cascade of green and gold. Then she touches the bark. “I’m sorry about that. Don’t be angry.” Then she takes the coin which Mother gave her for the eggs, and puts it down on the altar. “I know money doesn’t mean anything to you, but it’s all I’ve got to give.” Why—why—does she do this? Ghilane herself isn’t certain. Somehow she had a hideous picture of Bergette thrown into a prison for what she’s done, and screaming—and despite everything, Ghilane can’t stand it. That’s just how she is—squeamish and over-imaginative—or compassionate.
The Tree rustles, a long sigh, as if it knows now Mother will also beat Ghilane for having “dropped” the coin and failed to bring home the eggs. But of course the Tree knows. The god knows. The god and the Tree know everything.
The Christian priest in the church (who drinks too much beer) lectures them all on how they mustn’t believe in pagan things, demons and spirits in the forest. The trees are only wood, the wolves are only wolves, and nothing else exists. However, he does tell them to believe in the Devil, who uses their superstition to entrap them. The Devil is in the forest, suggests the beery priest, and in their own wicked hearts.
Ghilane, on the other hand, who doesn’t believe the Devil is particularly in the forest, believes that other things are.
Having nothing better to do now, she walks between the trees in the direction that will lead her over to the Widow’s shack. Perhaps Bergette too may refind the path. And the Widow might let them have an egg for the baker anyway, without payment… she sometimes has in the past, when Bergette, who sets some store by money, has pocketed the coin.
The Widow is supposed, by some, to have been the wife of a (now dead) Crusader, who retired to the villages hereabouts for some unknown reason. A most unlikely story, but there is something peculiar about her.
She’s old and bent, with gnarled brown hands, but she veils her face and hair over as they say women do in the heathen East. Sometimes you catch the flash of her narrow old eyes behind the veil, but not enough to see their color. The rest of her features are invisible.
Her shack is tumbledown and not very clean, and cats live there in quantities, together with a vast, ivy-green toad. They cause each other no harm, strangely, the cats and the toad. Even the hens peck in and out, and sometimes birds from the forest, and the cats just yawn and go elsewhere to tear things apart.
Today, the Widow’s out at the front, weeding her garden patch, where she cultivates wild cabbage, celeriac, and a walnut tree. Hens potter round her feet. There’s no sign of Bergette.
The Widow straightens from her plants and stands staring at Ghilane through the veil.
“Good morning,” says Ghilane. “Do you have any spare eggs?”
“Who bruised your ribs?” snaps out the old woman. How can she know? Perhaps the birds have told her.
“My sister.”
“What else?” snaps the Widow.
“She stole the offering to the Tree.” (And why say that?)
To Ghilane’s surprise, the Widow laughs. She says, “No eggs. They haven’t laid these past three days.”
Ghilane turns to go, knowing now she’ll be really thumped and belted, because there’ll she be minus coin and eggs. The Widow says, “Come in the house.”
Also oddly, Ghilane doesn’t mind the Widow’s shack. It smells of hens and cats (and toad?) but also of herbs and various medicines the Widow makes from nettles and similar things. Light streams in at a narrow window. They sit down on two stools.
“Have you made offerings at the Tree?” asks the Widow.
Ghilane hasn’t lied to the Widow. Somehow she knows it wouldn’t be much use. And the Widow anyway seems to know everything—all this is just a formality.
“Yes.”
“What did you ask for in return?”
“Silly things. Not to be hit.”
“Didn’t work, did it,” says the Widow.
“No.”
“But you go on thinking there’s something in the Tree.”
“So it’s a man?” slyly asks the Widow.
“Yes,” says Ghilane. “But not a man.” She goes red and looks away. “I saw him, once.”
The Widow seems amused again. “What did you see?”
Ghilane blushes until she thinks her head will burst, but she says, anyway, “It was one early morning. Bergette scalded me, and I ran up there to the Tree, but when I got close, I waited, because there was a wild boar there. Only it wasn’t goring at the trunk, just standing still. And then it walked off. And when it did—up in the leaves—sort of under the leaves—”
“Yes?”
“Him.”
“What was he like, then?”
“Like—” Ghilane can’t say, since she has so far nothing to compare him to. If she had, she’d say, “Like a young prince.” Or maybe not. Finally she says, “He was handsome, and there were leaves and grapes in his hair, and his eyes were green, and then they were black. And then the wind moved the branches and he was gone.”
“I’ll tell you,” says the old woman, “what you’ve been doing wrong at that Tree. You haven’t been asking for enough.”
“Enough? But—”
“Listen hard. I’ll say it once. Don’t ask him to let you off a slap, or make your bruise stop hurting. That’s no use. Because if he does it, next minute you’ll have another bruise and you’ll be slapped again, won’t you?”
Ghilane nods, watching the hens.
“So what would you really have, girl, from the god in the green Tree? Think. Think carefully. Then speak it out.”
Ghilane shakes back her hair and stands up, and raises her hands. “My life to be changed to something wonderful and new, something different—and far away from them all!”
“Be sure of it,” says the Widow.
Ghilane is quite sure. She thinks, She’s a witch, I’ve always known…
And then she sees straight through the Widow’s veil, as if it isn’t there.
Ghilane can’t scream. She throws herself down on the floor, and the chickens cluck annoyedly. They don’t worry about the presence of a god who’s been around forever, and especially here since the Widow peacefully died at sunset, yesterday.
Bergette had blundered along until she tripped over a great root, and when she sat up, found she’d bruised her ribs and nearly knocked the breath out of herself.
She doesn’t know where she is.
She begins to cry, blaming Ghilane for getting her deliberately lost. It’s a trick Ghilane’s thought up with Mother, who’s always hated Bergette and secretly liked Ghilane because Ghilane is almost all one color, honey brown, like a young tree. Bergette hates herself, too, and now she wants to kill someone or something, preferably Ghilane.
Then she looks up properly and the dark forest is all lit with the vividity of noon, the brilliant sunlight crashing down through all the black trees on top of Bergette.
Bergette considers. If the sun’s up there, when half an hour ago it was over there, then that is the east, and she knows that the Widow’s shack lies over that way.
In a minute or so, Bergette is limping on—she’s hurt her foot too, in the fall. Birds sing, and she hates them and wants to wring their necks. She sees a spotted snake coiled high up, and curses it, and her snake-venom eyes become more venomous, so nasty in fact she can hardly see with them, and so it comes as no surprise when she at last looks round and finds she’s now got into a clump of the darkest thickets, ringed by budding ash trees, which in turn seem ringed as if by a wall of thick, sable firs.
Bergette stops again. It was only noon just then, but suddenly she’s cold. She shivers, and the firs do the same. As if something unseen is walking across the tops of them.
So Bergette says a prayer. But the prayer won’t really come because it’s all about being forgiven for her sins, and Bergette will be damned if she’ll admit to having any of those right now.
It’s all Ghilane’s fault, this. Just let her wait—
Bravely, Bergette sings her song, a line or two,
“For I shall wed a bold young knight,
Come from the East, so fine and grave,
And he will dress me in ring of gold,
And I shall be his own true love.
Then he will take me for his bride
And I shall live well as a queen—
(Bergette wants to stop singing now. Finds she can’t.)
And like the stars his armor all
Shines in among the leaves so green.”
The forest is truly now black as night. Pitch black. A storm must have come up, covering the sky with cloud.
Bergette senses the approach of lightning, thunder—which never happen—but still she crouches down and starts to whimper. Until finally—
“I never meant to take your apples!” cries Bergette.
Too late?
There’s someone coming out now from between the fir trees and the ash. Dark as the wood, as the sky. Black of eyes and hair and garments and—oh.
“Oh, it’s you,” croaks Bergette, as the old Widow-witch comes cranking up to her.
“And is it me?” says the Widow.
And then Bergette knows, with a gush of boiling fear that, no, it isn’t.
“I never—I never never—”
“But you did.”
“I was a fool.”
“Yes, you were.”
“Don’t—don’t—only say how I can put it right?”
“Is that all you’d ask for? Ask again.”
In her panic, Bergette shrieks, “Set me free! How can I be good when everything’s so bad? Let my life be changed to something wonderful and new, something different—and far away from them all!” And knows she means this, though why she’s said it would almost puzzle her, if she weren’t so frightened.
“Where are those selfish beasts of girls?” shouts Mother, stamping about in her horrible dirty stinking house, that can’t ever be called a home, even by the mice who have unrented rooms in the walls. (Let it be said here, not all easy-women are as dreadful as Mother. No, she has developed a special talent for lousiness.)
However, the situation helps. The baker hasn’t turned up. Mother thinks, even so, she could have fancied an egg herself, couldn’t she?
Those ungrateful parasites—those sluts—put them to work, that’s what they needed. Why should she keep them in luxury—their own bed and all—she’d never wanted them.
It was the forest’s fault. Those two handsome woodcutters. An evil place, the forest, everyone knew it, full of temptations and imps—
Of course, the woodcutters were both village men—another village, she didn’t know where it was, they’d neither of them said. Yet, in the wood they hadn’t either of them seemed like village oafs. They’d seemed witty and cultured. Especially the first one, Bergette’s father. Well, Mother thought disgustedly, she’d almost been in love—twice! And so been careless. Twice.
Bang went the wind, blown down from the woods with its friend, the black sky. It would rain soon, and water would come through the roof.
Oh, she’d tan their hides, both of them, with the leather belt. When they got home.
And looking forward with slight anticipation to this treat—what Life does to Mother she’s always ready, later, to take out on Ghilane and Bergette—Mother forgets something. Which is that it’s now just possible her other (secret) wish—that of losing both daughters—may at last have come true.
When Ghilane wakes up, real night has come, prowling through the forest like a lynx, and she jumps to her feet in fear.
How could she have slept after what had happened? Oh, perhaps he made her sleep, the god. Lulled her asleep the way a supernatural being could. Or she’d simply fainted, from the shock. The last thing she remembers is how she stood there and said exactly what she wanted, although she can’t actually remember what she said. Nor, come to that, what the god looked l
ike—
Anyway. It was a dream. That must be it. She ran up here and found the poor old Widow had died (which is curious too, because Ghilane can’t really remember this either, only that she knows about it). And then somehow the god was there, so she must have sat down exhausted among the chickens and dreamed all that about the god.
A shame. It had been a good dream. Alarming but also magical and—well, lovely.
Like the other dream she’d had once about seeing him in the Tree among the leaves.
Ghilane sits thinking about this, until some lights come wending along the path and stop at the door.
Then she glances up and sees ten old women, each one very much resembling the dead Widow, with their faces all veiled, and each one carrying a rush candle that burns with a bluish cats-eye gleam.
This might be upsetting, but isn’t really. The Widow was indeed part of a professional Witchery, and her sisters have felt her death and come to bury her in the proper, respectful witch fashion.
They therefore do so. Ghilane, who feels sorry about the old woman—though the witches assure Ghilane the Widow is happy, and even young again, now—helps them. She holds candles, assists with spades, and also gathers in the chickens for the night.
“I’ll live here now,” says one old woman, who’s exactly like the others. Ghilane really can’t tell them apart.
Then three of them invite Ghilane to accompany them to their own house, which is apparently far across the forest. They seem to think Ghilane will have witch-power herself. “Something about you,” they murmur, staring through and through her with their veiled eyes.
Ghilane knows, whatever else, she can’t go home. She’s not only not got coin or egg, she’s “dropped” her sister as well.
She feels mysteriously drawn to the three old women. She gives in.
They walk all night through the forest.
The trees look like bears in the dark, but the three old women don’t seem bothered. The stars cast down their glitterings whenever there’s a gap in the branches. Frogs creak from the quags. Once a wolf crosses their path. The old women greet the wolf and the wolf seems to nod, then trots on. A trick worth knowing, if nothing else. (As, come to that, is the trick of walking all day to get to the Widow’s, and then all the way back without a real rest.)