The Midnight Circus

by Jane Yolen

  This time when I got home Mairi was already up at the quern, her face as black as if it had been rinsed in peat. She did not say a word to me, which was even worse, but by her silence I knew she had said nothing to my father, who slept away in the other room.

  That was the last but one I saw of Iain that summer, though I went night after night to look for him at the stones. My eyes were red from weeping silently as I lay in the straw by Mairi’s side, and she snoring so loudly, I knew she was not really asleep.

  I would have said nothing, but the time came around and my blood did not flow. Mairi knew the count of it since I was so new to womanhood. Perhaps she guessed even before I did, for I saw her looking at me queer. When I felt queasy and was sick behind the house, there was no disguising it.

  “Who is it?” she asked. Mairi was never one for talking too much.

  “Iain the traveler,” I said. “I am dying for love of him.”

  “You are not dying,” she said, “lest your father kill you for this. We will go to Auld Annie who lives down the coast. She practices the black arts and can rid you of the child.”

  “I do not want to be rid of it,” I said. “I want Iain.”

  “He is walking out with Margaret MacKenzie in her shieling. Or if not her, another.”

  “Never! He loves me,” I said. “He swore it.”

  “He loves,” Mairi said, purposefully coarse to shock me, “the cherry in its blossom but not the tree. And his swearing is done to accomplish what he desires.”

  She took me by the hand, then, before I could recover my tongue, and we walked half the morning down the strand to Auld Annie’s croft, it being ten miles or so by. There was only a soft, fair wind and the walking was not hard, though we had to stop every now and again for me to be quietly sick in the sand.

  Auld Annie’s cottage was much the smallest and meanest I had seen. Still it had a fine garden both in front and again in back in the long rig. Plants grew there in profusion, in lazy beds, and I had no name for many of them.

  “She can call fish in by melted lead and water,” Mairi said. “She can calm the seas with seven white stones.”

  I did not look impressed, but it was my stomach once more turning inside me.

  “She foretold your own dear mother’s death.”

  I looked askance. “Why didn’t I know of this?”

  “Your father forbade me ever speak of it.”

  “And now?”

  “Needs does as needs must.” She knocked on the door.

  The door seemed to open of itself because when we got inside, Auld Annie was sitting far from it, in a rocker, a coarse black shawl around her shoulders and a mutch tied under her chin like any proper wife. The croft was lower and darker than ours, but there was a broad mantel over the fire and on it sat two piles of white stones with a human skull, bleached and horrible, staring at the wall between them. On the floor by a long table were three jugs filled with bright red poppies, the only color in the room. From the rafters hung bunches of dried herbs, but they were none of them familiar to me.

  Under her breath, Mairi muttered a charm:

  I trample ’pon the eye

  As tramples the duck ’pon the lake,

  In the name of the secret Three,

  And Brigid the Bride . . .

  and made a quick sign against the Droch Shùil, the evil eye.

  “I knew it, I knew ye were coming, Molly,” Auld Annie said.

  How she knew that—or my name—I could not guess.

  “I knew it as I knew when yer mam was going to die.” Her voice was low, like a man’s.

  “We haven’t come for prophecy,” I said.

  “Ye have come about a babe.”

  My jaw must have gone agape at that for I had told no one but Mairi and that only hours before. Surely Auld Annie was a witch, though if she threw no shadow one could not tell in the dark of her house. Nevertheless I shook my head. “I will keep the babe. All I want is the father to come to me.”

  “Coming is easy,” Auld Annie said in her deep voice. “Staying is hard.”

  “If you get him to come to me,” I answered, suddenly full of myself, “I will get him to stay.”

  From Mairi there was only a sharp intake of breath in disapproval, but Auld Annie chuckled at my remark, dangerous and low.

  “Come then, girl,” she said, “and set yer hand to my churn. We have butter to take and spells to make and a man to call to yer breast.”

  I did not understand entirely, but I followed her to the churn, where she instructed me in what I had to do.

  “As ye churn, girl, say this: Come, butter, come. Come, butter, come.”

  “I know this charm,” I said witheringly. “I have since a child.”

  “Ah—but instead ’a saying ‘butter,’ ye must say yer man’s name. Only—” she raised her hand in warning, “not aloud. And ye must not hesitate even a moment’s worth between the words. Not once. Ye must say it over and over ’til the butter be done. It is not easy, for all it sounds that way.”

  I wondered—briefly—if all she was needing was a strong young girl to do her chores, but resolved to follow her instructions. It is a dangerous thing to get a witch angry with you. And if she could call Iain to me, so much the better.

  So I put my hands upon the churn and did as she bid, over and over and over without a hesitation ’til my arms ached and my mind was numb and all I could hear was Iain’s name in my head, the very sound of it turning my stomach and making me ill. Still I did not stop ’til the butter had come.

  Auld Annie put her hands upon mine, and they were rough and crabbed with time. “Enough!” she said, “or it will come sour as yer belly, and we will have done all for nought.”

  I bit back the response that it was not we but I who had done the work and silently put my aching arms down at my sides. Only then did I see that Annie herself had not been idle. On her table lay a weaving of colored threads.

  “A framing spell,” Mairi whispered by my side. “A deilbh buidseachd.”

  I resisted crossing myself and spoiling the spell and went where Annie led me, to the rocking chair.

  “Sit ye by the fire,” she said.

  No sooner had I sat down, rubbing my aching arms and trying not to jump up and run outside to be sick, when a piece of the peat broke off in the hearth and tumbled out at my feet.

  “Good, good,” Auld Annie crooned. “Fire bodes marriage. We will have success.”

  I did not smile. Gritting my teeth, I whispered, “Get on with it.”

  “Hush,” cautioned Mairi, but her arms did not ache as mine did.

  Auld Annie hastened back to the churn and, dipping her hand into it, carved out a pat of butter the size of a shinty ball with her nails. Slapping it down on the table by the threads, she said: “Name three colors, girl, and their properties.”

  “Blue like the sea by Galan’s Head,” I said.

  “Good, good, two more.”

  “Plum—like his eyes.”

  “And a third.”

  I hesitated, thinking. “White,” I said at last. “White—like . . . like God’s own hair.”

  Auld Annie made a loud tch sound in the back of her throat and Mairi, giving a loud, explosive exhalation, threw her apron up over her head.

  “Not a proper choice, girl,” Auld Annie muttered. “But what’s said cannot be unsaid. Done is done.”

  “Is it spoiled?” I whispered.

  “Not spoiled. Changed.” She drew the named colors of thread from the frame and laid them, side by side, across the ball of butter. “Come here,”

  I stood up and went over to her, my arms all a-tingle.

  “Set the two threads at a cross for the name of God ye so carelessly invoked, and one beneath for yer true love’s name.”

  I did as she bid, suddenly afraid. What had I called up or called down, so carelessly in this dark house?

  Auld Annie wrapped the butter in a piece of yellowed linen, tying the whole up with a black thread, be
fore handing it to me.

  “Take this to the place where ye wish to meet him and bury it three feet down, first drawing out the black thread. Cover it over with earth and while doing so recite three times the very words ye said over the churn. He will come that very evening. He will come—but whether he will stay is up to ye, my girl.”

  I took the sachet in my right hand and dropped it carefully into the pocket of my apron.

  “Come now, girl, give me a kiss to seal it.”

  When I hesitated, Mairi pushed me hard in the small of the back and I stumbled into the old woman’s arms. She smelled of peat and whiskey and age, not unlike my father, but there was something more I could put no name to. Her mouth on mine was nothing like Iain’s, but was bristly with an old woman’s hard whiskers and her lips were cracked. Her sour breath entered mine and I reeled back from her, thankful to be done. As I turned, I glanced at the mantel. To my horror I saw that between the white stones, the skull was now facing me, its empty sockets black as doom.

  Mairi opened the cottage door and we stumbled out into the light, blinking like hedgehogs. I started down the path, head down. When I gave a quick look over my shoulder, Mairi was setting something down by Auld Annie’s door. It was a payment, I knew, but for what and how much I did not ask, then or ever.

  We walked back more slowly than we had come, and I chattered much of the way, as if the charming had been on my tongue to loosen it. I told Mairi about Iain’s hair and his eyes and every word he had spoken to me, doling them out a bit at a time because, truth to tell, he had said little. I recounted the kisses and how they made me feel and even—I blush to think of it now—how I preferred them to what came after. Mairi said not a word in return until we came to the place where the path led away to the standing stones.

  When I made to turn, she put her hand on my arm. “No, not there,” she said. “I told you he has gone up amongst the shielings. If you want him to come to you, I will have your father send you up to the high pasture today.”

  “He will come wherever I call him,” I said smugly, patting the pocket where the butter lay.

  “Do not be more brainless than you have been already,” Mairi said. “Go where you have the best chance of making him stay.”

  I saw at last what she meant. At the stones we would have to creep and hide and lie still lest the fishermen spy us. We would have to whisper our love. But up in the high pasture, along the cliffside, in a small croft of our own, I could bind him to me by night and by day, marrying him in the old way. And no one—especially my father—could say no to such a wedding.

  So Mairi worked her own magic that day, much more homey than Auld Annie’s, with a good hot soup and a hearty dram and a word in the ear of my old father. By the next morning she had me packed off to the shieling, with enough bannocks and barley and flasks of water in my basket to last me a fortnight, driving five of our cows before.

  The cows knew the way as well as I, and they took to the climb like weanlings, for the grass in the shieling was sweet and fresh and greener than the overgrazed land below. In another week Mairi and I would have gone up together. But Mairi had my father convinced that I was grown enough to make the trip for the first time alone. Grown enough—if he had but known!

  Perhaps it was the sea breeze blowing on my face, or the fact that I knew Iain would be in my arms by dark. Or perhaps it was just that the time for such sickening was past, but I was not ill at all on that long walk, my step as jaunty as the cows’.

  It was just coming on late supper when we turned off the path to go up and over the hill to the headland where our little summer croft sits. The cows followed their old paths through the matted bog with a quiet satisfaction, but I leaped carelessly from tussock to tuft behind them.

  I walked—or rather danced—to the cliff’s edge where the hummocks and bog and gray-splattered stone gave way to the sheer of cliff. Above me the gannets flew high and low, every now and again veering off to plummet into the sea after fish. A solitary seal floated below, near some rocks, looking left, then right, then left again but never once up at me.

  With the little hoe I had brought along for the purpose, I dug a hole, fully three feet down, and reverently laid in the butter pat. Pulling the black thread from the sachet, I let the clods of dirt rain back down on it, all the while whispering, “Come, Iain, come. Come, Iain, come.” Then loudly I sang out, “Come, Iain, come!” without a hesitation in between. Then I packed the earth down and stood, rubbing the small of my back where Mairi had pushed me into the sealing kiss.

  I stared out over the sea, waiting.

  He did not come until past dark, which in summer is well in to the mid of the night. By then I had cooked myself a thin barley gruel, and made the bed up, stuffing it with soft grasses and airing out the croft.

  I heard his whistle first, playing a raucous courting tune, not the one he had played on the beach when first I had noticed him, but “The Cuckoo’s Nest,” with words that say the one thing, but mean another.

  In the dim light it took him a minute to see me standing by the door. Then he smiled that slow, sure smile of his. “Well . . . Molly,” he said.

  I wondered that he hesitated over my name, almost as if he could not recall it, though it had been but a few short weeks before that he had whispered it over and over into my tumbled hair.

  “Well, Iain,” I said. “You have come to me.”

  “I have been called to you,” he said airily. “I could not stay away.”

  And then suddenly I understood that he did not know there was magic about; that these were just words he spoke, part of his lovemaking, that meant as little to him as the kisses themselves, just prelude to his passion.

  Well, I had already paid for his pleasure and now he would have to stay for mine. I opened my arms and he walked into them as if he had never been away, his kisses the sweeter now that I knew what he was and how to play his game.

  In the morning I woke him with the smell of barley bread. I thought if I could get him to stay a second night, and a third, the charm would have a chance of really working. So I was sweet and pliant and full of an ardor that his kisses certainly aroused, though that which followed seemed to unaccountably dampen it. Still, I could dissemble when I had to, and each time we made love I cried out as if fulfilled. Then while he slept, I tiptoed out to the place where I had buried the butter sachet.

  “Stay, Iain, stay. Stay, Iain, stay,” I recited over the little grave where my hopes lay buried.

  For a day and another night it seemed to work. He did stay—and quite happily—often sitting half-dressed in the cot watching me cook or lying naked on the sandy beach, playing his whistle to call the seals to him. They rose up out of the water, gazing long at him, as if they were bewitched.

  We made love three and four and five times, day and night, ’til my thighs ached the way my arms had at the churn, and I felt scrubbed raw from trying to hold on to him.

  But on the third day, when he woke, he refused both the barley and my kisses.

  “Enough, sweet Moll,” he said. “I am a traveler, and I must travel.” He got dressed slowly, as if almost reluctant to leave but satisfying the form of it. I said nothing ’til he put his boots on, then could not stop myself.

  “On to another shieling, then?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “And what of the babe—here.” It was the first time I had mentioned it. From the look on his face, I knew it made no matter to him, and without waiting for an answer, I stalked out of the croft. I went to the headland and stood athwart the place where the butter lay buried.

  “Stay, Iain,” I whispered. “Stay. . . ,” but there was neither power nor magic nor desire in my calling.

  He came up behind me and put his arms around me, crossing his hands over my belly where the child-to-be lay quiet.

  “Marry another,” he whispered, nuzzling my ear, “but call him after me.”

  I turned in his arms and pulled him around to kiss me, my mouth wide open as if
to take him in entire. And when the kiss was done, I pulled away and pushed him over the cliff into the sea.

  Like most men of Leodhais, he could not swim, but little it would have availed him, for he hit the rocks and then the water, sinking at once. He did not come up again ’til three seals pushed him ashore onto the beach, where they huddled by his body for a moment as if expecting a tune, then plunged back into the sea when there was none.

  I hurried down and cradled his poor broken body in my arms, weeping not for him but for myself and what I had lost, what I had buried up on that cliff, along with the butter, in a boggy little grave. Stripping the ring from his hand, I put it on my own, marrying us in the eyes of the sea. Then I put him on my back and carried him up the cliffside to bury him deep beneath the heather that would soon be the color of his hair, of his eyes.

  Two weeks later, when Mairi came, I showed her the ring.

  “We were married in God’s sight,” I said, “with two selchies as bridesmaids and a gannet to cry out the prayers.”

  “And where is the bridegroom now?” she asked.

  “Gone to Steornabhagh,” I lied, “to whistle us up money for our very own croft.” She was not convinced. She did not say so, but I could read her face.

  Of course he never returned and—with Mairi standing up for me—I married old McLeod after burying my father, who had stumbled into a hole one night after too much whiskey, breaking both his leg and his neck.

  McLeod was too old for more than a kiss and a cuddle—as Mairi had guessed—and too pigheaded to claim the child wasn’t his own. When the babe was born hale and whole, I named him Iain, a common-enough name in these parts, with only his nurse Mairi the wiser. At McLeod’s death a year later, I gave our old farm over to her. It was a payment, she knew, but exactly for what she never asked, not then or ever.

  Now I lie abed with the pox, weakening each day, and would repent of the magic and the rest—though not of the loving which gave me my child. Still I would have my Iain know who his mother was and what she did for want of him, who and what his father was, and how the witch cursed us all. I would not have my son unmindful of his inheritance. If ever the wind calls him to travel, if ever a witch should tempt him to magic, or if ever a cold, quiet rage makes him choose murder, he will understand and, I trust, set all those desires behind.