by H C Turk
“Aye, and it’s not the dreaded runningvine bush we’re desiring to grow up our noses, is it, miss?” I Elsied my ever-knowing sister.
“No,” she replied.
Searching for a superior site, I found myself in another challenge, and finally understood their nature. Neither Marybelle nor the world around us was offering these tests, but the flexible witch herself, as though a type of emotional self-mutilation.
“I suggest, Miss Marybelle, that we plant our home on the bottom of that rocky hill; for with the first storm of rain or half-eaten lizards from Hell will come an avalanche to flood and kill us, and thus I will be unable to rant on further in response to your fine knowledge and moderate disposition, which pray God I will learn to better appreciate if ever I stop talking.”
“You speak well, Alba.”
“You speak perfectly, Marybelle.”
Eventually Marybelle discovered our site.
“Against that hill, on the side where the sun shines to warm us. No bank above is there for rains to run down nor snow to collect and melt. Yet the low and straight hillside and huge boulder there gives us the most part of two walls for our beginning.”
“Ah! Miss Marybelle, your learned and lucid erudition describing cleanly the criteria for our homesite is such a composition as to be theatrical, and thereby I determine your insistence upon refuting yourself as carpenter or mason, for in fact you are the composer of opera!”
“I go for limbs,” she said, and I was certain she suppressed a cackle of glee at my ration of meager humor.
I aided, beginning a task requiring years, it seemed. So far from Marybelle I roamed that she could not be smelled. Initially, however, I gathered nearby limbs, my first loads judged by my colleague.
“These be too small, and scarcely useful,” she reported.
“Yes, miss, and thank you.”
“And this large one is—”
“Is easy to bear, though of a grand size.”
“Easy to bear because the worms have eaten it inside, and soon it will be naught but pulp.”
“Thank you, miss, and I thought you were no carpenter.”
After carrying those useless loads in my arms, Marybelle showed how to bundle limbs together, tie them with vines, and drag them behind me, a greater quantity thus transported with each journey.
“And how, miss, am I to gain segments of these tough and green vines?”
“If the yellow ones are not to be found, search for these but in a brownish state and thus breakable,” she replied, “or cut them with your knife.” And from her bag, Marybelle pulled forth a waxed bundle that she uncovered to reveal a blade.
“And where is yours?” she asked.
I refused to be astonished.
“Not being an eater of lizards, I have no need for weapons to butcher them,” I asserted, and withdrew to find a townhouse exactly like Rathel’s.
So massive was my next heap of limbs that I did not return until overnight. And pleased I was to have found a type of vine breakable with repetitive bends. Marybelle, however, submitted that these vines were not the best type, for the yellowish she had found were more flexible yet equally sturdy and could be achieved even by someone with no knife.
“Yes, miss, and thank God you are no mason, lest I be dragging the wrong color brick halfway across Earth,” I mentioned, and left her sight for the night to return with a tremendous load of sticks whose dragging seemed enough to kill me, but Marybelle had remained nearer our site, finding several sources so that her multiple loads conspired to lose mine in their shadow, away with me again for two full days, not caring to return with a single flipping limb, but by the grace of God hoping to find a way to avoid contests I had begun whose rules I could not determine.
• • •
“Presumably, we next begin piling them, leaning some straight and vertical against our great boulder here, others against the hill’s edge, then tying the lot together with vines of the proper pink and blue color.”
“We begin,” Marybelle replied.
Quite content was I to allow Marybelle to supply guidance while I accomplished most of the physical chores—and was not the cause here my guilt for having taken advantage of Elsie, my (my!) servant? But caring for me was a task she cherished, even as I cherished mine, for the obvious motive of producing an abode, for the secondary cause of ethical shame and social retribution and flipping bog muck philosophy I suppose.
Our home would require two full walls and one partial plus a roof, the former made carefully straight so as not to fall and crush the inhabitants, the latter angled from the hill to guide water away. And what had I learned from observing a certain cathedral constructed by dissimilar sweating bodies? The basic outlines we established by holding limbs upright, setting others thereupon as supported by knotty protrusions and tied fast with flexible, yellow vines so strong as to retain their innumerable leaves interminably, cleared with difficulty by the pale witch pink who had no knife and by the devil would not use the one offered her, every leaf necessarily removed to promote better tying and placate the ancient architect; and surely a few cathedrals of her own Miss Marybelle had tossed together in her day.
After the frame was up like a skeleton, I asked Marybelle of the particular nature of our abode: townhouse, chalet…?
“Hut,” she replied.
“Might we arrange for a window?” I suggested. “How pleasant to look from our home onto the realm that God has provided us.”
“We’ll have a door, which is needed, but I fear making a window in that the wall might be unsturdy.”
“Therefore, am I to expect no upper story of my own? No basement nor interior balcony shall be provided? No cornices and columns, no drawing room and lady’s chambers?”
“I be no carpenter.”
“Nor mason, I might surmise in a fantastical bout of waking dream.”
“Nor mason,” she agreed.
After uncounted days—in that certain of the local populace became distraught at the very mention of arithmetic—our house was recognizable as a hut, but a chalet for any witch accustomed to sleeping in bogs.
“Am I correct, Miss Marybelle, in surmising that an exceptional wind might take our house along with it like constables an unwilling prisoner?”
“The bottom we will bond to the earth with clay.”
“Being but a common witch at heart, if not in the crotch, I know little of clay, since I am no mason.”
“Yonder lies good, grey stuff.”
“None yellow? Recently this has been my favorite color for building materials.”
“Grey,” she replied.
This specifically grey clay we transported with a small sled made of limbs too tiny for the hut brought early in the construction process by the white—not yellow—witch, its surface covered with a weave of leaves, though not the tiny sort stripped from our attaching vines whose hue I could scarcely be expected to recall.
Our hands were the implements for digging the sticky clay from the ground and applying the material along the hut’s base and those edges attached to the great boulder and adjacent hillside. After the task was completed months or millennia later, I noted to Marybelle that the walls were porous, for I could see through both simultaneously.
“We seal them with clay,” she said.
“How is it, miss, I understand your meaning in that I am no mason?” I wondered.
Before completing this sealing coat, our crew ran short of clay, and had to search a day to find a new source hours removed from our home, thank you, Satan. The roof then followed in losing its porosity. Here I was greatly disappointed, for I had a certain expertise in repairing thatched roofs as learned on my Man’s Isle abode. But no palm trees grew in the Cambrian Mountains, and our roof was not thatch, but pottery. Praise God Marybelle knew nothing of blown glass. Regardless, I heartily applied my efforts toward the particular roof she designed without thoughts of Edward Denton.
Though arduous, my task of climbing the hill then clam
bering down to the roof was part of good living. From my physically superior, intellectually questionable vantage, I received from Marybelle clay enough to cover our roof. When both roof and walls were coated and allowed to dry, Marybelle suggested another application to fill those cracks left by the drying. But when cracks formed in this layer and I casually described the exterior scenery by standing within the hut to look out—not through the window, for our chalet had none—Marybelle suggested that another layer of clay be applied inside. When this dried—after some days, since the sun’s rays were excluded from our castle’s windowless, nearly doorless interior—my oh my, our hovel yet held cracks.
“I note, Marybelle, that these latest cracks are thinner than the former. Do we therefore attempt another clay layer, or seek a solution from the resident mason, who unfortunately does not exist?”
“We seal them with sap,” she replied.
“Would you, from fortuitous happenstance or lengthy wandering of this new domain, have noticed a source of the aforementioned material?”
“No,” she replied.
“Sap, this stuff oozing from trees, is what we seek; but what say our non-mason, non-carpenter as to the preferable color?”
“Clear,” she told me.
Marybelle soon found a small, tough plant called glue brush she deemed adequate for our needs. Breaking the greenest limbs near the plant’s base produced a fine flow of clear pitch. But no means for collecting and transporting this substance was available until an incandescent idea occurred to me.
“Shall we use your bag, miss? Emptied, it would transport a fine load.”
“I should keep my bag, and full as is. Yours be less porous.”
“Oh, sorry, no; for if our castle collapses and I need to return to London, whatever shall I use for luggage?”
At my—yea, at my—suggestion we made a vessel of clay reinforced with limbs and dragged on a simple sled. Since a fine container it was, God I fully praised for allowing me to finally pass one of my own tests, yet feel more relief than pride. And no great satisfaction need be felt, for each glue brush plant was but a minor source, and scores had to be drained. Marybelle and I therefore constructed smaller vessels, leaving each beneath a split limb to catch the drippings. But we were certain not to permanently damage the plants, for we sought no destruction, and might one day need more of this adhesive for repairing yearly wear to our estate.
Slow to collect and slow to dry was this sap, especially when the thinner witch applied too much to the roof in order to hasten the uncomfortable chore. Before the drying thus came dripping, the roofer examining her work from within looking upward to find it on her hair and feet but only one drop in the eye, which stung briefly and required days of rubbing before the eye would open again.
We made our door large enough to overlap its opening on all sides including the bottom where we formed a high, clay sill. Secured on the inner side with vines and stick wedges, the door provided an acceptable seal, a bit of light leaking through at the edges, The remainder of our shack was dark, this being descriptive of security from the weather, and perhaps suffocation if the door were made to seal more tightly.
The weather became cool, though no snow fell before our home was completed. Before we had fully engineered the mechanics of the door’s latching, we slept within, being certain the sealing sap was well dried, since neither witch desired to awaken bonded to the floor for a very long life. Soft, strawlike grasses we collected and brought into the hut, along with our bags. We witches selected separate sites for our bedchambers. So voluminous was our house that another pair of women could have joined us, though my four-poster in the Rathel’s was too long. We considered no additional furnishing, no kitchen table or library shelving. Inside we lay, sunlight lolling through the open doorway and filling our house. Immersed in secure comfort, we slept.
Awakening near dusk, we found little activity to occupy us. The door panel required drying before we designed the hinging; and though no mason nor carpenter was present, did not the hut’s populace include an expert in latchwork? Therefore, we lounged about on our grass piles like useless sinners, Marybelle nibbling a sweet shoot, offering me a bite for which I thanked her no, this witch’s belly yet full of a new berry discovered only after eating to be indigestible. After a walk merely to verify the world outside as ours, we returned for the night’s sleeping, the door opening providing a moonlit view of our domain.
Days later, our door now dried, we were able to secure it from within via Marybelle’s design of vine ties and a stick latch I invented, harrumph. Surely, our home would now provide security against the snows and freezing winds sensed coming, cold weather worse than any of Man’s Isle. The witch without fat’s padding especially desired to separate herself from upcoming icy conditions, being shy a coat and shawl like a sinning lady, yet having lived protected in society too long.
Studying the completed house, I determined the true nature of our construction. With its solid, windowless walls, “hut” was no proper term. Neither did we sit within a manse nor hovel nor castle.
Suddenly I turned to Marybelle and called out sharply.
“Now I see, Miss Marybelle, that despite your lack of carpentry and masonry skills, you reveal yourself a virtual deity, for you have created a cave!”
“I fancy the damp,” she confessed.
The seasonal differences seemed to make our stay in this land more genuine. The leaves’ changing in color predicted their fall, plant life grew slowly or not at all, and animals other than witches prepared to settle in shelters against the approaching cold. During this ending season, an important task for Marybelle and I was collecting foodstuffs to last through a winter’s deadness. Each sister had her preferences for eating, Marybelle mentioning that my sky berries and soft nuts would spoil in weeks and be inedible. Thank you everso, miss witch. Soon I began another task, one Marybelle considered as evil as her eating a lizard had been to me.
I undertook a new construction. So long did I work on this item that Marybelle was forced to become both curious and loquacious.
“You make a large vessel of clay and with a lid. For storage it be?”
“For deposit, Marybelle, in that I make us a chamber pot.”
“The thing sinners empty on the street?”
“Swank sinners bury their swill, and we have no streets to soil.”
“Do you say we are to use it?”
“If the cold comes so intensely that we cannot quit the cave, our bowels might be emptied herein.”
“You say we shit in our new house?”
“Only under drastic conditions.”
“So long you’ve been in London as to be unable to hold your pee a freezing season in which you are nothing but asleep?”
“We white witches are different from you commoners, perhaps,” I retorted, and continued with my project. Marybelle left my sight aghast enough to eat fried cattle.
Exceptional was the winter that came to our domain. Yet no suffering befell me, for I had not lived in London long enough to lose my natural immunities. No standing in a heated room looking out to snow made the last winter preferable to this, nor did my renewed exposure to nature after an interval of pampered society make the current winter more bitter than its objective temperature. Although our house was high, soon it was covered with snow, though the air itself seemed colder than the ice coating our land. So changed was our world in its colors and textures that it seemed another new domain. But our house seemed as old and sturdy as its supporting hill, the door leaking little until the edges were blown filled with snow. Surely, our homesite became so ensconced with snow as to be hidden, for the door opened a crack revealed a white wall blocking our view, not a glimpse of the grey sky to be seen, a wall so solid it did not collapse to fill our hut, our home.
On the rare day early in this season when the dry snow could be pressed way, Marybelle and I moved outside: to chew snow for its water, and for the required bodily drainage that could not transpire within our ho
use, since my chamber pot was a container for food’s storage until an emergency, so displeased was Marybelle’s smell regarding this sinning device. Another cause for exiting was observation and existence, for this land was our home and we intended to live therein, not hide. Little wandering about we undertook, for I especially had no preference for bare limbs, birdless skies, and white ground revealing scarcely any life except the occasional rabbit footprints. But the land remained natural even in its severity, and I continued to love it. Then the cold came so bitter that we dared not leave, placing our two beds and bodies together in order to retain the warmth that God’s animal creatures produce with their blood and flesh.
How easily time is discerned in the wilds, for therein are obvious seasons, clear distinctions of month according to the moon, day and night as delivered by the sun, minutes too inconsequential to be countable even by an educated witch. Moments were everywhere, and winter was our longest.
Our attitude of mutual holding became an occupation seldom left by the witches, who slept through entire days scarcely moving to avoid exposing new areas of flesh not previously chilled, and no true desire for a fireplace in the adjacent room had I, merely random thoughts. None of our extra clothing we wore, for that would have proven our failure to secure adequate bedding. With all our sleeping, we required little eating, most of our collected food unnecessary, and the chamber pot was merely another unopened bag. Eventually the season became static, a permanent, blowing cold to render the witches in their home like the trees outside, equally active, equally warm. And I could only wonder of other animals: along with bears and witches, did elephants hibernate? But soon we were no more aware than those trees and bears, for we fell asleep so deeply as to not awaken until another year.
Chapter 24
Hoax Witches With Words
So stiff were we upon awakening that sitting was an effort, and standing did not come early that day. Freezing was not the cause, but weeks of stillness to lock our joints as though parts of a sinning latchwork rusted together. Surely, the young witch was no more supple now than the stiff hag beside her, our poses so comical that Marybelle and I cackled together, but only briefly, for here was another act to pain us.