by Paula Guran
So they were happy for the first time in their lives; so happy, in fact, that certain desires always before subjugated to the desire for knowledge, began to awaken. “I don’t suppose,” Barry said one night across the table, “that you ever thought much about marrying?”
“Well, no,” his friend answered, doubtfully. “That is, I’m in minor orders . . . and it seemed irrelevant . . . ”
“And expensive. Besides, in my time, no self-respecting woman would want to share my kind of life. American women are so damned poised and efficient and glamorous, terrifying creatures. . . .
“And women here are little and dark, like beetles, with bad teeth,” Lenoir said morosely.
They said no more about women that night. But the next night they did; and the next; and on the next, celebrating the successful dissection of the main nervous system of a pregnant frog, they drank two bottles ot Montrachet ’74 and got soused. “Let’s invoke a woman, Jehan,” Barry said in a lascivious bass, grinning like a gargoyle.
“What if I raised a devil this time?”
“Is there really much difference?”
They laughed wildly, and drew a pentagram. “Haere, haere,” Lenoir began; when he got the hiccups, Barry took over. He read the last words. There was a rush of cold, marshy-smelling air, and in the pentagram stood a wild-eyed being with long black hair, stark naked, screaming.
“Woman, by God,” said Barry.
“Is it?”
It was. “Here, take my cloak,” Barry said, for the poor thing now stood gawping and shivering. He put the cloak over her shoulders. Mechanically she pulled it round her, muttering, “Gratias ago, domine.”
“Latin!” Lenoir shouted. “A woman speaking Latin?” It took him longer to get over that shock than it did Bota to get over hers. She was, it seemed, a slave in the household of the Sub-Prefect of North Gaul, who lived on the smaller island of the muddy island town called Lutetia. She spoke Latin with a thick Celtic brogue, and did not even know who was emperor in Rome in her day. A real barbarian, Lenoir said with scorn. So she was—an ignorant, taciturn, humble barbarian with tangled hair, white skin, and clear gray eyes. She had been waked from a sound sleep. When they convinced her that she was not dreaming, she evidently assumed that this was some prank of her foreign and all-powerful master the Sub-Prefect, and accepted the situation without further question. “Am I to serve you, my masters?” she inquired timidly but without sullenness, looking from one to the other.
“Not me,” Lenoir growled, and added in French to Barry, “Go on; I’ll sleep in the storeroom.” He departed.
Bota looked up at Barry. No Gauls, and few Romans, were so magnificently tall; no Gauls and no Romans ever spoke so kindly. “Your lamp” (it was a candle, but she had never seen a candle) “is nearly burnt out,” she said. “Shall I blow it out?”
For an additional two sous a year the landlord let them use the storeroom as a second bedroom, and Lenoir now slept alone again in the main room of the garret. He observed his friend’s idyll with a brooding, unjealous interest. The professor and the slave girl loved each other with delight and tenderness. Their pleasure overlapped Lenoir in waves of protective joy. Bota had led a brutal life, treated always as a woman but never as a human. In one short week she bloomed, she came alive, evincing beneath her gentle passiveness a cheerful, clever nature. “You’re turning out to be a regular Parisienne,” he heard Barry accuse her one night (the attic walls were thin).
She replied, “If you knew what it is for me not to be always defending myself, always afraid, always alone . . . ”
Lenoir sat up on his cot and brooded. About midnight, when all was quiet, he rose and noiselessly prepared the pinches of sulfur and silver, drew the pentagram, opened the book. Very softly he read the spell. His face was apprehensive.
In the pentagram appeared a small white dog. It cowered and hung its tail, then came shyly forward, sniffed Lenoir’s hand, looked up at him with liquid eyes and gave a modest, pleading whine. A lost puppy.
Lenoir stroked it. It licked his hands and jumped all over him, wild with relief. On its white leather collar was a silver plaque engraved, “Jolie. Dupont, 36 rue de Seine, Paris VIe.”
Jolie went to sleep, after gnawing a crust, curled up under Lenoir’s chair. And the alchemist opened the book again and read, still softly, but this time without self-consciousness, without fear, knowing what would happen.
Emerging from his storeroom-bedroom honeymoon in the morning, Barry stopped short in the doorway. Lenoir was sitting up in bed, petting a white puppy, and deep in conversation with the person sitting on the foot of the bed, a tall red-haired woman dressed in silver. The puppy barked. Lenoir said, “Good morning!” The woman smiled wondrously.
“Jumping Jesus,” Barry muttered (in English). Then he said, “Good morning. When are you from?” The effect was Rita Hayworth, sublimated—Hayworth plus the Mona Lisa, perhaps?
“From Altair, about seven thousand years from now,” she said, smiling still more wondrously. Her French accent was worse than that of a football-scholarship freshman. “I’m an archaeologist. I was excavating the ruins of Paris III. I’m sorry I speak the language so badly; of course we know it only from inscriptions.”
“From Altair? The star? But you’re human—I think—”
“Our planet was colonized from Earth about four thousand years ago—that is, three thousand years from now.” She laughed, most wondrously, and glanced at Lenoir. “Jehan explained it all to me, but I still get confused.”
“It was a dangerous thing to try it again, Jehan!” Barry accused him. “We’ve been awfully lucky, you know.”
“No,” said the Frenchman. “Not lucky.”
“But after all it’s black magic you’re playing with—Listen—I don’t know your name, Madame.”
“Kislk,” she said.
“Listen, Kislk,” Barry said without even a stumble, “your science must be fantastically advanced—is there any magic? Does it exist? Can the laws of Nature really be broken, as we seem to be doing?”
“I’ve never seen nor heard of an authenticated case of magic.”
“Then what goes on?” Barry roared. “Why does that stupid old spell work for Jehan, for us, that one spell, and here, nowhere else, for nobody else, in five—no, eight—no, fifteen thousand years of recorded history? Why? Why? And where did that damn puppy come from?”
“The puppy was lost,” Lenoir said, his dark face grave. “Somewhere near this house, on the Île Saint-Louis.”
“And I was sorting potsherds,” Kislk said, also gravely, “in a house site, Island 2, Pit 4, Section D. A lovely spring day, and I hated it. Loathed it. The day, the work, the people around me.” Again she looked at the gaunt little alchemist, a long, quiet look. “I tried to explain it to Jehan last night. We have improved the race, you see. We’re all very tall, healthy, and beautiful. No fillings in our teeth. All skulls from Early America have fillings in the teeth. Some of us are brown, some white, some gold-skinned. But all beautiful, and healthy, and well-adjusted, and aggressive, and successful. Our professions and degree of success are pre-planned for us in the State Pre-School Homes. But there’s an occasional genetic flaw. Me, for instance. I was trained as an archaeologist because the Teachers saw that I really didn’t like people, live people. People bored me. All like me on the outside, all alien to me on the inside. When everything’s alike, which place is home? But now I’ve seen an unhygienic room with insufficient heating. Now I’ve seen a cathedral not in ruins. Now I’ve met a living man who’s shorter than me, with bad teeth and a short temper. Now I’m home, I’m where I can be myself, I’m no longer alone!”
“Alone,” Lenoir said gently to Barry. “Loneliness, eh? Loneliness is the spell, loneliness is stronger . . . . Really it doesn’t seem unnatural.”
Bota was peering round the doorway, her face flushed between the black tangles of her hair. She smiled shyly and said a polite Latin good-morning to the newcomer.
“Kislk doe
sn’t know Latin,” Lenoir said with immense satisfaction. “We must teach Bota some French. French is the language of love, anyway, eh? Come along, let’s go out and buy some bread. I’m hungry.”
Kislk hid her silver tunic under the useful and anonymous cloak, while Lenoir pulled on his moth-eaten black gown. Bota combed her hair, while Barry thoughtfully scratched a louse-bite on his neck. Then they set forth to get breakfast. The alchemist and the interstellar archaeologist went first, speaking French; the Gaulish slave and the professor from Indiana followed, speaking Latin and holding hands. The narrow streets were crowded, bright with sunshine. Above them Notre Dame reared its two square towers against the sky. Beside them the Seine rippled softly. It was April in Paris, and on the banks of the river the chestnuts were in bloom.
This is a horror story. Just as the Brothers Grimm often did, Margo Lanagan terrifies us with how cruel the world can be. But she strips us of the illusion there is anything supernatural that can change it—for better or worse. As young Hansel tells us in this powerful and gruesome tale: “And I knew there was no magic in the world, just trickery on the innocent.” In the original Grimm version of “Hansel and Gretel,” the witch is a witch because we are told she is. The only evidence of her alleged witchcraft is that she has an edible house that attracts children. Otherwise she is a cannibalistic serial killer: evil, but no sorceress.
In the days of the Western European witch hunts—an era of religious and socio-economic upheaval—the accused were often those with the most tenuous connection to the social order, usually old women living alone. Controlling the weak, the different, and the alien can be seen an attempt to maintain “proper,” orderly society. This witch, however, is no innocent old lady living peacefully in the woods.
The Goosle
Margo Lanagan
“There,” said Grinnan as we cleared the trees. “Now, you keep your counsel, Hanny-boy.”
Why, that is the mudwife’s house, I thought. Dread thudded in me. Since two days ago among the older trees when I knew we were in my father’s forest, I’d feared this.
The house looked just as it did in my memory: the crumbling, glittery yellow walls, the dreadful roof sealed with drippy white mud. My tongue rubbed the roof of my mouth just looking. It is crisp as wafer-biscuit on the outside, that mud. You bite through to a sweetish sand inside. You are frightened it will choke you, but you cannot stop eating.
The mudwife might be dead, I thought hopefully. So many are dead, after all, of the black.
But then came a convulsion in the house. A face passed the window-hole, and there she was at the door. Same squat body with a big face snarling above. Same clothing, even, after all these years, the dress trying for bluishness and the pinafore for brown through all the dirt. She looked just as strong. However much bigger I’d grown, it took all my strength to hold my bowels together.
“Don’t come a step nearer.” She held a red fire-banger in her hand, but it was so dusty—if I’d not known her I’d have laughed.
“Madam, I pray you,” said Grinnan. “We are clean as clean—there’s not a speck on us, not a blister. Humble travellers in need only of a pig-hut or a chicken-shed to shelter the night.”
“Touch my stock and I’ll have you,” she says to all his smoothness. “I’ll roast your head in a pot.”
I tugged Grinnan’s sleeve. It was all too sudden—one moment walking wondering, the next on the doorstep with the witch right there, talking heads in pots.
“We have pretties to trade,” said Grinnan.
“You can put your pretties up your poink-hole where they belong.”
“We have all the news of long travel. Are you not at all curious about the world and its woes?”
“Why would I live here, tuffet-head?” And she went inside and slammed her door and banged the shutter across her window.
“She is softening,” said Grinnan. “She is curious. She can’t help herself.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You watch me. Get us a fire going, boy. There on that bit of bare ground.”
“She will come and throw her bunger in it. She’ll blind us, and then—”
“Just make and shut. I tell you, this one is as good as married to me. I have her heart in my hand like a rabbit-kitten.”
I was sure he was mistaken, but I went to, because fire meant food and just the sight of the house had made me hungry. While I fed the fire its kindling I dug up a little stone from the flattened ground and sucked the dirt off it.
Grinnan had me make a smelly soup. Salt-fish, it had in it, and sea-celery and the yellow spice.
When the smell was strong, the door whumped open and there she was again. Ooh, she was so like in my dreams, with her suddenness and her ugly intentions that you can’t guess. But it was me and Grinnan this time, not me and Kirtle. Grinnan was big and smart, and he had his own purposes. And I knew there was no magic in the world, just trickery on the innocent. Grinnan would never let anyone else trick me; he wanted that privilege all for himself.
“Take your smelly smells from my garden this instant!” the mudwife shouted.
Grinnan bowed as if she’d greeted him most civilly. “Madam, if you’d join us? There is plenty of this lovely bull-a-bess for you as well.”
“I’d not touch my lips to such mess. What kind of foreign muck—”
Even I could hear the longing in her voice that she was trying to shout down.
There before her he ladled out a bowlful—yellow, splashy, full of delicious lumps. Very humbly—he does humbleness well when he needs to, for such a big man—he took it to her. When she recoiled he placed it on the little table by the door, the one that I ran against in my clumsiness when escaping, so hard I still sometimes feel the bruise in my rib. I remember, I knocked it skittering out the door, and I flung it back meaning to trip up the mudwife. But instead I tripped up Kirtle, and the wife came out and plucked her up and bellowed after me and kicked the table onto the path, and ran out herself with Kirtle like a tortoise swimming from her fist and kicked the table aside again—
Bang! went the cottage door.
Grinnan came laughing quietly back to me.
“She is ours. Once they’ve et your food, Hanny, you’re free to eat theirs. Fish and onion pie tonight, I’d say.”
“Eugh.”
“Jealous, are we? Don’t like old Grinnan supping at other pots, hnh?”
“It’s not that!” I glared at his laughing face. “She’s so ugly, that’s all. So old. I don’t know how you can even think of—”
“Well, I am no primrose myself, golden boy,” he says. “And I’m grateful for any flower that lets me pluck her.”
I was not old and desperate enough to laugh at that joke. I pushed his soup-bowl at him.
“Ah, bull-a-bess,” he said into the steam. “Food of gods and seducers.”
When the mudwife let us in, I looked straight to the corner, and the cage was still there! It had been repaired in places with fresh plaited withes, but it was still of the same pattern. Now there was an animal in it, but the cottage was so dim . . . a very thin cat, maybe, or a ferret. It rippled slowly around its borders, and flashed little eyes at us, and smelled as if its own piss were combed through its fur for pomade. I never smelled that bad when I lived in that cage. I ate well, I remember; I fattened. She took away my leavings in a little cup, on a little dish, but there was still plenty of me left.
So that when Kirtle freed me I lumbered away. As soon as I was out of sight of the mud-house I stopped in the forest and just stood there blowing from the effort of propelling myself, after all those weeks of sloth.
So that Grinnan when he first saw me said, Here’s a jubbly one. Here’s a cheese cake. Wherever did you get the makings of those round cheeks? And he fell on me like a starving man on a roasted mutton-leg. Before too long he had used me thin again, and thin I stayed thereafter.
He was busy at work on the mudwife now.
“Oh my, what an array of herbs! You
must be a very knowledgeable woman. And hasn’t she a lot of pots, Hansel! A pot for every occasion, I think.”
Oh yes, I nearly said, including head-boiling, remember?
“Well, you are very comfortably set up here, indeed, Madam.” He looked about him as if he’d found himself inside some kind of enchanted palace, instead of in a stinking hovel with a witch in the middle of it. “Now, I’m sure you told me your name—”