by John Crowley
The street and the shuttered houses they passed were palely bright, as though illuminated by a cold sun, and yet his vision was not as good as it was in waking life: far-off objects were shapeless and unresolved, and leaves and walls had not even the dim memory of color which they have in moonlight they were gray as tombstones, or stars.
How fast they moved! His heart felt huge within him, pumping stolidly and without effort, like a strong man chopping wood, and the ground fled away beneath his feet. He smelled the ripening crops, mown by the night wind passing through their silver ears; he felt a great pride in the standing grain, and yet unconcerned in it, unable to remember how he himself had plowed and sown his father’s strips and prayed for their good growth.
The wind was rising.
He had asked the old one: Why do we not tell the people, tell them what we have done for them, how we guard them; wouldn’t they love us then, and not hate us as they do? The old one had smiled at his question, and the boy knew the answer now as he sped over the colorless country: knew it in his bloody heart, knew that he was a creature violent and ruthless, who would slay without compunction—a creature like the ferocious armed knights who protected this realm from its enemies, good men whose path the wise did not cross. He almost laughed to think it.
They skirted the cottages of the outlying folk, staying downwind of their stables and their dogs; it was not yet time to raid. Soon they had left the country that he knew, the bounds of his parish; the fields and ways were unfamiliar to him. By the moon he saw they went north and west toward the forested land. The night sped away and yet seemed also to hang changelessly in the gray air, the stars not turning, the moon not going toward its setting. And there were others on the way now with them; he smelled them long before he saw one, a dark loping shape far off, across the fallow field, at the edge of the forest: he could taste its aliveness, its likeness to himself, with a sense he had not known he possessed. Gone then. And then again with them on the way, drawing closer.
Another caught him by surprise, appearing suddenly almost beside him, a great rufous animal from which the boy-soul just inside him shrank, starting away and toward his protector—but his protector was now, under the moon, only another like the red, and just as hideous, as he was himself: and exaltation lifted him.
They came out, the three of them, onto the upland pastures where shepherds summered their flocks. One at least of these shepherds (he knew) was a creature of his kind, and was no doubt on the way with the rest of them this night toward the battle. That was a hard fate, he thought: to be, yourself, inside, the very creature whom you must protect your flock against, the creature they most feared.
In a soft fold of the meadows a little flock had huddled out of the wind, their shepherd with them. The three night-walkers bore down on them behind the tossing trees. The sheep sensed them, and stirred as one animal; in a moment they were running bleating together up the narrow valley, the shepherd with them hurrying the stray lambs with his crook. He could not guard them all, though, alone as he was (his fellows all in hiding, probably, ears big to hear the panicked sheep but too afraid to come out from their huts, not on this night), and it was easy for the three of them to cut out a single lamb, start it from the rest and send it hurrying toward the trees while its fellows fled the other way.
As they closed in on the lamb—he, the grizzled old one, and the red leading them—the shepherd turned to make a stand, crook grasped in his hands and his face set: they could see the teeth in his mouth, the great whites of his eyes. Brave man! They passed around him, and circled the lamb; the little thing had ceased to flee, and stood still, mild and almost patient now, its very mildness starting their bloodlust. The shepherd fled stumbling away. They blessed the lamb, they slew it and ate it.
The boy lifted his bloody head, baptized now, and replete; and the moon’s white head looked down on him. Then from somewhere within, from the root of his bony member or from his narrow fundament, there started a noise, a tremor as though his sinews were plucked and sounding. It issued from his throat at last, a cry that made his own rough hair stand up and his back thrill, shaking the bones of his skull and skirling forth seemingly without end. When at last he was done, he lowered his head and saw the older ones regarding him with something like fondness; and from far off across the mountain and the valley came an answer, wolf’s or man-wolf’s.
Now they left the homeplaces of men behind them, the walled towns and tilled fields, the bridges, watchtowers, and turnpikes. They climbed up along the bony back of the untenanted mountain, from whose rock outcroppings they could look down on the black and endless bristle of the forest sundered by a twist of river. The giant wind, into whose embrace they seemed to rise, was taller than the mountains, rising to the torn clouds and the moon. There were many of them now, coming from far places, joining their fellows on the broad invisible way that led toward the battle. The two elders who ran beside him exchanged a look of wonderment, or was it foreboding? This summer’s battle would surely be fierce, for the witches too had been summoned in numbers, flocking thither like great nightbirds; as he climbed he heard them in the treetops, alighting to rest, taking wing again to join others passing overhead. In their bags and cloaks, in the belts they wrapped around them, they carried the yield of the year, the ripening grain and the offspring of the herds: bearing it to their lord, who would reward them for their despoiling, for the famine and despair they brought.
But how reward them? he had wondered. Don’t they too have to live on the earth with us, don’t they too suffer when the earth is robbed? What reward could be so great as to compensate them, what could make up for the death of the year? God forgive them, the old one said: they are that hungry, that everlastingly hungry, and nothing they can see or touch or taste can satisfy them; they must be always imagining some better food, some greater pleasure, sharper sauce, sweeter fruit than any known, and that’s just what they’re promised, though they never get it, never, for the Devil doesn’t have it to give: he has only his promises.
They came to the throat of a long pass that led downward, to the last valley and to the burned-over environs of Hell, whose sour smell reached them now on the huge wind; there they rested. When they sat to converse, they sat as men did, upright, with their hands upon their knees, looking into one another’s faces. Had they been men, they might have taken out a tinder-box, and started a fire for their comfort—but they had no love now for fire.
They talked of the wolf-hunters, out in numbers just now with Imperial licenses to beat the woods and take pelts, on which a high bounty would be paid. Take care, watch well. They gossiped of those they had heard of, who were beings of their kind: how one at least was a prince of the Imperial blood, who in the high castle of Prague was shut up to howl in the deepest dungeon on Ember nights.
They kept their own lore, among themselves, which the waking world didn’t know, which they didn’t know themselves when they were in the waking world. They told the tale (it was believed among some of them) that on the night of Christ’s Nativity there was a great and much-feared wolf in the vicinity of Bethlehem, and when the angels announced the good news of the Babe born, this wolf heard it too, only he was not awed as the shepherds were; and when they had left their flocks to seek the Child, the wolf fell upon their lambs and killed and ate one. When he had done so he felt remorse, for the first time, and didn’t know why; and full of grief he fled the flock, and came upon the shepherds who were going toward the manger. He followed them; he saw the Mother there within, and the Child; he saw the shepherds kneeling and offering a new-born lamb. The wolf watched and waited; and when all within the manger were asleep, he crept close. The animals, sensing his presence, began to stir, and the Child awoke, and calmed them; with His mildness He summoned the wolf, who came and laid his muzzle on the hay, to beg forgiveness. And for his sins and the sins of all his kind, the Christ Child that night laid this penance on the wolf: that he and his descendants thenceforth should go into the world of men, and
seem in the light of day to be men; only on certain holy nights they would be summoned to be His soldiers, to do battle in the name of the Lamb, and on those nights they would revert to their wolfish forms. And such has been their condition from that day to this, to suffer the hatred of all men, and be known as just only to Him.
So their true nature was the one inside, the hairy nature, and the human form the semblance.
They nodded their heavy heads in assent at this story, heard so often before, and they would have wept too, but they could not weep now. And then one among them lifted his black nose into the air, and caught a scent, and one after another they turned upon their four feet and (heads nodding this way and that, long tongues panting) they set off again.
To be strange within your own homeland.
To go unrecognized; to have allies whom in the light of day you do not know.
To be one thing on the outside, another on the inside; to seem nothing and no one; to be despised and ignored, unseen, and yet to be the one on whom the welfare of all depends, though they don’t know it.
In the last battle, the battle that brings in the new age, they would be there; when the children of men run to hide their heads, and cry to the mountains, Fall on us, and to the hills, Cover us. They would be there; they would not hide.
And in the next age, perhaps, they would all be seen for what they were, not the less feared perhaps, but honored justly; and though it might be that heaven was closed to beings of his kind—that at death they would turn again into the earth like the beasts—still while they went among men they would no longer need to hide, they could live whole and not divided: the hidden patent, and the inside out.
In that new time they would not be exiles; they would acknowledge one another in the light of day; they would bear proudly the badge of their fraternity, wear it when (in their bland human daylight forms) they proceeded all together to the altar to receive: in both species too, for they were true Bohemians and Utraquists, they would consume corporem utraque sanguinem, both flesh and blood.
The wind still rose. Not only the Bohemian witches were borne on the wind tonight, but the witches of Livonia and Moravia as well, the red witches of Galicia and the witches of the Transylvanian mountains armed with stalks of fennel; witches who had never gone out before rapt into the air and sent on their way as though by the great wind itself. Each one was pursued by a strong pursuer; as many as they were, their enemies were just as numerous, streaking with them eagerly toward Hell-mouth.
He seemed now to have been on the way for a hundred years, to have known for a hundred years what it was to be as he was. He knew that the long rufous one who had run beside him, with whom he had slain the lamb, was a great captain of their kind—pathfinder, witch-biter, grain-saver. He meant to stay by her in the battle to come at the night’s end. He wondered if he would know her if he met her in her other form, a long-armed red-haired housewife at her washing.
He was alone now, out of sight of the others, but knowing them to be proceeding all around him. His heart was huge within him, and far from weary. He thought he knew what the battle to come would be like; he could see the witch it was his fate to pursue and punish, striding on great legs ahead of him down the defiles of Hell: he could see her fearful hungry eye cast back at him.
He followed a dim trail down through the forest, a trail which it seemed his kind had made for their convenience, made by their passing and repassing this way: it glowed faintly in his eye like a snail’s track. When the wolf-trap set in the path closed on him—trap of real iron, set by men—it tossed him into the air with the force of its snapping shut and smashed instantly and for good the ankle of his left foot.
His shocked spirit returned into him shrieking, in the awful knowledge (like the knowledge of the damned soul at death) that he was caught, that he was hurt dreadfully, that he could not free himself and that he was likely now to be captured by the wolf-hunters and to die the death. But what pierced him more, what made him twist and bite in hopeless rage, was the knowledge that by his unwisdom he would miss the battle. The first battle he had ever been summoned to, the last battle it might be, the battle he had been made by God to fight: and he would not be there. He chewed earth and wept. In the air above him his enemies stole on ahead.
It was as though Earth and Nature had finally admitted the force of that argument made against Copernicus, that if the ball of Earth really did roll around always to the East, then we ought to feel a wind blowing continually with awful force, the whole sphere of air set in apparent motion westward by the earth’s eastward motion, a wind strong enough to uproot trees, sweep up men and beasts and push them into the sea, slop the sea out of its basin over the dry land. Well here it is. He laughed aloud, bent against it. Why does the heart love wild weather, fires, floods, and winds, for all that it destroys our works and seeks our lives?
There were still miles to go before he reached the gates of Prague City, and he seemed likelier to lose ground than gain it in this storm. Look at those clouds, dense as haysmoke, black as bear’s fur. He had a horrid and exhilarating vision that they might part, and Prague itself and its surmounting castle be revealed riding the wind, uprooted and dropping clods and cobblestones as it went west.
Time to call a halt. He had come down into a huddle of houses, shutters shut, a lost straw hamper being tossed down the street, bumping blindly into walls. There would be no inn here. There was a church, though, and Bruno, tired of batting his stinging eyes against the dust, pushed open the wicket in its door and went in.
It was dark as night inside, for the priest had shuttered the windows; candles and a pitch-pine torch were burning, loose airs toying with their flames. Villagers filled the church, kneeling on the floor, wrapped in shawls and cloaks, black sheep huddled together; now and then a white face looked up from amid them to stare at a sound.
Mass had nearly reached the Consecration. After that, Bruno supposed, they would begin ringing their one sour bell, to scare away the airy dæmons. He raised his eyes: odd the way fissures in the stone fabric of the church, the tower, the roof, amplified sound, making weird harmonies. The dæmon’s voice, these people thought, crying for souls. But Bruno knew it wasn’t so. The semhamaphores who are the wind cannot speak.
—Suscipiat Dominus sacrificium de manibus tuis. Bruno knelt himself, having already attracted stares, a foreigner, someone to be feared. No doubt they believed too that witches could raise winds, beg them from the dæmon. It was perhaps well that he knelt, for this day and this church were soon to be much talked of, in fear and wonder, the reports reaching as far as to the Emperor in Prague, and to the Papal Nuncio, who sent them on to Rome: how when the country priest spoke the words of consecration, turning the wafer to the Body of Jesus Christ, and held it aloft for the people’s adoration, the people had seen gripped in the priest’s fingers a tabby kitten, who then changed to a stick of elmwood, which changed to a wriggling trout, the priest staring upward with bared teeth and eyes wide, unable to let go; and the trout changed to a live coal shedding sparks, and that to a gray pigeon. The people closest to the altar could hear the flutter of its wings.
The wind blew through that day and the next, moving huge fleets of dark cloud overhead to invade the West. In the Narrow Seas the Spanish captains felt it in their faces, as a man feels the onrush of a wolf at his back the instant before he hears the drumming of its feet. The sky darkened, in the wrong quarter. And they crossed themselves, or swore terribly, or both.
But it blew not only over the length of Christendom; that wind blew right around the world, combing the Russian grasses, whipping up gray foam on the Bosphorus, snapping the Sultan’s silken banners, blowing out lamps in Babylon and Cathay. It shook the rope bridges of Peru across which the King of Spain’s gold was carried night and day; it closed with driven dust the eyes of Libyan lions, lifted snow from the Caucasus. In Egypt, as the sands moved like seas, the heads of sphinxes appeared, and the long bodies of fallen obelisks; the stairs of temples ages lo
st were revealed, leading down; in the sanctuary (the herdsman taking refuge there kneels in awe) the lamps still burn above the altar, and the idol’s eyes are open.
In Trebona, a day’s ride from Prague, where it had first begun, just a little vortex whirling a handful of fallen leaves, it still blew hugely, hooting in the towers of the castle of the Rožmberks and tossing the heads of trees in the park. In an apartment high in the castle the new glass windows rattled in the old stone arches, and vagrant airs stirred the hangings and teased the candle flames. John Dee’s wife Jane held her children to her, Katherine and Michael, and sang them a song. Blow blow thou Western wind, the small rain down can rain. On the rich rug that overspread the floor Rowland Dee played with quoits of heavy gold, sophic, wonderful; one rolled away and the cat moused after it.
Above in his tower room, John Dee sat before a clouded crystal stone set in a frame on his table of practice. He was looking down into its depths at something he had never seen before, a tiny young woman hiding there.
He asked: Is it the first wind, of which you told us, the wind that will shake down empires?
When she answered he heard, and that for the first time too; heard as though the voice were hers and yet his as well, he could feel the cords in his own throat tremble when she spoke.
—Pity, she said. Pity a poor maiden, Madimi, who has done all that was asked of her and no more. Say nunc dimittis, for I cannot stay. Oh pity.
He understood he had been deceived by her. She had given him directions to cast a seal by which certain princes of the air could be called, and he had done so, and spoken the words with it she had told him to say: and the wind had risen. But he had not raised this wind himself for his purposes at all, but had only occasioned it; she had only flattered him to call it his, it had purposes he could not know, it blew where it listed. But was it the first wind of the passage time, and if it was, when would the second, contrary wind arise?