“Oh, it's no misconception,” said the tithingman. “Everyone knows you're a witchist. It's just a matter of whether you do so as a fool or as a follower of Satan.”
“How can everyone know that I'm a thing which I never heard of until this moment?”
“That's proof of it right there,” said the tithingman. “Witchists are always claiming there's no such thing as witchism.”
Waldo faced his students, who had either turned in their seats to face him, or were standing beside their chairs. “This is today's puzzle,” he said. “If the act of denial can be taken as proof of the crime, how can an innocent man defend himself?”
The tithingmen caught him by the arms. “Come along now, Mr. Emerson, and don't go trying any philosophy on us.”
“Oh, I wouldn't dream of it,” said Waldo. “Philosophy would be wasted against such sturdy-headed men as you.”
“Glad you know it,” said the tithingman proudly. “Wouldn't want you thinking we weren't true Christians.”
* * *
They had Alvin in irons, which he thought was excessive. Not that it was uncomfortable– it was a simple matter for Alvin to reshape the iron to conform with his wrists and ankles, and to cause the skin there to form calluses as if they had worn the iron for years. Such work was so long-practiced that he did it almost by reflex. But the necessity to be inactive during the hours when he could be observed made him weary. He had done this before– and without the irons– for long weeks in the jail in Hatrack River. Life was too short for him to waste more hours, let alone days or weeks, growing mold in a prison cell and weighed down by chains, not when he could so easily free himself and get on about his business.
At sundown, he sat on the floor, leaned back against the wooden side wall of the cell, and closed his eyes. He sent out his doodlebug along a familiar path, until he found the dual heartfire of his wife and the unborn daughter that dwelt within her. She was already heading for her writing table, aware through long custom that because Alvin was farther east, sundown came earlier to him. She was always as impatient as he was.
This time there was no interruption from visitors. She commiserated with him about the chains and the cell, but soon got to the matter that concerned her most.
“Calvin's doodlebug has been stolen,” she said. “He had sent it forth to follow the man who collects the names and some part of the souls of Blacks arriving at the dock.” She told him of Calvin's last words to Balzac before all his will seemed to depart from his body. “First, I must know how much of his soul remains with his body. It is different from the slaves, for he seems to hear nothing and has to be led. His bodily functions also are like an infant's, and Balzac and their landlord are equally disgusted at the result, though the slaves clean him without complaint. Is this reversible? Can we communicate with him to learn his whereabouts? I have searched this city all the way up the peninsula, and find no collection of heartfires and no sign of Calvin's. It has been hidden from me; I pray it is not hidden from you.”
Alvin had no need to write or even formulate his answers. He knew that she could find all his ideas in his heartfire moments after he thought of them and they fell into his memory. The kidnapped doodlebug– Alvin had never worried about that. His fears had always been that something awful might happen to his body while he wandered. But in his experience, his body remained alive and alert, and whenever anything in his environment changed– his eyes detecting movement, his ears hearing some unexpected sound– his attention would be drawn back into his body.
His attention, and therefore his doodlebug. That's what the doodlebug was, really– his full attention. That's what was missing from Calvin. Even when things happened around his body, happened to his body, he could not bring his attention back to it. His body was no doubt sending him frantic signals demanding his attention.
The slaves, on the other hand, couldn't possibly have surrendered their attention to the man named Denmark. What they gave up was their passion, their resentment, their will to freedom. And their names.
That was an important conclusion: There was no reason to think that this Denmark fellow had Calvin's name. In fact, what he probably had was a net of hexwork that contained the free portion of separated souls. He might not even be aware that Calvin's doodlebug had got inside. The hexes caught him automatically, like the workings of an engine. The hexwork also served to hide the soulstuff that it contained. Calvin could not see out, and could not be seen inside.
But the hexes could be seen. Margaret could not possibly find them, since she saw only heartfires, and if a man knew how to hide heartfires from her, he could certainly hide his own heartfire so she could not discover the man who knew the secret.
“Is he hiding from me?” she wrote.
He doesn't know you exist. He's hiding from everybody.
“How could Calvin be captured, when he didn't make the little knotted things the slaves made?”
I don't know the workings of Black powers, but my guess is that each slave put his own name and all his fears and hatred into the knotwork. They needed the knots in order to lift this part of their souls out of their bodies. Calvin needed no such tool.
“They had to do a Making?” she wrote.
Yes, he thought, that's what it was. A Making. Whether it was the power of Whites or Reds or Blacks, that's what it came down to: connecting yourself to the world around you by Making. Reds made the connection directly– that connection was their Making, the link they forged between man and animal, man and plant, man and stone. Blacks made artifacts whose only purpose was power– poppets and knotted strings. Whites, however, spent their lives making tools that hammered, cut, tore at nature directly, and only in the one area that they called their knack did they truly make that link. Yet they did make that connection. They were not utterly divorced from the natural world. Though Alvin could imagine such men and women, never feeling that deep, innate connection, never seeing the world change by the sheer action of their will in harmony with that part of nature. How lonely they must be, to be able to shape iron no other way than with hammer and anvil, fire and tongs. To make fire only by striking flint on steel. To see the future only by living day to day and watching it unfold one path at a time. To see the past only by reading what others wrote of it, or hearing their tales, and imagining the rest. Would such people even know that nature was as alive and responsive as it is? That hidden powers move in the world– no, not just in the world, they move the world, they are the world at its foundation? How terrible it would be, to know and yet not touch these powers at any point. Only the bravest and wisest would be able to bear it. The rest would have to deny the hidden powers entirely, pretend they did not exist.
And then he realized: That's what the witchcraft laws are. An attempt to shut off the hidden powers and drive them away from the lives of men.
“At least the witchcraft laws admit that hidden powers exist,” wrote Margaret.
With that, Alvin realized the full import of what Verily was attempting. It would be good to strike down the witchery laws, but only if it led to an open acknowledgment that knacks were good or evil only according to the use made of them.
“Verily's strategy is to make the whole idea of witchcraft look foolish.”
Well, it is foolish, thought Alvin. All the images of the devil that he had heard of were childish. What God had created was a great Making that lived of itself and contained lesser beings whom he tried to turn into friends and fellow Makers. The enemy of that was not some pathetic creature giving a few lonely, isolated people the power to curse and cause misery. The enemy of Making was Unmaking, and the Unmaker wore a thousand different masks, depending on the needs of the person he was attempting to deceive.
I wonder what form the Unmaker takes to bring this witcher fellow along?
“Some men need no deception to serve him,” wrote Margaret. “They already love his destructive work and engage in it freely of their own accord.”
Are you speaking of this Quill fello
w? Or of Calvin?
“No doubt they both believe they serve the cause of Making.”
Is that true, Margaret? Aren't you the one who told me that however much a man might lie to himself, at the core of him he knows what he truly is?
“In some men the truth lies hidden so deeply that they see it again only at the last extremity. Then they recognize that they have known it all along. But they see the truth only at the moment when it is too late to seize upon it and use it to save themselves. They see it and despair. That is the fire of hell.”
All men deceive themselves. Are we all damned?
“They cannot save themselves,” she wrote. “That does not mean they cannot be saved.”
Alvin found that comforting, for he feared his own secrets, feared the place in himself where he had hidden the truth about his own motives when he killed the Finder who murdered Margaret's mother. Maybe I can open up that door and face the truth someday, knowing that I might still be saved from that hard sharp blade when it pierces my heart.
“Calvin's need for redemption is more dire than yours right now.”
I'm surprised you want to save him. You're the one who tells me he'll never change.
“I tell you I've seen no change in any of his futures.”
I'll search for him. For the hexes that hide him. I can see what you cannot. But what about Denmark? Can't you find him when he walks the streets, and learn the truth?
“He is also guarded. I can find him on the street, and his name is carried with him, so he hasn't parted with that part of his heartfire. Nevertheless, he has no knowledge, no memory of where he takes the knotwork and whom he gives it to. There are blank places in his memory. As soon as he leaves the docks with a basket of souls, he remembers nothing until he wakes up again. I could follow him, with eyes instead of doodlebug…”
No! No, don't go near him! We know nothing of the powers at work here. Stay away and cease to search. Who knows but what some part of yourself goes forth from your body, too, when you do your torching? If you were captive as well it would be too much for me to bear.
“We are all captives, aren't we?” she wrote. “Even the baby in my womb.”
She is no captive. She is home in the place she wants most to be.
“She chooses me because she knows no other choice.”
In due time she'll eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. For now, she is in the garden. You are paradise. You are the tree of life.
“You are sweet,” she wrote. “I love you. I love you.”
His own love for her swept over him, filling his eyes with tears and his heart with longing. He could see her set down the pen. No more words would appear on the paper tonight.
He lay there, sending forth his doodlebug. He found Purity easily. She was awake in her cell, weeping and praying. He stifled the vindictive thought that a sleepless night was the least she owed him. Instead, he entered her body and found where the fluids were being released that made her heart beat faster and her thoughts race. He watched her calm down, and then kindled the low fires of sleep in her brain. She crawled into bed. She slept. Poor child, he thought. How terrible it is not to know what your life is for. And how sad to have found such a destructive purpose for it.
* * *
Verily Cooper left Arthur Stuart, Mike Fink, and John-James Audubon in a small clearing in a stand of woods well north of the river and far from the nearest farmhouse. Arthur was making some bird pose on a branch– Audubon discoursed about the bird but it never made it into Verily's memory. It was a daring thing he was going to try. He had never knowingly attempted to defend a man he knew was guilty. And Alvin was, under New England law, guilty indeed. He had a knack; he used it.
But Verily thought he knew how witch trials were run. He had read about them in his mentor's law library– surreptitiously, lest anyone wonder why he took interest in such an arcane topic. Trial after trial, in England, France, and Germany, turned up the same set of traditional details: curses, witches appearing as incubi and succubi, and the whole mad tradition of witches' sabbaths and powerful gifts from the devil. Witchers asserted that the similarity of detail was proof that the phenomenon of witchcraft was real and widespread.
Indeed, one of their favorite ploys was to alarm the jury with statements like, “If this has all been happening under your very noses in this village, imagine what is happening in the next village, in the whole county, all over England, throughout the world!” They were forever citing “leading authorities” who estimated that, judging from the numbers of known witches actually brought to trial, there “must be” ten thousand or a hundred thousand or a million witches.
“Suspect everybody,” they said. “There are so many witches it is impossible that you don't know one.” And the clincher: “If you ignore small signs of witchcraft then you are responsible for permitting Satan to work unhindered in the world.”
All this might have had some meaning if it weren't for one simple fact: Verily Cooper had a knack, and he knew that he had never had any experience of Satan, had never attended a witches' sabbath, had not left his body and wandered as an incubus to ravish women and send them strange dreams of love. All he had done was make barrels that held water so tightly that the wood had to rot through before the joints would leak. His only power was to make dead wood live and grow under his hands. And he had never used his knack to harm a living soul in any way. Therefore, all these stories had to be lies. And the statistics estimating the number of uncaught witches were a lie based upon a lie.
Verily believed what Alvin believed: that every soul was born with some connection to the powers of the universe– perhaps the powers of God, but more likely the forces of nature– which showed up as knacks among Europeans, as a connection to nature among the Reds, and in other strange ways among the other races. God wanted these powers used for good; Satan would of course want them used for evil. But the sheer possession of a knack was morally neutral.
The opportunity was here not just to save Purity from herself, but also to discredit the entire system of witch trials and the witchery laws themselves. Make the laws and the witnesses so obviously, scandalously, ludicrously false that no one would ever stand trial for the crime of witchcraft again.
Then again, he might fail, and Alvin would have to get himself and Purity out of jail whether she liked it or not, and they'd all hightail it out of New England.
* * *
Cambridge was a model New England town. The college dominated, with several impressive buildings, but there was still a town common across from the courthouse, where Alvin was almost certainly imprisoned. And, to Verily's great pleasure, the witcher and the tithingmen were running both Alvin and Purity. A crowd surrounded the commonbut at a safe distance– as Alvin was forced to run around in tight circles at one end of the meadow and Purity at the other.
“How long have they been at it?” Verily asked a bystander.
“Since before dawn without a rest,” said the man. “These are tough witches, you can bet.”
Verily nodded wisely. “So you know already that they're both witches?”
“Look at 'em!” said the bystander. “You think they'd have the strength to run so long without falling over if they weren't?”
“They look pretty tired to me,” said Verily.
“Ayup, but still running. And the girl's a brought-in orphan, so it's likely she had it in her blood anyway. Nobody ever liked her. We knew she was strange.”
“I heard she was the chief witness against the man.”
“Ayup, but how would she know about the witches' sabbath iffen she didn't go to it her own self, will you tell me that?”
“So why do they go to all this trouble? Why don't they just hang her?”
The man looked sharply at Verily. “You looking to stir up trouble, stranger?”
“Not I,” said Verily. “I think they're both innocent as you are, sir. Not only that, but I think you know it, and you're only talking them guilty so no o
ne will suspect that you also have a knack, which you keep well-hidden.”
The man's eyes widened with terror, and without another word he melted away into the crowd.
Verily nodded. It was a safe enough thing to charge, if Alvin was right, and all folks had some kind of hidden power. All had something to hide. All feared the accusers. Therefore it was good to see this accuser charged right along with the man she accused. Hang her before she accuses anybody else. Verity had to count on that fear and aggravate it.
He strode out onto the common. At once a murmur went up– who was the stranger, and how did he dare to go so close to where the witcher was running the witches to wear them down and get a full confession out of them?
“You, sir,” said Verily to the witcher. He spoke loudly, so all could hear. “Where is the officer of the law supervising this interrogation?”
“I'm the officer,” said the witcher. He spoke just as loudly– people usually matched their voices to the loudest speaker, Verily found.
“You're not from this town,” Verily said accusingly. “Where are the tithingmen!”
At once the dozen men who had formed watchful rings around both Alvin and Purity turned, some of them raising their hands.
“Are you men not charged with upholding the law?” demanded Verily. “Interrogation of witnesses in witch trials is to take place under the supervision of officers of the court, duly appointed by the judge or magistrate, precisely to stop torture like this from taking place!”
The word torture was designed to strike like a lash, and it did.
“This is not torture!” the witcher cried. “Where is the rack? The fire? The water?”
Verily turned toward him again, but stepped back, speaking louder than before. “I see you are familiar with all the methods of torture, but running them is one of the cruelest! When a person is worn down enough, they'll confess to… to suicide if it will end the torment and allow them to rest!”
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