Jake might have decided to sleep up there. I don’t know. I went to bed wondering what it would be like to be a witch, have magic spells and strange, curled up things in bottles of yellow liquid that I would use for potions. All I had, though, was knowing that the water was making the kingdom sick.
Chapter Eight
And so the clouds gathered on two sides of us: (1) Arbuckle and Jake spied and peeked and tried to find our secrets (although they already knew, just didn’t know they knew), and (2) like Cassandras who knew something no one would listen to, Alyssa and I had shouted our message about bad water into deaf ears.
It had to be something more mysterious, Arbuckle was sure, and he favored the supernatural. Like everyone else, he thought that water was water. Anyone could smell that it was fine and hold it up to the light to see that it was clean. Something had to be out of place for the world to have turned so wrong. And so, as with his theory of fashion, he clung to what he thought he already knew.
And we two kept trying to tell everyone around us every day that the water was the problem. We tried to think of more ways to show it than just the two of us being healthy. Cleaning up the water would be the solution. But the priests prayed, the diviners continued to cut open chickens to read the message of the entrails, and the heaven gazers charted the stars and planets and the moon in their nightly peregrinations. All reported to the King that something was amiss, and they were hot on the trail of possible corrections. But everyone kept drinking the water and their great thirst increased with every loss of fluids out of every bodily opening.
The kingdom languished. The King and Queen most of all because they accounted themselves, in a most royal way, chiefly responsible for discovering what was wrong and correcting it. The head of the army suggested they attack a neighboring state that must be doing something evil on the sly to cause the sickness. Reports from spies said that the neighbors were not sick at all. War would be the answer the generals said.
The priests maintained that an unhappy God could be pleaded to through sacrifices and the raising of prayers and exotic smelling smoke up to the heavens. God would fix everything when the kingdom had sacrificed and offered enough. Piles of incense were gathered and prepared to make a holy stink to the heavens. The altars were prepared for sacrifices.
The soothsayers and astronomers joined together to look to the skies in a different way than the priest, and they each drew out elaborate diagrams of heavenly connections, birth conjunctions and orbits that would give the kingdom a picture of its woes; solution to our woes would be triangles and rectangles and overlapping spheres of influence.
And so it was inevitable that, besides Alyssa and me, the farmers, who looked mostly to the land except on Sundays, that the farmers would be the first to pay some attention to our pleas to clean up the water. And some did, beginning with father who began to hear my pleading about the bad water. My health and my refusal to drink water eventually came up and smacked him between the eyes. Ah ha, he thought at long last. Maybe the girl has something there. Nothing else works. And he began with himself and avoided the water. He, in a week, felt much better with a diet of freshly crushed apples and watermelon. Then he took the water away from mother, too, who seemed quicker to believe him than her daughter. But better late than never. And in time my new family stood in glowing health among the plagued population of the kingdom.
But it’s always difficult to get a king to listen to a farmer; it always has been and maybe always will be. Our one family beamed the light of health from the countryside, but when father tried to get an audience with the king, he was turned away by the kingdom’s most fervent (but sickly) advisors whose very jobs depended on the King’s belief that they alone held the key to making the sickness cease. And when father went to his neighbors with his health news, they groaned and asked him who did he think he was to answer the big question that the finest minds in the kingdom could not answer. Just who the hell did he think he was? So no matter how he paraded his healthy family before them, they moaned and returned to their illness because this farmer, their own kind, was acting without authority or standing or agency among them. It seemed everyone all along the line had trouble convincing the next level of power.
And then Jake, now healthy and slurping watermelon every waking minute of his day, made his discovery. His sister did not just seem different. As he suspected all along, I was not his sister.
The two and two he put together was a combination of accident and good observation. As his health improved, he began to watch me more and more closely as I went about my chores or sat at the dinner table. At Arbuckle’s urging he studied how I walked, how I ate, smiled, sneezed—everything! I could feel his gaze, almost as if Arbuckle had made Jake his deputy whose job it was to note everything and report back to the sheriff. Jake was on the lookout every day that passed. There were Arbuckle’s eyes flashing somewhere behind Jake’s.
When did she start doing that, Jake wondered? Did she always do that? And on the same subject he remembered that before the sickness, I sat up stick-straight at the table while the rest of them leaned into their food. I ate while daring the large gap between plate and mouth, daring the gap where food could fall in my lap. I poised the food there above the plate then executed the move smoothly without a slop or spill. How did I do that? I could see him across our table, now as we all tried to regain our health. He watched me like a frog watches a dragonfly.
That was the clever part. The luck part was a little more complicated, but without it, Jake might have been left mulling my exotic table manners and never seeing through the disguise.
I was fond of the kitchen garden where I raised the fresh vegetable and herbs used every day for meals. Oh, I did other chores—the stable cleaning, the care and feeding of chickens, keeping the hay troughs full for the animals. But the garden was my special delight. Anyone could tell. I sang when I worked there before the bad water came. I hummed my way across the yard on my way there. I couldn’t help it. I would begin to smile as I gathered my gardening gloves, trowel, shears, kneeling pad, string and pegs for planting straight rows. I felt like the plants I cared for, as if we both were drawing power directly from the sky. My step was light with the anticipation of my favorite work. It was hardly even work for me because I doted on it, and my fondness for dirt and plants alike glowed like rays of sunshine into the shadowy places of the world. My work—I couldn’t hide it—was my kind of worship.
Not that Jake knew any more than that I floated off to the garden every chance I got. And there I hummed and sang to the plants, the dirt, the butterflies snuffling among the flowerings. Jake saw me fill up there on some unseen and lavish love that he couldn’t quite understand. It all looked like work to him. He was glad for my garden joy, I think, since he didn’t particularly like the drudgery and the bending and kneeling. He would rather be fishing the pond and catching turtles, sidling among the saplings to see if new bird nests had appeared, swinging from branches.
One day as Jake was skulking past the garden to make his great escape to the woods before father found something useful for him to do, I was there half sticking out from the tall green potato plants and let out a sharp cry and then some words Jake had never heard before. I had punctured one finger with a sharp splinter and yelped my everlasting pain. But it was what I said that brought Jake up short. We are not entirely in control of the words that come out of our mouths in such agony.
“By my sacred ancestors and all their holy God’s blood…” I swore. “Damnation and fiddlesticks… Oh my…” And then followed a string of words Jake had never heard in his life. And, he was pretty sure, his father and mother had never heard in their lives either. He had heard his father swear in the barn, had been party to what his father called the male initiation rite of learning to curse, a skill, father maintained, that the finer nature of women would not need but that males in their baser states could cultivate. And what I had flavored the morning air with, that was not ever in the cursing lessons.
Jake stood, mouth open, hearing the wailings from the depths of my aching finger. And then I turned and saw him and flushed red from my ears inward that rose crimson up my cheeks and left my nose aglow. I stuttered and looked at him and muttered parts of things and looked at my shoes. Then I pulled off my glove in obvious pain and hurried away toward the house with the blood flowing down my hand. I had, for the bloody moment, completely gone back to being a princess favoring the garden air with my song of pain, my very educated song of pain.
Jake couldn’t have known what he had just seen and heard, as if he’d suddenly been transported to some other kingdom where he floated like a stranger among the foreign language. I could hear him repeating what he remembered. He knew he wasn’t getting it right, but he repeated over and over the parts he could. He would take this to Arbuckle to find out what I had said. This is what Arbuckle had been asking for. Spells, imprecations, insults to the order of decent folk.
Arbuckle, for his part, had decided that a high thing sent to a low place, a low thing raised, a thing from the left sent to the right, a hidden thing suddenly revealed, a thing that should be hidden somehow abroad in the air—he thought of the combinations of wrongness that he could set right. And he plotted. Find the boy again, he thought, and begin there.
So Jake and Arbuckle met again, around the back of our barn where I could hear them from the loft. And this time Jake had a rush of information he blurted out as soon as Arbuckle came into sight. Jake had worked hard and long to remember what he could of the string of noises that spewed from my mouth when I punctured my finger. He repeated them all together in a rush of half-remembered sounds. Arbuckle listened like a dog hearing a far off, very high whistle: he cocked his head to the side, his ears visibly raised, his eyebrows furled.
Then he said, “Again. Say it all again, boy.” And this time Arbuckle narrowed his eyes and pursed his lips until his face seemed to collapse on itself in concentration. Jake recited his litany.
After several repetitions, one slowed down, one slowed way down, Arbuckle broke into a grin, an expression so foreign to his face that it seemed transplanted from some other face. He announced: “That’s Latin! That’s Latin, boy, and you have it down pretty well. Congratulations. That’s your first Latin!”
“But my sister doesn’t know Latin. I don’t think she does. She wouldn’t. We don’t have Latin in school.” Jake scratched his head, puzzled. “No Latin. Where would she get Latin?”
Arbuckle announced, “Who knows Latin? The church. And witches. I think they do. They would, you know. They know things that most people do not.” Arbuckle was hearing a choir of his own suspicions ringing in the air. “I was right. They are both the same kind of witch!”
Jake was very impressed by Arbuckle for the first time. Magic and witches and spells and unnatural things, these were interesting. He was feeling very proud of having remembered my words well enough for Arbuckle to decipher them. The code was broken. What was hidden was revealed. “Just think, my sister, a witch! Wait until I tell her I know. She will be so mad that, that…her ears will fall off. They’ll put up a sign outside our house, ‘Beware of the Witch.’ They will put up two signs!” he pronounced finally and with great firmness. The prospect, it seemed, was very pleasing to him as if he might take me to school on a leash to show me off. Maybe he could parade me around the village on market day. “Maybe I could sell her.” But then he scowled. He had gone too far. I was very nice to him, nicer than Alyssa was in her sternness. He thought about it. “No, I won’t sell her. But it will be very interesting to show her off.”
Arbuckle was shaking his head. “No, you won’t sell her. You won’t anything her, boy. She will be taken to the castle where they have people who specialize in this sort of thing. Ministers, I think. Or sub-ministers at least. These people have experience with dangerous sorts like these two girls. I’m not sure if either one of them is the real princess.”
And I could hear him now speculating on the rewards he would get, surely a post at court, and, of course, treasure. And, his painting done for the wall to join his famous ancestors.
Arbuckle was already cashing his new information. The world was out of joint because farm girls begin to speak Latin. Contra naturum, against nature itself. First girls! Then farm girls! Speaking Latin like some sacerdotal malediction, like some evil priest hurling down souls and raising up wickedness. Was it a sign or the cause? Arbuckle returned to his Latin learning, the language of all things holy. And Latin used out of its natural order, of all things unholy! One talked to the everlasting in the language that the everlasting understood, good or wicked.
But as he began to ponder the philosophical ins and outs of the pieces of the world wrenched from their proper places and Latin flowing from the mouth of a farm girl, Jake broke his bubble of thought.
“I don’t think she’s my sister,” he announced in a voice matter-of-fact while he picked a piece of grass to chew.
Arbuckle jolted out of his fuzzy pondering. “Well, of course not. She’s been occupied or some devilish thing. She’s been transported or transmigrated…or transmogrified or something. It’s her, but it’s not her.” And he went back to his cogitating.
“No,” Jake insisted. “It’s really not her.” She isn’t Alyssa. My father was wrong; it’s not girl stuff. You’re wrong, it’s not that she’s occupied or any of the trans things. It’s just not her.” Jake sighed deeply as if all there was to say he’d just said. His plans of sister-on-a-leash fleeing.
“Can you prove it? What makes you think this…this…thing you think?”
“She’s too nice to me. She takes my side in everything. She never pulls my ear. She never gives me a Dutch rub or Vandal burn on the arm or a flick on the nose. That’s it. She’s too nice to me and has been for a long time now. Alyssa was my sister, a little bossy, but not always on my side when I did things wrong. When I broke her…” And here I think a light went on in Jake’s eyes. “I broke her music box. I didn’t mean to. It slipped. But then she patted me on the head and said not to worry. I should have known. She loved that music box. It was the only music in the house except if we sang or hummed ourselves. I thought she would kill me so I hid the pieces but not very well, and she found it. And then she…” Jake opened his eyes and took a deep breath, “…she patted me. I was so relieved that I didn’t see what was happening. Alyssa would never have let me off the hook. She’d have kept me there wiggling as long as she could and then gone to mother…or I don’t know what. I’d still be working it off somehow—her chores or her cleaning or something.”
Arbuckle’s train of thought came running back to the present. He listened to Jake and recalculated. If I was not Jake’s sister, that was still the kind of displacement that could foul the world and plunge the kingdom into… But wait. If the farm girl was not herself, then surely the princess, as he had suspected, was some kind of substitute too. Arbuckle was circling in on the situation having taken the long way around (and his brain may even have stopped for a snack and a drink of water, I think). His “Aha” was glorious as the sunset and startling to animal and insect alike. Jake snorted his approval of the aha and the two heads came together, and plans were hatched just a few feet away from my spying hideout in the loft.
Chapter Nine
I continued my campaign to get the farmers to stop drinking the water, but the belief was too strong: if the water was clear, it was good. If water didn’t smell bad, and you could see the clarity, it was good. And their water seemed to flow from the vicinity of the castle pure and odorless. No monsters in the water because monsters could not be that small—unseeable, untasteable, unsmellable. Everyone knew that a
nything monstrous enough to make everyone sick and even kill some people just had to breathe fire, or thunder down upon them like war or come in the night with great fangs. And the cure would not be fruit and vegetables, that much was clear. A cure for such a great sickness would be that things needed to be put right. Order was everything.
And so the generals, such as they could function, prepared for war (still unclear about whom to attack, but they knew attack they must). The priests and wizards and mages and necromancers burned incense and mixed potions and muttered spells, such as they had the energy for.
Alyssa at the castle kept up her campaign in her own way and also encountered such powerful beliefs and habits and traditions that turning anyone’s opinion was like trying to stop a wagon load of wood that was rumbling downhill toward destruction. In court, a pale ghost of court activity was in place. No intrigues but only discussions of bowels and vomit. No ritual but scurrying for the outhouses.
She reported to me that Arbuckle each day moved among the ghosts and ruins of court with a growing certainty that not only was Jake right but that he, Arbuckle Pemberton III, was going to be celebrated in story and song as the savior of the kingdom. His name would ascend to the pantheon of historical kingdom notables, his selfless act resonate among schoolchildren for time immemorial. He felt assured that trumpets would announce his name, hushed whispers of admiration would follow. He paced the court already aglow with his powerful news. He thought about how to stage the telling, how to gather the power of court and blow loud the horn of his news so that everyone would know it was he who had saved the kingdom from two fierce witches and… Were there any dangerous animals involved in the saving act, he wondered? He might add one or two since these unnatural things usually involved some kind of dangerous beast. A battle? Well, not really, but a capture, of course, when the time came. The capturing could present some dangers too. Though they looked like two mere girls, there was no telling what hideous ogres had wrapped themselves in the disguise of innocent girls.
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