“I see Lottie,” I agreed, but I don’t recognize the others. Those two are much older. I think I treated one of them earlier.” As I spoke, Lottie looked up and saw us at the window. She beckoned for me to go down, and called up with a note of true desperation in her voice. “Something is badly wrong.” I said. I experienced conflicting desires, battling within me: I was desperate to continue my discussion with Erasmus and unravel the mystery of Gideon’s plans, but I could see real anguish written on the child’s face. I could not turn away from her. I hurried from the room. Erasmus followed. Once downstairs, he unlocked the front door. A teenage boy stood on the doorstep and now I could see that he was indeed the lad I had treated for a broken finger, and he still had my strip of scarf binding it to the splint. His injury did not, however, stop him from carrying a small child in his arms. The second young man with him whipped his cap from his head and twisted it nervously in his hands.
“I’m Robin, missus. Begging your pardon, but Nipper ’ere’s hurt bad. We was told you could help him.”
I looked more closely at the limp figure in the other boy’s arms. It appeared to be a boy, very small, I estimated about six years old. He was unconscious and his left arm and hand were tightly bandaged in a bloodstained cloth. He was covered in grime and dirt, most of which looked like coal dust.
Lottie tugged at my skirts. “Please, missus, will you help him?”
Erasmus spoke before I could.
“Bring him inside,” he said, holding the door wide. “Take him through to the kitchen.”
Lottie led the way and I bid them place the boy on the table.
“Gently, now! Lottie, can you tell me what happened to him?”
“Nipper works with the ponies down the catacombs,” she told me.
“Catacombs?” Erasmus questioned her information. “What work would a child be doing in such a place?”
Robin put in, “Them’s not real catacombs, mister. That’s just what people call them. She means the tunnels at Camden.”
“Ah, yes.” Erasmus nodded. “Where goods are transhipped from canal barge to railway, I believe.”
Lottie went on with her story. “Nipper tends the ponies that pull the carts down there. He’s small, see, and the ponies, they like him. He has to lead them along the tunnels when the carts are loaded up, then take them back to fetch more.”
“Do they transport coal?” I asked, wiping some of the grit from the boy’s face so that I could open his eyes to check his pupils.
“That’s right, missus. It gets shoveled into sacks off the barges before it goes on the carts. Old Mr. Antrobus, he’s the one what says what goes where. He’s supposed to check the loads, only this one couldn’t have been fixed properly, ’cos it shifted as they was going down the hill. The pony got scared and started to run. Nipper ran with him. He tried to calm him down, but he’s so small…” She broke off as tears spilled from her pale blue eyes and began to streak her dirty face.
I was carefully examining Nipper’s limbs. He moaned softly when I touched his arm, but still did not stir into consciousness.
“Was he run over by the cart, Lottie?”
She shook her head. “It tipped. The tunnel bends a bit on that slope, and it toppled over. Nipper was trapped between the cart and the wall. Will he be all right, missus? Will he?”
“You did the right thing bringing him here,” I told her. “I will do my best for him.” The poor girl continued to weep silently. “Erasmus, why don’t you take Lottie through to Mrs. Timms? I can manage here.”
“Excellent plan. Come along, young lady. Let’s see if Mrs. Timms has anymore of that famous lemonade of hers, shall we?”
He showed the rest of the worried little party out and then led Lottie through the adjoining door to his housekeeper’s kitchen, leaving me alone with my fragile patient. During my examination of him I had found remarkably few injuries aside from his damaged arm. There were numerous cuts and contusions, but his head appeared to have escaped harm. I suspected he had fainted from the pain his arm was causing him. As I unwound his make-do bandage the extent of the damage became clear. This was no simple fracture; the lower part of the limb and his hand had been crushed and broken in so many places I feared I might not be able to save them. What was of even more concern was the quantity of filth that had been pressed into the open wounds. The risk of serious infection was high. Yet again I cursed the fact that antibiotics were not available to us. I would have to bring all my healing skills to bear if Nipper were to stand a chance of surviving, those of the surgeon and of the witch.
The first thing to do was wash and redress the injury, setting the bones as best I could. After that I could worry about Nipper’s minor wounds, getting him bathed, put to bed, and eventually fed. I found the kitchen scissors and began snipping away at the mangled fabric of his sleeve. As I neared the shoulder of the garment, and then his breast pocket, I detected a movement. I stopped, holding my breath. There must be rats underground. Could an opportunist one have hitched a ride beneath the poor boy’s clothes? I snatched up the poker from the range and held it high, ready to beat off the thing as it emerged. But it was not a rat that came whiskery-nosed out of Nipper’s jacket. It was a small, grubby, bright-eyed white mouse.
23
The first thing I learned when Taklit accepted me as her student was that, to her, the word was obviously the same as servant. From the moment we met, she barked orders at me, setting me to all the menial tasks necessary to survive in the desert. I had to sweep out the tent, tend to her camel and two goats, taking them to graze on the meager plants that grew between the rocks, or gathering their dried dung as fuel for the fire. At night, the temperature would drop dramatically, and Taklit liked to be warm, so it was up to me to keep the fire going. She would even wake me up, nudging me with her foot, to put more fuel on the damn thing, when she could easily have done so herself, given that she was awake.
“This is a servant’s job,” she told me. “Taklit the Blessed is not a servant.”
“Taklit the Blessed didn’t have a servant until a couple of days ago,” I pointed out. “How did she feed the fire then?” I asked. Her habit of talking about herself in the third person was catching.
She merely shrugged and said, “She used her magic.”
“But now she’d rather use me, right?” I said as I pushed another dried camel dropping into the flames. She didn’t argue. In the mornings I would use some of the millet I had previously pounded into flour, mix it with a little water, and do my best to produce passable flatbreads. I was pretty pleased with the results. Of course, Taklit thought they were woeful versions of the real thing. It wasn’t until day five that she took a mouthful and then grudgingly declared it “better.” It turned out Taklit had her own well, thank the Goddess, otherwise no doubt I’d have been made to trek miles to fetch water. The strange thing was, this well was only a few yards from where the Berber men had left me, and yet I hadn’t seen it when we had stood there together. A whole line of camels and a dozen men had walked slowly past that exact spot, and yet none of them had seen it either. Later, when I better understood just how powerful Taklit was, it made sense. When I went to draw water from it again I found it not quite where it had been the day before. And the day after that it was somewhere else altogether. Perhaps she was the Greatest Witch Living after all. She certainly enjoyed making life harder for me than it already was.
One day, when there had been no breeze to dry the sweat that seemed to pour from me constantly, and I was nearing the point where I wanted to find shade, even if I had to share it with scorpions, and curl up and pretend I was somewhere, anywhere, that wasn’t hotter than hell, Taklit pushed me just one step too far.
“Bring more water,” she told me, sitting herself down on a rock to gaze over the desert, which was something she spent a great deal of time doing.
I trudged off to the well, except it wasn’t where it should have been. I searched for it, biting down my irritation. It was bad enough I h
ad to wait on the wretched woman without her playing tricks on me for her own amusement. After half an hour of fruitless stomping about in the hot sand, I gave up and returned to where Taklit was busy doing nothing.
“The well is not there anymore,” I said.
“The well is where it is.”
“I can’t find it.”
“Clever Witch cannot find a well she has been using for days? It might be Taklit must change your name to Stupid Witch,” she said with another of her choice snorts.
Something inside me snapped.
“And it might be I have to change your name to Taklit the Lazy!” I yelled, sand and thirst making my voice hoarse. “And how about we call me what I am … Exhausted Witch, Hungry, Tired, Seriously Fed-Up Witch? Or how about plain old Slave Witch!”
She narrowed her eyes at me. “You are angry.”
“Too bloody right I am! You’ve had me cooking, lighting fires, collecting dung, dragging those goats of yours for miles looking for something for them to eat, and do I get so much as a “thank you”? No way! You just sit on your backside taking in the view while I slog away in this heat, waiting for you to decide to bother to teach me something, anything, that might make putting up with all this worth my damn while!” I stopped, breathless with the effort of shouting when all I felt like doing was crying from tiredness and frustration.
Taklit said nothing for a moment. I was so close to packing up and hitching a ride with the next camel train, in whichever direction it was traveling, just to get away from her. At last she did speak, and her voice was low and soft, which was a drastic alteration from her usual way of talking to me.
“Where did you learn the name Taklit the Blessed?” she asked.
“I heard of you years ago. From a witch I was studying with in France. And then later, from another in America who knew someone who had met you.”
“And did they tell you the meaning of the name?”
I shrugged, really too tired to be playing this particular game. “That you were the Greatest Witch Living, that your magic was superior to anyone else’s, that…”
“Did they tell you that the word Taklit is Berber for ‘Slave’?”
I was astonished. “No,” I said. “They didn’t tell me that.”
She stood up, unfolding her long limbs, lightly getting to her feet and planting her staff upon the rock. She turned to look at me steadily. “Do you think you are the first? Do you think there have not been others who came here before you, looking to steal away the wisdom and magic of Taklit the Blessed?”
When I opened my mouth to speak she silenced me with a wave of her hand.
“I turned them away. I would have turned you away, too, sent you back into the Deserts of the Dead to walk and walk until the sun dried you to a crisp.”
“But you didn’t.”
“There is much magic already inside you. Magic of the elements. Taklit saw this, and knew at once that it was … different. The whispers spoke of what you could be, of what you must be, but you are incomplete.” She paused, and I thought, hoped, she would say more about what this meant, but I dared not question her. It was the surest way I knew of making her clam up. At last she said, “No person can learn when their arrogance cloaks them. No wisdom, no skill, no words of magic can enter their soul while they hold themselves erect, proud, important.” She pointed a long, bony finger at me. “You came here wearing your cleverness like silver armor. Only the humble can learn. Now,” she turned her hand palm uppermost in a gesture toward me that spoke volumes, “now you are reduced. As I once was. Now you are ready to learn.”
And then we began.
Of course I still had to sweep out the tent, tend the animals, and make the flatbreads, but those were only tasks between the lessons. They were the things I now did willingly and quickly so that I could do more of whatever Taklit had decided to teach me that day. My first lessons took place at night because she wanted me to understand the stars. We would sit on the rocks and she would point with her stick, telling me the Berber names for the different constellations and planets, and then testing me on which was which. She explained how the desert nomads navigated by the stars, and how Tuareg witches, such as she was, would only perform certain rituals and cast certain spells when the night sky was the right shape, with everything most auspiciously aligned. Not surprisingly, Taklit was a fairly brutal teacher. She barked at me if I gave wrong answers to her questions, or laughed at me if I said something she thought dim-witted. Even when I was lighting the fire or beating the rugs she would make me repeat, over and over, the names of the stars in the order I would find them. Finally, after nights of stumbling and hesitating, I got them all right. We were sitting by the fire and I named them all, every single name of every single star. I was very pleased with myself, but if I expected praise from Taklit I was going to be disappointed. She just snorted, nodded, and then started eating.
She surprised me the next morning by presenting me with my own staff. It was slightly shorter than hers—of course!—and not intricately carved in the way hers was, but it was made of a beautifully smooth, golden wood. I had no idea where she had conjured it up from, and knew better than to ask. She tossed it to me.
“Is yours,” she said.
I opened my mouth to thank her, but didn’t get the chance to speak. Before I knew what was happening she swung her own staff at me. Instinct made me block her blow with mine, but she had put so much force into her swing that the connection rattled painfully up my arms.
“What was that for?” I gasped.
“If a person has a thing, she should know how to use it,” she went on by way of explanation.
“Are you crazy? I don’t know how to fight.”
But Taklit wasn’t in the mood for talking. She leapt at me, staff raised above her head. I dived to the left as I heard it scythe through the air and thwack into the ground. I rolled across the sand and then struggled to my feet as quickly as I could. I was barely up when I felt the stick land across my shoulders. I cried out as I fell forward. Taklit danced behind me.
“Get up!” she shouted, not keeping still for an instant, weaving and dancing and moving the staff all the time so that I had no idea what her next move might be.
I tried to turn so that I was facing her, tried to follow the sound of the bells around her ankle, ringing as she jumped, but she was too quick for me. With a nimble twirl she brought the unyielding wood smartly into the back of my knees, sweeping my feet from under me. Again I was on the floor, bruised and hurting, my own staff dropped onto the sand beside me. Taklit towered above me.
“You are slow,” she said. “You must get quicker.”
And so we trained, day and night, until my limbs were a psychedelic collection of bruises and all my muscles ached from the effort of leaping and turning and trying to avoid her pretty damn merciless blows. She was relentless. She’d take every chance she got to catch me somewhere harmless but painful—ankles were her favorite. Just as I thought I was getting the hang of at least some defensive moves she would change her tactic and find another way to whack me. Half the time I was almost blinded by the sweat running into my eyes, and dizzy from the all-encompassing heat. In the end it was a mixture of fury and desperation that drove me to attack her. I saw a tiny opening and I went for it, charging at her, thrashing wildly, ignoring the red pain when she wrapped my knuckles or smacked my shins, driving forward until at last, at last she was on the back foot. I pushed on, yelling now, Goddess knew what, as I swung and lunged until Taklit lost her footing and went down. Now it was my turn to stand over her. I stood, panting like a sprinter, the point of my staff held at her throat.
“Looks like I got quicker,” I said, before turning on my heel and marching off to sit, pointedly, on her favorite rock.
After that I like to think she took me just a little bit more seriously. Not that she would ever have admitted I beat her, but she did start to talk to me about things. Things like her own magic.
“Tuareg magic is anc
ient,” she told me one chilly night as we sat watching the fire dwindle to embers. “It is not written anywhere for fools and such like and so forth to find. It is told, from one woman to another.”
I thought of Elizabeth, then, and the pain of missing her stabbed me again. Her mother, Anne, had taught her everything she knew about healing, and she would have passed on her magic, if she had lived. And then Elizabeth had taught me. I understood how Taklit felt about the privilege of carrying that magic within us. Of passing it on. But if I hadn’t pitched up, who would she have passed it on to?
“You have not taken a husband,” I said, choosing my words carefully. “Don’t you want a daughter to inherit your knowledge?”
She gave a particularly loud snort at that. “Taklit the Blessed will never take a husband. She will not have a child. She will pass on what she knows to those who are worthy of it.”
I knew her well enough not to expect any sort of compliment or praise in my direction. It was enough that she was willing to share anything at all with me. I kept quiet. I sensed she was in an expansive mood, that she felt I had earned the right to something. I had no idea what that something would turn out to be. If I had, I might have started running then and there and not stopped until I had put a very great distance between me and the Greatest Witch Living.
“We are children of the desert,” she said. “The night sky keeps us from being lost. The stars guide us. They also show us the path our future may take. A Tuareg nomad knows the stars like he knows the dunes and the wells of the Deserts of the Dead. His life depends upon it. A Tuareg witch knows the stars in this way, but also she knows their secrets; those things that they can tell us about what is yet to come.” She paused to prod the fire with her foot. A shower of sparks flew up into the darkness, new stars to add to those older than time that glistened and glinted above us. The light from the fire fell onto Taklit’s noble and graceful face, while all around her was in deepest shadow. As she spoke her eyes flashed with firelight, tiny flames reflecting in the malachite green of her irises.
The Return of the Witch Page 26