Haunt Me Still

by Jennifer Lee Carrell

  The phrase was Shakespeare’s, I was certain of that. But not from Macbeth. On my phone, I pulled up the Web and entered the words into a Shakespearean search engine. Othello, Julius Caesar, and Henry VIII, came the answer. Spoken about Desdemona, Portia, and Queen Elizabeth.

  I frowned. It had been an old jest between my mentor roz Howard and myself that my auburn hair, dark eyes, and the tiniest hint of a hook in my nose made me look like Shakespeare’s queen, in her days as a princess. It was a jest that Ben had kept alive. But the voices couldn’t have known that. Could they?

  I clicked on Henry VIII, pulling up the phrase in its context.

  She must die:

  She must, the saints must have her; yet a virgin,

  A most unspotted lily shall she pass

  To the ground, and all the world shall mourn her.

  Lily, I thought raggedly. They hadn’t threatened me; they’d threatened Lily. And I’d let her walk out of that circle alone.

  I stood up, filled with sudden dread. I had no idea where her bedroom was. On this floor, I thought. I had to find it—and her—if it meant knocking on every door in the goddamned house. I was already striding for the door when I heard a quiet tap from the other side and flung it open.

  11

  LILY STOOD in the hall in loose flannel pants and an old black Belle and Sebastian sweatshirt, a book and a small wooden box under her arm, her face bright with excitement. “I couldn’t sleep. I’ve had an idea, and, well, I saw your light on, so I thought I might as well run it by you.” She bounded into the room. “You aren’t angry with me, are you?”

  In my confusion, I felt as if I’d been bounced by Tigger. “for listening? I would’ve done the same thing at your age. Maybe at my age.”

  “I’m not normally so nosey. Only, I saw the knife out on the terrace before dinner, and afterward I heard you talking about it in the little sitting room, and I was so curious…. Is that it?”

  It lay where I’d left it on the table, shining in the firelight. “Yes.” Setting the book and the box on the table, she caught it up, hefting it in her hand.

  I glanced at the book. The cover showed a tall stone standing alone in a green field under lowering clouds, a single bright ray of sun illuminating the scene. It was titled Ancient Pictland, by Corra ravensbrook. Using both hands, Lily began waving the knife in slow motion, almost like she was doing Tai Chi. “Do you think it’s really a thousand years old?”

  “I don’t know.” How could it be? How could it not be?

  .

  “It’d be really cool to use this in the festival, don’t you think? for the fight between the kings.”

  “for a stage fight?”

  She smiled. “You heard Eircheard. It’s a ritual knife. And it’s an old ritual we’re staging.”

  “Lily—it’s a real knife. An edged weapon.”

  “I know. But it’s a king-sacrifice we’re staging, just like the one that killed Macbeth.”

  “‘Staging’ being the operative word.”

  “It would be authentic.”

  “It would be insanely reckless,” I said incredulously. She was from a theatrical family, for heaven’s sake.

  “You know Eircheard and Jason are taking those roles? If anyone could handle a real knife, it’d be those two.” She gave me a wicked smile. “And there’d be those who’d be happy enough if Jason came out a little worse for the wear, I can tell you that. It’s one thing for Sybilla to have been asked to be the Cailleach; she’s been a member of the Beltane fire Society—the festival organizers—since long before she hit the big time. It was idiotic, though, when Jason was cast as the Winter King. That role has always been cast from members of the fire Society before. Like Eircheard as the Summer King. Amateurs who really care about the show and the myths behind it. But Sybilla wrote a big check, and voilà, we’re saddled with Jason. Bit uncomfortable, now that they’re not speaking. On the other hand, there’s no speaking in the show, either, so maybe their feuding won’t matter a toss.”

  She blew a strand of coppery hair from her face. “But I’m in no position to complain, or even say ‘I told you so,’ because I’m an exception to the rule myself. Too young, you know. Gran pulled some strings for me.”

  Holding the knife tightly, she raised both hands toward the ceiling, as she had out on the lawn. “I’d like to be the Cailleach one day. Ever so much more than Lady Macbeth. I mean, the Cailleach’s, like, the real thing, isn’t she? It’s her show. She chooses the champions who will be kings, and she sets them against each other. They’re fighting for the right to marry her, at least in her young person of the Bride, as much as anything else.”

  She brought her hands down to her hips. “Do you know what the name ‘Dunsinnan’ means?”

  “No.”

  She marched over to the windows. I’d drawn the curtains wide, letting the windows frame the hill. “fort of the Nipple,” she said with a flourish. “Dun means fort in Gaelic, and sine means nipple. You can’t really tell from this side, but next time you drive in from the main road, have a look. The whole hill looks like a woman’s breast.” She threw open the middle window and leaned out into the night. “Weird name for a military hill.”

  I had my doubts, having met a few of Ben’s friends. Some of them were capable of seeing breasts and penises in the void of outer space. But I held my tongue.

  “The archaeologists all say that the ramparts on the hilltop are the remains of an Iron Age hill fort…but there’s no evidence of that. I mean, buildings, yes. But not of a fort or castle specifically. And it doesn’t seem, militarily speaking, the best place around. I mean, the hill just to the east, the King’s Seat, is higher. So if the point is really male and military, like all the histories say, don’t you think you’d build your fort next door?”

  Privately, I doubted her expertise in judging suitable spots for fortification from an Iron Age perspective, but it didn’t seem the right time to point that out.

  “But they didn’t.” Pulling back inside, she turned and hopped up to sit on the sill. “for over a thousand years, the stronghold was on Dunsinnan. Which would make all the sense in the world if it were less a fort and more, say, a spiritual stronghold. Especially given its shape and the stone circle at its base.” She crossed her arms in triumph. “I think it was a temple complex.”

  She was looking at me as if daring me to disagree. As I made no move to shout her down, she went on. “There are records, you know, of Macbeth coming here to consult with witches. But, like, change that title to ‘priestesses,’ and you’ve got a Stronghold of the Lady. The great Goddess worshipped in this land for millennia before the coming of Christianity…. I’m not talking about Scotland, mind you.” Her nose wrinkled in contempt. “The Scots are newcomers, invaders from Ireland.” She threw her arms wide. “This—the whole of central Scotland—was Pictland, the kingdom of the Picts. That’s what the romans called them. The Priteni, they called themselves—or something like it. Their actual language is lost. Celtic, but closer to Welsh than Gaelic, apparently. In any case, it’s where we get the word ‘Britain,’” she said proudly. “Dunsinnan—or the stretch of country from Dunsinnan to Scone—was once the spiritual center of Pictland, the land of the Priteni. The spiritual center of Britain. Ground zero for Goddess worship, right here. How cool is that?”

  How much of this was being regurgitated from Corra ravensbrook, whoever she was? No matter—Lily was clearly very taken with her version of history. If I wanted her to consider another viewpoint—a sane one, say—I’d have to proceed with caution. “But isn’t Dunsinnan where the battle was?” I asked aloud. “The great battle between Malcolm and Macbeth in 1054? Sounds military to me.”

  She shrugged. “Wouldn’t be the first battle fought at a temple. Think about it: Malcolm’s army came down from Birnam, just this side of the river from Dunkeld, where his grandfather had been the lay abbot. Even then, way back in the eleventh century, Dunkeld, see, was a bastion of Christianity.” She jumped down fr
om the sill and began to pace before it. “Don’t you see? They weren’t just fighting for the throne, Malcolm and Macbeth. It was a holy war. A Christian crusade against the old faith. Against the Goddess. A war to enforce Christianity and disinherit women. To banish the old Pictish ways that properly belong to this place.”

  She pointed at the book with the knife. “That’s where ravensbrook’s so interesting. The usual Wiccan stuff—well, it tends to be airy-fairy. All about how gentle and good Wicca is, in tune with the earth and the natural rhythms of life, you know? Which is fine—more than fine. But the old Goddess religion, it could be fierce. It didn’t just pay lip service to the notion that death is a part of life. It embraced that fact fully. If you know what I mean.”

  I frowned. “You mean sacrifice?”

  “Blood sacrifice,” she said with teenage relish. “Sacrifice of the king. There are a lot of stories about king sacrifice, you know,” she babbled on, “the Samhuinn fire festival among them, but they weren’t always just stories. Corra says the myths are memories of old rites.”

  She held up the knife. “According to Eircheard, this is a ritual knife. And it’s also the knife that killed Macbeth. King Macbeth.” for a moment, we both stared at the firelight and moonlight playing on its surface. “Ergo, the knife killed Macbeth in a ritual killing. Macbeth was killed as part of a ritual sacrifice of the king.” She let one finger stray across the runes on the blade. “I mean, what is a ritual knife for but ritual?”

  Who was this Corra ravensbrook, I wondered again. The ideas of king sacrifice she seemed to have planted in Lily had been discredited among academics long ago. A growing number of neo-pagans, especially the more intellectual sort, dismissed much of it as wishful thinking. But Lily, I realized, was in no mood to hear the voice of reason.

  “Seems like rotten timing,” I said mildly, “to slice up your leader and feed his lifeblood to the gods just when you’re on the run, looking for a place to make a last desperate stand.”

  “King sacrifice would never have been common. Performed only in times of great need, to settle some extraordinary debt with the gods. And what greater need than the destruction of your whole civilization?” She grinned. “Hey, apocalypse threatens, you’ll do anything. Reason goes right out the window.”

  It was the most sensible thing she’d said in some time. I sighed. “All the old histories say that it was Macduff, fighting for Malcolm, who killed Macbeth and set his head on a pole. Not priestesses. Even Shakespeare used that part of the story.” It was one of his most blunt stage directions: Enter Macduff with Macbeth’s head. So preposterous that it was a dicey moment onstage: Audiences had been known to laugh.

  Lily waved off the authorities. “And who wrote those histories? Monks! Christians. Busily writing the Goddess and her priestesses out of existence. I imagine Macduff found the pole, all right, and took it up as a trophy, waving it about. But it was the Celts, not the Christians, who worshipped heads. Decorated their sacred spaces with them. Submerged them in wells, boiled them in cauldrons, believed they could speak. It would have been Macbeth’s own people who wanted his head as a talisman. By taking it, I reckon Macduff ripped the heart out of whatever will to fight they had left. A sort of grim Capture the flag, if you like.”

  “If you’re right, it didn’t work out any better for them than for him, did it?”

  “No,” she said sadly, “not much.” She crossed the room and set the knife back down on the table and stood with her hands on her hips, staring into the fire. “He was the last Celtic king. The last king of the Priteni. But because of him, not everything was lost.”

  She was starting to make Macbeth out to be a Scottish King Arthur.

  “The old religion survived, you know. It just went underground. Really deep. Especially in places like this. Out in the sticks now—think what it would have been like in the eleventh century.” She turned to me, her eyes gleaming with excitement. “So…imagine Shakespeare coming through with a troupe of traveling players. Imagine him glimpsing, somehow, a rite preserved from the old days by women descended from the priestesses of the ancient Pictish Goddess. What would he do with it, do you think?”

  Presupposing all her ridiculousness was true, I knew exactly what Shakespeare would have done with it. He was a magpie, a pack rat, when it came to plot, borrowing and stealing from everywhere. And magic made good theater. Spectacular.

  “He would have written it into a script,” I said quietly.

  “Now, that would make your bloody play interesting,” said Lily.

  No, I thought, that would make it explosive. It was titillating enough to suggest that he’d put in a real spell or some rite of casting a circle—at least one that people once thought was real. But those could be found on the pages of grimoires and witch-hunting manuals. They weren’t entirely lost. Putting in a rite of sacrifice preserved from an otherwise lost pagan religion—hell, if we were talking about the Picts, it was pretty much a lost civilization—that was something else entirely. Never mind the obvious fascination for Shakespeareans. Every neo-pagan, every Christian, every scholar of Britain’s history, every journalist who wanted to sell papers or airtime, would be salivating over it.

  I cleared my throat and said aloud what a responsible adult ought to say. “That’s a lot of ifs.”

  “And one cold, hard, thousand-year-old piece of evidence,” she said with shining eyes.

  Nothing is but what is not.

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” she said, “even if he got it wrong—painting something as evil that wasn’t, really—I’d still want to read it. I’d even forgive the irritating old git for tormenting every school-kid in modern Britain, just for preserving it at all.” She turned to me. “So, what do you think?”

  “That I need to think.” I felt as if she’d just gone after me with a baseball bat.

  Picking up the wooden box she’d brought along, she opened it. Inside was something covered in black silk. “I brought my tarot cards,” she said. “Want a reading, while you think?”

  I glanced over at the clock. I’d have to be up in three hours. “Could I take a rain check on that?”

  She jumped up. “Oh, Lord. So sorry. You’ve got to get up for Gran’s early morning hike up the hill, haven’t you?”

  “You’re not coming?”

  She snorted. “Let’s see. Macbeth and a cold walk up the hill, or my warm bed and a nice morning’s lie-in. No bloody contest. But I don’t think you have a choice. So of course we can do it later…. Just as long as you let me corner you at some point. I bet your cards will be really interesting. Besides, you’ll like my deck. It’s a Macbeth deck.”

  She started for the door. “Lily—what were you doing out on the lawn tonight?”

  Halfway across the room, she stopped. “Charging the mirror.” The mirror that had been in the middle of her dance. “What does that mean?”

  She sighed. “I’m trying to learn to scry. To see things in a mirror. But you have to learn how to empty your mind first. And also charge your mirror. Fill it with energy. Kind of like you’d charge a mobile phone, but the energy’s different. Natural. Mostly, you charge them with moonlight.” She turned back with a mischievous smile. “Like I said, Goddess worship had to go underground. But it never entirely died out. Not through all the battles, not through all the burning years. And now, it’s coming back. People are returning to the old ways.”

  “Including you?”

  “Among others.”

  “What do you want to see?”

  She shrugged. “Same as everyone else. My first love. My future.” Her eyes met mine. “My parents.”

  I took a deep breath but said nothing. There was nothing useful I could say.

  “I heard you lost yours,” she said in a small voice. “What happened to them?”

  I sighed. “They were diplomats. A small plane and bad weather in the foothills of the Himalayas. A lethal combination. I was fifteen.”

  Her eyes were growing glassy. “Better than t
he motorway outside Preston.”

  In the fireplace, a log disintegrated in a shower of sparks. “There’s no good place for it.”

  Her voice shrank. “They were driving home from visiting me down at school.”

  I locked my eyes on hers and held them. “It wasn’t your fault, Lily.”

  After a moment she shrugged. “I know that. Lots of expensive therapy.” She gave me a watery smile and looked away. “But sometimes it’s hard to feel it. When did you stop missing them?”

  Was this it? Was this why she had sought my company? A toxic combination of guilt and longing. Poor kid. No wonder she was acting out. “Never.”

  She looked back sharply.

  “Only, the hurt loses its sharpness, gradually,” I said more gently. “And other experiences collect and change the balance of things. It doesn’t go away. But it does become bearable. Does that make sense?”

  “Thank you for not saying it will all be fine.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Did I tell you that you look nice in that dress?”

  I’d followed her to the door. Having entirely forgotten what I was wearing, I looked down and saw Lady Nairn’s peacock-blue silk. “Thanks. Your grandmother lent it to me.”

  “It was my mother’s.”

  I looked up, aghast. What the hell had Lady Nairn been thinking? “I’m so sorry. I had no idea.”

  She smiled. “It’s okay. You look a little like her. Besides, she’d have liked you. I like you, too.” Squeezing me in an impulsive hug, she opened the door and pattered off down the hall.

  And I like you, I thought, staring after her.

  I was turning back into the room when I heard another door open and glanced back. Sybilla emerged from Ben’s room in a flame-colored kimono. Seeing me, she nodded, her eyes sly with triumph as she swayed silently down the hall. As if the flames from her kimono had brushed me with kerosene, I felt waves of heat sweeping around me, the blue silk disappearing in a whoosh of yellow and red, my skin liquefying, melting into puddles at my feet.