“How is it you know all this?” Chess asked, only to find himself served with Yancey’s most withering look. “How d’you think?” she inquired, in return.
When the Icelandic family first moved in, Ed and Yancey had gone over to welcome them, and the boy—young man, really, not that Missus Daughter seemed like to ever recognize that fact—had been civil enough. The old lady, however, had sat there staring poison at Yancey, blue eyes so light they almost seemed blind, until finally muttering the one word in her repertoire both of them recognized: “Hexe.”
“No ma’am,” Yancey’d replied, politely as she could. “You’re mistaken, but it’s an easy error. I’m . . . something else.”
There’d been a brief, sharp confab between Missus Daughter and Freyr, complete with gesticulation, pointing; the woman wouldn’t let it go, or let her son do so, either. “My Momma says,” he’d eventually begun, reluctantly, “she sees draugr at your back. Ah . . . geisten?” Yancey’d nodded. “Says she knows you ain’t, uh, ‘blind’, like most. Which makes you how she is.”
“Well, not quite . . .”
No matter how Yancey tried to explain herself, it didn’t matter—Missus Daughter knew better, or thought she did. And from that moment on, there was an ill-wishing blown her and Ed’s way, a tangible bad feeling, so palpable that things around ’em began to sour. Animals died, crops failed; they felt watched at night, and otherwise. Someone slammed doors, broke window-glass, stole pans, made candles melt and turn, the tallow itself rotting. A sickening smell pervaded the house, no matter how spick and span she kept it, and as the weather turned cold, Yancey knew there was only worse to come.
“Can’t she tell you ain’t a hex?” Chess asked. “I mean, I knew straight off when we met there was something different, not that I could put it into words.”
“Like I said, she doesn’t speak English, and Freyr can’t seem to explain the difference between a dead-speaker and a hex. For one thing, I think hexes do talk to ghosts and walk the Dead Road, over where she’s from. And then I guess I went and made it even worse, just by trying to put what I meant straight into her, the one time. . . .” Yancey looked down, shaking her head in disbelief over her own idiocy. “Bad idea. Now she won’t let me anywhere near, and she’s been sending these—creatures of hers against us, all through October, November . . . right ’til now.”
Chess frowned. “‘Creatures’?”
“Yule Lads, Freyr calls ’em,” Ed put in. “Got something to do with Christmas, these days, though I guess they’re probably a hold-over from beforehand—back when her folk used to worship earthquakes, volcanos and one-eyed wolves, or what-have-you. Sort of like elves gone bad, or that fella old Kees Hosteen used to talk about; you recall, the one who leaves coal in the stockings and hauls the naughty kids away, to boil up for Christmas dinner?”
“Krampus, that’d be. Black man with horns and a tail, like Old Scratch, but hairier.”
“Yeah, well: Yule Lads are thirteen little Krampuses, and instead of makin’ toys, they raise hell. But they do have a boss of their own, far away from Saint Nick as you can get—this horrible old hag called Gerda. Or was it Gilla?”
“Grýla,” Yancey corrected, quietly. “Her name’s Grýla, and she loves eating other folks’ children too, boiled or raw; never goes hungry, or so Freyr says. His mother told him—”
But there she stopped, clearly unwilling to elaborate, while Ed—cast unhappy eyes her way as he might—seemed similarly loath to ask. Chess, however, heard the echo of it without even trying, the same way Yancey’d learned Missus Daughter’s sad history:
—told him how she would come at the end, borne on the storm, when all her Lads’d already been and gone . . . come knocking Christmas morning and kick the damn door down, Jesus or no, just in time to bite my baby’s head off when it comes sliding out.
It was a hell of an image, one he was happy enough to keep out of Ed’s head. So Chess simply shook his, to clear it, and demanded of her, instead—
“What-all made you think it wasn’t the best idea to call on me to deal with this, gal?”
“’Cause . . .” Yancey looked away, though not down. “. . . I thought I could do it, is all. And how was I to know what you’d want?”
“Not what you’re thinkin’, I’ll take a bet. Hell, this is my job; whole city trusts me to do it, by the book, believe it or not. There’s a mess of protocols, and I ain’t broke one yet.”
“Such as?”
Now it was Chess’s turn to sigh, angrily. “Scout for such as her long-distance, then set down right near her, catch her off-guard. Approach her all together. Make her Oath up, or my lot move in, power her down, and we go on from there. Don’t have to kill nobody anymore, we don’t want to, and plain fact is, we don’t—not most of us. That’s the gift old Doc Hex gave us when he made the damn Manifolds, and the Thiels shored it up when they got government permission to kick Songbird a crap-load of ’em, long’s she promised we’d only use ’em on each other.” He turned to Ed. “Come to think of, where’s yours, anyhow? Don’t tell me you chucked it down a well, just ’cause the Hex War’s over and done with.”
Ed shrugged, helpless. “Government property, Chess—Thiel took it, right after we confabbed. I’m not Agency, not anymore.”
“Hell, we ain’t Agency!”
“Never said you were. But you keep the peace, right?”
Chess nodded. “‘Naturals’ to use ’em, hexes to make sure they don’t get overused—it’s some system, that’s for sure. Never would’ve thought it’d work, I hadn’t seen it myself.”
“Sounds peachy. But see, Chess—it’s not like that, out here. You know as well as I do that’s why hexes go to Hexicas, in the first place.”
“I didn’t, though,” Chess shot back. “Did I? No, not for years. Kept to myself, did for myself . . .” He shook his head. “Well, fact is, I can’t call ’em back, not at the moment—they’re on some mission got Songbird all in a tizzy, so much so even Yiska’s off her game. So . . . Christ, I don’t know. One old woman, huh? And she’s that hard t’deal with?”
“Not at first,” Yancey replied, “which is why it grew on me—slow, soft, like a bad cut turns septic. And now . . . now, she’s so damn certain I mean to harm her, I have no idea how to persuade her otherwise, short of letting her kill me.”
“She should be scared of you, then, that’s really what she thinks.”
“And she is, Chess: so damn scared! It hurts just to think about it. But that doesn’t help me any.”
“Don’t see why not . . .”
Yancey turned in her seat, then, fixing him again, almost as sharp—but more sad than anything else, this time. “’Course you don’t,” she said, unsurprised, unjudgemental. “How could you? ’Cause in all the time I’ve known you, you’ve kept yourself far too angry to really be afraid, Chess, even when you had good cause—the best, by any standards. And that’s just who you are.”
After that, all affection aside, there seemed nothing left to say, for any of them. So they sat there near-silent as Yancey busied herself scraping the sanded plates, ’til Ed finally rose to show Chess where the guest-bed’s sheets were kept—whereupon there was a fresh knocking at the door, and all three quickly re-armed themselves: Yancey and Ed with steel, Chess with a wave and a muttered word, his whole palm suddenly filled with purple flame.
A blond, bearded face, cold-reddened, peered down from under the wide brim of an oil-cloth hat, too anxious even to notice how much imminent danger he was in of being set hexaciously alight. “Missus Morrow, please?” the shrouded figure asked, anxiously, and Chess—suddenly aware this must be the famous Mister Freyr Whoever’s-son—stepped aside, hand slipping behind his back, to let Yancey draw near.
The conversation was brief. “I have left my Momma’s house,” the young man announced. “Waited ’til she was sleeping, but when she wakes . . . Mister Morrow, I go to No Silver Here, probably, to work the railroad as far as it tak
es me. Might join up, if there’s a Thiel station along the way; I have experience with hexen, after all. Though I do not think I will seek Expression.”
“That’ll come when it does, if it does,” Yancey agreed. On the door-frame, out of Freyr’s vision, Chess saw her knuckles whitening. “But—Freyr, your Momma’ll be frantic, she finds out you’ve gone.”
He nodded, unhappily. “Yes. And I am sorry, I am. You have been good to me, Missus Morrow. But . . .” Stepping back outside, towards his nervously snorting cart-horse, he cast a last warning back over his shoulder. “She sleeps now after three days’ spinning, making a charm that frightens even her. She has put on her hairy shoes, and her distaff runs red, after being used so long her hands bleed! Please, takes steps to defend yourself.”
“Freyr, if you’d just—”
“No! Ma’am, I cannot. I am sorry.” He swung himself up onto the horse, shrugging his various bits and pieces closer, and shouting, over a rising wind: “Defend yourself! What she summons comes. It comes!”
Then, with a neigh and a clatter, he was gone.
“Well,” said Chess, grimly, “I’d say that tears it.”
“She’s a sick old woman, Chess.”
“Uh huh. And that’d count for something, she wasn’t a hex, to boot—but seein’ she is, I can tell you this much: she means to kill you, she’ll get it done, just as sure as she was young and healthy.”
“Thank you, but no. I know you mean well, but outright murder’s not the best option, under any circumstances; I know that myself, from when I thought it was. And so do you.”
“Goddamnit, Yancey Colder Kloves—”
“Goddamn what, Cheshire Pargeter?” Yancey snapped back, unwilling to let a man whose sole guiding principle had once been sheer, bloody-minded perversity lecture her like a schoolmarm. But here too-patient Ed finally raised a paw and hollered: “Enough!”, shocking them both silent.
“No time for that,” he said, gruffly; “storm’s comin’—look yonder, you’ll see it. Missus Daughter’s, I guess, but one way or the other, there’s work to be done. Be appreciative for some help, from both of you.”
Yancey cocked her head at Chess, who blew out, then struck a pose, to show there were no hard feelings.
“How appreciative?” he asked, raising one red brow, in mock-salacious invitation.
That night, while Chess sat watchful on the porch and Ed circled the farm to secure hutches, sheds and doors against the storm, Yancey lit a “Christmas” candle in the window the way her mother’d taught her, long before she’d known it to be a hat-tip to the Hanukkah festivities neither she nor Yancey’s Pa felt they could celebrate outwardly, and summoned up the Rabbi Dovber Diskin.
In life, this worthy’d been a literal Wandering Jew, ministering to many of the tiny communities scattered throughout New Mexico, in both scholarly and advisory capacity. But all that had changed when he’d suffered a heart attack during one Passover seder and Expressed right there, with earth-quaking force. Afraid their kin would be blamed for the resultant destruction, two of his own congregation—essentially good men, the Rabbi maintained, who’d already managed to survive pogroms back in Russia, and didn’t look to do it again—had taken him off into the desert and opted to damn themselves by strangling him rather than see their families persecuted further, burying his body underneath a scree of rocks.
That’s awful, Yancey’d said, after the Rabbi told her his tale—back when she’d first thrown herself open to the wind, hoping for advice on how best to honour her odd heritage of secret Judaism and even more secret Romani traditions, the latter something her mother had never made particularly clear even to Pa, who loved her beyond reason. But the Rabbi’d simply shrugged and inclined the uneven smudge that was left of his face, replying:
Eh. I understood, then; even better, now. Like them—and you, I suspect—I have had some small experience already with being hated over nothing.
According to the Rabbi, the Torah might be read as clear that hexation was inherently against Jewish tradition, as in Deuteronomy: For you are coming into a land that God is granting to you; do not learn the ways of the abominations of the native people. There shall not be found amongst you . . . a sorcerer, soothsayer or engager of witchcraft . . . or one who calls up the dead. For it is an abomination before God, and it is on account of these abominations that God is giving you their land.
To which Yancey had laughed, remarking: There’s sorceresses of my acquaintance might challenge your Good Book on that one, sir—most ’specially those from the Diné tribe, who don’t reckon any bilagaana worth just one of their hataalii, and aren’t too likely to forgive the palefaces for taking what was theirs just ’cause they claim a God the Diné never heard of said it was a good idea.
True enough, the Rabbi conceded. Why should they accept it, any more than we accepted the Philistines’ claim on our lands, or the Romans’? The Egyptians and Babylonians were only allowed to take us for slaves because we ourselves deserted Him, so He saw fit to use them to punish us for it. But I always saw more sense in the Nachmanides’s theory that magic is simply another part of the natural world, like gravity or electro-magnetism, created by God and thus of Him. Thus it can be well-used or badly used, depending on whether or not we acknowledge its source: just as nature does not work without God, neither does the occult. And so these forces become a source for evil when they are viewed as an alternative power to God.
The Witchery Way.
Hmmm. Yes, I think so—very similar. And so you see how the idea of righteousness is the same throughout every culture, no matter what language is used to express it, just as God lies at the heart of every system, whether or not we call Him by His true name.
Was something about the way he’d said it made Yancey feel he was paraphrasing, or maybe even deliberately misinterpreting the original text, but she’d certainly appreciated the sentiment; faith was hard enough without the knowledge that something could be made from nothing by people who weren’t gods, yet had good reason to fall into the error of believing themselves such.
Now, she leaned her forehead against the cold glass, and asked him once again what she should do. Felt the Rabbi’s phantom hand on her shoulder, comfortingly strong, as she heard him say, inside her mind—
You want to save this woman, because she is in serious danger of wrong-doing; your friend too, I think. And yourself, as well—for the self-same reasons.
It’s too easy, is all, she told him. To get hit at and hit back, even harder—what’s it prove, let alone help? That’s how it seems to me. And I can make Chess see that, maybe, I just try hard enough. But her . . .
You are right to believe she is in error, the Rabbi told her, which didn’t really make Yancey feel any better. A grave one, though human; she defiles herself, in trying to defile you. And she will pay for it, unfortunately.
How can I show her that, though? Before it’s too late?
As though it was glaringly obvious: With His help.
Yancey sighed. Thought to herself, too fast to catch it back: ’Course, you’d say that. . . .
Of course, yes, the Rabbi agreed, without resentment. You expected differently?
Well, no. But . . .
. . . He doesn’t know me, sir, she started over, trying to make amends. Not the way I was brought up—no more’n I know Him. That’s all.
Silence, just for an instant—Yancey almost looked up, assuming herself suddenly alone. And then the Rabbi was there once more, voice full of love and respect, cut with just the slightest bit of laughter.
Oh, Experiance, mayn sheyne maydel . . . you couldn’t be more wrong. He knows everyone, even you, even your friend. Even your enemy. And the sad part is, she knows Him, as well—
(—if only she would let herself remember.)
Once midnight’d come and gone, there was nothing to see outside but a pulsing, grainy swirl of white, half dust and sand, half storm-driven snow. Ed woke from a dream he couldn�
��t recall and felt his way over to the corner to piss, careful to leave Yancey curled on her side in sleep, big belly pillow-propped—but even as he finished, he suddenly realized he could hear somebody moving stealthily around in the kitchen: Chess, he hoped. That was if they were lucky.
And so it proved. Yet by the time he’d tucked himself away and grabbed up the shotgun, Chess must’ve come upon the notion that letting one or the other of the Morrow-Colder Kloves crew know where he was going before he went might be better than simply doing so, leaving them to wonder. Ed found him waiting at the table, legs sprawled, arms crossed.
“I’m gonna kill that bitch, while we still can,” he said, like he expected to be talked out of it.
Ed only nodded. “Prob’ly help to know where she lives, though,” he pointed out.
“You said—”
“What, ‘over there’? I know we told you her property abuts onto ours, I don’t rightly recall specifying where, exactly.”
Chess squinted, sitting up straighter. “Well . . . that’s true enough. So?”
Ed should’ve had to debate the question a moment, he supposed, if he was any sort of moral, or even only as moral as he usually thought himself. But in point of fact, he really didn’t.
“Think things’d go better if I just showed you,” he replied, reaching for his coat.
“’Scuse me?”
This fresh voice came from a step or two behind, where Yancey stood glaring in the bedroom doorway, hand on her swollen gut. And: “What’re you two fools doing here, exactly?—oh!” was all she had to add to it before jack-knifing, abruptly down on one knee and holding herself, as though about to vomit. Ed lunged to help, saw her eyes roll back as Chess jumped up, all but sniffing the air.
“She’s awake,” he said. “Knows her boy’s gone, too, and she don’t like it. And—” Another man might’ve gone pale; Chess just set his jaw. “—she sees me. With you.”
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