Eastlick and Other Stories
Page 18
I turned to see what Sara Maarinen would say to this when Christina grabbed me right on the sore part of my shoulder.
It was me she was talking to.
Sara looked up anyway, and I swear by all the old gods and tiny fishes, she smiled.
I stood between the two women, staring from one fine-featured face to the other. Only then did I see their strong resemblance. Of course, Sara’s city-cut hair and fancy clothes were as much of a distraction as Christina’s tangled locks and honest island woolens, but that was no excuse for my not noticing it before.
“Well, Palka? Are you going to answer her?” Sara’s voice slashed into my dumb reverie. What did it matter if they were kin? The whole island was kin, if you counted back far enough.
I shook my head and gave Christina my sweetest smile, but she could read the terror on my face as though it were scrawled there in charcoal. Her eyes bored into me, and then she shook her head ever so slightly.
Behind me, Sara’s laugh flowed into the room. It was as false as the sunlight from the far window, but it rang sweet. “I guess the cat’s got his tongue,” she said, now leaning against the wall so that her upper back touched the diadem. “He said he wanted to welcome me to the cottage, so I took him up on it. And such a charming little place it is!” She spread her arms as if showing off the place to prospective tenants.
Christina gave a low hiss as I struggled to find my voice. It was a lie, a foul and terrible lie! And where had Christina been? I could say nothing. Christina still held my bruised shoulder. I thought she’d draw blood.
“I don’t know your full game yet, witchdaughter, but this is not yours.” Christina’s grip tightened as she spoke. I didn’t know if she was referring to the cottage or to me, but Sara’s eyes widened nonetheless. “You would do well to board that ferry and hie yourself back where you came from before harm is done here.”
Sara’s expression did not change. “You know I cannot do that.” Her voice was a lesson in cool, calm, and collected. Of course, her shoulder wasn’t being wrenched from her body.
“Don’t tell me what I do and do not know.” Christina almost whispered the last words.
The cottage darkened in that moment, as the window behind Sara began to admit the reality of the day outside. I missed the sunlight, even if it was tricksy magic. And in the next moment, I was being hauled up the street to the apartment above the mercantile.
~o0o~
“What the hell was that?” I asked as we mounted the steps in the fog.
“Not out here.” Christina’s voice was chopped, as if she struggled against panic.
There are no secrets on an island this small. What she thought to keep hidden was beyond me. Everyone who’d seen Sara Maarinen—old Kennewick, Grant Archerson, Gertie, the loungers at the White Rock—knew some version of the truth already. Words chased one another through my head in a sort of summoning: witchdaughters, bloodkin, mirror-twins, changelings. Children of the bone.
I thought of the Palka duty, the stained ax in its dank hole, and said nothing more.
We pushed into the apartment. It was a witchy enough place, of course, hung with travel posters of Bavarian castles and the Golden Gate Bridge, a shelf of chipped china horses along one wall, orchids struggling on the windowsill for sufficient sunlight. No purple silks or tinkling charms for Christina. Quiet magic.
But she was unquiet now. “What possessed you?”
“‘Possessed’ is such an ugly term.” She stiffened, and I wondered why we were fighting when by rights we should be plotting. “The salt failed, Christina. Then she took me in hand, demanded I let her in. I could not refuse her, any more than I can refuse you.” And for much the same reasons, I did not add. “Who is she to you?”
“No one.” Christina whirled away from me, striding across her cracked floorboards like an army on the march. The mercantile had closed when I was a small boy, but I imagined the drumming of her heels echoing among the shrouded shelves and dusty cobwebs down below. She turned back, tangled hair flying and eyes flashing.
All I could think was of the way her body bent like a storm-tossed sea as we made love, the same swirling hair, the same wild look on her face.
“No!” she shouted, for of course my own witch knew what was in my thoughts.
“Sara Maarinen called sunlight through the cottage windows,” I said quietly, pitching my voice down to draw Christina from the perch of her anger, for of course her familiar knew her witchy ways. “Driftglass off the ocean, melted and recast with the blood of gulls and gravedust in the forms.” My voice had the cadence of lessoning, for such I recited. “Frames made from shipwreck wood. Those windows are mirrors that reflect power. She is the Bone Island witch come again.”
Christina looked stricken. “No...”
“And she is your sister.” I already knew the color of Sara Maarinen’s nipples, the flavor of her as I set my mouth between her thighs, for she would be like Christina in all things save the nature of her power. Noisy magic and quiet magic, two halves of the same shell, split to be parceled lest they unite too great.
I wondered exactly what it was that the Palka ax had been meant to split.
Christina advanced on me, rage still in her eyes. Her hands trembled as she lifted them toward me. I don’t know if she meant to strike me down or seize me for another sacrifice, but instead she pulled me into a rib-jarring embrace.
Her breath was warm in my ear, and my body surged as it always did to the scent of her. “She was never meant to be here, Cary. I am afraid.”
I held my witch as she cried a while, something she had never done in my memory, and wondered what my place in all this would be.
~o0o~
Here on Bone Island we have recipes for many things we never make. Literal recipes, in some cases. Most children over the age of six know how to make kraken stew, despite the fact that no kraken has been seen here or anywhere else since time out of legend. Likewise mermaid sausage, which had always struck me as a delightfully perverse idea.
So it was with the witch’s cottage. There was only one cottage, and it survived despite a lack of maintenance or improvement, unitary and needing no replacement. But still many of us knew how to measure a foundation course for a new witch’s cottage, and what (or whom) to bury beneath the hearthstone, and how the windowglass should be cast, and the facing of the doors.
I’d long thought such knowledge must have uses beyond winter tale telling and providing fodder for the seaside games of children. Even when I was little, it intrigued me to comprehend the proper use of goat entrails. Mainland children were not so lucky, I knew, removed from the purpose of their rituals so that a charm against the plague was nothing more than a dancing game.
On Bone Island, when we said a charm against the plague, we knew damned well what the ring around the rosie was.
But we didn’t have the plague. And we only had one witch, who died when I was still quite young, and who had never sought her own replacement. It was like the failing of a line of queens, now succeeded by the minor nobility like Christina.
Except Sara Maarinen was a princess. And if she was a princess, so was Christina. And that meant that there were secrets on this island, secrets which no one had ever let me into, at the least.
Christina sat in the old wicker rocker, dribbling salt into her claret, then drinking it anyway as a patch of struggling sunlight advanced across the floor at her feet. I watched her a while, and began to feel a mighty need to go talk to Grandfather. He’d not spared a word for me since I’d taken up with Christina, even when we’d crossed paths, he on his way to the Moravian Church of a Saturday night and me on mine back to the pub.
But now I needed him. The duty needed me.
The thought came unbidden to my mind: A hive can have only one queen.
I found my greatcoat, tucked a few necessary things in the pocket, draped a shawl over Christina’s shivering shoulders, then let myself out. The river of her power was but a seep now, as she journeyed through some country of
imagination and regret.
It was time for me to seek the past as well.
~o0o~
‘Duty’ is such an unlovely word. It implies a burden, a chore, something laid upon one’s unwilling shoulders. Duty doesn’t sound pretty, but more like a soiling of something best left clean. Onerous and filthy.
I want to say that the Palka duty belies its name, but I’ve told enough untruths in my life, and I shan’t be lying any longer. This tale is my first solemn attempt at honesty—everything honest and needful, that is, not the sweet half-truths that island girls and tourists alike are pleased to hear, after the ale has run freely for a few hours and the music has started up once more.
As I walked up the main street for the fourth time this day, I passed the pub, heard the laughter inside, and was sore tempted. The sun—well, no, don’t let me lie again. The sun I hadn’t seen much of these many months, beyond the witch’s false-playing cottage window. The daylight, let me say instead, was beginning to fade, as in warmer climes the sun slips beyond the horizon and good honest folks gather their children home and prepare the evening meal.
I wanted an ale, or stronger drink. And I wanted it badly. My feet drew themselves of their own accord back to the doorway so resolutely passed a moment ago. I could smell the beer, and Archerson’s honeysuckle wine, and the straw on the floor, and even a bit of manure tramped in on someone’s careless bootheel. My hand was raised to the handle. It was warm in there, and heads would turn as I entered, faces would open in greeting, sweet bottoms would scoot over on benches to make room for me. I could see it all. I heard Janey Iverson’s sweet laughter, and my hand gripped the doorknob.
I dropped it and turned away abruptly, closing my eyes against my inner vision. No more lies also meant no more delays, no more avoiding my task. My burden.
My duty.
The road turned at the edge of the main street and climbed a little rise, where it then dwindled to a path that skulked drunkard through the windward trees. Bent and miserly, these poor remnants of someone’s foolish idea about greening up the place still held their own against the howling sea wind, though they creaked and groaned with the effort, and dropped ice water down the back of my greatcoat. At least they kept the worst of the wind off the leeward farms, Grandfather’s included.
Poor things.
The Palka would keep his place out here, though, and I would have to seek him out at his own hearth. That much I understood.
The last few trees were huddled together, as if to prevent one another from flying off the island altogether. The path narrowed so, I had to turn sideways to squeeze between them. Every time I did this, I wondered how stout Gertie managed, when she came for Grandfather’s washing and other weekly necessaries.
And then I was through, and Grandfather’s ancient house stood before me, vanishing into the mist and reappearing like an uneasy ghost.
It struck me in that moment how much he and the Bone Island Witch were alike. She too was old, alone but not lonely, unfriendly but not friendless, living in a building which seemed to be endlessly recreated without ever coming down or being built back up again.
But where her cottage had an air of ancient spells about it, screaming “magic” like a set right out of some Hollywood location scout’s fever dream, Grandfather’s screamed “farm”. The toolsheds, the rusting plows inverted like broken riflestocks over soldiers’ graves, the ancient cart overgrown with brambles, the goat pens, the straggling orchards along the lee of the chalk-white spinal ridge which erupted from the thin soil just to the east of the steading.
It was a farm which grew nothing but small boys fed on duty, tended and harvested by the old men they would become.
This was the one entrance on Bone Island I would never have to rap my knuckles against. Grandfather might have adopted a silent, passionless disdain for me, but I was still family. The only family left without a tiny little flower farm six feet above their heads.
My fingers stopped gently against the grain of the door. These planks had been rough sawn from driftwood, smoothed down by generations of wind, rain and callused hands. Beneath my touch was the quietest magic of all, earth and plow and family. That magic had left its veneer like a water stain.
Family, did it all come down to that?
I walked inside.
“Grandfather?”
The great room—for this was a real farmhouse—smelled of old ashes and stale tea. Comfortable furniture bulked unused as it had in the years since the last of the Palka women died, shadows of a merrier past with four feet and faded upholstery. There was no fire set, only a cold, burned down log. The long table which had once seated a dozen had a meal set, abandoned now.
Grandfather never walked away from a mess.
On the edge of panic, I whirled. His sweater and boots were not in their accustomed place by the door.
He had walked out, then. In an unaccountable hurry, leaving the fire unlaid and a dirty plate on the table. I checked. The eggs were old, at least a day.
Where?
But I already knew where.
Back outside into the howling fog, up through the struggling orchard, and along the oldest path this island boasted.
‘Palka’ meant priest. Our duty was only memory now, but Grandfather was surely at prayer, remembering whatever it was the ancient ax whispered to him in the long, dark winter nights that filled this island’s soul like matted cobwebs.
That’s what I told myself, anyway, hoping against hope that there was nothing darker afoot. The bag of salt back in my greatcoat pocket loomed large in my imagination. A day ago, Sara Maarinen was landing on Bone Island. A day ago, Grandfather saw or heard or felt something which made him push back from his eggs and walk away.
A day ago, I was coming to understand, my world had ended, and whatever had been made in its place was unknown to me. Truth, painful and incomplete, but far better than a lie over beer and sausages with a girl pressing up against each arm.
~o0o~
My feet were heavy within my boots as I made my way to the hawthorn-choked ravine, and the cave within. Every step took me closer to the end—my doom and my duty both. And what would come after? Somehow, I always thought I’d have more time.
I heard Grandfather before I saw him. His words were strange to my ears. At first I thought he was speaking some ancient tongue, a long-forgotten language of our forebears on the island. Then I heard chanting—could it be? It made no sense. Grandfather’s prayers were ever the most basic, plain-spoken. From his mouth to God’s ear, and no messing around with pretty poetry.
Only when I stepped through the dim light leaking from the mouth of the cave did I see him, and realize that he was laughing It was a bitter, defeated laugh, filled with the pain of centuries, handed down from Palka to Palka, stored in the freshly-bloodied ax.
“Grandfather!” I rushed to him where he was crouched on the floor, cradling the ax as if it were a stillborn infant.
The Palka continued with the terrible sound, heedless of me by his side, shaking his head as the unholy mirth poured from him. Tears leaked from the corners of his eyes, streaming salty down his wrinkled face. He clung to the ax, even as the blood oozed from its sharp blade, staining his dungarees and pooling on the floor of the cave.
“What happened?” I shook his arm, hard. Anything to get him to stop the awful, mad laughter.
He finally noticed me, turning a bleary blue eye to my face. He was far past reason, but he saw me all the same.
“It’s too late.” Grandfather rocked back and forth on the floor, the ax shifting in his grasp. I wondered if the blood was his, hoping against hope that I wasn’t seeing the end of him, that this was all a bizarre mistake.
“Too late for what?” I asked, though I knew full well. But he had to say it. He had to be the one to finish passing the duty on to me, end my youth with a sharp-edged whimper.
He had to be the one to hand me the blooded ax.
As for everyone else who might have played a part
this day—well, their restless bones already danced beneath the soil.
“You must...” He stared at me. Tears poured, sweat beaded on his forehead, though it was well near freezing in the dank cave. “You must...” He couldn’t bring himself to say it.
Instead, he held the ax out to me.
Hands trembled as someone I used to be reached out for the time-worn haft, polished by generations of bitter, callused palms. That person stood in the half-light of the cave, surrounded by the press of pale bone-rock, breath flooded with the meaty, sharp scent of blood which had run from nowhere to nowhere, stopping here along the way to pool at his feet. Dust motes spiraled in the damp wind eddying from outside, each individual speck of white gleaming fairy-bright as it danced its moment in the foggy glare from without, like the souls of men rising up from a ship’s shattered bones.
That person’s shoulder ached, where a witch had pressed him too close. That person’s back twitched, from walking before another witch so dangerous and angry. That person’s fingers closed on the wooden handle, gripping despite the blood and the walnut-wrinkled knuckles of another, older person still caught in the spell of the duty.
Spell it was, woven around an ancient blade forged and reforged just as soil, air and water become grain which becomes a cow which becomes beef which becomes a man which becomes shit which becomes soil, air and water once more. Never changing, ever different, the truth hidden in half a dozen forms but always the same.
Open any grave and you will find worms. Open any skull and you will find demons. Touch this ax, person who I used to be, and you will find—
~o0o~
Inside every girl born are all the children she will ever carry. A female infant has ovaries, tiny and poorly developed, but they are there, and filled with eggs. So it is with the world as a whole, each potential future encysted within the shapes and bounds of the present. Just as the eggs flow from a woman on a river of blood, so do the futures flow from the world on a river of blood.
Once wasp-minded people of modest stature lived beneath the hollow hills behind giant doors of stone, worshipping a copper-crowned woman and gods so old and strange that the stories retold around midsummer fires could not help but come out twisted as a witch’s soup ladle.