The Third Magic

by Molly Cochran

  No, she could not bear that. One day they would all return, she told herself. They would come back to the Tor, chastened by their adventures in the wild places, and they would welcome her into their open arms.

  And she would teach them what she had learned. For in her years of solitude, the woman had learned to amuse herself by moving things with her mind: food for her friends the wolves; wood for fire.

  She had begun by watching a wren bring blades of dried grass to its nest in a mulberry bush growing out of the side of the Tor. It seemed to be so much effort for the little bird that the woman willed a feathery shoot up off the ground, where a gust of wind picked it up and brought it closer to the nest. Then she willed it again, holding her breath, keeping the bit of grass suspended in the air, moving slowly toward the nest, down and in.

  The wren had cast a glance back at her, and she had laughed. But she never thought that what she was doing would be called magic.

  The extraordinary things she did were not even difficult. In time, as her powers of concentration grew, she was able to move heavier items—small rocks, fallen branches, rotted wood. Soon she had built a wall around the shelter she had made, a wall made entirely of things that had come to her when she asked.

  And too, during her days and years of solitude, she perfected how to Walk Through the Rock, which was much the same thing. Both feats involved seeing objects as they really were—as illusions, reflections, visions. To Walk Through the Rock, she found, she had to disbelieve its seeming solidity.

  Her greatest triumph, her initiation, was the yellow boulder. She had seen it in a field, all of a piece, like some great doorway into the earth. She had looked at it for months, touching it, feeling its life, its slow beating heart. All objects had such hearts, she had learned. Living creatures, of course, from the big thumping organ in her own chest to the flutter of hummingbirds, had very distinctive heartbeats. But insects had them too, fast, jumpy rhythms, and so did slugs and tadpoles. The rhythm of trees and plants was quite different, much softer. Not all trees felt the same: Oaks felt square and sticky, willows soft, and rowans exuded little sparks of excitement, and she could feel them all.

  The trees breathed, too. When she sat very still, she could see the faint wisps of life exude from their bark and wind around their trunks like smoke.

  And then there were the rocks, with their slow life, their rhythm so deep that she had to slow her own body down just to perceive it. It was an ageless rhythm, eternal, lacking all desire.

  When the woman could feel the beating heart of the great yellow stone, she knew that she was welcome inside it and she entered it, weightless, soft as a lover, feeling what it was like to be ancient and unmoving, to need neither water nor air, to be complete.

  She walked outside of the stone and knelt down in reverence.

  And then the stone moved.

  At first it only lifted slightly off its earthen bed, revealing hosts of small blind creatures scuttling around in panic. Then, as the woman began to grasp the extent of her power, it moved upward. Grass and dirt fell off it in great clods.

  She pointed her finger toward her dwelling at the top of the Tor, and the great stone flew there like a feather on a gust of wind. The sun shone upon its smooth yellow surface as it sailed toward the flat top of the hill and settled there. It gleamed like gold. The woman ran up the hill, panting and cackling with laughter.

  On the rock she carved a sunburst, sign of a new day. And next to it, the soot-blackened outline of her hand.

  She lived there in her bower for several more years. The woman was quite old by then, and had all but forgotten the tribe that had walked away from her those many years before, when one day she heard voices.

  Voices. The sound made by others of her kind. Her heart began to pound. A vision came into her mind, not of the beating or her abandonment by the tribe, but of their laughter, their excitement as they prepared for the long journey into the world, the shy smiles of lovers and the songs of the women as they prepared food.

  She missed them, missed them so much that her tongue ran over her lips in anticipation. Then, slowly, she emerged from her fortress of rock and wood and smelled the clean air upon which lay the scent of humans. She stopped short, her nose twitching. They were meat eaters. Closing her eyes, she could think of only one thing: Mother.

  The tribe had come back for her! What else could it be? The old woman broke into a crooked lope, waving toward the approaching humans with both hands high in the air. Her face grew tired from the unfamiliar grin creasing it. There was a lightness in her heart that was almost unbearable.

  The faces of the newcomers were not familiar to her. But naturally, she thought, how could they be? It had been so long.

  How long? she thought in a sudden panic. How old was she? She had no idea. Her steps faltered. She touched the matted snarl of her hair hanging over her shoulders, and felt suddenly shy.

  But what did it matter, she thought. These were the grandchildren of the ones who left her. Grandchildren and great grandchildren! And yet she craned her neck to see if she could catch a glimpse of a woman whose features she strained to remember.

  One of the boys, very handsome, picked something up off the ground and then came running at her so fast that she was startled at first. He was smiling broadly. There was a radiance about him that she could actually see, a bright vibrance. It frightened her.

  Too late she realized that the aura she saw was one of malice. The boy pulled his arm back and let fly the stone he had picked up. It hit her on the arm, so hard that the sudden pain brought tears to her eyes.

  Behind him was another, coming over the crest of the hill. The first boy shouted, and the other came running also, hurling a stick. The old woman deflected it with her forearm, but caught another stone on her breast. She turned away, and a stone struck her on her back, knocking her to the ground. The boys laughed and shouted loudly at her in a language she did not understand.

  Behind the boys were other voices, older voices chiding them, but they paid no heed. A third boy crested the hill, and a fourth, and they all thought it great fun to throw things at the funny old woman who now faced the ground on her hands and knees. As she tried to rise, a stone hit her elbow. It was already swollen with arthritis, and the pain felt as if her arm were exploding. As she cried out, another hit her on the head, and she fell to the ground, dazed.

  For a moment she thought that she had gone back to the awful moment when the elders of the tribe had bludgeoned her with rocks in an attempt to kill her.

  But these were not her tribe. They were cruel children, like the ones who looked down from the Tor, smiling, as the elders smashed the stones into her head.

  Oh, she should never have come out! She had been so seduced by the sound of humans that she had forgotten how cruel humans really were.

  The rocks that struck her were bigger now. The boys drew closer, sniggering. One spat on her. She looked up. The first boy was showing her an exaggeratedly innocent face while he took his penis out of the cloth that was wrapped around him and wiggled it at her.

  The others fell into paroxysms of laughter at this rudeness. One of them looked over his shoulder to see the approaching men of his tribe, their faces stern and angry. He said something to the boy who had exposed himself, but this one was not to be deterred. Calmly, with half-closed eyes, he began to urinate on the old woman.

  She scrambled out of the way, outraged. And then, before the boy could even stop urinating, she cast her eyes toward a flat, sharp stone. It flew at incredible speed, slicing off the boy's arm.

  The faces of the other boys grew ashen as they watched. When the boy began to scream, they ran.

  The first to run had his head smashed in by a rock. The second's back was broken.

  It took the adults a few moments to grasp exactly what was going on, and even then they could not believe it. One, the leader, carried a sling, and some others had spears, but their weapons did them no good. One by one they were struck with uncan
ny accuracy by flying objects from the makeshift fortress. Stones, branches, logs, rivers of pebbles... They all seemed to pour toward the newcomers as if thrown by invisible hands.

  Invisible, they said in their language. Demons.

  The woman laughed. She stood up amid the flying debris and placed her bruised hands on her hips, and opened her toothless mouth wide in laughter while the mass of logs and stones parted around her like water.

  "Witch," one shouted, pointing his finger.

  "Goddess," said another.

  It did not matter what they called her. They all died.

  All but one.

  The man carrying the sling was so horrified that he did not even seek shelter from the Cailleach's wrath. He dropped his weapon on the ground. He did not kneel before her, nor beg for his life. He simply watched.

  And as he watched, the Cailleach fell to her knees before the first child she had killed, the boy who had been bled white without his arm. She raised her arms to the sky. She screamed. She wept until she had no tears left.

  And when she had used her eyes for the last time, she plucked them out with her own hands and laid them upon the great yellow stone.

  Then, weeping tears of blood, she began to walk, widdershins, in a circle of undoing, while her bodiless eyes followed her from their place on the great rock.

  The watching man did not count how many times she circled the Tor. But she walked until the day turned to night, and then to day again. When the first rays of sunlight broke upon the flat summit of the mountain, they reflected a trail that circled it like a halo.

  Her eyes were withered and eaten by ants. Never again would she look upon the sunburst she had carved into the side of the yellow stone, that assurance that another day would come.

  In the distance, the Cailleach heard voices approaching. A man wearing a coat of badger skin would be among them, she knew. He would be carrying a sling, but would not use it. She would find him.

  The spell was complete.

  "Ho, there! Stay with the group!" the leader called to the boys who ran ahead.

  They were local boys, a little too high-spirited to serve as guides, perhaps, but the only ones willing to make the trek up the Tor.

  There were eleven men in all, come from the balmy climate of the Southern Sea to this cold and desolate place in atonement for a wrong committed long before by their ancestors toward one of their own.

  She was known as the Cailleach, the Watcher. A magic woman. Their grandfathers had killed a magic woman once, long ago, before the people arrived in the new land. No one had spoken of it for many years, and they had been good years, with sunlight and green fields.

  But then the storms came, and grew more evil each year, until the once-lush fields had broken off and fallen into the sea, and all the people's possessions and animals with them.

  And so the first whisperings began of the magic woman who perhaps had not died at all those years ago, but had lived through magic, and lived still on the Tor where she had been left for dead. She was the Watcher, the Cailleach, whose spell had reached out like long fingers to find her people and punish them for their wickedness.

  The people were certain they were doomed. What had they done, the shamans who knew the magic sounds but were still only men? Had they sought to kill one who possessed the true magic, one who could not be killed? If so, Her punishment on them would be terrible. And unending. The storms were only the beginning. The babies would die, the sea would drown them all.

  As soon as the misfortunes began, the family of the magic woman had been sacrificed under the shaman's knife, but that had not been enough. Now, decades later, eleven young men came on foot to right the wrong done to the one who had once blessed her people with her magic. They would bow at her grave. They would offer themselves in sacrifice. They would do anything they must to turn the Cailleach's power away.

  At the tail end of the group walked the shaman himself, a medicine man named Alder who wore a coat of badger skins brought from the Tor during the time of the exodus. The pelts were old. They stank and disintegrated in the rain that fell. Alder's armpits and belly itched from the badger hair that covered them. He had been warned about the cold of the Tor, but not of the rain, rain so different from the warm monsoons of his native land. This rain was vicious, spiky as pine needles, icy, blown by frigid wind.

  He had been a small child when the tribe had left this place. At least he thought this was the place. There had been a flat-topped mountain, with a lake on top. A lake and a canyon, where the elders had stoned the silent one, the Watcher, before they left.

  She had never spoken. All the old ones who remembered the journey away from the Tor agreed on that. And the fact that the nameless girl had possessed powers from the beginning. She had killed a boy, Alder's mother had told him. "Killed without ever opening her hand."

  "You should have kept her," the boy had answered, which had earned him a hot slap at the time.

  But he had been right, and after the disasters began, the others in the tribe knew also that killing the magic woman had been a mistake. Within one moon of the first big storm that had wiped out their homes, a mysterious fever had spread among the people and sucked the life from the old and weak. A year later, nearly half of the men who were left were killed by a roving band passing through the hunting fields. The women and children had stayed hidden for nearly a year. And then the second storm came. And the third. And then their very land had disappeared beneath the sea.

  It was during this time that the last shaman died. Alder had trained to take his place, but the training had not been complete. And so he was now called shaman, but all the tribe knew he was not truly a medicine man.

  The magic woman—and yes, her magic would be stronger than his, he was sure—would be fearsome, would kill him. She who took her strength from this cold air, these cold rocks, would see him for what he was, a soft creature of sun and sand and bright flowers, and laugh at his softness.

  He looked around at the barren landscape. How he wished he could learn magic from her! In his imagination he pictured her creating these lakes with her gigantic footsteps, forming these mountains with rocks that she carried in her apron. She was the Cailleach, rock-woman, hag, witch, sorceress, goddess, source. Womb where warriors are born, a tunnel of fire between her legs. Woman in her most fearsome aspect, all the parts that mortal women hide from men because they know that to reveal their strength would be so frightening that their seed could not be lured out of them.

  How he would have liked to learn the magic from her!

  But he knew that would not be. Already he knew that he would die, that they would all die, that the Cailleach would not be appeased. And so he stared for a moment into the cold northern sun, pale and small and hard, and filled his lungs with stinging air, and walked forward, up the rocky spiral path leading to the top of the Tor.

  The young boys with them had come from a village at the base of the mountain. They had told the travelers excitedly about the hag who lived alone at the top of the Tor.

  "In a fortress," one of them volunteered.

  "She's old and ugly," another said, making a face. "Sometimes we go up there and throw rocks at her animals."

  "You'd be too cowardly to hit her, though," a third boy taunted.

  "I could hit her if I wanted to!"

  "She lives with deer and wild rabbits," the first boy said. "And wolves."

  This last had convinced the members of Alder's expedition that they had come to the right place. Of course. Alder thought with admiration, the wild wolves would come to her.

  And so the eleven men of the tribe began the long climb to the Tor. The village boys, who had accompanied them unbidden, danced around their legs like bees, chattering and boasting, thrilled to meet strangers from so far away, ecstatic at the prospect of seeing the witch herself, and perhaps besting her in battle.

  It was one of the boys, then, who was the first to reach the flat summit of the Tor, the first to encounter the Cailleach w
ho waited for them, the first to throw a rock at the hag.

  She caught it.

  The boy was stupefied. The old woman had her back to him. And yet, at the moment he let fly the pebble that he hoped would strike her hard enough so that she would cry out and prove his triumph to the other boys, she reached up with one hand and caught it, thuk, as if it were a slow-moving fly.

  The other boys, who were just cresting the hill, saw it as well. They all stopped in their tracks.

  She smiled.

  They bowed down to her, to a man. All but Alder, who was too surprised to move, but could only watch.

  The Cailleach walked toward him. She knows, Alder thought as she approached. She knows this is not what I see in my vision. I see her killing me, killing us all, taking our heads and carrying them by our hair to the yellow stone. I see her walking in a long circle…

  And then he could see her face clearly. The woman had no eyes.

  "I am Alder," he whispered when she drew close to him. "Thank you."

  "Alder," she rasped, as if she recognized him. It was the first word she had ever spoken.

  With that sound, the Cailleach had called him to her and initiated him into the Mystery. What the shaman felt, from that moment to the present, in which, after countless lifetimes, he still found himself learning from her, was something like love.

  The globe dropped to the ground. "It was you," he said in quiet astonishment. "That's why you're blind. It was the spell. The End of the World."

  "Rather a grandiose term," the Innocent said. She assumed her guise as an old woman. "You were Alder, you know."

  He was stunned. "I? I've lived before?"

  She smiled. "Even magicians come and go," she said.

  He hesitated. "Our lives..." He looked pained. "They just go on and on, don't they?"