by Smith, Skye
Maya looked at herself in the mirror, all unruly hair and flushed cheeks and naked as the day she was born. She hoped Wendy wouldn't worry and come looking for her and walk in on this lot. Wendy had taken spy training or something, and could be quite violent when need be. She wondered if that was why William had warned her. He worried that Sir Nigel was going to turn her into a Mata Hari like Wendy.
There was a knock on the door from next desperate woman, so she got on with the business at hand, and then rejoined the group. Beet was, well, cherry red and laying on her tummy. Her bum could do with losing twenty pounds, Maya noticed. In fact, it seemed all the Brit girls she had seen so far could do some work on their butts.
They were gorgeous from the waist up, but from the waist down, well, with some of them she couldn't see any ankles. It was as if every woman was made up from two women, like one woman's top and the other's bottom and the bottom half was two dress sizes larger than the top. She sighed and approached Beet.
The cancer was obvious. Someone, probably the doctor, had drawn a ring in a dotted line in marker pen around a mole that looked angry. The other women were looking on expectantly. No one else had rushed for the toilet.
"Uh, the rest of you don't need to be naked. Just me and Beatrice." They all shrugged back at her. They seem to not have worn underwear under their costumes. They were obviously comfortable with their nudity.
"So, ah, Beatrice. I heal using my aura. I will first pray to center it and strengthen it, and then I will use my right hand to scan you with my hand hovering and not touching to find the places of dis-ease in your body. Then I will use my left hand to bathe the areas of dis-ease in my aura. Is that okay?"
"What if it makes it worse?" worried Beatrice. She was really quite sweet, with auburn hair and hazel eyes. Maya warmed to her. Beatrice went on. "We've done spells before that made things worse."
Maya gave her a reassuring pat. "You are already scheduled for surgery. Make sure they check your mole again before they cut."
"All right," Beatrice said smiling at her. "I'm good with that."
"Do any of you have a watch? I need someone to tap my shoulder every minute so that I don't lose time. Once I start with my left hand, don't let me go more than ten minutes." Everyone held up a cell phone and then there was a delay while they argued about who was going to be the time keeper. Angelica, the Goth, won. Maya had the feeling that she always won. She seemed to be the ringleader.
Afterwards, while Maya was withdrawing her aura, and Beatrice was lying in a peaceful trance, the others all spoke at once.
"It doesn't look angry any more."
"I didn't see anything, but I smelled flowers."
"I saw a white light, but it was in my head, not around her hand."
"Was I seeing things or was Beet having orgasms?"
"Lucky Beet, we should go back to the faire and pick some men out."
Fiona came out of the bathroom. "Maya, we are going to a Witches' Sabbath festival tomorrow. It's not far from here. Do you want to come?"
"Are they rock or rap?" asked Maya.
The women looked at each other and shrugged. Fiona got it first. "Not a band festival, a Sabbat, a witches' festival. It's always the day after the Strawberry Faire. Out of town and in the fen lands. The place used to be an island village famous for its seers and magical women, back before they drained the swamps and burned the women. It's between here and Ely. I can draw you a map."
"An Anglo-Frisian village?" Maya asked hopefully. They all shrugged their shoulders, except for Fiona who had found paper and pencil and was drawing a map. "A witches festival. A small faire then."
"You must be joking," replied Fiona, "Cambridge is one of the world's great centers of the craft. Half the women I know are Wicca."
"Has this anything to do with Hereward the Wake?" Maya tried again.
"Too right," said Angelica. "The witches of England fled to the fens to escape the Norman priests who were burning them. Ely became a place of magic and witchcraft protected by Hereward and his men. They were the real Robin Hoods, not those blokes in green tights that you see in the movies."
"You won't believe it when you see it," said Fiona, handing her the map. "It's hard to believe it all used to be swamp and islands and secret pathways that only the locals knew. William the Conqueror almost met his doom fighting the locals in the fens. If he hadn't bought off the Danes, he would have been a goner. Like he could defeat every army in Europe, but he couldn't defeat the bowmen hiding in the swamp forests. Especially when his men were scared shitless of witchcraft and seers."
"What are seers?" asked Maya.
"Wise women who could see things. Back before all the black hat and broomstick nonsense. Midwives and healing women, like you, but with ancient knowledge and the ability to see into the future. Get it? Seer."
"And you have all this ancient knowledge now?" fished Maya, hoping. Was it possible? Could she find another ancient book like the Tibetan Aura User Manual that she carried on her USB stick?
"Not likely," said Beet, coming out of her trance. "Don't bullshit her, you lot. She does have a power. Power you can feel. Amazing." She looked up at Maya. "We've got nothing. The priests did such a good job of killing wise women, that the knowledge died with them. It was an oral culture. Passed on from mother to daughter. Never written down. The knowledge died in the flames with them."
"Are you going to the Sabbat?" Maya asked Beet.
"I'm driving," she said proudly. She had the use of her mother's car and a full driver's license. She stuck her tongue out at Angelica.
"I will give you another treatment on the same day, then. It shouldn't take long. Just to check what happened today, and maybe make sure."
Fiona was pulling on her full skirt and wrapping her silk scarves around her breasts. The women looked much more erotic wrapped in diaphanous silk. "Come on, let's go back and dance. I want to be plied with champagne and taken advantage of. Maybe I'll find a husband with a future. This college is stacked with them."
Maya grabbed some of her Nepali silk prayer scarves and followed them out.
* * * * *
She never did find Wendy again that afternoon or that evening. Well, afternoon and evening were one and the same because Cambridge is so far north that the sun in June did not go down until 10 pm and then the twilight went on past 11. She did, however, have big fun tagging along with the coven. They danced to Vivaldi wearing their scarves and sometimes not wearing their scarves as the quantity of champagne removed their inhibitions and increased the applause.
Eventually, as the sun got low, the strawberry punts were replaced with falafel and kebab barrows. People started breaking up into couples, and she was quick to realize that she was now a liability to her coven. With her there, all slender and green-eyed with long blonde hair, the new men on the scene would target her first, and once shot down would be too embarrassed to approach another woman, who was so obviously their second choice.
"Obviously they never saw that Russell Crowe movie about that mathematician Nash," she said to Fiona and Beatrice. They didn't get it, so she said her good nights and covered her chest up completely for the lonely walk back to her room.
It was a good time to go. The men were all drunk already and were still drinking. Eventually they would become drunken assholes. Why didn't they learn how to stop once they were first tipsy and then just enjoy the good high of being slightly drunk? Men were fools. Drunkards were fools. And there were a lot of them leering at her as she hurried to her room while evading their eyes.
She had a shower, and scrubbed her feet which were filthy from dancing barefoot on the grass. They almost came clean. Clean enough. Her legs ached from five hours of dancing. She crawled into one of the two single beds, and fell asleep immediately.
And was almost immediately woken up by Wendy's arrival. She looked at the bedside alarm clock. She had actually been asleep for four hours.
"So which one did you choose after all?" she called out to the gla
morous woman who was now looking very much like a Robin Hood tart. Her hair was a dark unruly cloud around her face and shoulders, and one of her sleeves had what looked like mushed strawberries on it. There were grass stains on the bum and back of her outfit. With swollen lips, flushed cheeks and half-closed eyes, she looked as if she'd had a fine time.
"Yes," Wendy replied, dropping her soiled clothes to the floor and kicking them away from the bathroom door so she could make for the shower. She stank of smoke and spilled man-sex and just needed to be clean again. She pulled half a haystack out of her hair and dropped the grass to the floor on top of her clothes. Naked, she stretched languorously in front of the bathroom mirror.
"You didn't!" Maya sat bolt upright in her bed. "You didn't, you, you... you cougar!" she exclaimed in shock and awe and envy.
"Well, it was all your fault. You chose the brunette, who I was really keen on, but by the time you disappeared I had already promised the redhead. There was really only one solution." She turned to face Maya and raised her arms in a cheerleader dance. "God, it felt good! I have to stop hanging out with rich old men all the time. Oh, I feel so young, like a teenager again."
"I hope you were careful," Maya hissed, pissed off, and smashed her head down into her pillow so she wouldn't have to watch the joy in Wendy's movements.
"You don't think I actually let them do me, do you?" hissed Wendy. "Give me a break. I'm not in the business of giving it away. But," she sighed gustily and stretched again, " I had big fun teasing them, again and again. If you want to control a man, men, then tease them, don't give in to them."
Maya didn't know whether to be relieved or angry. Angry for the two men who had been so nice, so hopeful. She called out, trying not to sound priggish, "In Mendocino they would call you a cock-teaser."
"Don't be rude. You said no, remember? You should have heard them trying to convince me. This is traditional, they said. In the times of the Danelaw, the spring festival always included a lot of bonking in the bushes. It was the main fertility ritual, they said. The lord and lady of the manor were supposed to do it in public if the lambing had gone badly, they said."
"So that's what they told you to talk you out of your knickers." Maya was laughing now, and the more she thought about it, the more she laughed.
"Hey, it almost worked. They almost had me at 'traditional'. I've always been a traditional kind of girl." Wendy joined the laughter. Their laughter fed each other's, until they were breathless with laughter. They had to put their fists in their mouths when the pounding on the walls started, from people in the rooms on both sides of theirs.
* * * * *
* * * * *
MAYA'S AURA - The Charred Coven by Skye Smith
Chapter 17 - Witches' Sabbath
Unlike everyone else in the college, Maya was not craving orange juice and champagne in the morning. Her 10 pm rule always worked. Drink as much as you want before ten but then stop. You stayed flying in party mood until past midnight, but were almost sober by the time you got to bed, and in the morning you woke up without a hangover.
The mimosas were nice and all, but she didn't need to drink quarts of the stuff like some of the young men who looked green around the gills this morning. She grabbed a full jug, one of many, in order to take it up to the room in hopes of reviving Wendy. After all, they had a Witches' Sabbath festival to go to. She did an impromptu pirouette at the thought that today she may find the village that Britta and her ancestors were from.
Some of the men in the dining hall had just enough energy to clap in appreciation of her ballet, but quickly went back to holding their heads in their hands and drinking a hair of the dog. Maya left them with a deep bow, but none of them looked up so they missed her purposeful show of cleavage down her sunshine-yellow halter top sun dress. Serves them right for not adopting the 10 pm rule.
The room reeked of ashtray, but it wasn't from Wendy. She had showered while the wall banging was going on last night. It was her medieval-babe outfit. Between split seams, dirty hand prints, grass stains, mud spots and a copious crusting of who knows what, it was ruined. Maya opened the old fashioned sash window to let in some fresh cool air, and as an after thought threw the clothes out of it. Let someone claim them as a trophy of last night.
Wendy did not want to know that it was a beautiful morning. She was definitely not interested, she let it be known, head under the pillow. Maya wrote Wendy a note on Fiona's map, and then decided to call Beatrice for a ride. She used Wendy's smart phone so that she wouldn't have to turn on her own and be nagged by the rest of the world. Today was way too important for her to be sidetracked.
Beatrice picked her up outside the college. Only Angelica and Fiona were with her in the car. The rest had found boys and would probably be sleeping it off in some god-awful student hovel surrounded by their shame. Angelica's words, not Maya's. Angelica looked more than a bit butch, dressed as she was all in black.
Gone were the glad rags of yesterday in which they had danced away the night of romance. Today they were all in black, except for Maya, of course, in her yellow sundress. They looked at her as if she should be shame-faced for being so unrelentingly cheerful.
No one had taken the time for breakfast other than orange juice, so Maya treated everyone to some greasy eggs, with greasy bacon, and greasy chips, and cold hard toast washed down with strong bitter tea at a greasy spoon truck cafe on the outskirts of town. It was good cheerful trashy food, and they certainly brightened the morning of the truckers who had slept in their trucks. Whoops, lorries and lorry drivers. Her new friends were forcing her to speak English.
After the cafe, Maya switched with Angelica to ride shotgun so that Angelica could climb in the back with Fiona and go to sleep. "So what is it with witches that they think they must wear black?" Maya asked Beatrice.
Beatrice looked down at the difference between her long faded black skirt of coarse cotton, and Maya's bright yellow dress that ended above her knees. She turned, well, apple red and replied, "It's not that we are witches. The black is because we are feminists."
"Oh, I get it. To be a feminist you have to look anti-feminine," chuckled Maya as she looked out on boring flat land criss-crossed with drainage canals and punctuated by the towers of abandoned ancient windmills.
"Not anti-feminine. Black is feminine. Ask any widow. Anti-romantic. Yes, that's it. Romance is a copout."
"So, you didn't get any last night either?" Maya whispered.
Beatrice turned even redder. "I never get any. Boys always choose someone prettier. I can't believe you turned all those guys down. I would have taken any of them."
"Well, I bet none of them got any, either. They made the typical guy mistake of going for the cute stuck-up blonde rather than her willing and blushing friend." She started to giggle and Beatrice joined her.
There were no signs pointing the way to the festival. "If you don't know where it is, then you shouldn't be there," Beatrice pointed out as she turned down a well- used dirt track that went out into a field in the middle of nowhere. They rounded a copse of very old, majestic trees and discovered the parking lot on a recently harvested field of something grass-like. There were two hundred cars and not one of them was sleek, stylish, sporty or hot.
At the other end of the lot from where they found parking, there was a line of well-used small vans, and beyond that a line of market stalls. "Well, what did you expect?" Beatrice pointed out. "Witches are women. Women shop. Of course there's a market."
Maya did not wait for Beatrice to wake the other two. She skipped through the lines of cars, then passed the vans, to reach the market, all the while with visions of Harry Potter-style shops in her head. She was so hoping that the first stall would have a display of magic wands.
The first stall was registration and security, run by four of the biggest, roughest looking women she had ever seen. "You can't come in," she was told.
"Why not?" Maya gave her cutest smile. It was the wrong thing to do.
The big wom
en looked at each other and shrugged at the one who had refused her. She stared daggers at Maya and growled, "Because you're not dressed proper."
Maya tried to ignore them and walk on, but was pulled back, quite roughly by one of the big women. She wanted to cry at being so close, yet so far, from maybe finding her ancestor's village site. She had even worn Britta's crystal dropped down between her breasts, and the strange bog iron ring (sized by wrapping the back with string) on her left hand.
"She's with us," came a gruff voice from behind her. She could have kissed Angelica. Then she did, why not?
The big women all saw the pretty thing in yellow kiss the butch witch, and they nodded their heads knowingly and winked at lucky Angelica. The yellow bit would look great on the back seat of their motorcycles. They waved them through, enviously. "Get her to cover up a bit. She looks too bright and happy," said the woman at the table.
The next stall was a display of women’s clothing, or rather, black women’s wear. Cloaks and hats and skirts and bodices, with a good sprinkling of leather vests (black leather) and whips (black leather). It was promising to be another sticky warm day, so Maya decided to buy a large black scarf rather than the much more expensive cloaks. She wore it like a cloak, and stepped out of the stall to show the security molls.
They shrugged their shoulders. The scarf, when stretched into service as a cloak, became see through, and you could still tell that she was wearing the divine little yellow number underneath. They waved her on, trying not to grin.
Pleased with her find, Maya paid for the scarf by bargaining it in with a black feather boa which she gave to Angelica. Even Angelica was now having fun. Was that allowed for Goths?
As markets go, it wasn't all that different from any craft market. There were soap stalls smelling effervescent, and essential oil stalls smelling of patchouli, and jewelry stalls selling a lot of imports from India, while others displayed the much more expensive creations of the stall owners. There were stalls selling masks, and beads, and crystals. Not a single stall was selling magic wands, although at least half of the stalls were selling books about witchcraft.