by Smith, Skye
Maya stayed a while at the herb stall section, while the other girls went off to pay their respects to the more well-known witches, and to the more powerful covens. She smiled to herself, thinking that they were more like sororities, each of which (witch?) had a tent and a membership drive.
Most of the herbs she had seen before, either in California, or Vancouver, or India. Again there were no wands, but they did have an assortment of dried toads and salamanders, and jars of pickled eyes. That was more like it, like Harry Potter.
There were food stalls behind the herb stalls, and she wondered and worried a little about what was really in the food. She found that the only stall doing a roaring business was ... the chocolate stall. She rushed back to the closest herb stall, bought some cayenne pepper, and then returned and bought some dark chocolate.
The chocolate vendor was the only one in the crowd at the stall who was not taken aback at the sight of a slightly disguised fairy at a witch's convention, making a sandwich out of two squares of chocolate and a lot of red pepper, then moaning as she ate it. This, all the while surrounded by a very darkly-dressed throng of women wearing jewelry made in every form and size of pentagram.
"You are the dee first person in England that I see enjoy chocolate dee traditional way," said the vendor in a thick Latino accent. "I try at first to sell it like dat, but no one would buy it. English people are cold in dee mouth."
"I have a Mayan friend," replied Maya, after fully savoring her mouthful of bliss. "She taught me some recipes."
The vendor pulled a zip-lock bag out from under her display counter and opening it, offered it to Maya. "Here, try my favorite recipe."
Maya chose a piece from the bag, popped it in her mouth and then crushed down on it to melt and mix it with her tongue. "Ohh, ommm, Oh, my goddess! Oh, that is so good. The chili and the chocolate are so fresh. Oh my. May I buy some?"
"No," the vendor smiled sweetly at a fellow aficionado, "but you can take some more for later."
Maya thanked her and reached in the bag for more.
"No, not the round ones. They have also the hongos in them. This is not a good crowd for hongos. Too dark."
Maya chose another, and left the round ones with magic mushrooms in them. She agreed. Not a good crowd for psychedelics. That could easily go wrong, very wrong. The vendor was suddenly very busy selling peppery chocolate squares, so she waved her goodbyes and continued on her search for wands.
The closest she found to a wand was at the Toad Bone stall, which was selling, well, mostly things to do with toads and frogs and snakes. It was set up beside a summer scummy pond, and blackly dressed women wearing Goth makeup and lots of silver, were buying toad skeletons and then taking them down to the pond and floating them. Once the skeleton was floating in the scum, they would kneel and meditate or pray.
An old woman who was leaning on a broom and giving instructions told Maya that the women had to pray until one of the bones of the toad skeleton disconnected and floated away from the rest. That was the Toad Bone of the prayer, and must be fetched and kept safe so long as the prayer was in effect.
That was all too creepy, because Maya realized that the praying women all had twisted looks on their faces instead of the bliss of meditation. Their prayers were probably not wishing good things onto others. Maya backed away but bumped into something and almost fell over backwards over a fish aquarium. She reached for it to steady it, and then pulled her hand away. Not an aquarium, a terrarium, and not fish, but snakes. Muscular looking things with grayish or blackish skin, that raised their heads threateningly at her.
"Oy, you," yelled the old woman leaning on the broom. "Get away from the vipers until you've paid for one. The Black Adders are forty percent off, today only."
Great, poisonous snakes, Maya thought as she decided to mix with the crowd in front of the selection of toad skeletons. That was when she saw her first wand. It was a short cane with a hefty vine of some sort snaked around it. As a wand, it was more Tarot than Potter, and looked a bit like a wound up whip. The crowd around this stall gave her the creeps so she continued her stroll.
The next stall seemed to be an extension of the Toad Bone stall, but it contained an array of vials and tiny zip-lock bags each containing some noxious looking powders of varying hues. More interesting than the actual bags of powder and vials of oils, were the computer printed information card about the contents, and it's uses. Most seemed to be for aches, pains, and headaches, that is to say, women’s complaints, but not all. She wondered what was in the Flying Oil.
"It's good shit, ducky," called the vendor, a plump woman in a black French beret with silver earrings of intertwined pentangles that reached to her shoulders. "Find a quiet place where you can fly around without being seen, then oil the seat section of your broom handle. Lose your knickers and then mount the broom and gallop around. Within ten minutes you'll be flying."
After the blonde tourist girl gave her a look of disbelief, the vendor shrugged and said, "Ask around. My flying oil really works. Just keep it away from your mouth, that's all. It's meant for your other lips."
It took Maya a while to reflect on the instructions, and then the light bulb clicked on and she blushed. Deeply blushed. The dyky woman beside her flashed some cash at the vendor as she picked up two vials of Flying Oil. "Forget the broomstick, sweetie," she said to Maya, "vibrators work better. Say, if you want to try some out, I just bought lots..."
"Umm, thanks, but umm, not today." Maya excused herself and turned away to follow a woman dressed in a black tutu and black angel wings, who was trotting through the crowd on a black hobby horse, the kind with the broom stick. She seemed to be having big fun pretending that the horse was real and calling out to it through her moans and sighs.
Beyond the open market stalls selling wares, there were market tents selling services. It was a kaleidoscope of new age reasoning. There were palm readers, tea readers, tarot readers, crystal ball readers, massage therapists, aroma therapists, reiki therapists, all with interesting signs and closed flaps. Business was good.
Just as she was passing a crystal ball tent, the flap opened and a customer walked out and almost bumped into her. She peered into the tent at the woman dressed like an old fashioned widow complete with pill box hat with black veil, who was stuffing something down her bra. Pound notes probably. There was a crystal ball on a small round table. The widow looked up and called out, "Need a reading, love? Find out if he really loves you?"
"You know crystals, then?" Maya asked.
"Better than anyone else you'll find here today." The woman pulled the tent flap closed behind the blonde tourist and pointed her to a chair at the small round table. "It's five quid to answer a question, ten for a full reading." She sat in the other chair and lifted her veil revealing a pudgy middle aged face graced with black lipstick.
"This ball isn't crystal," Maya pointed out, "it's just glass. I don't believe you do know crystals."
"Point well taken. The ball is for the housewives, who seem to expect them," she pulled a very long quartz crystal up from between her breasts and let it fall outside her dress. "That better, love."
Maya pulled her heirloom crystal, Britta's crystal, up from between her own breasts and leaned forward so that the woman could see it. "What can you tell me about this one?"
"The five quid version, or the ten quid version?"
Maya hadn't brought a purse today because her sundress had two ample pockets, one per thigh. She reached into the right one and brought out some crumpled pound notes and put a ten on the table. The woman leaned forward again as if to get a better view of the crystal, but actually to softly scrape the ten pound note over towards her side of the table.
"Crystals are timeless," the widow began, "but their cages aren't. Yours has an old silver cage." She motioned for the tourist to take the crystal from around her neck and hold it forward in her hand. Then she had a closer look, but with her eyes, not her fingers. "This silver cage is perhaps two hundred years ol
d, hard to tell for sure. It's not its original cage though. See the grooves filed in the pointed end. The original cage was at the pointed end."
"That’s weird," Maya said, "That would mean it would hang with the ugly end down."
"Not weird around this shire, not on heirloom crystals. That's how gifted women used to wear them before they wus forced to the cross. You know, either kiss the cross or be burned on one. Where did you get it? From around here? What did you pay?"
"You are supposed to be telling me," Maya pointed out, "Maybe you should give me my money back."
"I'll give you money for that crystal. How much do you want?"
"It's not for sale. It's been in my family for at least two hundred and fifty years. My family hailed from around here someplace. I'm trying to find out where. They were Anglo Frisians, last name Fisher."
The widow laughed snarkily. "Ah yes. Another American searching for roots down along the Frisian Diaspora. Girl, before the wetlands were drained the cash crop was eels. They were all fishers. Have your tried the churches?"
"I don't think they were Christians. They were probably Wicca."
The widow looked at her in scorn. "No such thing as Wicca until after Aleister Crowley lived in these parts. Wicca are new age, not the witches of three hundred years ago. Back then there was two types. Christians gone bad, but still within the teachings of the church, you know, Satan and all that booga booga. Or those that worshiped some of the Nordic gods."
"Freyja," Maya offered up. "The woman who wore this crystal sometimes prayed to the moon and called it Freyja."
"Not Christian then." The widow picked up the crystal ball and swung around in her seat to placed it on a shelf between an ornate Christian cross mounted upside down in a wooden base, and a bonsai tree of some sort. She picked up the miniature living tree and placed it on the table. "This is a Yew tree, the holy tree. Normally they grow hundreds of feet tall. Not many left in England any more."
"Did the church get rid of them?" asked Maya.
"Nah, the kings. They wus prime wood for making bows and arrows. Chopped any that weren't in a churchyard. This little beaut is older than me. Go on, hang your crystal over it."
Maya's respect for this widow was now out of the basement and climbing a few stories. For one thing she had known what the grooves in the crystal were for, the original cage. And she had never once tried to touch the crystal. And she seemed to know about Frisians and Freyja, their main goddess. She arranged the crystal so it hung like an Xmas ornament from the largest branch of the miniature tree.
The widow reached forward for it, but assured her that she would not touch it. Instead she cupped both hands around it and closed her eyes and prayed. When she opened her eyes she shook her head, nothing.
"Perhaps if you took your own crystal off?" Maya suggested. The widow did so and hung hers over the only other strong branch, the one that faced Maya. While the widow went back to praying with her hands cupped around Britta's crystal, Maya opened her own hands underneath the widow's crystal and also closed her eyes and emptied her mind. All that came to her was a sense of dinginess, grayness, and darkness. She couldn't see anything past the darkness. Instead of raising the power of her aura to see if she could break through the darkness, she pulled her hands away and opened her eyes. The widow was staring at her.
"Here, what's your game, love?" the widow sneered. "Checking out the competition before you open your own booth. Well you can fuck off. Right now. Fuck off."
"No, you don't understand. I don't want to compete. I really am searching for information about the crystal, and about my family. Okay, I can also read crystals, but with mine I can't get back beyond the 1770's. That is when it came to America. I can't see back to where it came from originally."
"It came from around here, and it is likely pre-Norman. Now fuck off." The widow grabbed her own crystal back and slipped its silken chord over her head. She stared that the comely, no, pretty, no, beautiful, no, enchanting girl and didn't really want her to leave. She was too curious about the girl and her power to read crystals, to force her to leave. "Never insult it by hanging it on a cross. The crystal I mean. That is why I keep my Yew tree handy, to hang non-Christian artifacts."
"Please try again." Maya pleaded. "Anything you can tell me may help, maybe a clue, a vital clue."
"It's too bright. I can't see anything passed the brightness. The woman who wore it must have had a very magical force within her."
Maya thought for a second and cursed herself for wearing Britta's crystal too much. Obviously her own strong aura was taking over the crystal from Britta's aura. She would have to remember to treat it with more care, from a distance from now on, like, when she wasn't actually dreaming with it. "Ugh, thanks, thanks a lot." she said and grabbed her crystal from the strange stunted tree and fled the tent.
She turned back towards the market stalls. The faire was in full swing now, and more crowded, and now not everyone was in black. It was as if a tour bus had arrived. Lots of normal looking women, shoppers, housewives. She spun on her heel and headed away from the crowd.
Beyond the last of the crystal ball tents there was a tumbled down stone bridge across a dried-up creek, or maybe it was a canal. The bridge itself was wondrous. In the whole time she had been tromping across these fields she had not seen any stone. Unlike elsewhere in England, where ancient fields were bordered by walls made with the stones cleared from the fields, here there were no walls because these fields had always been stoneless.
From the slight rise of the bridge arch she could almost, if she squinted her eyes, make out the contours of a hummock in the fields, like a very low hill. It was about the size of maybe four football fields. Yes, it was definitely higher than the rest of the land, by just a bit. It was fringed by a horseshoe of old shade trees. She stepped off the bridge onto the hummock and expected to feel something, feel different somehow.
Before this marshland had been drained, this hummock would have been a dry island. If there was an ancient village built in the long gone swamps, it would have been here. She felt nothing but disappointment at feeling nothing.
She continued her walk into the clearing in the center of the horseshoe. In the center there was a stone well and beside it a small thatched cottage. The horseshoe was eerie in its quietude, especially considering the bedlam of a market just a few hundred yards away.
She tripped a few times. The ground was not flat. Hidden in the grass there were irregularities. She traced one out. It was square, a square of land that was slightly higher, so that you tripped over its edges. She stood on it and looked around. If she squinted her eyes she could almost see the outlines of other squares.
They must be hut rings, I mean squares, she thought. It stands to reason that a collapsed hut would raise the contour of the land around it. So this was a village. She smiled at the few other humans, human crows that were wandering within the horseshoe around her. They didn't return her smiles. They actually looked threatened by her presence.
I should have bought a cloak instead of this scarf, she thought. They can still see the sundress. I must look like a tourist, and if these are real witches then they will be very private and cautious folk around strangers. "Merde."
As she made her way between the hut squares trying to get a feel for the place she realized that the dead center was a well that was made of stone. Looking over the edge of it she could not see down because the well was closed off with some kind of wooden lid. The lid was recent, as was the small roof over the well. While she was looking up at the roof, she was grabbed on each upper arm from behind and lifted off her feet and whisked quickly towards the cottage and through its door.
She was dropped on the floor on her bum and finally got a look at who had grabbed her. Two human crows, but not the big women from security. She looked at the hands that were close to her face. These middle aged hands sported fresh manicures on hands unaccustomed to washing dishes and windows.
"What are you doing here, you don'
t belong," said a harsh voice from over her shoulder. The speaker was another human crow, standing straight and tall and glaring at the tourist. There was something about her that made Maya nervous, but what, she didn't know. It wasn't until the woman ordered her to speak and explain her presence, and then shook her shoulder, that Maya realized what it was.
The stench of charred toast. Maya was speechless and concentrated on just breathing. In her year and a bit of meeting psychopaths, this was the very first woman. She wriggled away from the woman's touch. Her touch was like black ice. "I'm just a tourist. Some women I met at the Strawberry Faire brought me. Leave me alone."
"Ah, an American. What is your name, girl?" Another crow grabbed her by the hand in a hard grip.
Maya almost fainted from the darkness running up her arm. She shook her head and tried to keep breathing. Tried to keep her wits. "Maya. I'm from California."
"Who did you come with? How did you get in?"
Maya tried to pull her hand out of the dark grip but it just tightened at her effort. She must not pass out. Not in the presence of these women. "Angelica brought me."
"Angelica, the Goth with the tattoos? A snake tattoo on her shoulder?"
"Yes, that's her," croaked Maya trying to hold it together. "Please go and get her. She'll take me away."
"What should we do with her?" There were snickers from the three crows. Some of the snickers were evil, some lustful, but all were sounds that promised trouble for Maya.
"This is not the time or the place to make such a decision. Not with the Sabbat going on all around," said a voice of command. "Go now and find Angelica and tell her that her friend Maya was being inappropriate and that we have driven her back to Cambridge."