by Robin Morgan
Then Brendan wept, and he be saying curses on the Bishop and be begging her to let him tell de Ledrede she had recanted, even if she dinna mean it. ‘Let me lie,’ he pleaded, ‘let me bear the sin instead of you. Pretend to go through with it, what does it matter, t’is only words. In Christ’s name, I beg you, let me carry the lie, let me save you!’ She looked up at him—a look so mellow with tenderness! But when she tried to smile, blood bubbles be frothing from her mouth. Then she spoke the second time. ‘I own my courage now,’ she chided him mildly, ‘Why would you be taking it from me?’ After that, he ceased his pleading. Poor man, he be sobbing, muttering things like ‘Not my church, not my Christ, not this, oh Jesus not this.’
“So then I told him what to do. ‘Sean Fergus,’ says I, ‘If you truly want to help her, here is what you must be doing.’ I told him to hurry out to the Kyteler estate, to Sysok’s and my cottage, to my pantry. I told him what to be looking for and where to find it and how to mix it. But he stared at me in such horror before he wheeled and rushed out, t’was clear he would never be able do it. I knew he would not be coming back. A consecrated Christian priest, after all.…
“But I dinna have time to be angry. I went back to trying to concentrate her, trying to teach her how to block the pain. Through the night, as the hours passed, I be saying over and over how she be not really there, not in prison; how the cell be not real; how she be lying in a green apple orchard in full Mayday bloom, just before the Beltane Sabbat. I told her how the blossoms be trembling on the warm spring wind, the air heady with the wine-scent of fruit to come and abuzz with the sleepy drone of nectar-drunk bees, how the creamy petals be tumbling like snowflakes down to the soft emerald grass where she lay, under a bowl of sky so clear and blue it arched on forever.… That was the third time she opened her eyes. ‘Apples,’ she says, ‘I like apples.’ Like a child. Or a madwoman. But she be speaking so calmly I felt mayhap I reached her after all.
“Then, like a sign from Brigid the Healer, there was the turnkey again. And in walks Sean Fergus. The man looked blasted. He had brought what I asked for, though, mixed as an ointment. Properly mixed, too—all the correct proportions. He puts it in my hands. Then he crosses himself.”
Rapt, Alyce leaned forward.
“Aconite,” she whispered.
“Aye. And cinquefoil. And foxglove. In beeswax and almond oil. Though fairly little of it. Still, Biddy Róisín would have been proud of her boy. I told him that, I said it. Poor Sean Fergus. He be like a man sleepwalking, a wraith. ‘What do I do now?’ he mumbles. I could give him no answer. ‘I know not what to do,’ he kept saying. ‘My Church is killing Christ again,’ he says, ‘What can I study now that I bear this knowledge’—but flat like, not like a question anymore—‘How do I live the rest of my life.’ I dinna know how to answer him. When I began to rub the ointment on her I be looking up at him—that he should step out, for her modesty’s sake. Then he be backing away out of the cell, crying all soft, still asking those questions that not be questions, still staring at us … I dinna know what became of him. I never saw him again.
“Then I sat with her, holding her, waiting for her to die. T’was not enough ointment he brought to pass her over, but sure I knew she would not last the night anyway, and at least it eased the pain. A long night, that.
“Then t’was morning. We all were dragged in chains to watch the execution. The Bishop be in his big chair, in his furs, with his cowl covering his eyes again. I think he be sweating, because the lower part of his face be wet. He be so drunk they had to help him into his seat. They carried her out, too, but when they bound her to the stake, she be so limp they had to lash her tight with ropes, to hold her upright. I thought—I hoped—mayhap she be already dead. She seemed not conscious, and I be thankful for that.
“But then, as the smoke swirled closer to her body and the rags of her skirt caught fire, she opened her eyes again. She looked straight in front of her. I canna ever forget it. That small face … it be hugely swollen now, a purple, scarred, bloated pulp between those blood-caked braids once the colour of the snow-heavy sky. I could smell her flesh beginning to sear. I tried to not breathe her, not to breathe her in. I tried to look away. But the guards wrenched my face back again and with their filthy fingers forced my eyes open and held my eyelids up. Snowflakes were starting to swirl. Her feet were blistering, charring black in front of me. I started to vomit.
“But then … then … what was left of that face … started smiling. Those swollen slits of eyes fluttered open, and she started smiling. She called out. ‘Look!’ she cried, ‘The petals! In leaf and bloom and fruit, all at once! Look!’
“Then, in a clear voice strong above the crackle and roar of the blaze, she began singing,
No other law but love She knows,
By naught but love may She be known,
And all that liveth is Her own,
From Her they come, to Her they go.
“The flames started wreathing her body. Her hair caught fire. She be changing into a living torch in front of my eyes. Still, she repeats the last line. But this time she sings
‘From Her I come, to Her I go’
—and dies. Simple. Like a child dropping off to sleep.”
Helena sat up on her stool as straight as her twisted back would permit, her head held high.
“That is what became of Petronilla de Meath.”
Only the tac tac tac of the little wren’s pecking for crumbs broke the silence. But Helena sat as if refreshed, her face radiant with the reflected serenity of that other, long-ago-lost face.
She sat that way until a sound she had never heard before shattered her reverie.
It was an unearthly sound. Small as a far-off echo at first, it was rising, growing nearer.
It was an inhuman sound.
It was coming from Alyce Kyteler.
XIX
THE MIDWINTER SUN
THE SOUND WAS ALIVE. It was struggling to be born.
Harsh, guttural, it was roiling inside the belly of Alyce Kyteler—deep in the belly of what a moment ago had been Alyce Kyteler, in the belly of what now was a creature crumpling from its stool to the floor. The creature hunched there. Then she dropped to all fours. She writhed, trying to crawl. She crouched, squatting, her fists pawing and beating the stone floor. Her head swung from side to side, the face swiveling slowly to stare at Helena. The mouth grimaced, spasming from an O to a grin to an O again, tongue lolling.
The sound was clawing up from the creature’s belly. It was rattling from her breast, her throat, her mouth.
“Ngeh,” she said. “Gegghhk. Gahgh.”
The sound was ripping its way through her, rupturing tissue, scraping vocal chords, talons forking blood tracks in its wake.
The sound clotted and chunked, and the creature grunted and gagged. The sound whined and whistled through her, and she groaned and hissed with it. It became a watery crooning, and she wept and drooled. She gibbered as it heaved and ebbed, to rise and heave again. Blood vessels bulged on the creature’s throat with the effort to spew it. She gibbered as it chattered through her teeth, drizzled from her nostrils, leaked from her eyes, slobbered from her mouth. She felt it pop and gush from her womb, her bladder, her bowels. It oozed across her tongue, her spittle tasted brassy. It hummed and droned along her limbs, twitching and shuddering her to its rhythms. The scream possessed the creature. The creature became the scream.
Then, crouching on all fours, the creature threw back her head, her jaws stretched wide—and the long curling breath-riding arc of it slimed free of her and crashed into the air. A newborn raptor in first flight, it keened a wild glad grief as it soared. Swooping, it bashed against the walls, howled at the ceiling, shrieked along the floor, shrilled its echoes at the hearth, moaning up the chimney to peal its death-knell dirge into the night. Trapped, the scream mourned at the door and wheeled, circling the room, a raven cawing, keening, beating its huge wings in claps like struck gongs of bronze. The creature was slid
ing toward darkness. Her head hit the stone floor yet still she could hear far off the scream circling, keening, clanging its wings until, dizzy with no air to ride now, the scream swooped, descending, dwindling, wheeling down one last high long wail of loss. The creature reached out her hand, but slid into darkness before touch could restrain her. Whimpering soft then, the scream drifted down trembling to light on her outstretched wrist where, breath short in feathery gasps, it folded its great wings and bowed its fierce head, and knew itself, finally, as love.
An outline shimmering in the firelight was the first thing she saw when she opened her eyes. It had a shape like a face. It was human. It was bending above her.
A familiar face, coming into focus. Helena! Helena Galrussyn. Helena Galrussyn was bending over her, glittering tears falling from her grey eyes, falling and falling. Helena was holding her hand. Helena was stroking her head, murmuring something.
Slowly, the wood-beamed ceiling above Helena’s face returned, flickering in the light from the hearth. Then the walls, dancing with shadows thrown upward. Then the cold stone floor beneath.
Slowly the room came back.
Helena half-pushed and half-dragged Alyce closer to the hearth’s warmth and slumped there on the floor beside her, holding Alyce propped against her breast, partly in her lap, as she might hold a child.
The two stayed this way, in silence, their faces turned toward the flames.
After a long time, Alyce wet her lips, swallowed, tried to speak. Her voice was hoarse from the scream, low, croaking.
“All these years,” she rasped. “All these years I betrayed her. By believing she had betrayed me. All these years.”
“You dinna betray her. You dinna betray anybody. You dinna know.”
“I should have known.”
“Petronilla dinna want you to know.”
“I should have thought it through. She sacrificed herself for me, Helena. She suffered the tortures meant for me. She died the death meant for me.”
Helena shifted her position. She propped Alyce up, half sitting, against the rungs of a stool. Then she leaned back and regarded her with a tinge of disappointment.
“We each of us be having our own suffering, m’Lady,” she said mildly. “We each be dying our own death. She dinna sacrifice herself for you.”
Absent-mindedly, Alyce realized that her lip was bleeding. She licked away the blood.
“She dinna do it for you,” Helena repeated softly.
Alyce turned to Helena, her cheeks flushed from the fire.
“Sara. Of course. How could I have.… It was all for Sara. The lies in the letter, the taking of the Moon Crown and the Lunula and my cloak and the horse—all for Sara. The refusal to name others, the defiance, the willingness to die—for Sara. For the legacy of a better kind of world she wanted to leave Sara.”
“Nae.” Helena frowned. “T’was all for Sara but the last three.”
“What?”
“Not the last three. The ones you said.”
“Which … I do not—”
“Once she knew Sara safe away with you, there be naught she could do for Sara. Not anymore. Not ever. She be making herself let Sara go, like she be making you let her go. Not naming any others—that she be doing for us. For me. For Eva. For Robert. Aye, for your son Will—and for whosoever of the others she thought be taken. She gave us our lives, aye, that she did. But she dinna die our deaths for us. We each be doing that for ourselves.”
“I do not understand.”
“I know.” A keen look. “I know you dinna understand.”
“Help me understand, Helena.”
“I believe Sean Fergus—blessed be that man, wherever he’s got to—could have saved her life. By a good lie or whatever—and I do think there be such a thing as a good lie. When truth-tellers lack all power to be heard, a good lie mayhap be the only thing to tell. I believe Sean knew he could save her life if she let him, and I believe he will always carry that knowing as his own cross. I believe Petronilla could have lived, in prison, as did I —if you call that living. And mayhap even get free years after, when I be freed. Mayhap have come with me and this night we two both be rapping at your door together.”
“Then … why … I still do not—”
“I be saying that after six floggings even the Bishop dinna dare more torture to get her to name us. I be saying she knew Sara safe away and she knew the rest of us would not be burnt. I be saying she knew she could be saved from the stake. And still she dinna recant. Still she dinna want their sacraments. Still she defied ’em.”
Alyce winced and leaned forward, trying to read Helena’s face.
“Now that … t’was not for you, m’Lady. Not for us. Not even for Sara.”
“Why then? Such a waste! For what?”
Helena frowned with surprise at Alyce.
“Why, for herself.”
Then she sat back, wrapped in the satisfaction of her certainty. It was soft, warm, vast, merciless. It filled her with triumph. Her face was luminous with it.
“For herself alone,” she repeated.
Alyce Kyteler’s hands lay motionless in her lap—open, as if by an act of faith, as if the empty, upturned palms held a gift beyond claiming.
There was another long silence.
Then Helena spoke, gently.
“In a way, t’is harder for you, I think—all this. We lived this story—through days and weeks, months, even years. But you meet the whole tale in a single night’s black hour.”
Alyce, returning from her thoughts, lifted her head.
She began speaking, and her voice grew stronger with every word. She sat up straighter. Her eyes were wet, but they flashed with a glint of their old iridescence.
“Petronilla de Meath,” she said, caressing each syllable.
She got to her knees. Then, with a hand out to ward off Helena’s aid, she struggled to her feet.
“Petronilla de Meath,” she said again. “She shall not be forgotten, this poor little—no. This magnificent woman. This—Initiate, this Wiccan. This amchara.” She bowed her head in humility. “This … Priestess.”
Alyce threw back her shoulders and stood, tall, fierce. Her gaze penetrated the walls of the house, seeing far out into the night. She was speaking to the past, to the mounds of the ancestors in distant Eire. She was speaking to the future. She was speaking to herself.
“The courage Petronilla de Meath struck on the forge of fear must not be forgotten. She may seem lost to us, as Eire may seem lost to us. But she is ever ours as Erin is—greenling isle of glens and mounds afloat in white sea-foam, there in the West where we can go no longer … not until we drift westward home with our own dying, as does the sun returning home from exile every dusk. Petronilla de Meath must live in our lore, in all our days’ memories, in all our nights’ dreams—as the land, the homes, the customs we were forced to leave still and always live in our days’ memories and nights’ dreams. The snow’s crunch at the Brigid Sabbat in the wintry blue light of Imbolc. The bright vernal Equinox. Beltane’s swollen buds and lovely riotous lust. The great Solstice of summer and the year’s Longest Day. The first-harvest fires of Lugnasad. Autumn’s crisp Equinox flaming the trees red and gold. The solemn dark frosts of Samhain and the Otherworlds. And the longest night of all, the Winter Solstice, the Black Sun, the Day Outside the Year.”
Helena recognized the intensity before her. She strained to rise in its presence, the dazzle of a High Priestess. Alyce reached out to her. Helena grasped that strong hand and was pulled to her feet in one fluid motion.
“The Forms pass, the Circle remains. Petronilla de Meath is free now, and unafraid. She shall live,” Alyce went on, pressing Helena’s hands between her own, “in our breathing in and breathing out, as does the Eight-Spoked Wheel that Turns the Year. She shall flow through our lore as do the holy springs of Erin, the rivulets, rivers, and wells. And this I swear in the Name of She Who is Nameless: that wherever this story is told, silence shall be shattered, secret p
ain made visible, and terror thaw from hearts wintered with fear. This Magick has Petronilla de Meath given us.”
In the glimmer of fading embers, the faces of both women glowed. No innocence there, only resolve. They embraced.
Then Alyce was no longer a High Priestess, merely a woman wearing a sad, crooked smile.
“We will talk again tomorrow, Helena. There will be time now—years—to talk. To heal. And to marvel at the strange clarity of Her ways.… But tonight you shall sleep in a soft warm bed with clean linen and a goosedown quilt. And every night thereafter, for all of your life. Come upstairs, rest now.”
Limping, Helena followed her old mistress out of the kitchen.
“We will look in at Dana for a moment, quietly, so as not to wake her,” Alyce said, a mother’s insight in her whisper. “Then, in the morning, what a surprise she shall have, what bliss for you both! I have told her stories about you, and Sysok, and Old John. She has always said, ‘My momma will come for me one day. I know it.’ ”
A sob broke from Helena. It bent her double, suddenly, like a blow to her breast.
“Hush, dear, hush,” Alyce said. “Perhaps … we must take this joy of reunion morsel by morsel, like food after long starvation. Else it may crack our hearts and kill us outright. Come. Tonight you will see her sleeping, perfect as a faerie child. Then, tomorrow, you shall hold her and play with her as long as you like, hour after hour. And again, through the next day. And through the luxury of the next, and the next. And you shall rest and eat and sleep, and become well and strong again. Welcome … my friend. You are home now.”
“I know I am. Blessed Be, Alyce Kyteler.”
“Blessed Be, Helena Galrussyn. Merry …” She raised her head high, her voice breaking. “Merry Meet at last. Here,” Alyce added, putting an arm around the other’s waist, “I will help you, Helena.”