There seemed to be too little of me to fill myself, a jar of sea-water poured into a copper tub. My bones echoed. The bird, called a towhee, sat on my shoulder and her beak against my neck made noises like bells do—wood to metal shell, hollow. I sat down, body echoing with old sorrows that now had room to move.
“You, I think, have seen quite a lot,” said the woman with birds in her skirts eventually. She pulled a gold flask, small as one of her sparrows, from a pocket. “What is your name? I have been waiting so long for someone to talk to,” she continued, and took a sip from the flask, then passed it to me. I drank. It was something bright green and strong, like all the herbs from all the mountains I could see rising green and brown in the distance had been distilled together. It burned my chest. I laughed then, and smoothed my hands over my coiled hair. The sensations of hair on palm, of liquor in chest, were as strong as sustenance to my just-unfolded body. I started to feel less hollow.
“I have not spoken,” I said, and it came out in roughened slivers, “in four hundred years. I have hummed, but not spoken. My name is Ffion.”
“Yes.” She paused. “I have been called Iris,” she said. She grabbed a robin in her fist, broke his neck clean, and opened his abdomen with a sharp nail. “Here, you can see, It Fell. How I knew you were coming, all along. Like a thread thrown across half the planet, stitching.” Inside the liver and the gizzard, the pink pulsing lungs and the elegant coils of gut, I saw what I had seen in oil spills on the surface of the sea, the cities loosening like clouds do in the sky. Land breaking from itself in big quakes.
Small as a pinhead in the center of it all, amidst cities and innards, I saw my own hut of stone and slate. I saw a brown and silken rabbit, and in her silk, in her dark ears and the loft of her fur, I saw myself floating in a green bottle on a green sea, and I saw that town of so long ago, Dinbych-y-pysgod, overgrown with willow shoots and wildflowers. No one left; only barn swallows and a group of wild boars. Then I saw, amidst the willow shoots and tumbled walls, amidst the entrails of that robin’s belly and the fur of my rabbit, a woman climb up, balance, pace the edge of the stones. She was black as coal from head to toe, crying out to the sky. I heard that soot-dark lady cry like she was a voice inside my own head. She cried out for the dark of the ground, for the dense pack of carbon and sun and long-dead ferns, compressed in their natural deaths.
“I can never go back!” she screamed. I saw she was transparent, the dark spirit of the coal. “You dig it up, you can never put it back away.” She carried a bag on her back. It was lumpy and full of rough chunks of coal. She dug holes for them, one by one, patted earth on top. “I will never go back,” she whispered, and dug another hole, crying.
Iris took the bird away then, closed up his stomach, slipped his damp body into the pocket of her ragged dress. She plucked the heart out first and ate it, like a raspberry. My cheeks, I found, were wet.
“Come with me,” she said. “It’s time for us to begin. There must always be three of us, you know.”
The brown, black, red, dun, yellow and white birds rushed back beneath her dress. The elephant seal carcass was picked clean of insects. The glass bottle that had been my home lay in pieces in the sand. I put one in my pocket. I did not know why she had waited for me to begin, nor what it was that needed beginning, nor this business of three. It seemed to me that beginnings were over for our kind, that all there was left to do was end.
“No,” Iris said to me, without turning back. A chickadee sat on her shoulder, chipping. “We can’t help it, but begin, and begin, and begin.”
I walked behind her for miles, through the sandy beach, up a streambed in the yellow branches of willows. Our words came out like rare stones picked up on the shore, at random, savored. She never told me where we were going, only grinned and handed me hazelnuts from a pocket, like they were an answer. The stream passed a meadow, and we walked on deer trails in tall grass, brushing ticks from our legs. I saw rusted cars beside their wheels, a collection of wood and blue tarp and metal pipes, smoking in the trees.
“Walk like you are not here,” she said to me when we passed. “Witches are treated the same as they ever were. Worse.”
The ladder made of spider silk was thick but so translucent that I would have missed it entirely, if not for the sun’s angle through the fir trees and the five house finches who burst out from beneath Iris’s skirts and landed smugly on the rungs. She hiked up her dress, then, and began to climb. I followed, thinking of rabbit-hair ropes, wondering where this all would lead.
We climbed the ladder high into the canopy of a fir forest, past ravens’ nests and slumbering raccoons, up into the peaks where the wind moved every spire in delicate circles and the hawks landed to look out over the land.
At the very top, the ladder’s edges fanned out, part of a woven mat of threads, like the silk canopy stretched over a tent at the fair. A silvery rat with white paws bounded along fine tracks of web to sniff us, followed by two more. They wore golden rings on their tails, and the insides of their ears were dabbed blue. Here and there across the canopy of spider silk—woven with a warp and weft like a woman does, not a spiral, like a spider does—burrows went into the canopies of branches, making snug chambers. Double-banded pathways pinwheeled off in every direction over the treetops; an intersection of highways. Scraps of pretty things hung from twigs and needles: barn owl feathers, bright fabrics, wheels worn of all but the metal, antlers, horns, plastic beads, weathered bottles.
I smiled at these, and then she appeared, a girl with wheels for feet, dewy and supple as the webs around us. Her back was hunched all the way over, so her hands trailed near the ground. She moved easily across the webs, wheels hooking and rolling, hands grasping and propelling her forward. I saw terror in her eyes, an animal fear. A silvery rat nestled in her shoulder blades, dozing.
“You are the child of a witch,” said Iris, hoisting herself free of the ladder and onto the web itself. She swayed with the topography of feathers beneath her skirts. The girl looked panicked, and also relieved, even as she rolled backward at the word.
“She was burned.” Her voice had brambles in it, and buds.
“I am a witch,” I said, wanting to soothe her, seeing now this tattered trine we made.
“Some things may only be begun by our kind,” said Iris, and the birds murmured at her ankles.
“I’m no witch,” whispered the girl, “only a runaway Fool. A deformed one too.”
Iris smiled and gestured around her at the webs, now aglow with morning. “If this is not magic, well.”
“It is only what all spiders can do.”
“Exactly,” I said, because I found her beautiful, and sad, and so alone. “Magic is only that which all other creatures know, or have inside their leaves, and we’ve forgotten. Or don’t care to remember.”
The girl stared at me, as did the rat on her back.
“What is it you want begun?” She cupped and un-cupped her hands.
“I want to let it in again, at last, the magic. What form it takes is not up to us, but opening the door is,” said Iris. “The Fools, you are the ones who carry it. The only ones left. Your mother’s kind were all burnt.” A handful of towhees wriggled free of her skirt and flew up to her shoulders.
All the woodrats climbed to rest on the girl’s back, then. I saw a smile, sad and sweet, touch her mouth as she watched the towhees, and peered at that big and ragged skirt. “You can call me Wheel,” she said.
“It has been so long,” whispered Iris. “I can’t even tell you how long. A body can only bear so much of this sorrow.” I saw tears speckle and then coat her face, like stars which have waited patiently to come out.
I tell you this as an old woman. I have aged, out of the glass, like any mortal girl, gone from twenty-four to seventy with the turning of planets and stars. There is much more to this story, much in between, but I tell you this part because it is about endings, and then beginnings, and the tight ropes we walk between. I tell you this part
because she was right; we will always be like thistle-burrs stuck to the ankles of does, finding every last patch in which to re-seed, to remake our world, until there are none of us left at all.
I tell you this because it is true; we did, in the end, prop open a small and knotty door.
What went out, and came back through, well, that is not for me to say.
What I must say may sound less important than doorways propped open, but may indeed by the most important thing of all. I do have a sense for such matters, being a witch, and having floated in a glass bottle for an age on the dying sea.
It is a secret, well kept, that Wheel herself, like all women, was a door. She was with child when we first came to her in her webbed treetop home. She gave birth to a baby girl some five months later, in the heart of a buckeye, and named the child Anja. People thought her immaculately born, of the buckeye. Wheel let them say so. She knew what suspicion had done to her own mother. It took her longer than the rest to trust that the world had changed.
Anja, Anja. There are already many tales about little Anja. Long after I am dead, Anja’s story will be alive, and perhaps truer yet. I have loved her well, and yet I fear I hardly know her at all.
It has been many years since I saw Anja or her Martin, many years since they went east. Sometimes memory can be like a glass bottle, keeping someone always the same inside.
In my memory Anja is always a careless fifteen. The sun is rising and she is dancing with the boughs of a firtop in the morning wind, one palmed branch in each hand. She turns, feeling me approach through the webs, and the sun illuminates her face and the spiked halo of her hair. I see she has tears on her cheeks. I am startled. Anja never cries.
“Aunt,” she says to me. She has always called me thus. “Why do little ones have to die?” She crouches down and shows me a tiny tree vole nest tucked into the lower branches of the fir, near where the webs of her mother Wheel are woven fast. In that cup of moss and bark and fur are five tiny vole babies, all dead. They have perfect, minute paws. Their eyes are squeezed shut.
“An owl must have taken their mother,” I tell her, surprised she is made so sad by this. Many creatures must die, so that others may live. I wonder now if she is dancing to push away her sadness. Anja is not often sad; she has no reason to be. Her life is full, and safe, and gentle. When the feeling comes on her, she does not quite know what to do.
Later, I see her carry the nest down the web-ropes to the earth, where she digs a hole with her fingers and buries them all together, like a bulb. She is weeping again, crooning over their small paws. She does not know I see her, but I see many things I never say. She does not mention it again, and later, over dinner, she laughs often, showing her teeth to her own sadness.
I am an old woman and a witch still, and this is the memory in me that will not rest. Anja and the morning sun and the little nest. I cannot tell you why, because I do not know. Only sometimes I dream of her in the snow, in the mountains somewhere, and in place of her belly is a nest of baby voles shining like stars waiting to be born.
Bells: Yet I do ring, I chime, brass and wood. They toll, my bells, tallow-bright as summer, crying out our hearts. They sing and clatter, tarnish and swell.
Perches: It was marsh-dawn and no sorrow. I sat by the saltgrass, sewing hawk-thongs. There were scars like rings on my every finger, delicate, falcon-made.
Boots: But I am not only my soles. I walk with my brothers, tangled in our tinkering, quilted in our wares. We are welded like a wheel, stitched like a shoe, together in the dust of roads: each man, he seeks his own particular grail. Bell, boot, a bird that perches and that hunts.
No storytellers worth their salt will tell a tale only of themselves. We three once walked the length and breadth of this land, leaving stories everywhere we went like seeds. It was our good work, our pilgrim’s penance. Here is the story of a telling, and of a tale.
No one knew where we had come from, how far or how long we had been walking, when we arrived at the edge of the ocean called the Pacific and unloaded our blue and gold cart in the center of a meadow-bluff of purple needlegrass and iris, just at the edge of a village. The one of us called Perches stuck his tongue out to taste the air, while the one called Boots sifted a handful of dirt and the one called Bells closed his eyes, plugged his nose, and listened. We reached our conclusion in unison—“it is good”—and got to building a fire. Boots hung a cast iron pot over the flames. In it cooked a quail and wild onion bulbs. Perches set loose the four tawny Jersey cows who pulled the cart, and they began to graze.
The children of that village by the meadow-bluff of iris bulb and seed were the first to investigate. They came in pants of deerskin and nettle, here and there a special patch cut in the shape of a star, clamshell, wheel, from an old velvet or corduroy. They hung at the edges of the field, daring each other to creep one step closer, and one more, until a boy named Henrymoss had touched the blue and gold stripes on our cart, bringing back news to the others that it was real, sturdy and wooden, that it smelled like oiled leather and rust, with the faint sweetness of blackberries, that inside he had seen piles of bells, neat shelves full of boots, a bucket full of sticks, branches, wires, each with a leather tag and letters etched on it. That around the corner four cows were grazing, and their eyes were dark brown.
“We are connoisseurs,” one of our voices called out to the children where they huddled behind the cart, whispering. “We are pilgrims.” The voice had a lilt and a roughness that made several children, the younger ones, run off to the pine trees, to the huts where their mothers sat gossiping and spinning nettle fibers while sipping shots of dark mead.
Bells hung along the edge of our cart roof, and a pair of fine calf-skin boots was affixed to the front, above the door, like a figurehead. The boots were dyed red, laced with grommets, and embroidered with small crosses like stars. Ontop of the boots perched a kestrel, smaller than the shoes, cream and charcoal and pink-orange feathered, with the most beautiful, kohl-dark eyes the children had ever seen. She, good lass, made a shrill call when she saw them.
Henrymoss, having been the one to touch the cart, felt he should maintain his reputation, particularly because the girl Jay, hair tousled and so black it seemed blue, was there with the others, watching and twisting her fingers in the tufts of her dark feathered hair. We could see he wanted to run when he heard the kestrel but instead he walked around the cart, right to the fire where we sat stirring our quail stew and fiddling with a cowbell, a eucalyptus limb carved with crows, and a rubber rain boot, respectively.
“I thought pilgrims did it for religion,” Henrymoss managed through a dry mouth, after a moment’s staring at the blue tattoos all over our hands, corresponding with our names; our beards like nests, our clothes which were simple robes like monks once wore, very rough-spun and sturdy, all mottled shades of brown and red.
Perches looked up at him solemnly, his big brown eyes sharp in that skinny, hawkish face.
“Oh yes, indeed. We have each chosen our worship, our path to perfection. You see.” He held out the carved eucalyptus stick. The crows etched into it were glossy, impossibly detailed. “This,” said Perches, “is where they are at ease, in a perfect balance with the wind, the light, the bark. They know exactly the branch. Is it not what all men and women seek?”
Boots stood then and slapped a broad hand on Henrymoss’s back, laughing. The boy jumped.
“This fellow is full of shit.” He winked. “It is my way that is holy. The Boot. How is it we tramp through the world? The Perfect Boot is the perfect union of foot, earth and path, weathering all mudslides, all asphalts, all heartbreaks. Come my boy, have a drink with us.” Boots is the biggest of the three of us, blonde and freckled, with a flushed, round face and nimble leatherworking fingers. Henrymoss noticed that he was barefoot, his soles and toes so callused and battered they looked like rocks. He sat down on a wooden folding stool next to the third of our number, Bells, who polished a coppery cow-bell in his lap, and poured Henrymoss a
glass jar full of wine. Bells looked up at the boy, grinned, showing three missing teeth like black doorways, and rang the cowbell.
“Listen,” he said. “The bells toll in and out the ends of the world. Did you know that? Have you heard that they carried Bells, all those players, and their Lyoobov?” He ladled soup into a ceramic bowl and offered it to Henrymoss.
“Hey kids!” Bells yelled, whistling two tones through his three missing teeth. “Come out from behind the cart, come sit and have a bite and a tale.”
Henrymoss took a big gulp of his wine, hoping it would make him look at ease and adult when they came. It was sour and strong in his mouth. The girl Jay was the first to pop her head around the side of the cart, hair making a spiked blue silhouette with the late sun behind it. She darted, taking leaps through the meadow. Two boys, Jeremiah and Samfir, followed her, and then slowly another girl, the small one called Mouse, though her real name was Mara, who could climb a tree faster than anyone, who always stuck her hands in holes in the ground first, just to prove she was tough, and did not deserve to be called Mouse. Still, her hair never grew longer than a thick fur, her ears were rounder than normal, and she was short; it stuck.
No one else followed. They’d crept back to the trees, to tell their brothers and their aunts—something new has happened, something strange. Throw dimes and old wires into the fire, leave out the wishbones for the old women with bobcat tails who live in the brush. Come see, come see! One girl hung about at the edge of the wood for a moment after the others had fled, staring at our dark-eyed cows with a silent, bright kind of hunger which she at last, with some difficulty, swallowed down, running after the others under the arms of the bays.
And so it was only the four children called Henrymoss, Jay, Jeremiah, Samfir and Mouse who sat around our fire, we wheeling seekers of the True Path, all walking it together though our grails are many. A pipe full of strong tobacco was produced, and a set of fine china plates wrapped up in a child-sized quilt, tied with gut string. Perches fetched silver forks and knives from the inside of the cart, kept in a box lined with velvet full of slots and bands to keep the cutlery separate.
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