Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances (36 page)

The room was small, and there was nowhere to hide, and the room’s window was a narrow slit in the stones.

The old woman, who had not slept in so many decades, she who had once been a princess, said, “You took my dreams. You took my sleep. Now, that’s enough of all that.” She was a very old woman: her
fingers were gnarled, like the roots of a hawthorn bush. Her nose was long, and her eyelids drooped, but there was a look in her eyes in that moment that was the look of someone young.

She swayed, and then she staggered, and she would have fallen to the floor if the queen had not caught her first.

The queen carried the old woman to the bed, marveling at how little she weighed, and placed her on the crimson counterpane. The old woman’s chest rose and fell.

The noise on the stairs was louder now. Then a silence, followed, suddenly, by a hubbub, as if a hundred people were talking at once, all surprised and angry and confused.

The beautiful girl said, “But—” and now there was nothing girlish or beautiful about her. Her face fell, and became less shapely. She reached down to the smallest dwarf, pulled his hand-axe from his belt. She fumbled with the axe, held it up threateningly, with hands all wrinkled and worn.

The queen drew her sword (the blade-edge was notched and damaged from the thorns) but instead of striking, she took a step backwards.

“Listen! They are waking up,” she said. “They are all waking up. Tell me again about the youth you stole from them. Tell me again about your beauty and your power. Tell me again how clever you were, Your Darkness.”

When the people reached the tower room, they saw an old woman asleep on a bed, and they saw the queen, standing tall, and beside her, the dwarfs, who were shaking their heads, or scratching them.

They saw something else on the floor also: a tumble of bones, a hank of hair as fine and as white as fresh-spun cobwebs, a tracery of gray rags across it, and over all of it, an oily dust.

“Take care of her,” said the queen, pointing with the dark
wooden spindle at the old woman on the bed. “She saved your lives.”

She left, then, with the dwarfs. None of the people in that room or on the steps dared to stop them or would ever understand what had happened.

A MILE OR SO
from the castle, in a clearing in the Forest of Acaire, the queen and the dwarfs lit a fire of dry twigs, and in it they burned the thread and the fiber. The smallest dwarf chopped the spindle into fragments of black wood with his axe, and they burned them too. The wood chips gave off a noxious smoke as they burned, which made the queen cough, and the smell of old magic was heavy in the air.

Afterwards, they buried the charred wooden fragments beneath a rowan tree.

By evening they were on the outskirts of the forest, and had reached a cleared track. They could see a village across the hill, and smoke rising from the village chimneys.

“So,” said the dwarf with the beard. “If we head due west, we can be at the mountains by the end of the week, and we’ll have you back in your palace in Kanselaire within ten days.”

“Yes,” said the queen.

“And your wedding will be late, but it will happen soon after your return, and the people will celebrate, and there will be joy unbounded through the kingdom.”

“Yes,” said the queen. She said nothing, but sat on the moss beneath an oak tree and tasted the stillness, heartbeat by heartbeat.

There are choices,
she thought, when she had sat long enough.
There are always choices.

She made her choice.

The queen began to walk, and the dwarfs followed her.

“You
do
know we’re heading east, don’t you?” said one of the dwarfs.

“Oh yes,” said the queen.

“Well,
that’s
all right then,” said the dwarf.

They walked to the east, all four of them, away from the sunset and the lands they knew, and into the night.

T
he witch was as old as the mulberry tree

She lived in the house of a hundred clocks

She sold storms and sorrows and calmed the sea

And she kept her life in a box.

The tree was the oldest that I’d ever seen

Its trunk flowed like liquid. It dripped with age.

But every September its fruit stained the green

As scarlet as harlots, as red as my rage.

The clocks whispered time which they caught in their gears

They crept and they chattered, they chimed and they chewed.

She fed them on minutes. The old ones ate years.

She feared and she loved them, her wild clocky brood.

She sold me a storm when my anger was strong

And my hate filled the world with volcanoes and laughter

I watched as the lightnings and wind sang their song

And my madness was swallowed by what happened after.

She sold me three sorrows all wrapped in a cloth.

The first one I gave to my enemy’s child.

The second my woman made into a broth.

The third waits unused, for we reconciled.

She sold calm seas to the mariners’ wives

Bound the winds with silk cords so the storms could be tied there,

The women at home lived much happier lives

Till their husbands returned, and their patience be tried there.

The witch hid her life in a box made of dirt,

As big as a fist and as dark as a heart

There was nothing but time there and silence and hurt

While the witch watched the waves with her pain and her art.

(But he never came back. He never came back . . .)

The witch was as old as the mulberry tree

She lived in the house of a hundred clocks

She sold storms and sorrows and calmed the sea

And she kept her life in a box.

W
hen Saint Columba landed on the island of Iona

His friend Oran landed with him

Though some say Saint Oran waited

In the shadows of the island, waiting for the saint to land there,

I believe they came together, came from Ireland, were like brothers

Were the blond and brave Columba and the dark man they called Oran.

He was
odrán,
like the otter, was the other. There were others

And they landed on Iona and they said, We’ll build a chapel.

It’s what saints did when they landed. (
Oran:
priest of sun or fire

Or from
odhra,
meaning dark-haired.) But their chapel kept on crumbling.

And Columba took the answer from a dream or revelation,

That his building needed Oran, needed death in the foundations.

Others claim it was doctrinal, and Saints Oran and Columba

Were debating, as the Irish love debating, about Heaven,

Since the truth is long-forgotten we are left with just their actions

(By their actions shall ye know them): Saint Columba buried Oran

Still alive, with earth about him, buried deep, with earth upon him.

Three days later they returned there, stocky monks with spades and mattocks

And they dug down to Saint Oran, so Columba could embrace him

Touch his face and say his farewells. Three days dead. They brushed the mud off

When Saint Oran’s eyes blinked open. Oran grinned at Saint Columba.

He had died but now was risen, and he said the words the dead know,

In a voice like wind and water.

He said, Heaven is not waiting for the good and pure and gentle

There’s no punishment eternal, there’s no Hell for the ungodly

Nor is God as you imagine—

                               
Saint Columba shouted “Quiet!”

and to save the monks from error shoveled mud onto Saint Oran.

So they buried him forever. And they called the place Saint Oran’s.

In its churchyard kings of Scotland, kings of Norway, all were buried

On the island of Iona.

Some folk claim it was a druid priest of sunlight that was buried

In the earth of good Iona just to hold the church foundations,

But for me that’s much too simple, and it libels Saint Columba

(who cried “Earth! Throw earth on Oran, stop his mouth with mud this moment,

lest he bring us to perdition!”). They imagine it a murder

as one saint entombed another underneath that holy chapel.

While Saint Oran’s name continues,

Martyred heretic, his bones still hold the chapel stones together,

And we join them, kings and princes, in his graveyard, in his chapel,

For it’s Oran’s name they carry. He’s embraced in his damnation

by the simple words he uttered. There’s no Hell to spite the sinners.

There’s no Heaven for the blessed. God is not what you imagine.

And perhaps he kept on preaching, for he’d died and he had risen,

Until silenced, crushed or muffled by the soil of Iona.

Saint Columba, he was buried on the island of Iona

Decades later. But they disinterred his body and they took it

to Downpatrick, where it’s buried with Saint Patrick and Saint Brigid.

So the only saint is Oran on the island of Iona.

Don’t go digging in that graveyard for the kings of old, the mighty,

Or archbishops and their riches. They are guarded by Saint Oran

Who will rise up from the gravedirt like the darkness, like an otter,

For he sees the sun no longer. He will touch you,

He will taste you, he will leave his words inside you.

(God is not what you imagine. Nor is Hell and nor is Heaven.)

Then you’ll leave him and his graveyard, and forget the shadow’s terror,

as you rub your neck, remember only this: He died to save us.

And that Saint Columba killed him on the island of Iona.

There were ten tongues within one head

And one went out to fetch some bread,

To feed the living and the dead.

OLD RIDDLE

O
UTSIDE THE PUB IT
was raining cats and dogs.

Shadow was still not entirely convinced that he was in a pub. True, there was a tiny bar at the back of the room, with bottles behind it and a couple of the huge taps you pulled, and there were several high tables and people were drinking at the tables, but it all felt like a room in somebody’s house. The dogs helped reinforce that impression. It seemed to Shadow that everybody in the pub had a dog except for him.

“What kind of dogs are they?” Shadow asked, curious. The dogs reminded him of greyhounds, but they were smaller and seemed saner, more placid and less high-strung than the greyhounds he had encountered over the years.

“Lurchers,” said the pub’s landlord, coming out from behind the bar. He was carrying a pint of beer that he had poured for himself. “Best dogs. Poacher’s dogs. Fast, smart, lethal.” He bent down, scratched a chestnut-and-white brindled dog behind the ears. The dog stretched and luxuriated in the ear-scratching. It did not look particularly lethal, and Shadow said so.

The landlord, his hair a mop of gray and orange, scratched at his beard reflectively. “That’s where you’d be wrong,” he said. “I walked with his brother last week, down Cumpsy Lane. There’s a fox, a big red reynard, pokes his head out of a hedge, no more than twenty meters down the road, then, plain as day, saunters out onto the track. Well, Needles sees it, and he’s off after it like the clappers. Next thing you know, Needles has his teeth in reynard’s neck, and one bite, one hard shake, and it’s all over.”