Cat Magic (17 page)

As she had spoken, Constance Collier’s voice had rolled through the room, commanding, powerful, full of strength and assurance. It was the opposite of senile. This was the very voice of wisdom, and in spite of their incredible nature, Mandy found herself forced to listen to Constance’s words.

“Time is short, girl. Go your way. And don’t make a fool of yourself by getting lost.”

Ivy shrieked and jumped back from the table.

For an instant Mandy thought she was reacting to the wild things Constance was saying, but then Tom’s head appeared from under the tablecloth.

“I’m sorry! He stuck his nose between my legs!”

“Honestly, Ivy. You’re awfully edgy this morning.”

“His nose is cold.”

“You know to keep your legs crossed when he’s around.” She looked at Mandy. “Watch out for him.

He can be a tricky devil.”

Ivy moved away from the table. With a glance at her watch Constance told Mandy to get started.

“But I have no idea what to do!”

“I gave you your instructions. I want you to fall back on your own ingenuity. Amanda, darling, this is only the second test, and it’s not the hardest. Please get going.”

“Now, wait a minute. What test? You must be some sort of a lunatic if you think I’m going to go traipsing around snow-covered mountains looking for fairies! I was brought here to illustrate a children’s book.
That
I’m willing to do.” And that was that—

“I can’t tell you what I’m offering you, Amanda.” She looked at the cat, who was now sitting on the drainboard licking the lip of the hand pump at the sink. “If I did he wouldn’t like it.”

“The cat wouldn’t like it?”

She nodded. “Something very odd might happen. You’d be surprised at what he can do.”

He continued licking the drips off the pump.

“I don’t mind if you’re eccentric. In fact, I’m flattered that you trust me enough to be yourself with me.”

“Amanda, this is
not
senility or eccentricity. What’s more, it’s terribly important.” Her voice was pleading now. “You must do it. More is at stake than you can possibly know.”

“What? What’s at stake? I came here to illustrate—”

“Hush! Forget that book. It was just a pretext to get you here.” She reached across the table, grabbed Mandy’s collar with trembling fingers. “You must trust me, just for a little while. Amanda, I’d rather kill myself than lie to you. Please trust me.”

Tears appeared at the edges of Constance’s eyes. Mandy reached up and took the old woman’s hands in her own. “I can do with a hike. I’m sure I’ll be fine.”

She simply could not turn down such a heartfelt appeal. The only thing to do was just open her mind and let things happen. Whatever she found on the mountain, she found.

If there really
were
fairies—well, what fun. She got up, drew her cloak around her, and went out. The door slammed behind her. She pulled up her hood against the gusts of Snow. The flakes were small and very hard, and they rattled against the thick wool. Mandy set out, her boots crunching the powdery half-inch thickness that crusted the ground, her face stinging in the fresh wind off the mountain. The clouds were low and gray; the sun was a smear in the east. As she walked along, Mandy’s heart thrilled.

She was so gay she thought to sing. Whatever happened on Stone Mountain, it was going to be highest adventure.

Even if she was
really
intended to enlist her imagination and draw the most wonderful Fairy Queen ever created.

She went down past the maze and through the herb garden.

Beyond the garden the land sloped farther down, then rose abruptly up the side of the first of the hummocks. When she reached the top she saw a group of men far off to the south working on her car with ropes and wooden pulleys. They wore deep brown homespun, and she could just catch the edges of a work song, the rhythm of the chant but not the words. The tone of their voices fairly lilted. The joy in them, open and unrestrained, carried clearly across the air.

Down the hummock she scrambled, trying to avoid getting her cloak caught in the bushes at its base.

“Amanda!”

A male voice. “Who’s that?”

A bush trembled. Instinctively Mandy backed away. There had been something harsh about that call, something that made her cautious.

A face, youthful. Satyr-like, appeared in the shrubs. With a great shudder of snow Robin stood up. He came close to her. “Where are you going?” he asked. He stood directly in front of her, dressed in a long wool cape, wool trousers, and a heavy coat belted at the waist. “You’re going to the rowan, aren’t you?”

Mandy said nothing.

“You know how the fairies keep themselves such a deep secret? If somebody sees them they don’t like, that person never comes back.”

Still Mandy said nothing. Robin seized her and kissed her with cold lips. “I love you!”

He was still a boy, and the road between seventeen and twenty-three is a long one. It was years since she had heard “I love you” uttered with such enthusiasm. “Thank you,” she said. How pale and controlled by comparison.

“Connie didn’t tell you anything about how to act, did she? About how to survive.”

“I didn’t get the impression they were dangerous.”

“Oh, but they are. They’re very dangerous. They have the fairy whisper. Nobody knows what it is, because it kills instantly. And they have tiny arrows made of splinters. The poison on the arrows gives you a heart attack, and no doctor can ever tell that you were poisoned. Hunters that die in the woods of cardiac arrest—half of them paid with their lives for seeing fairy.”

“Constance never even hinted at danger.”

“But there is! You’re being tested. Constance thinks you’re the Maiden, but they can’t be sure until the
Leannan
looks into your heart. She has all the fairy knowledge. She’ll read you like a chalkboard and either kill you or accept you. It’s all the same to the
Leannan
.”

“You’re telling me I could be killed?”

“If you aren’t just exactly who you’re supposed to be, the fairy can’t let you go. Surely you can see that.

They don’t want civilization meddling in their affairs. Anthropologists after them, for heaven’s sake. They saw what happened to the Indians, and they know that all their own kind in Europe were exterminated.

They’re very defensive, the fairy.”

Mandy began to entertain the notion of turning back. “Can you answer me one question?”

“Probably not.”

“Why me? Why am I being put through this—initiation or whatever it is.”

“You mean you don’t even know that? Constance is really playing it close with you.”

“She must be.”

“You’re unique, Amanda. She’s been watching you all of your life. Why do you think your father was transferred to Maywell? She brought him here so you would be close to her. What Constance knows—it’s impossible to tell, but she had the help of the
Leannan
at her disposal, as well as all the traditional lore of the witches. She commands a high and rare science, and you have to be very careful around her. You are old in the craft, Connie says.”

“Which craft?”

“Oh, wow, you’re really in a hole. Wicca, darling, witchcraft.”

“I thought that was it. All the town rumors are true, then. Everything.”

“Oh, not everything. By no means. All the good rumors, let’s say, and none of the bad! We’re learning the old ways again from Connie, and from the
Leannan
and her folk. And you are going to be our next Maiden, which is a sort of protector, especially if we’re under pressure from the outside. And our group is growing so fast, it’s only a question of time before the pressure starts. The very word ‘witch’ conjures up terrible images in people’s minds. They think we’re evil.”

“The wicked witch.”

“A false impression. Witchcraft is—well, you’ll see when you get to know us better.” His voice had taken on an edge of conviction. In many ways Robin was certainly a boy, but his love for what he believed was a mature emotion.

“Amanda!” It was Constance, calling from the edge of the herb garden.

Robin’s eyes narrowed. “She musn’t see me. Run, run to the top of the hummock! Wave to her, tell her you’re on your way.”

As Mandy found footing in the snow she heard his voice behind her, a barely audible whisper: “Blessed be, my love, blessed, blessed be!”

Blessed be? The witches’ greeting and good-bye. Mandy had read of it in Margaret Murray’s famous book,
The Witch Cult in Western Europe
. Nobody interested in fairy tales could escape without reading Murray.

She remembered her own dreams of being burned… and of being in a cage—awful dreams. She shuddered and went on.

Constance stood like a fur-wrapped stick a hundred yards behind. “Please hurry,” she cried. “Plea-ase!

The
Leannan
doesn’t wait for anybody very long!” Her voice was snatched by the wind and carried off among the rattling trees.

Far ahead of her she saw Tom jumping through the snow. She looked past him, to the dark tremendous mountain.

And she found that she was at least as curious as she was uneasy. She wanted to see the fairy. Oh,
if
there were such beings. A nonhuman intelligence sharing the earth with man. It was so enormous a thought that she couldn’t even begin to play out its implications, so she simply filed it in a comer of her mind to deal with later.

From where she was now she could see a few curls of smoke off in the direction of the village. It was interesting to imagine life there, wearing homespun and using candles within hiking distance of modem America. There was undeniable appeal in the idea of reacquiring ancient ways. The witch rituals, for example, were so very old and strange that they had been ultimately terrifying to the superstitious medieval world. Now anthropologists understood them as a remnant of human prehistory. The Old Religion, the way of the earth. Wasn’t “witch” an early English word for wise, or had that theory been discredited?

Crossing toward the tumbled, frowning face of the mountain, she heard off in the direction of the village a girl singing in a clear voice.

The lilting, sweet-haunted song did not fade until Mandy was battling her way up Stone Mountain.

The more she committed herself to it, the more brutal the climb seemed to become. The “track” was a miserable affair, twisting and turning, as often as not blocked by fallen stones or an outgrowth of brambles. But for the glowing snow there was little light, and would be no more unless the sun broke through the clouds that were coming down from the north.

As Mandy struggled along, her feet grew cold despite the thick woolen socks and the good boots. Time and again she slipped on an icy spot or was deceived by the snow into stepping into a hole. She had been climbing what seemed to be an hour when the incline finally grew less steep., She stopped to look for the rowan bush.

Everything was a jumble. She couldn’t possibly tell one plant from another. She turned around and found that she hadn’t come more than two hundred feet. She was just now getting level with the roof of the distant house, which stood on its dark hill among its trees, seeming most forlorn and distant at this empty hour.

The wind belled her cloak and made her remember the world within that curtained bed. And Robin. “I love you,” he had said. How could he love somebody he didn’t know?

She wiped the snow from her eyebrows and continued on.

Now the wind whispered, now it howled through the shaking trees. A fine hiss of snow made its way deep into her hood and reminded her painfully of her ears. She pulled the silken ribbon together. The track was now a mayhem of sharp rocks. To make any progress at all she had to crawl.

Paradoxically that very fact made her go on. The harder it became to climb it, the more she responded to the challenge of the mountain. She had not been given gloves, and her hands soon smarted from the cold and the stones. Her sketch-book, stuffed in her waist, jabbed her breastbone with first one comer and then the other.

If she had any sense, she would find some overhang, cuddle up under it, and make a few sketches of the Fairy Queen from imagination. Surely that was all Constance really intended. There could not be a Paleolithic species still surviving in these hills. And even if there were, they would be dirty, miserable, and scarce. Savages had none of the awesome beauty Constance had attributed to the
Leannan
. Savages living on a mountainside as rough as this would be little better than animals themselves.

The Paleolithic was thousands of years ago. Beyond memory. Beyond time. The whole notion was ridiculous.

And yet, Constance and Robin had both been so serious. Her whole life was dreams and visions and longing for miracles. Now she might be close to one—just might be. She struggled on. The wind roared without ceasing, like some immense tide restless in the rocks. Constance Collier had neglected to mention another little matter of some importance: the rowan must be on the very brow of the mountain, that dark, bare spine that got covered with deadly ice in the winter.

When she did come to the top, it happened so abruptly that she at first did not understand where she was. She almost staggered out onto a menacing slickness of ice as smooth as glass. She lurched and slid, then toppled amid her flapping, flopping cloak. Her sketchbook bent completely in two. She felt her pencils scattering out of her pockets.

Scuttling about, she retrieved them.

When she raised her head, she was frozen, but not by cold. This was a place of wonder. She could see to the north the long brow of the mountain, its gnarled trees huddling against it like warped children. The west wrinkled off forever. Beyond the Peconics were the Endless Mountains and he haze the northwestern fastness of Pennsylvania.

This was the border of one of the continent’s last empty corners. Below lay Maywell in its shield of snow, the steeple of the Episcopal Church marking the dead center of the town. She could see The Lanes and almost make out Uncle George’s house. The college’s black buildings squatted beyond the diagonal line of the Morris Stage Road. Directly below was the Collier estate. Huddling almost invisibly at the very foot of the mountain, the witch village blended so perfectly with the landscape that even looking at it she wasn’t completely sure it was there. After some time she counted twenty cottages, ten on each side of the central path. Foundations and walls for twelve more were in the process of being laid. The round building dominated the village. Occasionally a figure huddled from one door to another. Among the snowy hummocks tiny human dots raced about—the children of the village were out with sleds.