Cloud and Ashes: Three Winter's Tales (36 page)

The girl was kneeling in the rushes in her smock. Her face was downcast; her hands hung empty before the welter of blood in her lap. Suppliant. As if she begged her pardon for a thing she'd broken. Her childhood shivered like an egg.

Here's mischief,
thought Barbary.
She's ower pale for ae night's waking.
A blanched thing in a heap of stones. Like that flower called Star-Naked or Ashes-Bare-Annis, that shivers in the fields of autumn, leafless and forlorn. They'd forced her flowering, she thought. By leechcraft or by worse. They'd ways. And they'd fasted her. And waked. And drugged. The girl was waning with the moon; aye, and moonbent, inward on herself, with flinching. Smudged eyes in a peaked and haggard face.

A whisper. “I am Margaret still."

For a flicker of the candle, Barbary saw another, long-remembered face, and long-denied: a weeping boy, half naked, in a Bedlam coat.
My lass. She needs a woman by her.

Gone.

His eyes. Yet not his eyes. They had known relenting; they were yet bewildered by the loss of hope. The child's sought nothing.

Barbary set the candle by the bedside; knelt, face to face with Margaret; touched eyes, mouth, heart. “So yer come to Ashes."

There was no caress in her kindness: it was impersonal as rain on earth. She set about her work, stripped off the bloody smock. No woman's body there, poor waft. Scant as a skirret. Bruised, not with beating, but restraint. Barbary wrung out her cloth: all her anger in that wrenching. “Come up.” The child endured washing and dressing. No kindness sought, nor justice: she endured.
Reared at a witch's tit.

Grey dawning. No coal nor candle in the outer room. Yon madams were abroad. Barbary bent toward Margaret, undid her hair, loose-braided down her back and frayed with wear. A knot. Another and another, fine as fernseed. “So. Now yer moonwise, y'll be lating Ashes. Out ont fell.” The face was turned from her; yet she felt a stirring in the child, a shift of breath. Barbary took up the comb. She kempt the long hair, cannily; undid each knot, redid it otherwise. “Yer mun gang wi’ all t'women, will they or nill. ‘Tis Cloudlaw.” And lower voiced, “'Twill be Hallows. Happen you may find what door you came by."

A girl in a blue gown opens, with a hand curved round her candle. Light spills through her fingers, stills her face: long-lidded, lustrous as a pearl against the cheek of night. Her gown seems made of sky. For all her ornament she wears bright shears. Her hair is twisted in a cloth, a wentletrap of linen, with a streak of leaf-red hair wound round it, like the bandings on a shell.

"Hallows with you,” says the girl and blows her candle out. “Is this the lass?"

"Aye, feathery bonnet and all,” says the witch.

"Well met,” says the girl. “And long in coming."

Margaret curtsies low.

With a beck, the blue girl raises her. “For thy sojourn, thy house."

Margaret turns at the sill to bid the witch farewell, but she has gone. And the landscape. And the door. The blue girl puts her candlestick amid a throng of others. “I am eldest this time. Siony."

She brings her to a bare room, a bower full of girls at work. So many strangers. All in blue: dusk blue, or deeper, or the liminal bluegreen of twilight. Some wear turbans like the eldest, snailed and turreted like shells; and others, garlands of their own wreathed plaits. A girl in a blue smock bends to her needle, peering at the rents and ravels of a scarf, a gauzy thing. It haloes round her hand like iris. Rainbright in rain, her needle pricks and pulls an unseen thread. Her sleeve is stuck with pins. Another girl, sootblack and silver, crooks a tarnished platter in her elbow; breathes on it and rubs. She glances at Margaret, pushes back her hair with a smutchy hand; then bends to her work. A third stands sleaving out silk tassels, catkins of light. Bareheaded, that one, brief as thistledown. Her dress as pale as if she'd waded in the moon.

Through a doorway, in a farther room, Margaret sees a great bare sort of bedstead, and two girls stringing it with yarn. A gallows harp. A loom. Siony calls to them, “Talith, come. Tiphan! Here's weft."

Two others come, with bare arms streaked with dying, vivid to the shoulder.

They three unlid the basket. “Ah,” says Siony. Not clots and tangles of raw wool, as Margaret thought there must be, but skeins, smooth as a child's hair from her nurse's hands; and faintly bright. Like cobwebs. Talith—or is it Tiphan?—kneels, and tells them over, heaping up her sister's apron.

"Corn enough,” says Talith.

"But slain apples,” says Tiphan.

"Never such a year for lambs."

"Small rain."

"Long summer."

"Late snow."

"Lambswool,” calls a girl by the fire. “Will you sup?” A sonsy lass, with clustering curls. There is a faint rose at her hem, that comes and goes. Like dawning sky. Like dreaming. Margaret comes. By her knee, the girl sets out a dish of apples, withered and rosy, and a jug of cream. Sweet froth. The silver spoon bites deeply, to the seeded heart. A year. As in a dream, it dwindles. The blue girl dabs a finger at her iron—hot!—and goes on pleaching buds of silk, of bronze and palest green.

Margaret looks about the room. Clews everywhere, on shelves, in baskets. Skeins. Shuttles and bobbins. A swift of yarn, half-wound. Rush chairs, broad and low, still green; a great long standing board, scrubbed bare, and overheaped with work. Coffers and kists. An inlaid cabinet, a puzzlebox of wood in wood, and hidden drawer in drawer. Most curiously made. She longs to delve in it. The cabinet is crowned with tall blue and white jars, tear-shaped, shining like an April morning.

And the skein of girls.

All about her are the leaf-girls in their long blue smocks, weaving, sleaving, and unpicking, patching and polishing the winter-ravelled earth: not sticks and stars but green.

The dark girl beckons. As she turns, her dress clouds, changing indigo and stormy grey; a star glances in her skirts. Before her on the table is poised a scales full of hailstones, hammered bright; a chamois, and a goldsmith's elfin tools. She holds up her moonbright plate, a mirror. Round and scarry. “Look,” she says; so Margaret does, and sees the witch. Her owl face fills it, overbrims. She blinks, and sees herself; but still the witch's cap warped round her, like the old moon's arms.

Behind her, viewless in the glass, the dark girl says, “Your ring. Will I burnish it?” She holds out her palm. Margaret fumbles for the ring. It is black and bent; but it comes up bright to the leaf-girl's chamois. She turns it round and round in her clever fingers, puzzling out the half-worn letters in their endless tale. “
Wode spring leave wode? I fall an light."
Round again.
"Wode I fall?"
And round.
"Lief wode I fall, an light wode spring."
It's poised between finger and thumb. “Which this time?"

"I cannot tell,” says Margaret. “'Tis endless, like the Skein, the year.” She considers. “Unless some stone were in it, like the Sun."

The dark girl gives the ring to her.

Beyond her, the weavers, Talith and Tiphan, wind off a skein: dip and murmur. Long since, Margaret's done for Norni. She remembers with a pang.

"A game,” says the blue girl. “One that you began long since.” She takes the thread and weaves it, in and out, between her hands; holds out a braid of stars. Time's cradle. “Take it. They'll not fall.” Still gingerly, Margaret takes the strands and plays: recrosses, undergoes. The bright stars dance, conjoin.

"As above,” says the pale girl, dipping in. “So below."

Oh, I see,
thinks Margaret.
We keep measure.
A red star, like a drop of blood, falls backward through the web. A pale moon sidles, spiralling. The stars turn tendril in the pattern. Her turn: she weaves.

"Ah.” The blue girl takes the web within her hands. It changes.

They play on. Now one, and now another of the sisters takes her turn. Weaving, Margaret forgets all else; until the night within her hands turns dusk, grey fading into farther grey. Her eyes are weary; shutting them, it seems she holds a swarm of sparks. She nods.

"Margaret?” Her hands lie empty in her lap, and heavy, filled with sleep. Rousing, she sees the room is shadowy. The fire is embers.

"Come, see thy web.” The sisters at their weaving—Talith and Tiphan, tall Siony—beckon. Margaret comes.

Their web is winding from the loom, a spill of story. It is winter in the warp. But see, a green thread runs through it, recursive. All in green, a green verge in her hand, a child arises from the weft of snow, and where she walks spring flowers.
Ashes?
Now a girl, starfallen, stands amazed.
Ah, Perseis.
Her body is of sky and all the stars: bright Ashes in her privities, the Fiddler in her heart; but inward of her memory, her sisters rise. Her going is a Milky Way. Behind her—she will turn—there stands a woodwo, all in leaves of tatters, red and pale.
O rare Cosmography.

Now she is running from him, green in green. The leaves are scattered of her gown; or else the leaves create her, she is woven of their element. Her path turns ever to the heart of things, a blackthorn woven in a white, and at their roots a spring. She kneels to look in it, as in a mirror; she is caught. He weaves for her a crown of white and black; he lays her down. When they have done, he strings his fiddle with her hair; and when he plays, she dances.

When she rises from him, he is tree.

Now wood is water, river now in river, rippling and changing. It is sea. A white wave rises from the green; a cradle on it dips and swirls, is carried from her sight. The tree's a ship, still rooted, branching into stars. The moon is in its shrouds; a star falls burning from the mast, a man with sunbright hair. A great wave whelms the ship. Yet overturned its roots are branches.

Now the sea's a field of corn. Round-bellied, Ashes reaps what she has sown; her sickle is the moon. She strings it with her hair; she plays. Her lover dances in the corn, now here, now anywhere. But now three witches stand as harvesters. Inward and inward spiralling, they ring him round. They cut him off at knee. They bind him.

Heavy heavy now, the mourning Ashes rocks the empty cradle that the sea cast up. Her lover's sleeping in a sheaf of corn.

Leaves fall drifting from the tree.

The witches drink of him. They share him out as bread.

There is a child, half-naked, in a field of poppies. Black and bare now, seedheads, rattling in the wind. The child stoops, searching. There is something she has lost: a knife among the weeds, a stone from off her ring. Buried in the black earth, openeyed, there lies a girl scarce older, gashed and naked. Her mirror. Where she has lain, it blooms: the petals her beseeching wounds, her blood her cry. It runs all through the web, that thread of crimson, to the verge—But there the tale breaks off. Warpstrings, like the endless wind.

"Time,” says Siony behind her.

Still Margaret gazes. “Is that now?"

"Or will or may be. Or it would have been, long since."

"And ever and again."

"It looks like somewhat from my cards,” said Margaret.

"Thy pack is tatters of it,” said the eldest, Siony. “They but foretell; we tell what must have been that it might be: the stories of the sky in earth."

"Go,” said Talith. “Ask thy sister for thy tale. In there. At her book."

Through a narrow door.

A whirlwind. A babble and a blaze of tongues, all silent but a wind. Leaves rise and scatter, whorling, and are ash. The room is like a lantern pierced with windows; like a cresset heaped with flames. And at the heart of them, a girl's bent writing with a thorn: a word, a vein of words, on each. A book of leaves, unbound.

Unleaving.

"They are burnt,” says Margaret.

"But the tree stands,” says the leaf-girl.

What she prophesies is scattered even as she tells. The wind has fallen; but the words fly on.

Through the high window, an owl flies in, a clew in its beak like a mouse. She drops it into Margaret's lap.

"Thy tale's for thy telling,” says the leaf-girl. “Come. It's all to do.” She rises and Margaret follows her. At their feet, the bright web lies like autumn, fleeting even as she looks. The workroom is swept bare.

"Time,” says Siony. “You have a key.” Margaret gives it her. It fits, and opens on a winding stair. Farther in. The Nine are gathered at the door now, taking up grey hoods and lanterns, turning to ascend the stair.

"Coming?"

Wan and shaken, propped in Madam's chair, false Annot heard a clatter and a jangle coming. The maids beside her glanced and nudged, and bent to their stitchery. In came Barbary with a broad silver bowl, and the dairymaids behind her. Nan in a red cap bore a spindle, and Doll in a necklace of white pebbles held a riddle and shears; half terrified and half ecstatic, crow-clad Sukey shook Barbary's great bunch of keys.

"What is it, girl?” said Madam. “We are much engaged."

"A saining,” said Barbary. “To bring Mistress Annot intil t'company o women. Now she's bled.” She brought the bowl to Margaret. It brimmed with water. One red leaf floated, slowly spun. “Fetched from Mall's spring at daybreak this were. By a hale maiden, barefoot. What d'ye see?"

Margaret bent to it. “My own self."

"So thou's to be."

Sukey's face fell. “Yer meant to spy Ashes."

Nan tossed her head. “Nay, yer meant to see what's meant."

"Kate Imberthwaite see'd a sheep's head on her. Ever more,” said Doll.

"Hush,” said Barbary. “Here's rites.” And to Margaret, “Touch t'water."

It wavered. For a moment she saw witch enfolding witch, a furl of moonlight and the dark of moon. A rose of sky. Then the ripples faded out, the water stilled. “It comes round."

"So it does. Each moon. Now lave thy face and so it will be."

So cool the water was, and scented of the earth and leaves. A wakening. As if it cleared the fume of magic from her senses Over and again, Margaret bathed her eyes.

Setting down the basin, Barbary held out a towel to her blindly dripping hands. “There now, yer lawful. Ye can late afore ye wed."

Ostentatiously alert and gracious, Madam softly clapped her hands. “'Twas prettily played, you wenches. Barbary, thou hast taken pains with them. Enough. To work."