Authors: Anna Kendall
Crossing Over (2 page)
Bitterness ran through me like vomit.
Hartah would make me do it. He would make me cross over, lying concealed in the back of our worn and faded faire booth. That was why we had come here. And to make it happen, he would beat me first, as he had all the other times.
I was no longer six years old. I was fourteen, and as tall as Hartah. But I was skinny—how could I be otherwise, when I got so little to eat?—and narrow shouldered. Hartah could lift a cask of new ale on each shoulder and not even sweat. But now I had a penny. Could I run away on that? On a single penny and the memory of my dead mother in her lavender dress?
No. I could not. Where would I go?
And yet I dreamed of escape. Sometimes I gazed at Hartah and was frightened by the violence of my desire to do him violence. But Hartah had told me and Aunt Jo of finding the bodies of lone travelers on the roads of The Queendom, set upon by highwaymen, robbed and gutted. After such stories, I huddled in my thin blanket and went nowhere.
My stomach rumbled. I took the penny round back to the kitchen and exchanged it for breakfast, which I gobbled standing up in the stable yard.
A girl leaned against the well. There were other girls here now, climbing down from wagons or trailing behind their families into the inn. They wore their best outfits, wool skirts dyed green or red or blue, hiked up over striped petticoats, black stomachers laced tight over embroidered white smocks, ribbons in their hair. This one was no prettier, no more bright-eyed, no better dressed than the others, although she wore black lace mitts on her hands. But she watched me. The rest of the girls looked through me, as if I were a patch of air, or else their eyes narrowed and their pink lips turned down in disgust.
Dirty. Weak. Homeless
.
Dirty. Weak. Homeless
.
But this girl watched me thoughtfully, her heavy bucket of water dangling from one hand and weighing down her shoulder. Something bright and terrifying raced through me.
She knew
.
She knew
.
But of course that was nonsense. Nobody knew about me except my aunt and the bastard she had married, and sometimes I think even my aunt doubted. He can do
what
? Does he merely pretend? But Aunt Jo said so little, serving Hartah in such cringing silence, that it was impossible to tell what she thought except that she wished I had not come to her on her sister’s death. That wish was evident every moment of every day, but even so, she didn’t wish it as fervently as I.
what
? Does he merely pretend? But Aunt Jo said so little, serving Hartah in such cringing silence, that it was impossible to tell what she thought except that she wished I had not come to her on her sister’s death. That wish was evident every moment of every day, but even so, she didn’t wish it as fervently as I.
However, there had been nowhere else for me to go. My mother dead, my father vanished before I had any memory of him. Aunt Jo would never talk of either, no matter how much I begged. And now, all these years later, still nowhere else for me to go.
The girl nodded at me and walked off with her heavy bucket. Her long black braids swung from side to side. Her pretty figure grew smaller as she walked away from me, so that it almost seemed as if she were disappearing, dissolving into the soft morning light. “There you are,” Hartah’s voice said behind me. “Getting breakfast, are you? Good. You’ll need your strength this afternoon.”
I turned. He smiled. A mouth full of broken teeth, and eyes full of pleasure at what would come later. Slowly, almost as gentle as a woman, he reached out one thick finger and wiped a crumb of bread from beside my lips.
2
BY NOON THE
faire was in full whirl. Stonegreen was bigger than I had realized. The inn where we had slept was five miles back down the road, and there was a much better inn beside the village green, along with a blacksmith shop, a cobbler, and the large, moss-covered boulder that gave Stonegreen its name. The boulder reached as high as my shoulder, and someone had planted love-in-a-mist all around it. A placid river, bordered by trees, meandered by half-timbered cottages thatched with straw. The straw, too, had grown green with moss and lichens. Around the cottages grew hollyhocks, delphinium, roses, ivy, cherry and apple trees. Behind were neat herb gardens, well houses, chicken yards, and smokehouses—all the sources of good things that exist when women hold sway over prosperous households. I smelled bread baking and the sweet-sour odor of mulled ale.
faire was in full whirl. Stonegreen was bigger than I had realized. The inn where we had slept was five miles back down the road, and there was a much better inn beside the village green, along with a blacksmith shop, a cobbler, and the large, moss-covered boulder that gave Stonegreen its name. The boulder reached as high as my shoulder, and someone had planted love-in-a-mist all around it. A placid river, bordered by trees, meandered by half-timbered cottages thatched with straw. The straw, too, had grown green with moss and lichens. Around the cottages grew hollyhocks, delphinium, roses, ivy, cherry and apple trees. Behind were neat herb gardens, well houses, chicken yards, and smokehouses—all the sources of good things that exist when women hold sway over prosperous households. I smelled bread baking and the sweet-sour odor of mulled ale.
The faire was held in a field at the other end of town from the green. There were booths and tents where local people sold crops, livestock, meat pies, jellies, cloth woven by wives and daughters, ale and ribbons, and carved wooden toys. In other booths, merchants from as far away as Glory, the capital of The Queendom, offered pewter plate, farm tools, buttons. A third group, neither local nor from Glory, had come in a caravan of red-and-blue-painted wagons that traveled all summer to country faires. I had seen the caravans before. There would be a fire-eater, puppet players, jugglers, fiddlers, a show of trained fleas, an illusionist, a wrestler offering to take on all comers. Children ran among the booths, and couples strolled arm in arm. Fiddlers and drummers played, boothmen bawled out their wares, animals for sale bleated or lowed or clucked. I saw no soldiers, which, of course, was a good thing.
“Here,” said Hartah, and my aunt and I began unloading the tent from his wagon.
Our booth, unlike most others, was completely closed. The stained and faded canvas displayed only a small group of stars, arranged in the constellation of the Weeping Woman. Sometimes people entered thinking we were some sort of chapel, but Hartah was good at spotting those and sending them away none the wiser. Others, recognizing the ancient pattern of stars and their hidden meaning, entered alone, one by one. They conferred with Hartah and, later, came back for their answer, also alone. Hartah could neither read nor cipher. But he was not stupid, he took care, and it had been a long time since we had been denounced as witches. These were prosperous days in The Queendom, and even I at fourteen knew that prosperity lessens suspicion of witchcraft. People were not desperate. It is the poor and desperate, so accustomed to danger, who most fear what they cannot see.
Although, of course, we were not even witches.
As I tugged on the heavy canvas, I thought again about running away. I could do it. Boys my age did it—didn’t they? They found work as farmhands or stable boys or beggars. But I knew nothing of farming, not much about horses, and I was afraid not only of highwaymen but of starvation. And in a few months winter would be here. Where did beggars go in winter?
The truth is, I was a coward.
“Look lively, Roger!” Hartah growled. “Your aunt works faster than you!”
And she did. Aunt Jo scurried around like a scrawny whirl-wind, afraid of Hartah’s fists.
When the tent was up, he shoved me inside it. A rough table was set in the corner and draped with a rug that fell to the ground. Under this, unseen but hearing all, I would crouch for several hours, as the faire-goers came with their requests. We would not get the happy men, women, and children carrying their fairings, drinking their ale, winning prizes for their seventeen-stone rams. We would get the other people found in every village, every city, in every queendom. The people that the happy ones tried not to notice, lest it ruin their pleasure at the faire. The ones who were beset, grieving, afraid. My people.
And so it would begin again.
The first time I ever crossed over, I was six years old. Now I was fourteen and it was the same, ever the same, always the same.
All morning I lay cramped beneath my table, listening. Then, at noon, when the sun beat hot on the heavy canvas, the tent flap was fastened close and Hartah pulled me out. He smiled. “You ready, boy?”
“Hartah . . .” I hated that my voice quavered, that I brought my hand feebly to guard my face, hated that I was too frightened of him to fight back. His fist smashed into my belly. All the air left me, and I gasped with pain. He hit me again, in the chest, the groin, all places covered by clothing where my bruises would not show. The sounds of the fiddles and the drums and the shrieking children hid my cries. I was not an infant now, crossing over in an infant’s mindless letting go; I had to choose this. Pain plus choice. I willed it so, and even as my body fell to the ground, it happened.
Darkness—
Cold—
Dirt choking my mouth—
Worms in my eyes—
Earth imprisoning my fleshless arms and legs—
But only for a moment. I was not, after all, actually dead. The taste of death lasted only for the brief moment of crossing, the plunge through the barrier that no one else could penetrate, not even the Dead themselves. A heavy barrier, solid and large as Earth itself, and just as impossible to bore all the way through. Except, for reasons I did not understand, for me.
I tried again to cry out and could not for the dirt clogging my mouth. I tried to flail my arms and could not for the lack of muscle and flesh over my naked bones. Then it was over. The dirt gone, my bones restored, and I had crossed over into the country of the Dead.
A few of the Dead sat on the ground, doing what the Dead do. I ignored them as I took my bearings. There, in the near distance, the gleam of water . . . It might be the river beside Stonegreen.
The country of the Dead is like our country, but weirdly stretched out and sometimes distorted. A few steps in Stonegreen might be half a mile here, or two miles, or five. Or it might be the same. Sometimes our rivers and forests and hills exist here, but sometimes not. The country of the Dead is vaster than ours and I think it changes over time, just as ours does, but not in the same way. It is our shadow made solid. Like a shadow, it shrinks and grows, but from some unseen influence that is not the sun. There is no sun here.
There
is
light, an even subdued glow, as on a cloudy day. The sky is always a low, featureless gray. The air is quiet, and I could again breathe easily, all hurt gone from my chest. Pain does not follow me when I cross over. It is merely the price of passage.
is
light, an even subdued glow, as on a cloudy day. The sky is always a low, featureless gray. The air is quiet, and I could again breathe easily, all hurt gone from my chest. Pain does not follow me when I cross over. It is merely the price of passage.
In the cool, calm light I walked toward the gleam of water. Before I reached it, I came to the big, moss-covered boulder that on the other side had marked the village green. The boulder looked exactly the same, although without Stonegreen’s surrounding cottages and shops and fields. Without the road, as well. There are no roads here, just untrammeled grass of an everlasting summer. The steps of the Dead leave no marks.
Five of them sat cross-legged beside the stone, holding hands in a circle. They like to do that. It’s always hard for me to get the attention of the Dead, but when they’re in one of their circles, it’s impossible. They sit for long stretches of time—days, years—never talking, and on each of their faces is the calm, absorbed look of men aiming an arrow, or of women bent over a difficult piece of needlework. I passed them by and continued on toward the river.
An old woman sat there, alone under a great overhanging tree, her bare toes dangling in the water. She wore a rough brown dress and a white apron, her gray hair tucked under an old-fashioned cap with long white lappets. The old are the only Dead who will—or perhaps can—talk to me, and most often it is the old women who are good talkers. I sat beside her on the bank and said, “Good morrow, mistress.”
Nothing. She didn’t yet realize I was there. What do the Dead see when they see me? A wisp, a shimmer in the air? I don’t really know. I squeezed her arm hard, just above the elbow, and shouted, “Good morrow, mistress!”
Slowly she turned her head, squinted her sunken blue eyes, and said, “Who’s there?”
“I am Roger Kilbourne. At your service.”
That tickled her. She gave a cackling laugh. “And what service d’you think you could render me, then? You’ve crossed over to bother us, have you not?”
“Yes, mistress.”
“What the devil do you want now? Go back, lad, it is not your time. Not yet.”
“I know,” I said humbly. “But I would ask you some questions, my lady.”
She cackled again. “‘Lady’! I was never no lady. Mrs. Ann Humphries, lad.”
This was a piece of luck. Not an hour ago—if hours were the same here, which I doubted—I had lain under the table while another woman of that name had sobbed in Hartah’s tent.
“
My mother . . . taken from us just this last winter . . . her lungs . . . I know it’s wicked to be doing this but I miss her so much . . . the only one who ever really cared what becomes of me or my children . . . my no-good husband . . . drink and debt and . . . my mother my mother my mother—
”
My mother . . . taken from us just this last winter . . . her lungs . . . I know it’s wicked to be doing this but I miss her so much . . . the only one who ever really cared what becomes of me or my children . . . my no-good husband . . . drink and debt and . . . my mother my mother my mother—
”
My
mother, in a lavender dress. But I would never find my own mother here. The Dead didn’t wander far from where they crossed over. And neither Hartah nor Aunt Jo would tell me where my mother died, nor how. Of my father, my aunt would not speak at all. I have given up asking.
mother, in a lavender dress. But I would never find my own mother here. The Dead didn’t wander far from where they crossed over. And neither Hartah nor Aunt Jo would tell me where my mother died, nor how. Of my father, my aunt would not speak at all. I have given up asking.
I said, “Mrs. Humphries, today I met your daughter and namesake, Ann.”
“Oh?” she said, swishing her shriveled feet to make the water roil. “Look at the white stones under the water. See how they seem to shift shape.”
This is what the living do not understand about the Dead, and what I must never tell them. The Dead, unless they are very freshly crossed over, do not care about those they have left behind.
They remember the living, yes. Memory crosses over intact. The Dead know whom they have left, know who they themselves are. They perfectly recall life; it just no longer interests them. It’s as if life was a story they heard once about the acquaintance of an acquaintance, a tale that unaccountably stayed in memory but without any personal connection. Without passion.
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