The cauldron gurgled and gargled almost like a living throat; it boiled and bubbled. Soon Amanda began to see things rolling about in the murky waters. Shadows, faces… things that made her look more closely.
“That’s right, that’s good.” Constance swirled harder.
“The tennis shoes you wore when you were ten, some snapshots of you then. Baby treasures, too, Holly your dolly and first friend. And Old Moll with her nose askew, and calico Kitten Stew—remember them?”
“I remember.”
“Look, then. Look at life in the classroom.”
Something was wrong with this picture. Her childhood had not been a time of such terror. Or had it?
The waters turned and turned. She remembered sixth grade. There was Daisy O’Neill and Jenny Parks sitting by the window, and Bonnie Haver in the back, plump Stacey behind her.
Two swishing rows of girls came down the chapel aisle behind Mother Star of the Sea. They chanted to the Stabat Mater tune:
“Touch your lips to a weenie on Friday,
And you arc doomed.
Be a whiner or a masturbator,
And you are doomed.
Drown a baby or steal Mother’s eraser,
And you are doomed.”
“Now, wait a minute,” Amanda said. “Eating meat on Friday isn’t a sin anymore.”
Bonnie Haver: “But you did it when it was, so you are doomed.”
“I’m not even a Catholic! Mother Star of the Sea might have secretly baptized me that afternoon I fell asleep at my desk, but—”
“You are doomed.”
Just at the edge of the circle Amanda saw the blade-faced man again. He was wearing a long slack coat.
In his hand was a smoking soldering iron. He held it up. “How about some scars, girl?”
Constance brandished her staff and shouted: “Away, Tom! Come as her friend or don’t come at all.”
“He’s a demon, Connie, and I think the Leannan might be one, too!”
“No, Amanda, they’re not demons, not those two. They’re gods. Or angels, your Mother Star of the Sea would call them. In any case, they’re a couple of whores. All gods are. They’ll be whatever you want them to be and do what you want them to do. If you declare yourself guilty, they’ll take you to hell and give you to your demons. Or they’ll sing with you in heaven. It’s up to you.”
Despite herself, Amanda found that she was looking deep into her own soul, where the moss of forgetfulness grew. And under the moss she saw: “I did tease that nun. And I did it on purpose, because I wanted to make her suffer. Oh, God, I did it for the sake of hate.”
The man with the soldering iron stepped right through into the center of the circle. With a shout Connie pitched back and fell among the shadows of her witches. Amanda looked at the blue, smoking tip of the iron.
“Now, my dear, open your legs.”
She would not. She was guilty, but not that guilty, “I was just a little girl. It was the innocent anger of a child.”
The man twisted and hissed at her, then in a yowling instant was Tom again, curling about her feet, his tail low and sullen behind him.
Connie came shambling back, brushing corn silk from her cloak. This field had just been harvested.
“The particular deity you call Tom is your familiar, dear. You must learn to control him. Until you do, be careful. Remember that he follows your wishes. If you stay on this guilt trip, watch it.”
Amanda looked at the cat. He winked one green eye.
“No, dear, ignore him. Look into the cauldron again. See what you’ve suffered on behalf of the witches.
You needn’t feel guilty if you don’t wish to make such a sacrifice again.”
“I thought you wanted me back, Connie.”
“Not out of guilt. Out of love. Now, look. Look deep!”
There was somebody in the cauldron, a tall and furious somebody from a far place and a farther time.
“You’re beginning to see who you were. You’ve been a witch for a long, long time.”
“That other one down there—I remember him, too. He burned me!”
“He always does. But don’t be attracted by his bishop’s robe. Go back farther, to when he wore simpler things.”
Amanda looked deeper into the cauldron. Just then it shook as if someone had kicked at it. She seemed to slip and slide away from the edge. The waters, which had been clearing, grew murky again.
“What’s going on?” Constance rasped. “Who’s messing up the chant?”
“I’m sorry.”
“What’s the matter with you. Ivy? Can’t you tell she’s here? Can’t you see her?”
“Connie, I’m trying my best!”
“This is the most important circle we’ve ever cast! Don’t you dare break it. Now, chant, girl, chant!”
“I said I’m trying.”
When the chant became smooth, the cauldron cleared again. But it lasted only a moment. Soon the waters were more turbid than before.
“Ivy, you are breaking the chant.”
“I’m sitting in a damned ant bed, Connie. They’re swarming all over me.”
“Chant!”
The waters came clear. Amanda peered in. As before, her childhood floated at the surface. Below came the various colors of other lives, whole finished worlds swimming in dim old seas.
Back Amanda went through the babble of time, to a tiny brown village huddled beneath something vast and tumbled white, a mountain upon a mountain of pure ice, a glacier.
“This was the first life, Amanda. You had just fallen from the eyelashes of the Goddess. You were new then.”
Too late Amanda realized that she had leaned beyond the limit of balance. She fell into the boiling cauldron.
There was a shock of intense pain, then she was suddenly sitting in a reeking tent. It smelled of rancid grease and human filth, sour breath and sweat. She gasped, shocked that she had suddenly reacquired weight and substance. Her mind humbled about in an unknown tongue. Her body was smaller but heavier, her breasts enormous pendula, sweaty and jiggling with milk. She was swinging them back and forth over a fire.
Upon her head was a crescent of horn, around her neck a necklace cunning-twined of last summer’s vine, the one upon which the Red Goddess Flowers grew.
She was Moom, Daughter of the Red Goddess. Moom, the happy, the rich, the good! Round her thighs were fastened leather garters, one on each, made of the softest doeskin, well chewed. They were marked with the waxing and waning phases of the Red Goddess and signified the rule of the wearer, who could dance in them, work in them, give love in them, and never need for an instant to remove them.
Wearing them, she was the Goddess. Without, she was only Moom. She kept the knots tight, never mind that it made her feet tingle. Other women envied the garters and liked to lie upon her lap and gaze for hours at them. Chief among these was Leem, who would have been the great queen ahead of Moom had she not stolen a cave bear cub to keep her warm at night. Its mother came in a rage and bit off her hand.
No maimed woman could keep hold of garters.
The ritual of the raising of milk went on. As she swayed and wove herself about above the flames, Moom heard the leather of the tent slap against the frame. The whole tent shuddered. A frigid gust leaked in, making the men and the children in the outer circle press against the women who surrounded the fire.
Moom felt the milk oozing out of her bones, sensed it running along the milk channels in her flesh, knew it was filling her breasts.
They soon became huge and tight, brown-gleaming in me firelight, their nipples rigid and dripping.
The women sat back on their haunches now. All were engorged. They began to clap. Three times sharp, three times soft, three times fast, three times slow. They hummed the music of the bees, to bring summer luck to the family. First their daughters and their sons came to them and took each according to his age, the youngest as much as they willed, the older less, and so on. Through this the men waited.
Then each man brought to the fire something of their mysteries, a great black haunch of bison, a liver from an ibex, a mammoth’s stomach still stuffed with flowers and roots. All of these things they set in the immense earthenware cauldron, the family’s greatest treasure. They dropped brands in it until it hissed and smoked and filled the tent with wonderful smells.
Moom chewed the blue flesh of the stomach while her husbands took breast upon her, and then ate the flow of her monthly blood.
Thus Moom’s family shared the food of men and women, in the lost winter of a long time ago, not too far from what would one day be called Alesia, men later Eleusis, the central place of the mysteries of antiquity.
It was there, in the hard spring of her fifteenth year, that Moom met the most terrible of ends.
The water had flooded their lands that Maymoon, running down from the White King’s icy haunches until the men said, “The White King’s piss is going to drown the world.”
Moom said, “We belong to our place.”
The men said, “We cannot live in the White King’s piss. We’ve got to get out of here.”
As a portent a great piece of the White King, so large mat it reached far past the top of the sky,’toppled into the meadow with a roar that loosened teeth and sent the leather tent flying about in tatters.
So they left, all but handless Leem, whom they abandoned to the winds. They went down the long stone ridges, into the forests where the little animals lived. Life in the forest was hard, for a hunter could spend all day seeking a beast not large enough to fill a single mouth. Moom, though, had been granted the secrets of mushrooms and berries, so they did not starve.
Beyond the forest there were plains so full of bison that the very air smelled of them. Moom wondered if they were not a single beast with many bodies, so closely did they cling to one another.
In the center of these plains, where mere flowed water, men had made many leather tents, and even some of grass and mud, more tents than Moom had ever imagined in one place.
“I am Alis,” said the man of the place, when Moom brought her family down among the dwellings. “We are Alesians.”
“We are Moom.” She slapped her belly. “I am the Moom! The powerful! Full of milk and blood and babies.”
Alis laughed. He was tall and graybeard. “Eighteen times I have brought back the sun! Oh, I am the Alis!
The most powerful!”
She was confused and amazed. Challenged by a man, who could not even let the Red Goddess Moon into his baby closet? How could it be that he was so foolish? She did not know that Leem had come here ahead of them, traveling fast because she was alone, and contrived this treachery. “You might dry up the Goddess! I wouldn’t risk that if I were you!”
The lands of the Alis, she noticed, were yellow and dusty despite their river.
He threw her down and took her garters and put them on. Then he strapped a leather flap to his loins to cover his bull. He danced the women’s mystery dance, slapping his belly and shrieking the birth cries.
Then the Alesians made cages of strong saplings and put Moom and her women inside.
When hot stones were piled high around it, Moom ran her cage, and shouted and shrieked in agony unspeakable. AH one day as the sun crossed the sky of Alesia she suffered. And she saw Leem, jeering among the men, waving her stub of an arm. The bars at the end were covered with Moom’s roasting blood, and she was purple. She was cracked. She smelled like the last of the cauldron. Her hair was nubble that crumbled off in her hands.
She called at last: “I am Moom!” And died.
The Alesians ate Moom and her women. They remained beside the river a full season after that, but the men made no milk and birthed no young. In time other women came and took Moom’s garters off Alis’s legs, and the Alesians went away with them.
Amanda lay weeping, exhausted, in the shimmering, dying circle. The figures around her were exhausted, too, dwindled from ghosts to embers. Somewhere a bell was ringing.
“Amanda! By the four winds rise! Amanda!”
She couldn’t. She was too tired. Black fingers came from the sky, sweeping down around her.
“Amanda, you must wake up. The demons are taking you.”
The voice was dulled by the thick, black clouds. “You’re innocent, Amanda. You’ve sacrificed enough!”
She was becoming heavy and dreamy. She remembered summertime and cherry Kool-Aid and Mamma’s delicious gingerbread, and her own little backyard playhouse. “I used to pretend it was made of candy…”
“Amanda, you fool! You’re letting them deceive you! They can’t take you to Summer. They want to destroy you!”
“The cottage in the forest… gingerbread…”
“They’re monsters. They want to eat your soul.”
How silly Connie sounded. “Oh, Connie, it’s just Tom and another one of his tricks.”
“Tom’s a friend! But these things—oh. God.” The smoke smelled like honeysuckle. Amanda remembered the backyard, the sprinkler ticking. Mamma humming an old tune.
“Chant, witches! Chant with all your hearts and souls! Can’t you see what’s happening to her? She’s not guilty and they’re going to take her to hell anyway, because she dares to try and return to life. Please by the Goddess chant!”
The smoke had become a crowd of dark shapes. One of them shifted and focused, and grew into the solid form of a very pretty girl of about twelve, wearing a blue dress. One hand was hidden behind her, and in the other she held a leash. There was a bear on the leash, a bigger, more friendly bear than Amanda had ever seen before. It leaned down when it saw her, and regarded her with eyes so intelligent that their stare was a kind of song.
The bear said: “I am a very special bear, my dear, for I can give you visions. And they’re better than that cauldron nonsense.” With that it followed its mistress off into the dark beyond the circle. From Constance’s throat there came a last, fading cry: “Don’t forget, Amanda, you are not guilty…”
Amanda followed the girl, and her wonderful bear.
Chapter 19
Simon Pierce stood surveying what he could see of the Collier estate from across a tumbledown fence.
He was looking into a blackberry patch, beyond it cornfields, it was lovely land, and tended with love, too. Most of the nearby fields were already harvested. The nearest thing worth burning was a stand of uncut corn three hundred yards away.
For hundreds of years the people of Maywell had kept away from this place. There wasn’t even an occasional hiker. Nobody came onto the estate without an invitation from Constance Collier. Most would say mat it was out of respect for her privacy, but Brother Pierce had heard darker rumors. There had been spells and curses that Worked. Early Jones, back in the 1820s, had tried to cut wood in Collier land. His wife gave birth to horribly deformed twins. He himself died of a strange, progressive weakness of the limbs. More recently the Wilson brothers had hunted Stone Mountain. They had reported glimpsing “little men” who scared the animals away. Two years ago they had been found back in the Endless Mountains, far from the estate, lying dead around their campfire. They had both had heart attacks while they slept. Natural causes, or Constance Collier?
Simon did not want to cross into that woman’s land. But he had to. He had driven his congregation to a high pitch of excitement. They had to do something, and he had to lead them. Burn the cornfields. It was simple and practical, and he thought they could get away with it. The ethics of doing it bothered him a good deal, though, especially now that he saw with his own eyes how honorably tended was this land. It was painful to burn good land. He had been brought up to think of the land as the great source of prosperity. Still, this land was good because it was witched. Beneath its fertility was a foulness.
Simon motioned to the man behind him and started down the road. At first he moved along beside it, but the absence of opposition emboldened him to step onto the strip of grass between the ruts.
“Careful, Brother Simon. Better stay off the r
oad.”
“We’re here to do the work of the Lord. We have no call to skulk and hide, Brother Benson.”
“This is private property. If we’re seen here the sheriff’ll have a reason to fire me.”
“Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?” Simon felt sad for the poor, mistaken pagans, and found the deputy sheriff’s whining a disappointment. “You put yourself in the hands of God, Brother Benson. If the Lord wants you fired, you’ll be fired. You walk proud now, for you are on a mission of mercy, to teach these ignorant ones the power of the Lord.”
His mind turned and turned with the complexity of the situation. Simon liked things clear, but they were far from that. He needed the witches as a galvanizing issue; he also felt terribly sorry for them. He was not a man to hurt others.
He felt down deep in his pocket for the shrunken, brown talisman of his own wrongdoing. It was nestled there, reminding him for life of his terrible sin. Its presence gave him satisfaction: often he prayed with it,
“Lord, take me soon. I want to burn for what I did to her. Please, Lord, send me down to the deepest fire.” While awaiting his descent into his own richly deserved hell, Simon Pierce saved the souls of others.
He grasped the hard nubbin that was the hand. Once it had been white. Once soft and sweet to kiss. The hand had been connected to the precious body of one of the Lord’s finest creations, an innocent tittle girl.
Before he found the Lord, Simon had been so confused, so disturbed and angry. His mother hadn’t been a good mother. After his father had disappeared on a Bible-selling trip that never ended, she had whored, bringing man after man home, and he would hear her bed banging against the wall between the two rooms, and once one of the men came to him naked, and she hit him in the side of the head with a steak mallet and pushed him out on the fire escape.
She would drink and take diet pills and whip Simon, cursing him while she did it, then subside into long states of suppressed fury.