The Book of Shadows (27 page)

“And join us tomorrow evening,” said she, theatrically, “when Asmodei will favor us with his thoughts on Balthus, Boethius, and Boudin…. Thusly, within a month of suppers, we will make our way letter by letter through his entire Encyclopedia of Hate!”

Next thing I knew we were all of us laughing. Roméo stood to applaud. Sebastiana struck a crystal goblet with her knife and smiled wide.

Even Asmodei smiled, cursing us all the while. Finally, gesturing to the four folded slips of paper beside Sebastiana, he said, “Choose another. This
lesson
of yours ought to have at least the semblance of structure, or it will go on all night. And I, for one, am eager to retire to
other
pursuits.”

“This one seems to follow nicely,” said Sebastiana, a second unfolded sheet in hand. The second question of the evening was the first I'd written: “What am I?”

Sebastiana sat considering her response. Asmodei yawned, loudly; his mouth opened wide, he stretched his muscled arms overhead, and ran a hand through his blond mane. Leonine, he seemed always suspended between indolence and violence. “I thought you all made that clear already,” said he. I looked back to Sebastiana, but the next words I heard came, regrettably, from Asmodei:

“I'll tell you what you are. You are a herm—”

“No!” shouted Sebastiana.
“Arrête!”
Sebastiana rose from her seat, as though to somehow
physically
stop Asmodei's words. She smacked that brass bell on the table's edge and it resounded through the dining room. Roméo sat perfectly still, as did I. Asmodei, tilted back in his chair, sucked at a sliver of green fruit.

“Stop it! It will
not
be like that. I will not have—”

“Ach!”
said Asmo, dismissively, “I simply thought we ought to—”

“Silence!” commanded Sebastiana. And, surprisingly, Asmodei obeyed.

As Sebastiana retook her seat, Asmodei, fast as light,
flung
that sliver of fruit at me. (I can laugh at this now; then, my heart thumped to a stop.)…He missed. The fruit flew past me where I sat, stock-still.

Sebastiana, who may not have seen Asmodei throw the fruit, said to me, “There are words,
base
words from the Latin and Greek, that may, that
do
describe your state. We shan't use them. Ever.” She would not label me like one of her roses. And in choosing to
not
reduce me to some four-syllabled, freakish thing, she allowed me to become something other, something more. For that I will long remain grateful.

“Too many sisters were staked on a single word:
witch
. No one, man or woman…no one, I say, is reducible to one word.”

“That's well and good,” allowed Asmo, “but surely you will tell he, she, or it what it is we know of—”

“I will tell her that she is graced. That she is unique. That she is one of us. Family.”

Asmodei mumbled something. A sentence featuring words, common, coarse words corresponding to parts of the male and female anatomies.

“I will tell her,” said Sebastiana, “that Hermaphroditos was the offspring of the gods Hermes and Aphrodite, the literal union of the male and female aspects of God.”

“Whose brother,” added a sneering Asmodei, “was Priapus, a troll known only for the enormity of his—”

“I will tell her,” interrupted our hostess, “that Plato held we were all descended from a great and powerful race of dually sexed beings—”

“Who,” took up Asmo, “rebelled against the gods and were split in two.”

Silence then, before Sebastiana—having stilled Asmodei with a burning look—spoke on: “None of us knows where we come from. We are all orphans of a sort. As you remember so little of your mother, so too have we forgotten those who brought us into this world. I cannot be certain, but it—this orphan state—seems requisite: I have never known a sister who was not abandoned.

“And so we forge families—such as they are,” and here she looked down the length of the table to Asmo, just then turning his dessert basket upside down, shaking its contents out over the table, “from those we find, from those who—for whatever reason—find us. And, I assure you”—here she pointed a jeweled finger at Asmo—“those reasons are not always clear.”

“But why me?” I asked. “Why did you choose me for your family?” I tried, innocently, vainly, to sneak in a sixth question.

“Ah,” smiled Sebastiana, “I return to your second question. Our bullying friend is right to say that this night must have some structure.”

Roméo stood behind me now, tending the fire. I reacted
physically
to losing sight of him. I dared not turn to look behind me, but how I wished he'd return to his seat or walk toward the kitchen or…

“It is true, dear heart,” said Sebastiana, “that you are, physiologically speaking, different.” She spoke slowly. She chose her words well.

“Indeed!” was Asmodei's sharp, far less considerate aside.

“But we will not speak of
that
just now.” Roméo returned to sink into his chair; so too did a smile sink from his pink lips. He seemed bored; better that, I thought, than disgusted by talk of my…my
uniqueness
.

“You learned a great deal that night at C——,” said Sebastiana. “I trust you remember it well.”

I could only nod in the affirmative. When I thought to ask if…

“Ah,” said Sebastiana, “the
history
of it all. Is it all true? Allow me to answer your unasked question with this, a far less
personal
lesson than that of your final night at C——.”

Asmodei said something; I did not even deign to turn his way, intent as I was on Sebastiana, who commenced then a quick history of the Craft. Some of what she'd say was familiar to me: I'd culled as much from books, from histories and religious tracts. Hearing Sebastiana say it was quite different, though: her words were
fire
compared to the ash heap of history I'd read.

“In medieval days,” said she, “sorcery and witchcraft were synonymous; and as neither was yet associated with heresy, so-called sorcerers and witches were not persecuted. It was the eventual association with heresy that ushered in the Burning Days, during which tens of thousands of people—women mostly—were massacred, murdered by the Church; of course, heresy had long been punishable by death, since, I think…Asmo, the date please?”

“
A.D
. 430.” Having spoken, Asmodei returned to his wine and the close inspection of a thumbnail.

“Since
A.D
. 430,” resumed Sebastiana, adding, “Forgive me. I haven't a mind for dates. Luckily,
he
has.” She gestured to Asmo and went on:

“Over time, canon law stopped distinguishing between sorcerers, witches, and heretics, and began to identify them
all
as heretics and mete out punishment accordingly. This began sometime in the eighth century…. Am I right?”

“You are.” Asmo shifted in his seat. So too did Roméo. They each of them drank. Sebastiana spoke on:

“By the eleventh century heretics were being consigned to the flames, due largely to the followers of our friend Augustine, who held that only fire could purify, could save the heretical soul. And so it was the Church began to burn, and burn, and burn. First it was the Albigenses of countries to the east and in our own southern lands; then it was the Cathars, and the Waldenses. All because the Church feared the beliefs of these people.”

“Dismiss them all as heretics and fan the flames!” This from Asmodei, with forced calm. He held his wineglass up to the light, twirled the liquid around the rim. It did not spill.

“It was Lucius III in, I think, 1184 or thereabouts”—Asmo assented and Sebastiana continued—“who directed his bishops to investigate all deviations from Church teaching. And, not long after, when Gregory IX issued a bull establishing Dominican investigators, answerable only to the Pope, the Papal Inquisition was
officially
born.” It was, said she, “the proverbial beginning of the end.”

At the time of those first papal bulls, ecclesiastical belief in witchcraft was relatively uncommon. The
Canon Episcopi
—holding witchcraft to be merely illusory—was still in favor. But there followed more bulls against sorcery and its associated practices, more writings by demonologists and theologians, all of which led to a burgeoning interest in things demonic and divine.

Laws were widely enacted distinguishing between black and white witchcraft and setting forth punishments for both: white witches were to be branded or exiled, while black witches, those convicted of injurious witchcraft, were to be burned along with those convicted of bestiality and “unnatural familiarity” with members of the same sex.

In 1522, Martin Luther, discarding distinctions between white and black witches—“the Devil's whores,” and heretics all—railed against existing laws, which required, said he, “an excess of proof” for condemnation and proper punishment. Not long after there came the
Malleus Maleficarum,
which taught all interested parties how to track and torture a witch.

Soon every condemned witch was sentenced to death. In France and Switzerland and Germany, burnings beyond number. Scandinavia burned later, in the seventeenth century, as did England, and its rebel colony across the sea.

“And so,” concluded Sebastiana, “thus began the Burning Days. And as you know too well, my dear, those days have yet to end.”

It struck me, then: I'd come so very close to joining “the burned.” My gratitude was profound. I drank, and drank some more in silent salute. And then I asked, again:

“So then, I really
am
a witch?”

“And much else,” mumbled Asmodei.

“Suffice to say,” said Sebastiana, “that you are on your way.” Her words were punctuated by the hollow, low call of an owl. I waited for the ravens' response, which did not come. That plaintive
who
. I remember it well, for it came to mock Sebastiana as she read the third question:

“‘Who are you?'” She looked to me for clarification. “Presumably you mean: who are
we
? Asmodei, Father Louis, Madeleine, and me. Do I understand the question?”

I nodded. And I cast a glance toward Roméo, lest he be excluded.

“Of course: Roméo too. Very well. Let us start then with the boy, our dear Roméo.”

How I thrilled then! My skin rose in gooseflesh. Was it the imminence of learning about my Roméo? More likely it had to do with that owl's cry; and Sebastiana's ringing, again, that brass bell, which seemed to occasion a chill of air to blow through the dining room, setting the crystals of the chandelier to tinkling. I shivered where I sat; Sebastiana smiled and shrugged her shoulders and said:

“Sorry, dear, but the boy is a
mere
mortal. Hopelessly, beautifully mortal. And though he is clearly gifted—one need only
look
at him to know it!—it is not preternaturally so.
Homo sapiens,
heart; nothing more.”

I was disappointed. “Mortal?” I asked. It's an imprecise word: this I've learned.

“He is neither a sorcerer nor a spirit,” Sebastiana explained. “He is no lesser demon, nor elemental. He is a mortal man of some sixteen or so years who will age and die in time, as will you and I. He has talents, yes, but no powers. You, dear, have both.

“Patience,” counseled Sebastiana. She knew what I wanted to ask. (Talents for what?…What
kinds
of powers?) “All in time.”

She spoke on: “This manor has been in my possession for many years, decades. Since before the Revolution. And in all those years, no one, no
mortal
has ever crossed its boundaries uninvited.”

“Be accurate,” chided Asmodei, “no mortal has
survived
the attempt to cross its boundaries uninvited.”

Sebastiana did not take up the challenge, saying again, “No one has ever come uninvited, save Roméo.” Suddenly she seemed at a distance, lost in reflection. “…A perfect little boy with hair dark as pitch and ice-blue eyes came wandering out of the woods. There he suddenly was, one summer afternoon, some years ago, standing in the meadow staring up at the manor, little taller than the wildflowers surrounding him. I looked down from a high window to see him standing in that sea of color, crying. Indeed, in the stillness of the late afternoon, I could
hear
him crying.”

It seemed as though Roméo might cry now, sitting across from me. Candlelight caught the tears that welled in his eyes.

“Enfin,”
said Sebastiana, “this is what had happened:

“Roméo had been working a neighboring field with his father, turning a small square of soil, readying it for fall planting. It was his job to follow the horse and blade and gather up those stones too large to leave behind.

“Monsieur Rampal would sow whatever crop he could, but I'm afraid he was an unlucky farmer. That summer's crop had barely brought enough to feed the father and son and, as there'd been no surplus to sell, it seemed they'd have to ‘do without' for a while longer.” Here Sebastiana looked to Roméo, whose head was down. “I think that is why our Roméo has become the finest cook in France.” Roméo did not respond. Sebastiana resumed:

“Madame Rampal had died bearing Roméo's younger sister, Mireille, who in her turn fell victim to a fever in her fourth winter. It was not long after the girl's death that Monsieur Rampal, embittered by his losses, died in the field. A horrible death.

“You see, the man had driven his half-blind mule over a nest of bees—or wasps, or some such stinging things—and the blade had split the hive in half. Roméo, turning back from his rockpile at the edge of the field, saw his father running around, draped in something strange and dark, something
alive
, flapping his arms as if attempting to fly. This made the boy laugh, of course.”