The Witch's Trinity (22 page)

Into the small hours of the morning, I watched her rebuke herself and stare at me in wild anger. She mourned for the children and wondered aloud what it would be like for Jost to return to the village, if he returned, to find that his wife and mother had been killed in his absence. She cursed the day she had called the friar to our house to accuse me, but without taking a second breath she scolded me for living when all others my age were dead, and for continuing to eat when there was no food to be had. She muttered that she wished she had killed the cat. She recalled to herself that my mind was faulty, that I had forgotten about Alke’s burned nightgown.

“You were become like a child,” she said. “You had to be told things.”

While she ranted and walked our tower, I sat in a daze. Hours later, she stilled. She went to sleep upon the straw, leaving no room for me.

I sent my mind out into the snow, seeking my son. I drifted up to the slits and looked through the limbs of the tree, where the moon sat on a branch like an owl. It curved like the yellow slant of an owl’s eye. The air held the thick odor of the storm’s passage. I pressed myself forward until I felt the steady night wind across my face. Below me, the stones of the tower slanted down, down, until they embedded in the thick snow at the bottom. I prayed to the air:
If I must burn tomorrow and never inhabit this world further, let me see my son one last time.

I did not care who gave me wings. I was tired, exhausted beyond conception, my throat dry. The coldness of the air was welcome; it smelled of the sweetness of the snow and the evergreens. I felt more of this world than of the dank dimness beneath me, with my daughter-in-law sleeping fitfully on the straw. I was already of the forest I surveyed at a bird’s height; I saw the tree branches as a home, a place to sit and nestle my beak within my feathers.

And since you have signed the book, you can take a form as well. What do you wish, Güde? An owl? Shall we sail into the night together?

With the next gust of wind, I gave myself to it.

I unfurled my wings and felt the slight tug in my skin where the feathers attached. My sharp ears heard all the rustling across the village, the branches complaining of the cold, the crackles and sparks from the fires, a couple awake and rutting, murmuring and tossing while the straw beneath them released a wintry odor. And I heard my kin in the woods, hooting, and then I lost my sense of Güde-ness. I was only an owl.

I flew over the cottages and the wide expanse of the meadows. My quick wings moved me over the pines until the village was far away. I trained my eyes on the moon. I flew over a clearing and saw moving shapes. I circled back and let myself drift on a current as I watched the wolves pad into a formation and then sit upon their haunches. Of one accord, they lifted their heads, exposing their throats, and howled.

I was between them and the moon, so it seemed that their song was meant for me, all wild and full of animal hunger. Lust and heat and fur and fangs. No prey. Nothing to hunt.

Hunt…hunters’ party,
my mind sang.

They keened for sinews, the snap of bones, the clog of fur in the throat when swallowing. They sang for prey, for aught to eat, for prey, for prey. I had prayed once too on my knees for a thing that never came. I might better have prayed to the moon’s slip and all the forest creatures and the air in crystals and the earth veined with ice. I yearned for meat like these wolves; I understood the urge to devour. I was an animal too. The unearthly cry made the humans in the far-off village shiver; I heard a child pull a blanket up, heard the rutting couple pause. I was seized by pure wonder to catch the sound before the moon did. The friar sat bolt upright, terrified. I heard his prayer and his uneasy slump back into the bed. The heavens opened and gave us soft flakes of snow, and I retreated to a tree branch, my claws gripping it. I tucked my head into my neck and prepared to let the snow gather on me. Feathers folded into each other, compact and formfitting like the stones of the tower. The wolves below were sinking under coats of snow, losing their wolfness. I too was sinking under the weight of the snow and losing my form. It was time to sleep, although I untucked my head to stare again at the wolves.
Time to sleep, but Irmeltrud’s on my straw….

The air beat with silence. I did not notice when the wolves stopped howling, but the silence was so profound it was as if they never had.

Below, the wolves shook off their snow. They rose upon their hind legs, and as I watched, their fur blanched and retreated. The sharp ears curled and shrank. The round eyes ovaled and developed whiteness around the borders. The claws lengthened and fattened: fingers. Below me, the gray and black fur became spun wool, and the white throats of the wolves were again the necks of men.

It was the hunting party.

All alive! All alive! I fell like a bolt down to my son and he extended his arm so that I could rest there like a falcon on a glove. I have never looked upon a more welcome face, the thin expanse of cheeks, the mouth crooked into a smile.
Alive! Oh, Jost!
He extended his other hand to touch me, and it was pure love in his fingers. He touched me as gently as ever any touched, and his face was full of amaze.

“Mutter,” he said gently, tenderly. So exquisitely tenderly.

I heard the other men stamping around but could not break the spell of looking into Jost’s blue-gray eyes. I felt the stretching of the leagues of snow that lay between him and the Witch’s Tower so far away. I opened my mouth to speak. I had seen him one last time. It was terribly hard to make him understand I was saying hello and farewell at the same time.

15

We know from experience that the daughters of witches are always suspected of similar practises, as imitators of their mothers’ crimes.

—M
ALLEUS
M
ALEFICARUM

I
woke to the door opening and a hard crust of bread being thrown inside. As I darted to grab it, I watched the hand slide in a bowl of water and quickly withdraw. It was morning again. On the straw, Irmeltrud was waking, and I could see in her relaxed face that she did not yet remember where she was.

And then her face changed and she scrambled to the door to bang upon it, tumbling on her own numbed feet along the way. But it was too late.

I was lying on the ground by the fireplace, strangely calm. She bent over me and tore off half the bread, eating like a fiend as she trod away. “I saw Jost last night,” I said. I didn’t know if I said it to ease her or worry her further.

She stopped in midstomp. “What did you say?”

“I saw Jost and the others last night. They’re still too far away to return in time.”

“What wickedness are you saying?”

“I flew out in the night,” I said. “I flew many leagues hence. And I saw the hunters’ party. They had found no food.”

She said nothing.

“They were touched by witchcraft too,” I said. “Although I’ll not say that to the tribunal.”

She stared at me like a witless idiot.

“They appeared to me as wolves,” I said. “Jost and all the men. They howled at the moon and were gaunt and hungry.”

Irmeltrud began to cry soundlessly, with small tears forming again and again and slipping down her face. But her breast moved not and she sobbed not.

“They won’t return in time to save us,” I said.

“You
saw
this?” she asked finally. “By what power?”

“Either I am a witch and have been given the power to fly as an owl or my mind has abandoned me and I only think that I see these things.”

She cried further. “I hope you are only addled, Güde. For all night I prayed, prayed that Jost would return, and Ramwold too, whose counsel we all listen to. And even if they could not sway the friar, Jost would rescue me somehow. He would find a cart and fast oxen and gather the children and we would flee.”

“Without me?” I asked.

She turned away so that she could tell the lie without me seeing the guilt on her face. “Of course with you, Güde.”

“They won’t come,” I said.

“I should have known the friar would think that one witch in a cottage would taint all those enclosed with her. I never should have taken the risk to accuse you.”

She returned to the straw to sit, sniffling quietly as she cried.

I stood in the exact center of the tower, feeling as if I were the mill wheel. Calmly rotating, everything depending upon my ability to turn. I knew where Jost was and had said farewell to him. My mind was at peace, for I had done nothing wrong, while her mind was twisted and rotten, for she had done much wrong. She had been as Judas with a false kiss in the garden, condemning another to die. And sewed within my skirt hem, I had a way to ensure that my death would not pain me.

I also had an extra
Pille.

If I chose to share it.

It was my Christian duty to share the
Pillen
with her. How would God and his sweet Son greet me at the heavenly gates if I knowingly let Irmeltrud burn at the stake in dire pain?

Yet she had been willing for me to do that.

The priest had always spoken of forgiveness and told the story of Christ receiving a slap and then looking the man full in the eyes and turning to offer the other side of his face for another slap. And long before the priest, Ramwold had told us of how the animals forgave one another. If a fox shall bear down upon the rabbit and take its neck between its teeth, the rabbit shall understand, for the rabbit itself bites down upon the grasses of the field. And as the large insect eats the smaller, it too is eaten, by a bird that flushes down from the air to complete a cycle.

What was I to do?

It seemed I
had
signed the devil’s book since I had been allowed flight and taken the form of an owl. So then my soul was eternally damned and it mattered not what I did, and if I took cruel pleasure in hearing Irmeltrud’s screams, that would be only fair recompense for my own death. But if God understood that I had not meant to sign and I was granted reprieve, it would indeed matter what I did with the second
Pille.
If I showed mercy to Irmeltrud, God might also spread mercy out before me.

A fierce hatred rose in my heart. It had never been my fault that the crops failed, year after year, nor my fault that I lived past the time that most my age died. God kept me on earth for his own reasons. Perhaps because Jost loved me. Irmeltrud was wrong to think I ate food directed toward Alke and Matern’s mouths. We all had the same right to eat. It was true I did less work, but it was also true that we could feed the children only to see them die in the next year. They were still young and not past the age of danger.
Kinder
often died at their age, as much as the thought cost me to think it. And who was she to rank us according to importance? If God willed for us all to slowly starve, then she should not tamper with his design.

I stared at her, angrier than I had ever been. Her accusation had not been made in a moment of passion as her wits left her. It had been a slow plan, and I knew she had thought of it many days before she did it. What had it been like for her to open her mouth to the friar and speak those damning words? How had she
dared
?

I went to sit by her. The straw was first mine, as horrible as it smelled. She had no right to sleep there in my straw. Once again, as with the food she divided with the children, she had deemed herself more deserving than me.

“I have a question for you,” I said. “When you say that you never should have accused me, I wonder if you regret it only because you put yourself at risk. Is that what you mean? Or do you regret condemning your husband’s
Mutter
to die?”

I fingered the nub at the bottom of my skirt. Her answer would affect my decision.

“I thought you were a witch,” she said slowly. “You had an unholy alliance with the cat and—”

“You lie!” I cried. “You accused me because there is no food and you wanted one less mouth in the cottage!”

“Is that what you think?” She turned to me and showed a face that truly seemed filled with horror. Oh, she was a conniving one.

“I know it to be true,” I said.

“You
are
a witch, Güde. You confessed it yourself this morning as you told me how you flew out to see Jost. Or else you are addled and your mind makes you speak like a witch.”

“I watched you sit by the kitchen fire and plot the telling to the friar. You wanted to seize what small part I might eat and grant it to the children in my stead.”

“No, Güde. No!” she protested.

“Then tell me this. What payment did you get for accusing me?”

She reddened. “Meat. But that was not why!”

“You mused and considered how the friar brought his own food with him. You gave me to him to please him so that he would give you—”

The door opened and the friar’s notary entered. Both Irmeltrud and I took a step backward. “Gather yourselves,” he said. “The friar and indeed the town await you.”

It was in me to laugh at the notary’s suggestion. Gather ourselves? What did we have here but our own filth? I turned in a circle to look at each of the stones I’d numbered. I remembered one of the old pagan prayers—
Thank you, rock. Thank you, bird
—and altered it in my mind:
Farewell, rock. Farewell, bird…
Irmeltrud was pale, nearly the color of her hair. She had no thought of what to do and used her shoe to push the straw back into a neatened line, then tried to tuck stray hairs back into her braids. I did nothing, cared for nothing. I did not need to leave things on this earth tidy. It mattered not.