The Witch's Trinity (8 page)

“No, son, I scraped myself with the needle while mending it,” I cried. “Any woman can have a needle slip.”

“I’ll hear no more about witches and devils,” said Jost sternly. “Your own daughter will shiver tonight since you burned her nightgown for a simple stain.”

“Mutter told us to remember the blood,” offered Matern.

“I am worried full sore for our children, Jost,” said Irmeltrud. “Signs are everywhere around us: cats appearing out of nowhere, bloody marks on foreheads. Are you not concerned that Matern and Alke are in danger?”

“I am not,” he said. “Witchcraft is no more in our house than it was in Künne’s. You’re doing nothing but scaring them.”

Tears brimmed in Irmeltrud’s eyes and she put a protective arm around Matern’s shoulders, reaching across to grasp Alke’s hand. “Children, get onto your knees,” she whispered.

We all of us knelt and made the sign of the cross. “Our Father, save us from the women who ride at night, cast to the wind by the force of their own evil,” prayed Irmeltrud. “Keep our door free from beasts that hide the form of witches. Rid our village of evil. Bring us food, Father, that we may sup in fortitude as at your table. May meat load our board to groaning, and purity reign in our hearts. Amen.”

Even for this short prayer, my knees were aching from balancing on the dirt.

“No more talk of witches,” Jost instructed as we all rose. “Let’s go to sleep and dream with our stomachs full.”

With relief, I lay myself onto my tick and drew the blankets up to my neck. I always was grateful for the straw receiving me, but now that my body worked more slowly, the repose was more beloved. Sometimes as I sank in, I half wished I would not rise again.

“My nightgown was warmer than my shift,” Alke sniffled across the room.

“Then blame Güde’s shaking hands while you shake,” said Irmeltrud.

6

All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable.

—M
ALLEUS
M
ALEFICARUM

I
n the middle of the night, it put two paws onto my chest, bold as an incubus. In the light from the waning fire, I saw the cat was back. I shuddered in fear and made to push it from me. But it licked the hand that came at it, and then licked at its own paw, and the industry of its motion was so like to that of a child that I stopped, entranced.

Hesitantly, I held my hand up, and it butted against it like a baby calf seeking the nipple. I petted it and was lost again in the softness. Why did fur feel so much finer than skin? And heat pumped from its body too, better than any blanket. It settled its entire body onto my chest and I relaxed under the warm weight. I peered about the room to see how it might have gotten in. Had it dug under the door or prised up the window cloth? The instant its purr began, the singing began.

Thus am I banished from my bliss

By craft and false pretense
…

It was a high, reedy woman’s voice, singing from the other side of the wall. I stiffened, waiting to see if Jost and the others would wake from it. The cat continued its purr, even as my hand slackened on its fur from my sudden fear. For who would stand facing the wall of this cottage and sing, if not one of the women who rides out at night?
Faultless, without offense,
sang the voice, but I heard the smile that belied the words. There
was
fault, there
was
offense.

It was the woman who had walked the air above me the night Irmeltrud put me out.

“Off me!” I whispered harshly to the cat, knocking it with the side of my arm. Without a sound, it was gone. “Why do you seek me out?” I whispered to the air. “I am a child of Christ. Use me not in your twisted design!”

After a long pause, the voice began singing again. This time the singer was inside the house, next to my straw bed. All I could see of her was her dark shadow. She had left her corporeal body abed and sent her shadow whistling through the night. She leaned over me, still singing, and I saw she was a perfect reversal of what she ought to be. Her dark hair was white as edelweiss and her skin black as scorch. Her teeth were black too, and her eyes, except the very centers, which blazed white. Her loose hair unfurled and lengthened, stretching like a sheet being unfolded, until I lay beneath the canopy of her motionless, hovering white hair.

I closed my eyes to this hideous spectacle and willed my lips to speak their prayers. But they would not rustle for this task. I was clenched in bewitchment, unable to move.

Lightly, softly, I felt her hair descend upon me, covering every bit of my skin and the tick too, as careful as a death shroud. My skin prickled in sheer terror, but I could do nothing. She was now pressed against me like a lover, her face upon my face. She sang into my mouth. Then each hair from her head, acting on its own, curled under my body and lifted me. We floated through the wall and I felt the bitter wind.

She sang and I kept my eyes closed fast. She sang me into the forest, where the crows unwrapped her hair and she released me. I finally opened my eyes and gasped to see the same women crowded around me.

“Güde, welcome,” they spake at different pitches, sounding like a ghastly, wronged choir.

One held out a piece of meat, and as much as I tried to keep my hand at my side, hunger won out and I accepted the offered flesh into my palm. As they watched, fascinated, I lifted the chunk to my lips and pushed it in, entire. It was succulent but nothing I had tasted in my life.

Juice coating my tongue, I watched as the witch’s stark black and white faded and her cheeks gained the bloom of living skin, her lips the stain of berries.

There were four dogs outside the circle, each with its tail tied to a string attached to a lamp set in the snow. These small lamps gave all the light available to me as I stared into each of the women’s faces, wondering if any was Künne in false guise. None of them was of my village.

“The villagers all ate of Künne’s goat,” said one women. “But we gave the beast the obscene kiss, so they have tarnished themselves with that flesh!”

They all laughed, hands full of the unknown meat. There was no beast on the spit.

“What do we sup on?” I asked. “The leavings of the goat?”

“No, the child that Frau Zweig forgets she bore!” said one.

“It is easy to cloud a mind with snake paste and demon-wort,” added another.

“She complains of an empty womb but she has borne children to us, spidery and malformed, which we put to our mouths and ate of. We have eaten of all of them,” she concluded with glee.

I spat the flesh out onto the snow and spun around, stumbling, to race away. But I had taken no more than a step or two before a tree root, invisible beneath the snow, caught my foot and brought me down.

“When famine keeps the fields empty, what else are we to eat?” asked the one who had brought me there.

“I am not seeing this! My eyes are tricking me!” I screamed.

“And your tongue!” laughed one wickedly. “You spit into the snow but cannot bring up what you have already swallowed.”

I tried to retch then, as sickened as I ever was when carrying Jost inside my body, but nothing came. I spat and gagged, on my hands and knees in the snow.

“Tell me it was not the Zweigs’ child!” I wept in between the efforts of my throat. “Tell me I am sleeping in my bed! I do not want to live in this world!”

“You are but a child of pleasure, Güde. You love the fur of the cat; you love the pelt of the rabbit. You are earthly and rutted like a sow with Hensel. You pulled his face to yours to feel the prickling slaver of his tongue. Of course you want this world!”

“I want to die now!” I said, my face pressed into the snow.

“Why not see as we do first? We only offer pleasure.”

A hand pressed against my back, firm and kind. “Rise, Güde.” It was the voice of the woman who brought me. “You did not eat of the child.”

I made myself sit up, wanting desperately to believe her. “What was the meat, then?”

“Künne’s goat.”

“But it was passing strange.”

“It was the goat,” she insisted. She had such red lips, the color of flowers, of the brightest May Day ribbon. “Color too,” she said to the women behind her. “To pleasure the eye of Güde. Fur and skin and color: all these we number as tools to bring Güde to us.”

“But we know what she
truly
wants,” said one.

“The ice-cold prick!” said another.

I saw for the first time that behind the semicircle of women waited another group; these were men. Among them stepped a goat, the very vision of Künne’s goat, even with the tan spot on its rump. Its bell clanged eerily in the dark forest.

“But I know her to be slaughtered!” I protested, panicking again. “And did we not just eat of her?”

“You will see what we wish you to see,” said the women in unison. They all knelt and the men behind knelt as well. They spake in unison with broken tones, like a death rattle.

“Am I not in my bed dreaming?” I whispered to myself. “Are there not fleas a-biting and bringing me to wakefulness?”

My skin was numb now from the snow, and my bones beginning to ache, as if I had set them to carry far more weight than they could.

The goat muttered the chant too, his horns glinting as they moved with the motion. He walked to me and I stared at the flanks that narrowed to the knife-thin ankles and then the sharp hooves.

“We now pray,” said the women. And I saw that they arranged their hands in prayer, not with the fingertips pointing up as we do each Sabbath, but with the fingertips pointing down.

I shuffled backward in the snow, and the beast similarly stepped forward, maintaining the scant distance between us.

Was this Künne’s goat, that I had seen her milk a hundred times, her forehead nestling against its side? The goat impatiently shook itself and the bell rang out.

“I will not do this,” I said. “You may drag me from my bed and I cannot stop you. But I shall not pray to your unholy master nor chant your wicked words!”

The goat bounded off and in the midst of its leap vanished.

“Hensel could make her pray!” called one of the men. I stared into the dimness to see which man had known the name of my love.

“Douse the lamps then.”

One by one, each of the dogs was spanked on its ass, causing it to run in startlement. As they ran, the strings attached to their tails pulled the lamps over, until the flames met snow and died. We were in darkness.

And in darkness, the moans and low laughter began. Although I could see nothing, I knew there was much commotion happening. Then, in a moment’s time, I saw him there before me: the kind, rough face.

It was like the days when Jost was first born, when he would cry in the night with no candle burning, and I’d see my husband’s yawning face in the half-light left by our dying fire. He’d wake faster than me, have brought the babe to my breast before I scarce heard his weep. “Suckle your son,” Hensel would say gently, and in darkness I would do so.

It was the same now, but with no crying child. Just the kind face I could barely see.

“Güde, how you have lacked to me,” he said.

Tears trickled down my face in blessed amaze. Hensel! Back to me as handsome and strong-voiced as before I put him in the ground. I stepped closer to him and laid my head against his chest. Inside his heart was beating the same skipping rhythm that his mother had given him when she dropped a crock on his foot when he was a child. His arms crept around my waist and I burrowed into his heart’s sound, trying to suppress my own tears and the murmurs around us so that I could hear only that richness. How long had he lain in his grave with his chest pulsing?

“Your hair still smells sweet as hay,” he said. He pulled me away to stare into my eyes. I nearly swooned. It was him! It was truly no trick. Whatever bargain he had made, whatever black words he had uttered to make it, I cared not.

And as my man had always done, he hitched up my skirt.

I cried out to the wind and sagged into his hands, into his mouth. I returned his fervor and willingly spun as he turned me around. My skin began to feel like that of a woman’s again—no longer loose but taut with blood and desire, muscles underneath the skin clenching. His hands tightened on my waist as he pressed me forward against a tree. My fingers seized on the bark and I bent down, as eager for the rut as a maid half my years. I spread my legs, balancing my feet on the uneven surges of the roots that spread from the tree.

“You signed,” he whispered into my ear. “You signed the book.”

“I never did, my love,” I protested, but I didn’t care if I had or not. All that mattered was feeling
this
again, the heat of my husband, those familiar hands cupping my breasts. His rhythm, how he rutted and how his heart skipped to its own odd devising.

They were still murmuring around us. I only listened to Hensel’s ardent breathing. My fingers clawed the tree bark, thanking the tree spirit for bracing me.