Under My Hat: Tales from the Cauldron Page 14

  “I don’t remember any mother or father, or anything much until I was—I’d guess from my size then and abilities—about three years old. And how I’d gotten myself into the woods I’ve no notion. But I have a sort of set of memory fragments—things half seen or heard, felt, hated … these make me think perhaps I escaped from some sort of carnival or fair, where I was shown as a monster, jeered at and starved. But perhaps I’m wrong, and my parents simply abandoned me, having been scared of me from the start and unable to stand me another second.

  “The woods are my first certain memory. They were so big and dark, full of night. I think, for me, it must have been how it would feel to be at the bottom of a lake, or under the sea. And it was cold. It was the end of fall, and the leaves raining down and frost shining white.

  “But then there he is. Who? Why my rescuer, my prince there, Jehankin. He was younger then but still wise. He was warm and soft to touch, and good. He led me away to an old ruined barn, where he and his kind were living. There was a whole tribe of them, two hundred or more, a house full of fur. And they kept me warm and brought me a share of their kills—I won’t tell you, Radlo, what I fed on sometimes. You’d go green. But everything that lives must eat, and they saved me.

  “I stayed with them for years. Sometimes some of the cats went away to make new colonies, and sometimes new ones came in and proved themselves of use and stayed. And Jehankin taught me all I needed to know, for he’s a clever cat, you can’t think how cunning and brainy and brilliant as a star. I even learnt the human language because Jehankin made sure I heard and saw the things I must in order to do so. But the cats were my people. They never despised me that I couldn’t copy all their skills. They kept me safe and sane. And in the end, when I was about fourteen, Jehankin found this village, and this cottage, and he and I and some of his sons and daughters and wives came here.

  “In the beginning the villagers were afraid of me. But with time they came to understand I could help with healing, and talking to wild panthers and such like—and they could ask for little magics like the lighting of a fire without striking a flint, or the unfreezing of water that seems to come from a single word. Five years have passed. Now the village is quite proud to have a witch, even a furry one. And sometimes, as you saw, persons come great distances for cures, or some spell of good luck. And none of them doubts for one moment—” Here Felidis broke off, she lowered her eyes as if shy—“that I am a genuine witch. Although some more distant villages still fear me, the female who is part girl and part cat.”

  Radlo found himself speechless. But he also found next minute he said, “Jehankin must have been the tiniest kitten when you first met him. He’s only a young cat now—and you’ve known him, by your own reckoning, nineteen years less three. Yet there isn’t a gray whisker in his head.”

  To which she said nothing, but Jehankin himself sat up and stared straight at Radlo with his eyes of cool yellow clearness. If he was even six years old, never mind sixteen, seemed unlikely. But then, he was Felidis’s Familiar, who had woken her true magic gifts.

  Just then Felidis rose and Jehankin jumped down and followed her to the door. When she opened it, out he went into the moonless night. It seemed she had known what he wanted, it often did so, without any visible sign.

  After that she went upstairs. Radlo put the cups and bowls into water, and made up his bed on the floor.

  Something in him, which had been soothed and glad, had grown edgy. And lying watching the fire reflection on the ceiling—above which lay her noiseless room—that question began in his heart and mind:

  Am I in love with her? I can’t even look at her half the time—can’t be in love … but am I?

  4

  How quick the last of summer and then fall fell away, like water through a sieve.

  When the first snow came drifting down like flour over the gray-blue afternoon, Radlo was still living in the cottage. He still did the heavier chores, and also he had been teaching Felidis to read and write.

  During these lessons Jehankin was nearly always present. He observed everything they did, both tutor and pupil, peering over the witch’s shoulder. Though Radlo’s writing the cat seemed to prefer to look at upside down.

  Radlo grew accustomed to Jehankin, as he had to the other cats. He was used to Felidis saying they were her brothers and sisters, and the youngest ones her nephews and nieces. Once Radlo asked her, if that were the case, how were she and Jehankin related? “Oh, we’re not,” she said. “Though truly, he’s been like the father I never had. But more than that, he’s my Liege-lord, my prince. I owe him everything.”

  Radlo was not jealous of Jehankin.

  Definitely not. Radlo was not going to be jealous of a cat. Even a cat like that one.

  But Radlo had gotten used as well to being in love with Felidis, with finding her weirdly beautiful, and despite this, with never stepping out of line. He’d no more put an arm around her waist or bend to kiss her than—than what? Than try to bloody well fly.

  Love. It was hopeless. But it wouldn’t go away. And so, as she still made room for him, neither did he.

  Winter wasn’t a bad time there. They ate well, the villagers bringing her quite a regular supply of meat, the makings for bread, and other stuff. When the snow became serious they were wedged into a loaf of white ice, but there was plenty for dinner, and at Christ Mass a feast. Radlo fixed the cottage roof, cleared the chimney. He wrote poetry on the last of his store of paper—to her, of course, mentally kicking himself all the while.

  Wait till spring. He could get out then. Go away. Make for the damn town on the damn river.

  Each night in the firelight, if she wasn’t there but working above, he spoke softly to her of her changing her ways, of courting her, of her trying him out.

  When she was there he talked about the gray foxes he’d seen, the dark pheasant stalking through the snow-glades, or the broken bucket he had patched up.

  The thaw began about a month after Christ Mass.

  Radlo could have killed it, that warmish, slick wet shiny scent in the outer air, the drip of icicles over the door. The first reddish buds filled him with rage.

  “I think I’ll be off in a few days, Felidis. Once the slush has cleared a bit. The weather’s good. You told that woman who came to ask it would be a forward, lasting spring. Fine traveling weather.”

  If he had hoped to see her look upset, forlorn, she didn’t. She smiled at him. When she smiled, the delicate pearly fur by her lips rippled like a rill along a brook. And her lips looked so smooth, nice …

  “That’s sensible, Radlo. And you’ve been such a help to me. Only think, with the spring I can send for books on herbal lore, to increase my knowledge. Now I can read. I must give you a thank-you gift,” she added with—he felt—sudden tenderness. “I wonder, what would you like?”

  You.

  He stared at her bleakly, biting on the unspoken word.

  Then, “What I’d like I don’t think you’d give. ‘Oh shut up, you dumbleskull.’ ”

  But she turned her cat’s eyes on him and he could no longer look at her. She said, very low, “No, I couldn’t. Nor would you truly want it.”

  “You don’t know me. Or that.”

  “Nor do you know it,” she answered crisply. “Or yourself.”

  “But—” he shouted, getting up, flapping his arms like a crazed goose.

  And exactly then, over the afternoon hill began to come a sound of voices and cartwheels, and Radlo knew someone else was about to arrive, needing her in the only way she’d recognize. A man or woman desperate for her sorcerous skills.

  He turned and walked out of the cottage, and stood outside in the mud, watching the cart drawn by a big horse, and the escort of several villagers. The woodcutter lay on some straw. He was unconscious, and had been bleeding. But anything like this, and to the witch they came. She had never failed them. And Radlo wanted to bellow with fury at all of them for the interruption; unfair and unforgivable, a spoiled brat. He
took himself off into the trees.

  Then about a step short of a mile from the cottage he stopped. He turned and went back. But this time moving carefully and stealthily, approaching the house and its out-buildings from the other side, where no one was. He knew every nook and cranny of the place by now, all but her upstairs room where he had never been. Yet, this winter, while roof-fixing, he had discovered there was a little window up there, completely hidden from below. He’d never spied through it. Even had he been so base as to be tempted, the old glass was thick back then with snow. But it was spring now.

  “I’ll tell you what I want, Felidis, since you asked me,” Radlo muttered to the last trees beyond the house. “I want to see what the hell you do with your magic. If I can’t have you—at least I’ll have that.”

  It was about midnight that Radlo came back the second time. There was still a lamp burning in the lower room. When he pushed in through the door no sorcerous spell was spun to keep him out. Nothing seemed changed. The cats that stayed indoors were clustered here and there, sparring, washing, sleeping, as ever. Felidis sat by the fire on the bench, winding a skein of light green wool.

  Of Jehankin there wasn’t a sign.

  But then, he was usually off all night, about his own business in the wood or the world.

  His own business—

  Radlo slammed the door.

  Felidis showed no reaction; her hands never faltered on the wool.

  “You’re a liar,” Radlo rasped in a rough lunatic voice.

  It was a fact: anyone who spied on a witch was liable to be smitten mad, or blind, or simply dead. Serve him right, then.

  Felidis did not reply.

  “I say you’re a liar, cat-girl, because you’re no more a witch than I’m a—than I’m a cat.”

  At this she raised her face and smiled at him. And he saw, as he never had before, indescribably she smiled just the way Jehankin did.

  “Yes,” said Felidis. “I thought one day you’d come to find out.”

  Then Radlo hung his head. He slumped down on the floor and gazed into the fire. But all he could see in the flames was what already he’d seen earlier, through the little window in the roof.

  The injured woodcutter, who had been deeply and nearly fatally slashed by a breaking axe-head, lay on a mattress, and he hadn’t a flicker of awareness left to him, though he still breathed. Felidis stood mixing a beer-colored fluid in a cup, but every so often she turned her head, and looked attentively at the black cat with the white fur breastplate, her prince, Jehankin. One couldn’t miss that by this turning of hers, this pause and then going on with her herbs and the mixture, she seemed to be following a series of instructions. Yet nobody else, aside from the black and white cat and the senseless man, was in the room.

  Meanwhile, Jehankin himself, fastidious and spruce from a recent thorough preen, sat about one-third of an arm’s length from the woodcutter’s face. At regular intervals Jehankin leaned forward and breathed out his healthy meaty cat-breath across the man’s closed lids. And then, so subtly, the cat would put out a paw—usually the left one—and place it, claws sheathed, for a split second on the woodcutter’s forehead. Radlo watched about five minutes of this until, at one of these touches, the villager opened his eyes. He saw Jehankin, and then he drew in a huge breath and let it go in a vast sigh, as if he’d just eaten a wonderful meal, or woken from a fabulous sleep. After which he blinked and turned and saw Felidis, by which time the cat’s paw had been withdrawn. “Ah, lady Felidis,” said the woodcutter, “I feel a whole lot better. You’re a real wonder, you are.” And Felidis had glided to him and held the herbal cup to his mouth.

  “Drink deep,” she had said. “You’ll be right as summer rain by daybreak.”

  “It’s the cat,” said Radlo now, as midnight turned to the first hour of morning. “The cat. Isn’t it? The cat’s the sorcerer.”

  “Yes.” Felidis’s face was abruptly full of delight. She beamed, and threw down the wool, and raised her arms slowly up. “The cat, himself, my teacher and my prince, Jehankin. He is the witch. He is the genius.”

  “Then what in the Lord’s Name are you?” whispered Radlo, weeping now; he couldn’t help it.

  “I,” said Felidis, with the pride and glory of a king, “have the honor to be his Familiar, who—while he found me ignorant and all alone—nevertheless woke in him the skill of his true magic.”

  5

  “You didn’t tell me what you’d like to say my thank you—”

  “I did.”

  “No, my dear. That isn’t what you’d really like. Trust me—or trust himself there, for he knows.”

  “It’s a cat,” sulked Radlo.

  She laughed. He loved her laugh. The cat took no notice.

  Of course, naturally, obviously, when dealing with humans—(she had said, “Your people need to lose some of their family obsession with their own kind!”)—it had to seem she was the magician. Who would accept the gentle paw of a cat could pass on such miraculous healing, such wonders? (Jehankin had healed Radlo too. Radlo had not thanked Jehankin. Jehankin, patently, didn’t care.)

  “Listen,” said Felidis. “He told me of a mild spell he’d woven for you, dear Radlo. Please don’t scowl. It was kindly done.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” growled Radlo. “Well, I’m off now.”

  “The Lord bless you,” she said. She was so happy and full of compassionate interest in everything—he could have slapped her. But he wasn’t that sort of man. Nor such a dolt.

  For any dolt who did try that might not like the result, not with Jehankin sitting by the cottage door. Jehankin the witch. The healer. The prince. Her Liege-lord. Oh to hell with it all.

  Radlo strode off through the sun-goldening woods, and was as civil as he could be to the villagers who also waved him off on his journey, the woodcutter patting his shoulder and giving him a flask of spiced wine. “You tell them out there, lad. Tell them we have a fine witch here.”

  “Surely,” said Radlo.

  Only ten days, nights after did he curse himself for his own foul behavior. But they—she—wouldn’t trouble. None of them would care. He was irrelevant. And so back came the anger. And full of anger’s energy he traveled fast to the west and reached the town by the river in less than thirty days.

  That summer in the town, set up by then as a scholar in the university and making a decent living, Radlo met a lovely girl. Her hair was long and the color of sunset bronze. Her eyes were blue as coins minted from the sky.

  When once they were friends, she told him she had dreamed, the previous spring, of a cat, black and white and wearing a little silver crown, who called her by name. First the cat, a male, read her a story out of a book—for he could read! Then he told her the love of her life would soon be in the town. And he had been right.

  “They’re magical, all cats,” she said. “Extraordinary creatures descended from the old gods, the good gods, who ruled the world before the Lord, and who still sometimes move about here, with His approval.”

  Radlo kissed her. He loved her and she him, and in another year they would be married, a union that would last the rest of their lives. But Jehankin hadn’t given Radlo this wedding of love, no more than Radlo had inadvertently taught Jehankin to read. Jehankin was a cat. And Felidis. Oh, Felidis … she was only a witch in a wood, a female covered in fur, and with hair that was fur, who’d gotten two ice-green cat’s eyes. A girl who was a cat. Feline. Felidis.

  Felidis.

  Felidis …

  WITCH WORK

  NEIL GAIMAN

  The witch was as old as the mulberry tree.

  She lived in the house of a hundred clocks.

  She sold storms and sorrows and calmed the sea

  And she kept her life in a box.

  The tree was the oldest that I’d ever seen.

  Its trunk flowed like liquid. It dripped with age.

  But every September its fruit stained the green

  As scarlet as harlots, as red as my rage
.

  The clocks whispered time, which they caught in their gears.

  They crept and they chattered, they chimed and they chewed.

  She fed them on minutes. The old ones ate years.

  She feared and she loved them, her wild clocky brood.

  She sold me a storm when my anger was strong

  And my hate filled the world with volcanoes and laughter.

  I watched as the lightnings and wind sang their song

  And my madness was swallowed by what happened after.

  She sold me three sorrows all wrapped in a cloth.

  The first one I gave to my enemy’s child.

  The second my woman made into a broth.

  The third waits unused, for we reconciled.

  She sold calm seas to the mariners’ wives

  Tied winds with silk cords so the storms could be tied there.

  The women at home lived much happier lives

  Till their husbands returned, and their patience be tried there.

  The witch hid her life in a box made of dirt

  As big as a fist and as dark as a heart.

  There was nothing but time there and silence and hurt

  While the witch watched the waves with her pain and her art.

  (But he never came back … he never came back.)

  The witch was as old as the mulberry tree.

  She lived in the house of a hundred clocks.

  She sold storms and sorrows and calmed the sea

  And she kept her life in a box.

  THE EDUCATION OF A WITCH

  ELLEN KLAGES

  1

  LIZZY IS AN untidy, intelligent child. Her dark hair resists combs, framing her face like thistles. Her clothes do not stay clean or tucked in or pressed. Some days, they do not stay on. Her arms and face are nut-brown, her bare legs sturdy and grimy.