The Witches’ Kitchen Read online

  BOOKS BY CECELIA HOLLAND

  The Witches’ Kitchen

  The Soul Thief

  The Angel and the Sword

  Lily Nevada

  An Ordinary Woman

  Railroad Schemes

  Valley of the Kings

  Jerusalem

  Pacific Street

  The Bear Flag

  The Lords of Vaumartin

  Pillar of the Sky

  The Belt of Gold

  The Sea Beggers

  Home Ground

  City of God

  Two Ravens

  Floating Worlds

  Great Maria

  The Death of Attila

  The Earl

  Antichrist

  Until the Sun Falls

  The Kings in Winter

  Rakossy

  The Firedrake

  FOR CHILDREN

  King’s Road

  Ghost in the Steppe

  For MY MOTHER, FOR BOB BATJER, JOHN JACKSON, DAVID ANDERSON, HELEN BEALL, MIKE ALLEN, AND FOR ALL THE OTHER WANDERING STARS THAT LATELY WENT TO THEIR REST

  C H A P T E R O N E

  By midmorning they had hauled so many cod out of the sea that the boat could carry no more. The boys coiled up their lines, and Corban stowed the gaff alongside the mast. He went back to the rudder, glad for the chance to sit down. The boys scrambled around the boat, packing the fish away, getting their oars, and their voices rose in a sudden chatter.

  “Wait until Mam sees all these fish!” Conn crammed the last of the gutted cod into a basket and wedged the basket under the swell of the gunwale. He had been slicing up the catch, and his forearms were slick with blood; the boat’s hull, the wooden frame, the thwarts, even the mast glittered with scales and blood. Conn pulled his oar out from under the bench.

  Raef said, “I’m already sick of fish, and we haven’t even eaten any.” His hair was the color of duck down in the sun. He wore no shirt, and his shoulders were red as a blister.

  Conn snorted at him. “You always find something to gripe at! Get your oar.”

  “Don’t tell me what to do.”

  Sitting in the stern, by the tiller, Corban turned his head to look out over the sea. Their bickering put his teeth on edge. The boat felt too small to hold the three of them; he felt himself leaning back, twisting away. Reaching down behind him into the cleft of the stern, he brought out his shirt, shook it, and pulled it on over his head. His sunburnt shoulders flinched from the light touch of the deerskin. He stretched his gaze toward the eastern horizon and the open ocean.

  The day was blooming, warm and calm, the sky fair and blue, the water glossy, lifting in long gentle swells like a giant breathing. A swarm of seagulls dove and flapped around the water just behind them, fighting for the fish guts they had cast out. Corban waited for a swell to take them up higher, so that he could get his bearings; from the peak of the wave he could just see the dark line of land along the northern horizon.

  “We’ll have to row the whole way back,” Raef said, hunched down on the midboat thwart. “There isn’t a stir of the wind. I don’t think it’s such a good thing—” He jerked his face around, staring out to sea, frowning.

  “Let’s get a start on it, then,” Corban said.

  Conn sat down on the forward thwart and lowered his oar into the rowlock. A black wing of his hair fell into his eyes, and he tossed it back with a jerk of his head. “You just pull hard, that’s all, Raef.” His voice rang with threat.

  Corban at the tiller headed them toward the low dark seam of the land. Once they got to work, they would stop arguing. They had done well at the fishing; he was proud of them, his son, his nephew, strong and willing when he needed them, and then they had worked together, almost silent, tireless and sure. Burdened with fish, the boat felt reluctant under his hand; he wiggled the tiller bar a little, trying to feel how the water was going.

  “We could come out tomorrow. How did you know they’d be running like this, Pap?” Conn said.

  “When I was down off the southern point yesterday I saw the whales following them,” Corban said. “Get your backs to it, the wind should blow soon.” In this season there were often thunderstorms in the afternoon; he wanted to be well inshore by then. He squinted up at the sky, where more seagulls were gathering, their raw cries grating in his ears. A brown wintering gull floated down past them, almost to Corban’s eye level. More than one creature preys on the cod, he thought. A long rising sea lifted the boat and slid on away toward the distant shore; under his feet the wooden boat frame flexed as the wave went by.

  “She’s heavy,” Conn said, straining at his oar. “It must be all the fish.”

  Raef said abruptly, “Let’s get out of !Fre.”

  A tingle of alarm went down Corban’s spine. He felt the boat wallow down another long slow sea; it began to climb the next wave, and suddenly his feet were wet.

  His gut clenched. “No. She’s full of water.” He hooked the keeper over the tiller bar and grabbed the bailing bucket. “She’s coming apart again.” He looked around the boat to see where the water was coming in. The boat’s skin, sewn together of many hides, was always coming to pieces, and he had fixed it so many times he knew where every hole was. “It’s that patch in the bow again.”

  Raef sat where he was, his hands hanging and his eyes wild. “I knew it. We’re sinking.”

  Conn said, “Can we fix it?”

  Corban thrust the bailing bucket into his hands. “Bail like hell, boy.” He scrambled back into the prow of the boat, pulled away a great basket of fish, water sloshing around his ankles, and reached past more baskets toward the box where he kept his spare sail.

  “Raef! Help me!”

  His nephew came up the boat to him, his face fretful. Between them they spread the sail out, then, each taking one end, they pleated it into a length, and flopped the folded middle over the blunt prow of the boat. Leaning down around the prow, Corban worked the lower edge of the sail around and under the boat, spreading it over the leaky hide hull; he pulled the bottom corner up snug over the gunwale halfway down the boat and lashed it, and went up to the bow again to help Raef on the other side.

  Back by the stern Conn bobbed up and down, bailing, the bucket in his hands swinging in an arc that ended in a long brown jet of water flying out over the sea.

  Corban fastened down the bottom edge of the sail; he leaned down over the side of the boat, gathering the top edge of the sail tight around the breast of the prow, and Raef said, half strangled, “Uncle, watch out.”

  Corban lifted his head. Out there across the sleek water a narrow black fin was slicing down through the slope of the wave toward him. He jerked himself up and back, onto his feet and well into the boat. All his skin tingled. The fin veered off suddenly and circled around the prow.

  Corban went quickly up into the bow and yanked the edge of the patch as tight as he could. Fastening the edge down, he went to the mast and took the gaff out of its socket. Conn scooped up bilgewater and flung it over the side, and Corban said, “Stop for now. Get the oars out and row.”

  The boys jumped to the thwarts and swung their oars out. Corban stood by the mast, the gaff in his hand; the boat seemed drier, the sail maybe holding everything together, for now at least. The boys pulled two long hard strokes on the oars; the shark fin slid away through the water, leaving.

  Raef’s breath hissed between his teeth. “They can smell the fish.”

  Conn said, “Shut up. Just row.”

  Corban sat down on the stern thwart, the gaff across his knees. Raef was right. The water they had bailed out of the boat had been thick with cod blood; they had baited the sharks to them. The long dark strip of the land ahead looked no closer. He scanned the glassy water a
round him, looking for signs of wind, and saw another fin gliding slowly toward them. A moment later something bumped the outside of the boat.

  “Pap!”

  “I see—” Corban stood up, the gaff in his hands, watched the long gray body slipping along just under the water, and struck down hard. The gaff glanced off the shark, which whirled and fled.

  The boat rocked, bumped again. Two more fins prowled along through the water, circling the boat, and the bigger of them abruptly turned in toward them.

  Conn said, “Papa, I’ll help.” He stood up, his oar in his hand.

  “Keep rowing, for God’s sake. We can’t stop,” Corban said. He cocked the arm holding the gaff, watching the big shark swim slowly up beside the boat.

  Then suddenly the shark lunged; its pointed nose broke the surface of the water and its jaws gaped, and its teeth like saws ripped at the side of the boat. Corban swung the gaff around and smashed the iron head against the shark’s nose. The sea churned. The shark flipped around and disappeared into the darkness, green water rolling over its white flank.

  “Row, damn it,” Corban shouted. “Row!” He gaped at the big hole in the flank of the boat. The stiff resin-soaked hide of the hull was notched with toothmarks; a foot of the top rail of the frame was gone, only the false gunwale holding the boat together.

  “Pap—”

  “I’ll fight the sharks—you row!”

  The boys bent to their oars again. The boat waddled along. They were taking on water again. Corban grabbed the bucket and bailed, holding the gaff with his left hand, his eyes on the flat calm sea around them, where now he could count five sharks prowling, thin and black, not the big gray that had attacked them.

  “Uncle!” Raef shouted.

  Something struck the boat hard from below and rocked it toward the broken gunwale. Water poured in through the hole. Corban lost his balance, teetered on the verge of falling, the gaff clutched in his hand. He dropped the bailing bucket and threw his weight against the high side of the tipping boat; he heard Conn shouting, behind him. The boat rocked back upright again, lifting the hole up out of the sea. Corban could see the frame bowing; he thought it would break entirely and throw them all into the water with the sharks.

  The frame held. The boys flailed their oars back and forth, catching air, catching water, pushing them on. Corban scrambled bent-legged toward the hole in the boat, looking for some way to mend it, and then up through the jagged hole a huge maw rose, a pointed nose, a slick pink throat behind a great circle of teeth, coming at him.

  He shrank down; he could not get away. The maw reached for him. A carrion stench swept over him. He thought of his wife. He thought of the boys, cast into the sea. He swung up the gaff in his hand, and as the shark’s jaws gaped to take him he jammed the gaff inside its enormous mouth, the iron point straight up.

  The shark bit down. The wooden handle shuddered in Corban’s hand, and he saw the closing jaws stop for an instant, propped apart on the gaff, his arm enveloped in a wet heat, burning his skin. He yanked his hand free, saw his arm slide out between the rows of teeth, his whole arm slick as the shark’s gullet.

  Something yanked him backward—Conn, hauling him by the neck of his shirt into the middle of the boat. The shark still hung in the gap in the side of the boat, thrashing, its jaws stuck half closed. The boat frame bent under its weight. Green water shipped in past it. Just in front of the great notched fin, the shark’s back bulged up suddenly. Abruptly the iron head of the gaff burst out through its back. Blood splattered down its jaw and out the long slits of its gills. In a spasm it lurched back into the water and vanished, and the boat heaved upright again.

  “Row.” Corban lunged for Raef’s oar.

  “Are we sinking?”

  “Get us out of here.”

  “Are you hurt?”

  Corban looked at his left arm; the sodden deerskin sleeve of his shirt was shredded from the shoulder to the wrist. Silently he bent to the work of the oar. All his muscles were jumping. He saw again and again the wide pink maw, slick, devouring. He imagined himself disappearing whole down that clenching throat. Raef got the bucket and bailed. In their wake, suddenly, the circling fins were clustering together, and the water began to churn; at the center of it the big shark suddenly appeared again, or a piece of it, blood-striped. Corban dragged the oar through the water, his arm throbbing.

  He could feel how loose the boat was. With every stroke of the oar he saw how the broken frame opened and stretched and the hide buckled and water trickled in. He could fix that. Tie the frame together and put his shirt over the hole. But he could not do that now, with his heart hammering, his blood racing; all he wanted to do now was get away from the sharks, and he bent his back to the work.

  “It was as big as the boat, wasn’t it, Pap.”

  “I didn’t notice,” Corban said. They had hauled the boat out on the beach at the southern tip of his island, at the mouth of the great bay, and he was painting resin on the new patches. His whole body ached, exhausted, but he was nearly done: He had mended the frame with rope and green pine; he had caulked the holes in the prow with moss. His hands and arms were sticky with black pitch up to his elbows.

  “It was the biggest fish I’ve ever seen, except a whale,” Conn said.

  Raef said, “I didn’t think it was that big.”

  “Oh, yes, you were so brave, Raef!” Conn shoved him.

  “You get those fires built,” Corban said, “and stop arguing.” He didn’t like thinking about the shark.

  He was wondering if it had been, really, just a shark. He had a lot of old enemies, who he hoped had forgotten about him.

  He made himself think about easy things. While he had been fixing the boat, the boys had been slicing and hanging the cod, tail up, on long lines of rope in the sun. Now they were making fires to help the fish dry out faster. In a few days they would have enough dried fish to last them well after the cold set in. Nobody liked it, but everybody ate it when there was nothing else. There was still a lot of work, but Corban intended to do little of it himself. He would take the mended boat up around the island to his home on the north cove and fetch his wife and other children back here to help.

  He finished with the boat and sat scrubbing his hands and arms ineffectually with sand. He thought longingly of his wife, off at the other end of the island. Raef stamped up with a load of twigs and branches and dumped it onto the fireline. He glanced around, looking for Conn, and faced Corban, holding himself very straight. “I wasn’t scared, there, today.”

  Corban laughed at him. He felt a sudden rush of love for his sister’s awkward, gloomy son. “I was. Are you a fool, boy?”

  Raef flushed, bright red against his white hair. “Then I was, too, sort of. But I, I, I—”

  Corban slapped his arm. “You did well enough. We’re alive, we have the fish. Go get more wood. It’s getting dark. Benna will be wondering where we are.” Conn was struggling down the beach toward them under a great load, Conn, who had to do everything best.

  Raef lingered. “You’re not sailing up there tonight.”

  “No.” He wasn’t mad enough to try to sail the narrow water in the dark in a leaky boat. The tide was wrong anyway. “Let’s make a cookfire. We can eat some of this fish.”

  They roasted a piece of the cod. Corban sat with his back against a log, his belly full, feeling much better. The early summer twilight was deepening to night blue. The stars were coming out, and as if mirroring them the dark rippled waters of the bay shone here and there with ghostly sunken lights. The world was full of things he did not understand. Yet the shark seemed just a shark now. The boat was fixed; tomorrow he would see Benna, and the girls. It annoyed him to have lost the gaff; he had few iron tools.

  Conn said, “When the new boat is done, we’ll catch twice as many fish as we did today, every time we go out.”

  Corban grunted, amused. Raef said, “I hate fish. Uncle— when the new boat is done, is that all we’re going to do with her? Fis
h?”

  Corban slapped at a stinging fly lighting on his arm. “Hard to hunt squirrels with a boat, Raef.”

  Conn exploded with laughter. Raef turned redder than the firelight. But he persisted; this was a favorite point of his. “We can’t sail anywhere else?” He leaned forward, his eyes glinting. “Couldn’t we sail over the sea?”

  Corban was tired of the whole issue. “The boat is nowhere near done.”

  “We’re on the last course,” Conn said. This was something on which for once he and Raef agreed; they leaned toward him, one dark, one fair, their eyes hot with dreams. “She’s beautiful already, she’ll be true and fast and strong—why couldn’t we take her over the sea?”

  “We have to fit on the gunwale, and deck her, and set in the thwarts. She’s nowhere near finished.”

  Raef said, “Why don’t you want to go back where we came from?”

  “Here there are sharks,” Corban said. “There there are kings and priests. I’d sooner the sharks.”

  The two boys looked at each other. Corban said, “We have to carve oars and the steerboard, step the mast, and make a sail. That’s going to be hard.”

  Conn said slowly, “Ulf said he would bring us a sail, didn’t he?”

  “Ulf has not come for two years now.” Corban got up, stretching his arms. “Help me with these fires.” They had piled sticks up in a heap at the end of the fireline, and he gathered an armful and went along the string of fires, ducking down beneath the strings of split cod to stuff wood into the flames.

  He had been thinking much lately of Ulf, the Danish captain who had brought them here, when they left their old country behind. In the beginning Ulf had returned every spring around this time, bringing them food and stores and news, reminding Corban always of the old places, Jorvik and Hedeby, and of the people there, and what Corban had done there.

  Then their lives here had seemed temporary, a wandering, not a settling. But Ulf had not come the last year, or the one before, and now this third year was late in the spring, almost summer, almost past the time when his ship usually appeared in the great bay around Corban’s island.