The Witches’ Kitchen Read online

  He hauled the dugout into the water and climbed in, and began to paddle out into the deep water. All his life he had used river boats, and he had no trouble with this dugout, although it was clumsy and slow compared to the slim bark canoes of his people. The sky brightened to a fierce blue above him, while the mists rising from the water still veiled all the island save the points of the trees on the hill. Away behind him in the marsh some cranes began to call back and forth. A fish plopped nearby him. Among the ragged upper branches of the trees he saw the great twig-piles of fishhawks’ nests. Through the mist he began to make out the unnatural shape of the house, high on the gentle slope above the shore.

  At once he began to think the people were gone. The boat was nowhere in sight, and the meadow was empty. He could smell no smoke; he saw no one moving up there. He touched the amulet bag around his neck, wishing for a sign what to do. He wanted to land on the island and get as close to the house as he could. If the people weren’t there it would be easier.

  He remembered the man he had seen the day before, how strange he was. Not really a man: some kind of animal. A bear, perhaps. His thick black hair covered his head and his face, too, like a bear. Miska envied the quick sure way he had handled the boat; the dugout seemed almost useless compared to it. Above all he remembered the man’s clay-white skin.

  He had thought about this all the night, as he planned this trip to the island. He thought it was a curse, perhaps. These people were cursed, cast out, that explained much. Or they were really ghosts, counterfeits, who did not know how people looked beneath their clothes. He felt a little prick of anger at Tisconum, who tolerated them.

  They weren’t really people, even if they weren’t ghosts, just cursed outcasts. Maybe they had sprouted here, like mushrooms, which were also white. Or crawled up out of the sea, waterbleached like fish.

  Whatever it was, he hated that man. If he came on him, out on the island, Miska thought, he might try to kill him.

  The dugout plowed steadily through the flat water. The mist was clearing; now he saw the house much nearer, the square edges of its doorway, the tangles of yellow wildflowers sprouting on its roof. Beyond it on the trampled meadow were other made things: a small square house with a door set down into the earth, and, off a little by itself, a great long hollow shape, set on stilty legs, its body pointed at both ends, like a kind of wooden fish. He dug the paddle in, driving the dugout toward the shore.

  In front of him suddenly the water curled up into a wave, like the wave that formed when a quick-running river plunged over a rock in its bed. The dugout began to jerk and twitch, bobbing back and forth. He drove the paddle down, looking for steady water. The paddle wrenched in his grip like a live thing.

  The nose of the dugout pitched up, and the boat twisted. The water whirled around, and the center of it sank down into a well, falling away toward the bottom of the bay, and the dugout tipped forward and swooped down along the inside of the well.

  Miska’s belly came up into his throat; he dropped the paddle and grabbed the wooden sides of the boat, leaning back to stay upright, looking straight down into a whirling sink of water. The cold and clammy wind rushing up into his face blew the yell back down his throat.

  Then from the center of the hole the water whooshed straight up at him. A great foaming fountain exploded up from the center of the eddy, caught the dugout, and flung it into the air.

  Miska lost his grip on the boat. He sailed upside down through the air and hit the water on his back so hard it knocked him silly. Dimly he heard the dugout crash down beside him. The whirling water tugged and hauled at his feet like icy hands, drawing him under. The water closed over his head. He saw the sunlight, wan and green and wrinkled, fading above him. Brine trickled into his lungs. His foot struck something submerged, and he pushed himself up toward the surface as the need to breathe swelled up in him irresistibly.

  His head burst through the water; he gulped in the clean pure air. His head spun. He gathered in deep lungfuls of the wonderful air. Steadier, he turned around, paddling with his hands, looking for the eddy.

  It was gone. The bay was calm before him, flat and smooth. A little way from him, the dugout floated upside down. He swam to it and leaned on it, still breathless, his skin rough as bark with cold and fear.

  He touched the amulet bag around his neck. He whispered a thanks to his grandmother, whose powerful magic had saved him. He laid his head down on the dugout a moment, tired, trying not to think he might have died.

  He had not died. He was ashamed of being afraid.

  He watched a huge snagged tree glide slowly by him, a root like a long neck stretching up into the air. He lifted his head, looking around. The slow current was carrying him on down past the mouth of the river, clogged with driftwood. He turned to look the other way, toward the island, and saw through the flooded reeds an opening into a cove, sheltered behind the ridge of land where the odd-shaped house stood. He pulled himself higher onto the dugout, more into the sun, feeling better. Above him on the slope he saw the house, and behind it, half hidden, the strange wooden shape, which reminded him a little of the boat. There was no sign of the people at all.

  At least no one had seen him, he thought, relieved. He had looked like a fool, but nobody had witnessed it.

  His chest hurt. The water was cold and he was not a good swimmer, and the current was carrying the dugout and him far from the little beach where he had started. Now also he considered what might live beneath him in the cold and dark. Grimly he pulled himself all the way onto the overturned dugout, sprawled himself along its bottom, and, paddling with his feet and hands, headed it back where it belonged.

  He could try again to reach the island. But he remembered Tisconum’s indignant fear when Miska talked of going into the water, and now he understood it. Working his way back to the shore, he went over and over in his mind what had happened, so that he would be able to tell Burns-His-Feet and the others when he got back. He wondered if they would believe him.

  Probably not. Stretched on the dugout, straining to turn the clumsy floating log in toward the shore, he felt a sudden despair, and then a rush of rage at the white-skinned man, who had made him look silly.

  When finally he reached the shore, his arms were so sore he could hardly lift them. As he hauled the dugout up onto the beach, it slipped out of his numb fingers and fell onto the sand, and he left it there. He was glad he didn’t have to go back to Tisconum’s village, where someone might have seen his failure, where they might even now be spreading the story around, laughing at him. He wanted to kill the white-skinned man and trample his body.

  He left the dugout and went across the marsh, picked up his pack, and started off to the west. He was soaking wet, but he would dry off, walking. He reached the edge of the forest and went in under the trees, following a narrow old deer path beaten through the dense underbrush, and in the deep shadow of the trees he came abruptly face to face with a woman as white as an elder blossom.

  He stuck fast where he was, shocked still, his breath frozen in his throat. Tisconum had said there was another woman, and he knew at once this was she. She stood before him, not afraid, staring at him, making signs neither of welcome nor of fear. Her wild black hair hung around her, tangled with leaves. Her face was gaunt and her eyes huge, as if she lived only to see. Around the centers of her eyes were rings of clear gray, like storm clouds. He could hear her breathing. He saw her nostrils flare as she faced him.

  He looked into her gray eyes and saw worlds. She swallowed him into her eyes. He swayed, off balance, giddy on some promise in her eyes.

  She turned, her gaze leaving him, and was gone, as if when she stopped seeing him she vanished.

  He cried out. He leapt forward, his hands out to catch her, and clutched the air. He spun around, sweeping his gaze around him. Gone. Abruptly he stooped down, lowered his face to the earth where she had stood, and inhaled up a long draft of her, a scent of woman and moss and time.

  He straightened,
his heart hammering. She was gone. Yet she had deliberately shown herself to him. A warning. He gripped the bag of charms around his neck, which had failed.

  They had not failed. They had saved him in the eddy, and saved him also when this ghost-woman revealed herself to him. Her scent lingered in his nostrils, his eyes burned to have looked upon her. She had not been afraid; she had meant him to see her.

  He stooped and ran his fingertips along the ground where she had stood; something small and sharp turned under his touch, and he picked up a little white pebble. He opened his amulet bag and put the pebble into it.

  He would see her again. He had to see her again. A sudden pulse of lust passed through him. She had taken him, somehow, in that look. He would kill the man, but not her. He gripped the amulet bag, promising this. He would take her, as she had taken him.

  The wind rose, shaking the trees around him. He was cold. He went off quickly along the little path, heading toward the west, to bear word of all this to Burns-His-Feet and the rest of the Wolf People.

  C H A P T E R T H R E E

  The tide was out. The boat lay like a stranded jellyfish on the black muck of the beach. Raef followed Conn back up toward the sand dunes humping up just above the wrack line, topped with sawgrass like spikes of hair.

  They had dried all the fish and packed it into the storehouse, and as a reward Corban had let them take the boat by themselves until nightfall. Conn had immediately set out for the mouth of the bay, where the long low seaward beach edged a broad stretch of meadows and forest. During the fall and the winter he and Raef hunted there often, but during the summer the local people moved in, built their fishing villages, and did their own hunting, and Corban had warned the boys to stay out of their way.

  Nonetheless Conn wanted to lay out some snares, and Raef could not change his mind.

  Raef followed his cousin up the gentle slope of the beach. The land here rose away in sweeps of marsh and meadow; the forest took over the higher slopes inland, maple and pine. Raef’s feet sank into the dry loose sand above the wrack line, crisscrossed with the forked tracks of seabirds. Saw grass stuck up here and there like big green hairs. At the edge of the marsh was a big gray boulder, and Conn scrambled up it and stood shading his eyes to look inland.

  Raef sat down at the foot of the boulder, looking back toward the sea, running in long serene waves in from the south. Out there were other islands. He found his eyes straining to see into the misty distance toward the east. Earlier he had dived for clams, and now the heat of the sun was baking his bare arms and chest, but he shivered. His skin crawled; he felt itchy all over.

  He fought the feeling off. He hated being like this; nobody else felt like this, except his mother, who sang and screamed and lived in the woods and nobody ever saw her and everybody said she was mad. He had felt like this just before the shark attacked the boat. He remembered that—it had come at him in bits and jerks, and he had not understood it then, but now, looking back, he knew.

  It hadn’t helped. Corban had saved them, as always. He shivered the feeling off and locked his mind to it.

  Conn slid down from the boulder. “I don’t see anything. There’s a village away up near the top of the ridge, is all.” He rubbed his broad hands on his chest, looking around.

  “Are you sure we should do this?”

  “Don’t be a girl, Raef.”

  Conn was afraid of nothing. Conn never shivered. Standing beside the big rock, he pointed this way and that way over the inland marsh.

  “There’s no sign of anybody, see? We could go over toward the creek, there, and cut up along the bank toward the woods. With the sun up so high there won’t be much game on the wet ground, but it’ll be easy to see if those other people are around here at all. Or we could just go straight up to the maple grove, there. Maybe we can start a deer.”

  Stubbornly Raef said, “Uncle says—”

  Conn wheeled on him. “Are you going to let my father tell you what to do all your life?”

  Raef said nothing. The brown husk of a sword crab lay half buried in the crusty sand by his foot, and he dug it up with his toes.

  “Well, I’m not,” Conn said. He turned to stare over the meadow toward the trees, where now a brawling flock of birds scattered up into the air like a spray of blown leaves, their screeches faint in the distance. “I want to take some meat home.”

  Raef picked up the old piece of shell; most of it had crumbled away, only the round rim left, and the sword. They had no way to kill a deer if they did start one. He pulled off the sword of the crab shell and stabbed it into the sand.

  Conn said, “Pap goes around everywhere, all summer long. I don’t see why we can’t.”

  Raef was thinking about Corban; he said suddenly, “Why do you think he won’t even talk about the old place?”

  Conn said, “You heard him. Kings and priests. Come on.” He started down the side of the dune, his feet throwing sheets of sand ahead of him.

  There were kings and priests in Benna’s stories, too, not all of them as evil as Corban said. Benna told stories of wonderful lands, Hedeby and Jorvik, Denmark and England, where giant beasts carried people around on their backs, men fought with magic weapons, and people lived in great villages and danced and feasted every day. Sometimes she drew pictures to show them, but Raef thought she made most of it up. He followed Conn into the soggy meadow, tufted with clumps of knife-edged grass.

  He was still thinking of Corban, and where he had come from, and why he would not go home again, and without thinking he said, “He must have done something terrible, back there.”

  He dodged. The blow struck him anyway, hard. Conn said, “Don’t you ever say anything bad about my father.”

  Raef turned the back of his head to Conn. He had no father, which seemed to him the greatest wrong in the world.

  They crossed the meadow toward the first scruffy pine trees. The black muck under the spiky marsh grass was studded with pieces of driftwood, broken shells, pieces of dead crabs, dirty gull feathers. Where the ground was drier they crossed a little game trail, hardly a trace along the hard needle-strewn ground.

  While Conn fussed with a snare, Raef went in under the pine trees, looking for mushrooms. The air was close and dusty. Under the dense green of their outer coats of needles, the pines were tangles of dead black twigs around the trunks. A bird chattered, somewhere over his head. He circled back and found Conn again, moving steadily up the slight slope, following the trace toward the maple trees. There was no sign of the other people. Raef broke a hairy owl pellet in his fingers, full of tiny cropped bones.

  Conn set three more snares, little circles of string tied intricately to the surrounding brush. They pushed their way on steadily into the maples. These trees were higher than the pines, and under their wide heavy crowns scrawny saplings and masses of poisonleaf grew. They went single file along a deer path, ducking under low branches and spiderwebs. When Conn stopped to tie up another snare, Raef walked on, ahead of him, toward the sunlit meadow just past the maple trees.

  Somebody—the other people—had been gathering wood, all through the maple grove, and the brush was beaten down and all the fallen wood broken up, so that the grove was very open: Raef could walk straight through it under the spreading roofs of leaves. The openness startled him; he looked quickly all around, wary. Then, halfway to the edge of the sunlight, his ears picked up distant cries.

  His back tingled. Cautiously he went forward, working his way up behind a tree at the very edge of the wood, and stood looking out into the meadow.

  Out on the grass there a shouting gang of boys was running back and forth. They streamed down the meadow like a flock of birds that turned and flew in unison. Raef leaned against the tree, watching. He had seen them do this before, and at first had thought they were fighting, until he saw that they kicked some object back and forth among them. Even now he wasn’t sure what they were trying to do. His cheek against the rough bark of the tree, he watched two of them break out of t
he pack, hurtling down the meadow, the thing they kicked flying away ahead of them, bouncing over the rough ground. The other boys streamed after them, their voices keen as whips.

  Conn said, “What are they doing?”

  “Playing that game,” Raef said.

  Conn came past him, almost into the sunlight. “We could do that,” he said.

  “You want to? Go tell them.”

  Conn barked a little laugh. “We could beat them. Wait. Why did they stop?”

  “Oh, no,” Raef said.

  Across the grass, the wild stream of boys had suddenly halted. They were turning; they were looking up the meadow, straight toward Raef and Conn, and abruptly, down there, somebody shrieked and pointed.

  “Come on,” Conn said, and whirled, but Raef was already running. He bolted back into the maple grove, across the broad leaf-cushioned floor, racing for the path downward. Behind him he heard the yips and whoops of pursuit. Conn bounded at his heels. He tore through the brushy edge of the grove and down the slope into the pines. As if he could see them, he knew that some of the other boys were racing out to skirt the maples and reach the marshy meadows ahead of him. He thought of the boat, lying empty on the beach. If the other boys got to the boat before he did—if they lost the boat—

  He plowed down through the piny woods, his arms out ahead of him fending off the swinging, toothy boughs. His feet struck rocks and roots and he skidded and slipped. Conn ran into him and they pushed and caught at each other, getting their balance, and then ran on.

  Faster than Conn, Raef raced ahead of him, broke out onto the open ground of the salt meadow, and saw, off to his left, the first of the other boys charging in along the creek bank, his arms pumping.

  Across the empty stretch between them Raef looked into his face and knew him, that long jutting jaw and high brow, someone he had seen often, playing, hunting, in the bay fishing. He was far ahead of the other boys. Raef had only to beat this one boy to beat them all. He stretched his legs, cutting straight across the lowland meadow toward the great boulder that marked where the boat was. He bounded over puddles and patches of slick mud. Casting a quick look over his shoulder, he saw Conn lagging behind him and the other boy racing up, even with Conn, but twenty strides to the left. After that boy was a gap of a dozen yards and then a long stream of boys reaching back across the meadow to the creek. One slipped and fell hard, but the rest came pounding on.