The Witches’ Kitchen Read online

Over the years they had learned how to talk to each other, using words and also movements of their hands.

  Tisconum said, “You should keep it for yourself. Women don’t need such things. It only makes them stop working.”

  “My wife never stops working,” Corban said, thinking of her drawing.

  Tisconum said, “I saw you all working. I saw you caught many fish.” He made the fish with his fingers, wriggling through the water.

  Tisconum stroked his chin. Corban put the little birch bark container into his sack, but he could see that the other man still wanted to talk. Corban sat still, patient. Now suddenly, though, Tisconum turned to face him and said, “There is someone watching you.” He made the someone with his fingers, walking.

  “Hunh,” Corban said, startled. The backs of his hands prickled up. “One of your people.”

  “No.” Tisconum hitched himself a little closer, and his voice dropped, as if he didn’t even want the trees to overhear him. “He is from the Wolf People. West of here. Bad people.” He shook his head; his eyes bored into Corban’s, and he took his finger and drew it across his throat.

  Corban stiffened, cold. He said, “We do no harm.”

  “No. I know. They hate, those people.” Tisconum made a face. “Be careful.” He was standing up now, collecting the clamshells in neat stacks. It was the thick purple hinge he really wanted, Corban knew; he had seen Tisconum break that part of the shell free and throw the rest away. He wondered what they did with it. He wondered who these Wolf People were. His back was stiff. He stood; facing Tisconum, he thrust his hand out, and they gripped hands.

  “I will be careful,” he said, and a thought leapt into his mind. He said, “Will they hurt you?”

  Tisconum’s lips pinched together. He said, “I hate them.” With the clamshells in his hands he turned and went off into the woods. Corban gathered up his sack, with the furs and the birch bark syrup, and went back to the log boat.

  He would not tell Benna about this. Maybe it was nothing. They hurt no one, his family; there was no reason anyone would come to attack them. But the day that had been warm was cooler now, and on the south wind he heard the mutter of thunder. He thought again of the shark, and he went quickly to the boat, to get himself home.

  C H A P T E R F O U R

  During the summer, Mav, Corban’s sister, usually lived by herself in the woods, but this day toward evening she suddenly appeared on the shore of the island. Aelfu noticed her first; she clutched at her mother’s skirt, and Benna turned and saw May coming around the northern point of the cove.

  “Mav.” Gathering up Miru from the sand, she went quickly down along the curving beach to meet Corban’s sister. Aelfu followed along at her heels, subdued. Benna slowed to a stop and held out her hand. “May.” Corban’s sister walked up and gripped her hand, and smiled at her.

  She was Corban’s image, except that he was strong and square, and she was thin as a wraith, her eyes huge in the carved hollows of her face. She wore clothes made of plants, gatherings of leaves, vines, and flowers twisted together around her. She looked into Benna’s face and laughed. She never spoke anymore, but she laughed often, and wailed sometimes, and muttered. Yet in her clear gray eyes Benna thought she saw that she understood everything.

  “I’m glad to see you,” Benna said. “I was worried about you.” Mav wandered all over the woods; she even somehow crossed the water to the far shore, and Benna often wondered how the local people took her. She said, “Raef and Conn are out in the boat, and there’s a storm coming.” Turning, she stared away down the bay.

  The water had gone dull silver. The sun had slipped away behind the high bank of clouds building up from the south, boulders of clouds, rolling gray and dark. Lightning flickered around them, as if they struck sparks as they grumbled together. To the east the sky was still blue, but the birds were flying away over it, and the wind was picking up, turning up the leaves of the brush in pale green drifts. Still there was no sign of her son and Mav’s.

  She turned and cast a hard look up the hill, to where Corban was working on his boat. Wherever he had gone earlier, he had come back in a dark mood and would not speak to her. Now here was Mav come. She glanced at the taller woman, standing beside her, looking out toward the bay, her fair thin face vacant. Often when Mav came, something bad happened. Thinking that made Benna feel ashamed, and she reached out and put her arm around Mav’s waist and hugged her.

  Mav smiled down at her. Aelfu had drawn off a little, watching them; Mav frightened her, and now she put her thumb into her mouth. In Benna’s arms Miru shifted herself around toward the side opposite May. Benna hoisted her up higher, her arms aching.

  She stared away toward the churning water of the bay again, out past the point. Between the rumbling sky and the tossing water she saw nothing, and she aimed another angry look at Corban.

  “I wish he hadn’t let them go out alone. He acts as if they’re grown men.”

  When she brought her gaze back to the running waves of the bay, a shout ripped up out of her. “There!”

  Mav let out a high-pitched shriek and flung her arm up. Far down the bay, far past the point of land, like a leaf on the wind, the boat scudded along toward them.

  Its sail was paler than the clouds. It slid behind a wave and almost vanished and then popped up again. Benna’s heart lifted, gull-winged.

  Corban said, “The new boat will hold the water a lot better than that.”

  Benna startled; she had not heard him come up. She turned toward him, remembering to be angry, and said, “You still should not let them go off so much by themselves.”

  He was watching the boat thrash toward them; he slung his arm around her, indifferent to her bad humor. “They’ll do it without any word from me, anyway.” His eyes sharpened, his black brows pulling down; leaning against him she felt him stiffen all over. He looked over Benna’s head at his sister. “Can you hear them?”

  Mav gave a wordless cry. Benna gripped his arm, standing on her toes, trying to see better. The boat was weathering the southern point of the cove now. In it she could see people— Raef’s white hair—her son—and someone else.

  She screamed. Beside her, Mav was muttering and waving her hands, and Corban said, under his breath, “Well, damn. Ulf’s come after all.” Benna pulled herself out of his arms. Her heart was thundering. She could hear them now, shrieking to her, and more, she could see who came with them.

  “The ship!” Raef was shouting, waving his arms, “The ship!” and at his shoulder stood one she had left behind fifteen years before, and missed sorely every day of it. She rushed forward, into the water of the cove, wading out to meet the boat.

  “Arre! Arre!”

  The boat swung up before her, as she stood waist deep laughing and crying in the cove, and from the boat her sister climbed laughing and crying down into her arms.

  Ulf was older, but still solid, his shoulders sloped with muscle, his legs bandied from sitting too long in ships. The hair on the top of his head was entirely gone, but his beard grew like a drapery, gray and white, beneath the shapeless bulb of his nose.

  His eyes snapped with good humor. He said, “I don’t mind telling you, I had thought not to come again, the crossing is so risky. I thought I had leaned a little too hard on my luck the last time.”

  “You have a greater ship now, though.” Corban looked down at the cove, where Ulf’s ship stood at anchor, a fine, fat-bellied trader, ten oars to a side, humbling the hide boat beside it.

  “She’s his,” Ulf said, and nodded.

  Corban knew without looking where he was pointing. The crew was coming in from the ship only twelve men, in spite of the oar room, Ulf as usual cutting the edges close—but ashore with them also stepped Euan Woodwrightson, the merchant of Jorvik, Benna’s sister’s husband.

  Even before Euan’s foot trod the shore, he was looking around, as if his gaze pinned everything in its place, to be sized up, valued, stored away, and used. Corban wiped his hand over his face.
What Tisconum had told him gnawed at the edge of his mind. He had thought himself safe, but they were coming at him from both sides now.

  The captain was watching him steadily, his lips pursed in his grizzled beard. “Show me the new ship,” Ulf said. “She looks almost finished.”

  Corban led him up the slope toward the boat in its cradle. Ulf tramped after him. The thunderstorm had swept past them, and the air was crystalline, sharp and bright, everything glittering wet. The sun was going down in a stream of pure pink light. Beyond the spine of the island, above the western shore, an osprey fluttered motionless, its wings beating into the wind, and then broke suddenly downward.

  “Do you have enough to feed us?” Ulf said.

  Corban shrugged. That was not the matter here. “I have food. There’s a herd of deer down the island, we can hunt them. The woods are full of berries and fruit, this time of year. The bay always has fish.”

  “I have some bows and a few arrows.”

  “Good.” They had walked past the house, to the new ship where it sat on its crutches. He laid his hand on the new gunwale. The rain had dampened the golden oak of her strakes. The sweet swelling line of her freeboard heartened him, as it always did. This he had done well, whatever else happened.

  “Ah,” Ulf said. “She’s a beauty. She’s a dragonfly if I ever saw one.”

  “You showed me how,” Corban said, “and Benna drew the pictures,” but his chest filled at the dansker captain’s admiration. Seeing the boat appear under his hands had made him love it. He could feel the power in it also; he knew it was not his, but its own creature. “You showed me how to choose the wood.” He had prowled the forest every winter looking for trees whose grain ran in the shapes he needed, felled and hauled them home across the water, split each piece out with his hands and his axe. “I’d never made a ship with a keel before. You showed me how to do that.”

  “Yes, but this is very neatly done,” Ulf said. He ducked under the bow to the other side, and Corban walked around after him. “How did you sew on the strakes? Since there are no horses here.” He had said the dansker people used horsehair.

  “Hemp string,” Corban said. “We fastened them to the ribs with treenails, see. I just put the gunwale on, yesterday and today.” He rubbed his thumb over the pounded end of a treenail, bulging up from the smooth wood. “The boys helped, very much.”

  Lifting his eyes, he saw Euan coming toward them.

  His good mood faded. A long time ago, when he and Euan had together overturned the King of Jorvik, Euan had been only a boy, not much older than Raef and Conn were now, strange and clever and inward. What they had done together, Corban still saw no way to have done otherwise. They had had to get rid of Eric Bloodaxe. Yet he brooded on it: He could not escape the truth that he had committed a murder.

  Until now that truth had been old and worn and shadowy, but now here came Euan, bringing it all back with him.

  Euan was a well-grown man now, stoop-shouldered, with a heavy tread. From Ulf’s earlier voyages Corban had heard news of him, that he prospered in Jorvik, after Corban left, buying and selling, as he had learned to do in Corban’s service, and that he had married Arre, Benna’s sister. Corban knew no reason why Euan then should be turning up out here, on the edge of the world, with his wife or no.

  Euan reached the boat and nodded to him. “Well met, Corban. It’s been a long while.”

  “A long while!” Corban said. “And a far distance. Was it a hard crossing? Ulf says it’s much worse coming than going.”

  “I taught my wife to play chess,” Euan said, “to pass the time.” His eyes were unblinking. Above his high forehead the brim of his hat pressed down his hair. He said, “You are not especially glad to see us, are you.”

  “No,” Corban said, “I’m not.”

  Ulf was looking from Euan to Corban and back again. Euan shrugged.

  “No, I can understand that. You have a pleasant little place here, out of the way of things, and why share it with anybody? But things are bad in Jorvik again. They’ve saddled us with the Archbishop, and an ealdorman who will not leave off pressing, and we pay taxes now to the King of England!’ His voice grated. “We should have our own King, in Jorvik, as we always have, but they throw aside our rights, and walk over our backs. And so I thought—” His pale, watchful eyes met Corban’s. “I would go find my old friend Corban Loosestrife, who saved us once before.”

  Corban leaned on the boat. He said, “I don’t remember it that way. The taste of that undertaking’s been like ashes in my mouth for fifteen years.”

  He tore his gaze from Euan. Beyond, Ulf’s men were walking up across the meadow, carrying their gear, Conn and Raef among them; each boy hauled a carved wooden chest. Over by the door into his house, Benna stood, with her sister, their arms around one another, their faces bright as lamps. “Yet I am glad to see my wife so happy, and for that I thank you.”

  Euan said, “Yes, it’s easy to make women happy.” He sauntered off.

  Corban gave a bark of a laugh. His hand was locked onto the gunwale, and he opened his fingers. Beside him, Ulf said, “The Archbishop sent men to arrest him—he had to get out of Jorvik, and he offered me much money to bring him and her here, and the use of this fine ship besides. Otherwise . . .”

  Corban’s gaze strayed to the ship, beached just inside the mouth of the cove, where the sand was firm enough to stand on. It was an excellent ship, carved fore and aft, its sides pierced for the oars, dwarfing this little creature of his. Otherwise, he knew, Ulf would not have come here.

  His skin roughened. He felt crowded out of his own place. He said, “Keep them all on the island. I’ll see to feeding you. There’s not so much room in my house for this many, but the nights are fine, they can sleep outside.” He walked away across the meadow.

  Raef and Conn hung around the sailors all the day, avoiding chores, until Corban shouted them to the work of building a fire. He was unaccountably angry, Corban. Conn saw no reason for that at all—the excitement of so many visitors, new faces, new talk, made him fairly giddy.

  Raef was twitchy, as always. He looked at everything out of the corners of his eyes, mumbled when the sailors spoke to him, and blushed like a sunset every few moments. Captain Ulf, to Conn’s great delight, remembered him, teased him about growing so big, got him into a quick wrestling match, and let Conn overturn him onto the sand. After a quick glance at Raef, Ulf left him alone.

  Raef skulked around on the edge of everything, watching. “Everybody’s your friend,” he said, while they built the fire.

  Conn broke up kindling in his hands. “There’s so much I want to ask, I don’t know where to start. Jorvik, Hedeby! They’ve been to Hedeby!”

  Raef coughed. “I wish they’d never come to our island.”

  “Bah,” Conn said. “You’re just talking now. Wait until you hear the stories.” He went off to bring more firewood. Raef trailed after him, muttering.

  While they built the fire, Corban harvested all their crab traps, and Benna brought in some of the big yellow gourds from her garden to roast. There was fish also, and some venison, and a drink Benna made from elderberry blossoms, sweetened with birch syrup. They all sat around the fire as the sun went down and gorged themselves.

  Conn sat close by his father, wanting to hear everything that went on. For a while they only talked about the trip across the sea, and Conn’s mother’s sister’s husband had much to say about some Archbishop somewhere, which Conn did not follow. But the night rolled over them, and the moon and the stars rose, and soon the real stories began.

  They talked about heroes, Thor and Odin, Ragnar Hairypants and Sigurd Snake-in-the-Eye, Arrow-Odd and Hastein, battles and travels, encounters with gods and demons and strange magical women. Conn saw these doings as plainly as if they happened in front of him; he stared into the fire and watched ships sail through blasting storms, and swords clash like lightning.

  After a while, Ulf brought out a little keg, which he unsealed and opened
, and then dipped in a cup, which went around the fire. Someone was talking about a place called Miklagard, where bolts of fire hurtled through the air, and gold and silver birds sang in trees studded with jewels. Then Euan said, “I will tell the story of the death of Eric Bloodaxe.”

  Beside Conn, Corban stirred suddenly. “You will not.” The cup came to him and he handed it on.

  One of Ulf’s sailors, a man with wild red hair, said, “I have heard that Eric died a hero’s death in the battle of Steinmore, where five kings died. I heard he died defending Jorvik against the pagans. Is there more to it than that?”

  Corban said, “No, that is all. A hero, Eric. And a Christian man, too, as they likely say, who gave to the poor and the virgins.”

  He was staring hard at Euan. Beside him, Conn sipped eagerly at the brew in the cup. He choked, startled, on the harsh fiery taste, and the men around him began to laugh and pound him on the back.

  “Don’t spill it!”

  Somebody snatched at the cup. Conn clutched it. “Wait— wait—” In a storm of laughter he brought the cup back up to his lips and drank another long draught. Somewhere inside his head a star exploded. He sat blinking, while a dizzy warmth spread outward through his whole body.

  Somewhere, the redheaded sailor was talking. “I have heard good of Eric Bloodaxe, yes.”

  “God bless him, then,” Corban said. “He has nothing to do with me.” He turned to Conn. “Don’t drink any more of it, do you want to be a worse fool?” He took the cup and held it out to somebody else. Conn shut his eyes, glowing all over.

  Euan said, “Do you think you can escape from what you did, Corban? Is that why you came all across the sea?”

  Conn opened his eyes. He thought one more swig of the brew would make him utterly happy. But the cup was traveling away, around the circle.

  Beside him, his father said, “Yet Eric was a Christian hero. You heard the man.”

  Raef dug an elbow into Conn’s side; his breath warmed Conn’s ear. “What are they talking about?”