Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History (15 page)

“No,” Munira’s voice is oddly gentle. “I am of his court, but I do not
serve
him like Prabhu served his nawab. The kingdoms of nawabs are waking things, their borders are drawn in land and blood. They are powerful, perhaps, but they must follow the rules of the waking. We–” Munira gestures between them. “Cani,
we
are creatures of the dream. In the dream there are no borders unless we make them, no wars unless we choose to wage them.” She laughs. “There is no purdah unless we wish to enforce it.”

“It is not so simple for me. I am not a dream-walker like you, Munira.”

“Perhaps not, Cani,” she allows. “But do you wish to be like Prabhu? He sacrificed his life for his nawab’s ambitions. Is that what you desire for yourself?”

Two spear-wielding guards open the heavy carved-mahogany doors to the durbar-hall; a court official approaches Cani from within. “Canimozhi Theruvil,” he rasps nervously, not meeting her eyes. “The most benevolent and auspicious Nawab Muhammad Anwaruddin awaits your presence.”

“Yes,” agrees Munira acidly. “I am sure he does.”

“You would use me too, Munira,” Cani says, ignoring the official.

“Of course I will,” she says. “But I am offering you a choice.”

Cani lets out a breath. “I will never make another dream-weapon.”

To her surprise, Munira shrugs. “Good. We are not weapons, to be used so carelessly.”

The silk-clad official clears his throat. “Madam. The nawab expects you.”

Cani looks at him and thinks about her parents; she is still young enough to go back to Madras. To let them hold her and love her and find her a husband. To have children and will herself to dream of only simple things. She could sell her jewels and silks and build from them a good life. She could even dream of the games of queens some nights, and wake to small and comfortable contentment.

Cani thinks of her mother saying
do not look back
, and turns to Munira as she says to the official, “Tell him that I serve him no longer.”

Cani dreams that night of forests full of snake-trees and beaches sanded white with powdered skulls and a horizon that snatches itself away as she reaches out to grasp it. She dreams of a night sky full of stars that arrange themselves in the shape of Mama’s face. She dreams that she is Queen Meenakshi, climbing a tower to reach the window at the top and as she throws herself from the battlements she wakes, cool and light and almost unbodied, ready to be free.

Art by Daria Khvostova

1886
Denmark

Every town has its witch, or so the Midsummer Ballad says, but I had only lived in Tarup a fortnight and I did not know who the witch might be.

I asked Bjørn first, but the right side of his face was stiff like wax from his apoplexy, and his reply came out mostly in spittle. I placed a piece of chalk in his hand, as I had tried doing these several days since he began to sit up again, but as before, he could only make it glance across the slate before his hand spasmed and the chalk fell to the floor. His voice went on in a mumbling moan.

I wiped his face dry with my apron and said, “My husband, are you distressed because you are ill, or hungry, or because you do not like what I ask?”

He beat his hand upon the slate. I found his bowl and began feeding him spoonfuls of øllebrød, which was all he could eat now, morning and night.

“You have not had much time to know me yet,” I told him, “but I would not look for a witch unless I had great need.”

Bjørn jerked his face away, causing øllebrød to run down his cheek.

“If you have had enough to eat,” I said, “I will go out.”

He beat his hand upon the side of his chair.

“We have run out of beer,” I said, and he stopped beating.

Mads Olesen was just coming up to the mill, a bushel of potatoes in his arms. “No wind,” he reported, as if I could not see perfectly well the unmoving branches of the oak tree, as if I could not hear perfectly well the stillness of the mill’s sails.

I gave him a sack from our dwindling flour supply in exchange for the potatoes, and asked if he would sit with Bjørn for an hour.

“My Farmor, when she was sick,” he said, “she always liked me to sing to her.”

“By all means sing to Bjørn,” I said. “I am sure it will gladden his heart.” I was sure of no such thing. We had known each other a matter of weeks before the apoplexy struck Bjørn. I was already unsure how his face looked with both sides alive.

Before I left, I filled a basket with eggs. The smell of the chickens, straw and shit and warm feathers, reminded me of the farm in Allerup, where I was born. One of my brothers held it now. Until I met Bjørn, I had been resigned to living out my days there, tending my brother’s livestock and serving my brother’s wife and reading novels in secret.

“Dagny Jorgensdatter,” I said aloud, to reassure myself, “you are never going back to Allerup.” And I threw a scarf over my shoulders and a bonnet on my head, and went instead down the hill to the village.

Hans Fisker’s wife, Maren Knudsdatter, was feeding her goslings, four of them, nested in boxes in her kitchen. She had a coffee pot just beginning to spit on the stove. “Dagny Møller,” she said, without smiling. “I see you have eggs for me. I suppose you would like some herring in exchange.”

I had not yet figured whether she disliked me in particular or disliked people in general, but either way, I did not intend to leave without a chat, and since the coffee was ready, she could not very well get rid of me. She poured coffee for each of us, and we pulled up stools close to the hearth and kilted up our skirts to warm our legs.

“And how is Bjørn?” she said.

“He is angry with me,” I said, “because I told him I was going to look for a witch.”

“A witch,” she echoed, still with those flat brows. “You told Bjørn you were going to look for a witch.”

“Allerup has two.”

“Allerup has a Grundtviger parish leader who teaches girls to defy their families,” Maren said. “All manner of things can be found in Allerup.”

“I live in Tarup now,” I said, “and I need a witch.”

“I have lived in Tarup all my life, and I am a good Christian,” Maren said. “I do not know such things as witchcraft.”

I drank my coffee in silence then, from a blue and white cup small enough to hide in my fist. It was very good coffee.

Maren wrapped up the herring and I gave her the eggs.

“Kirsten Larsdatter could weave you a new scarf, if you wanted one,” Maren said.

“I have a scarf. Bjørn gave me this one when we were wed.” It was a fine one, bordered with tassels; much finer than anything I could buy for myself with the mill becalmed and my husband ill.

Maren looked away, up at the sky, well-bred enough to make it look as if she was not rolling her eyes. “Kirsten Larsdatter cannot walk about, and she would welcome a visit.”

Kirsten Larsdatter lived in a small house, by herself. I did not know if she was a widow or if she had never married. Today, her front windows were open to the cool spring breeze and I could hear the hush and clack of her loom as I approached.

The sound stopped when I knocked, and then I heard the clatter of Kirsten taking up her crutches and making her way toward the door.

“Dagny Møller!” she said. “Come in and have some coffee.”

“Thank you, but I have just had some coffee with–”

“Nonsense, nonsense! I have the pot all ready to go.” I watched her drag her reluctant legs over to the stove.

I set my basket of herring beside the door and examined Kirsten’s loom. She was making a table-runner for someone, with red and yellow stripes. She had been lamed by a childhood illness, I had heard, and so she spent all her youth perfecting her weaving and sewing, and was known far outside Tarup for the fineness of her work.

“And how is Bjørn?” she said, with the same flat look I’d just seen on Maren Knudsdatter’s face. I began to think I had seen it on the faces of all the people of Tarup when they asked after my husband.

“He is angry with me,” I said, just as before, “because I told him I was going to look for a witch.”

Kirsten Larsdatter laboriously poured coffee, leaning on one crutch, and handed me the cup: even tinier than Maren’s, and the coffee was stronger, earthy and rich. I held her cup while she settled into her chair and leaned her crutch against the arm, and then I passed it over.

“A witch,” she said. “You told Bjørn you were going to look for a witch.”

“Am I to have this same conversation with every woman in the village?” I asked.

Kirsten cradled her cup in both hands and looked at me square. Her grizzled hair was pinned back but a few strands lifted in the breeze from the open window.

“You might have it with every woman in the village, and man too,” she said. “In Tarup, we do not take quickly to outsiders.”

I set my cup on her hearth with a click. “I am not an outsider. I am the wife of Bjørn Møller.”

“Ask your husband where you may find a witch, then.”

“I did,” I said. “And I am sure he would tell me, if he could speak. He wants the wind even more than I do.”

Kirsten Larsdatter sighed heavily, and leaned far over to set her cup beside mine. “You want a witch to raise a wind.”

“Just enough to turn the sails of the mill, before all of our grain succumbs to rot or rats.”

She looked me in the face again. “I am not the one you need to beg,” she said.

“Ah!” I said. “I thought Maren Knudsdatter was hinting to me that you were the witch.”

“That sounds exactly like Maren Knudsdatter,” Kirsten said, “but I am not the witch.”

I set my elbows on my knees and sighed down at the hearth. “Do you know who is?”

She sighed, too. “It is not for me to say. But I have something else that will help. My Farfar had an apoplexy when I was a girl, and though he could not speak or write, he could tap his hand, and we made a board of letters for him to tap upon, to spell out what he would say to us.”

I felt very low that I had not thought of such a thing, and very grateful that she had.

She smiled, and squeezed my elbow. “Go and see,” she said.

I walked back up to the mill with my basket full of herring and a jug of beer from Christian Brygger. I paused before the door to look at our oak tree: even this far into spring, it was leafless, the buds still brown and hard, barely green-tipped.

Inside, Mads Olesen was not singing, but was combing Bjørn’s hair. “He did not like my singing, but he likes this,” Mads explained.

I thought he was not wrong: Bjørn was not banging his fist on anything, at least.

I sent Mads on his way with a fresh loaf of the bread I’d baked that morning, I put the herrings and the beer in the icebox, and I sat down with Bjørn by the hearth.

“Kirsten Larsdatter gave me an idea,” I told him.

I wrote out all the letters on the slate. Bjørn breathed harshly through his mouth, the coals in the stove settled now and then, and the chalk squeaked, and I could hear everything too easily in the quiet of the windless weather, without the sweep of the mill’s sails above.

When I was done I held up the board. “Can you point to the letters of your name?”

Bjørn extended his trembling left hand toward the board. The index finger smudged over the B, and continued.

When he had spelled it out, he lifted his chalk-smudged fingertip and pointed it toward me, and I saw the lines deepen and lift around his good eye, as if he would smile.

The next days were quiet. The wind did not rise, and the oak tree did not come into leaf, but the sun shone and the other trees greened and the chicks grew strong enough to peck in the yard. Bjørn’s old dog limbered up in the warmer air and ran about nosing at everything. I traded out some of our dwindling flour; I baked some and traded the bread; I gave some grain to Christian Brygger for beer.

Each morning after I had washed Bjørn and helped him out of bed and given him his øllebrød, he would tap upon the slate and I would come to him and watch him spell out the day’s business.

Some of it was needless. I chided him for telling me to do the washing, for, I said, why get a wife if he did not trust her to do the washing? But some of it was needful, such as parts of the mill that might need oiling, or the instruction to send to Odense to cancel the next month’s order of flour sacks.

I had Doctor Henriksen back again, and he let more blood and pronounced Bjørn better healed than he expected. As I dug in Bjørn’s moneybox for the kroner to pay his fee, my fingers scraped bare wood at the bottom.

When Doctor Henriksen had left, I came to Bjørn and showed him. “We cannot keep on this way,” I said. “We need the mill working again. We need this calm to break. And if it does not, we need to think about what I can do for hire.”

He tapped on his thigh, his sign for wanting his slate. I brought it to him and he spelled out, “Wind.”

“I know we need wind, husband. That is why I asked you for the witch, earlier, but I did not want to bring it up again since it angered you.”

“Me,” he said.

I did not know what he meant. I looked at his face, which wore the half-vacant, half-pained expression it almost always wore.