Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History (16 page)

“Me. Witch,” his finger spelled.

I caught his hand in mine. I knelt on the hearth before him and looked up at his eyes, the one that followed me and the one that did not seem to see.

“You are the witch?” I said, to be sure. His chalky fingertip tapped against my palm. He shut his good eye.

“Then teach me,” I said. “Teach me to raise the wind.”

I went down the hill to visit Kirsten Larsdatter, as I had been doing many days lately. Through her window I heard the rhythm of her loom and the aimless sweet mutters of her geese.

“I know now,” I called through her window. “I have learned what you could not tell me.”

The loom stopped and Kirsten crutched to the window. “Bjørn told you?”

“With his slate,” I said.

“Finally,” she said. “It is clear to me that he chose you well, even though I was surprised at first.”

“So was I,” I admitted, for Bjørn was past the age when most men marry, and he was thought to be particular, and a particular man did not usually favour a plain woman past her best years, especially one who had given up churchgoing. “But now I think he is not sorry.”

I let myself in through her door and tucked up my skirts to tend her fire; she could do it herself, but she had to pull a chair over and bend deep, and it hurt her legs and back, whereas for me it was a moment’s work.

“I already owe you more favours than I can count,” I said, “and I have come to ask another. I need a blue scarf, of fine wool, such as I know you have made.”

“Must it be blue?” she said. “For I have a red one I made for a customer in Odense who has not yet paid.”

“Bjørn says it must be blue.”

“Then give me a week,” Kirsten said.

“I will give you all the money I have left,” I said. “It is to make the wind return.”

“Then give me two days, and help me smooth things over with Agneta Blok when I do not have her dress done in the time I promised.”

I helped Kirsten select the wool from her stores. I lingered long enough to make her a pot of coffee and set it on the tiny table nearest her loom, and I refilled her lamps with oil and set them close too. Then I went back up to the mill to wait.

The scarf was very fine, so fine it caught on the rough skin of my hands. As Bjørn had instructed, I teased out strand after strand of the blue wool, snipping them to the length of my arm, and tucking them into my bodice. It seemed a pity after all the work Kirsten had put into it.

When I thought I had enough, I touched what was left of the scarf to my cheek. It felt like a blanket for a baby.

“Dagny Møller,” I said to myself, “you are not going to have a baby. You are not even going to have the mill for long unless you get this done.”

I was standing on the walkway that stretched around the middle of the mill like a belt around the waist of a stout woman. Before his apoplexy, in the first days of the calm, Bjørn had positioned the sails at rest, in an evenly-balanced X. Now I reached out with a broom-handled hook and dragged the left-hand sail down straight.

Mads Olesen had helped me carry Bjørn and his chair outside, and the two of them waited in the yard below.

I wrapped the shortened scarf around my neck. I had taken off my apron and vest, tucked up my skirt more than was proper, and removed my shoes and stockings. Now I took hold of an upper rung of the sail, and stepped my bare feet onto the bottom one, and prayed that the wind would not rise just now.

I climbed up and up, right to the top rung, where the sail narrowed and the spine of it joined the central rotor. Right hand for the work, left hand to hold: Bjørn had spelled out the rule three times over, but it still felt precarious to have only my left hand clutching the rung while my right searched out a thread from the tangle of blue wool tucked in my bodice.

Bjørn had made me repeat the words of the spell thrice, too. I said them now over the thread, touched it to my lips, touched the scarf there too, and tied the thread to the top rung of the sail to which I clung.

Going down was very slow. Every rung needed a thread, every thread needed the words. I paused once to look down at Bjørn and Mads in the yard; their pale upturned faces looked blank and blurry from here, their eyes dark blots.

I reached the bottom of the sail and stood again on the walkway. It had felt high and narrow before, but compared to the sail it was solid as an oak. I turned and waved down to Bjørn.

Mads shouted up, after a moment, “He wants to know if you remember the words!”

I shouted them down.

“He says that is right!”

“Of course it is right!” I said back, but only under my breath.

I reached up with the broom-handled hook again and dragged the next sail down. As the first one swung up, I could barely see the blue threads upon it, even against the white sail.

I climbed again, all the way up to the heart, and began tying and speaking and tying and speaking, working my way back down.

When I finished this sail, I looked down into the yard again and saw I had an audience: Maren Knudsdatter, looking cross, with her arms folded.

“You should not have your poor husband out of doors!” Maren called.

“He is directing me,” I said.

“He is an invalid!” she said. “He belongs in his bed!”

“He is teaching me to bring the wind,” I said. “And I do not care what you think about witchery – without the wind we will starve.”

“How can he teach you witchery when he cannot even speak?” Maren demanded.

“Mads, tell her,” I said, reaching up and out again for the next sail.

I did not listen further, but I heard Mads talking excitedly, and even a rumbling groan from Bjørn. I climbed up until their voices were lost in the creak of the oaken sail-frame and the rustle of my skirts against the canvas.

When I finished this sail, Maren was gone. Mads and Bjørn remained. I could not tell, from this height, whether Bjørn looked pale.

“If you must go in, you must go in,” I said. “I can finish alone.”

Silence for a minute.

“Bjørn says you are a very fine wife and you will not finish alone while he has breath in him,” Mads called up.

I did not think Bjørn had had time to spell out all of that, but I thanked him anyway, and pulled down the last sail.

The trampled earth of the yard stretched impossibly deep and wide beneath my feet. I clawed my toes into it like the chickens did.

The legs of Bjørn’s chair had sunk in a little, too, but he still sat, alone and triumphant; it seemed Mads had gone home for his dinner. I came to Bjørn and knelt on the ground.

“Dagny,” he said. His tongue sounded thick and spittle bubbled at the righthand corner of his mouth, but it was my name, nevertheless.

I grinned up at him, and unwound the tattered scarf from about my neck.

I placed one end of it into his hand, and he closed his fingers over it. I took the middle of the scarf and folded it, looped it around, knotted it tight. I set my lips against the softness and said the words Bjørn had taught me.

When I looked up, his good eye was crinkled at the corner.

“Do we wait for morning?” I said, for the sun was westering now, the days still short.

Bjørn shook his head. It was not just a palsied motion on his neck.

I hauled in a breath and took his good hand in my free one. “Are you ready?”

He nodded. He nodded, and I stroked the back of his neck the way you do with a horse who has been strong and brave, before I realized what I did, and took my hand back.

We held the frayed scarf, one to each end. I said the last of the words, which were very simple.

I pulled my end of the scarf. The knot slipped free.

A frozen minute. The earth was cold under my knees.

Bjørn’s eyelids drooped, especially the right. His hand trembled a little; I could see the fabric of the scarf rippling in the sunset light.

A lock of my hair stirred, very lightly, against my cheek.

Up above, the sails of the mill began to ripple, too. I could hear the canvas as it filled taut. I could hear the slow sweep and creak as the arms began to turn.

I kissed Bjørn full on his mouth, and on the palms of each of his hands.

The mill turned day and night for a fortnight. We made up for all of the lost time and more. Mads moved his things up to our house and brought his brother with him, and still I had to bring another young man over from Langeskov to keep up with all the milling.

Bjørn grew stronger. He formed more and more words with his lips and tongue, and set aside the slate except for when he was very tired. He learned again how to chew meat, so that he might vary his diet of øllebrød. I invited Kirsten Larsdatter up to teach Bjørn how to walk with a crutch. His right foot dragged so that I had to stitch a leather patch over his toe, but his left was sound enough to bear him a few steps at a time around the house and yard, although he could not walk into the village or climb the heights of the mill.

The blue wool threads slipped free from the sails: I found a few of them snarled in the bushes here and there. But the wind did not cease for many days, and when it did, it was only a short calm, as happens in all seasons.

I watched the oak-buds finally break open into sprays of painful green. I watched the leaves grow, tender and wet at first, but darker and thicker and stronger by the day.

I pointed them out to Bjørn one evening, as we took our coffee by the open door, feeling the breeze of summer lift our clothes.

“The oak tree is like our family,” he said. His words were still thick and stumbling. Others could not always understand, but I could. “Last to bear leaves.”

“Our family has not borne any leaves at all yet, my husband,” I said.

“It will,” he said.

And sure enough, in the next winter, we turned the sails of the mill so that the uppermost was just coming on vertical, which meant celebration, and I was delivered of a son.

We called him Hjalmar Egekvist, which means oak-twig. Kirsten Larsdatter stood as his godmother so that he could be baptized. He was a small baby, slight-boned, but long, and I thought he would grow up tall.

“I cannot see what may come for him,” Bjørn said, over his cradle. “My witch-sight is not what it was.”

“He will take over the mill when he is grown,” I said.

“I hope I will live to see it,” said Bjørn.

“Maybe he will be a witch,” Kirsten said, “for he was born of a witch and a witchwife.”

“Hjalmar, no,” I said, “but perhaps his children, or theirs.” As I spoke the words I knew them for truth, and by this, I knew that our dreams of a moment ago did not hold that same truth, and would not come to pass.

The knowledge ran over me like cold wind called from over the sea. I reached across the cradle and gripped Bjørn’s hand, and then I gripped Kirsten’s hand too. We sat in a circle around the cradle, the three of us, all the family little Hjalmar had: each of us frail and growing older, here for such a short time.

Then the fire settled within the stove, and I shook my head, and sighed. For Hjalmar would have all manner of things I could not see, just as I had things my own parents had never imagined. No, this feeling I had was not for him, but for me, for my own little family, and I held tight against the time when I would have to let them go.

Art by Daria Khvostova

1775
Paris, France

This room is the universe. This bed the earth, the ceiling the sky. Somewhere in the plaster heavens above me are the clear brushstrokes that will flare like sunlight when I will them into being.

When
I
will them.

I watch Maurepas enter the room, framed by my knees. He is plump and old, like the others that come to us, ministers and directors, princes and counts. Smelling of cognac and roasted birdflesh, their doughy skin scored by silks and velvets cut for younger bodies. He strips now, this minister, and when the last piece of cloth is discarded he is just another old man.

All their power is stolen
, Mémé says.
Even that of kings: they steal their power, and as such it can be stolen back. Why should they have so much and we so little? Do we not come into the world the same, and leave it the same? What does anyone truly possess, save the body she is born with?

Our bodies and their power, the only true power in the world.

Or so Mémé says, and we are supposed to believe.

Maurepas watches the blood between my legs. Already his lips have parted, his face become damp with sweat; the air between us crackles. Is it already beginning? Do they all yield so easily? These men who rule France, rule it with pen and paper and sword and shot, all paying in coin and dissipation to taste me.

Mémé teaches us that the spasms we feel are not pain; they are
hunger
. Every wrenching ache is not some ancient curse; it is
anticipation
. Our bodies are doing what they were made to do: open completely, the better to impose our will upon the universe.

I feel his energy flow into me, stoking my own fire. His mouth between my legs, tasting me before he rises over me, his lips wet. I close my eyes; I cannot bear to look at him.
It smells like marigolds
, they tell each other in the salon, smirking like naughty boys. Thinking they are taking from us, gaining a few extra years, a last rally of youth. When instead it is we who take from them, we take their power and their vigor, we take and we take and we take–