Chapter 11 Anassa
One of the witches steps out of the cave, cackling like a hyena who has spotted prey.
Part of me wants to turn around and run; part of me wants to gouge her eyes out.
Neither part is helpful – especially with Claret gaping at the witch’s wart-infested face as if she’s gazing at the Lord’s eternal glory.
Is this a glamour spell? Is she bewitching lesser minds, hiding the true hideousness of her appearance? And where are her sisters?
‘Your thoughts are very loud, Lady Macbeth. And very rude.’ The witch addresses me, using my name, and I am forced to gape at her as well.
Suddenly, her wicked visage melts like candle wax, revealing a breathtaking countenance of youth – like night’s first shimmering star gracing the sunset sky.
Her hair is luscious, dark brown and spilling to her waist in thick ringlets, her crown adorned with hyacinths and yarrow.
And when she smiles at me, my knees go weak.
It’s possible Claret was right. Kneeling makes sense, when one is faced with radiance.
‘There, that’s better,’ the goddess croons. ‘Now sit down, both of you. We have much to discuss, and time is of the essence.’
Claret immediately obeys – and so do I. The goddess sits across from us, at the exact same spot she sat the night before, only now there’s empty air to her left and right. Are her sisters also secretly divine? Have I been tricked before, to see them as disgusting hags?
The thought feels sacrilegious.
‘Sublime Spinner,’ Claret starts, ‘why did you bring us here? What is all this?’
The starry goddess smiles. ‘Look at you, Klytemnestra, daughter of Leda, mother of your killer. Look how much you’ve transformed already, and how much more you’ll transform still …
So filled with thunder is your heart that it can blind you to your power – or it can guide you.
How fares that knife of yours? Still sharp?
Make sure to keep it by your side, always. ’
Klytemnestra – no, she’s Claret to the bone, even if she doesn’t look like it at present – blanches. She grabs her knife hesitantly, nodding once as if her neck is stiff.
I push through my newfound urge to please this goddess, to be pliant.
We need more answers, not half-sibyllic warnings and instructions.
I take a deep breath, amping up my courage to address her.
‘Will there be danger, then? Is that why Claret needs to keep that knife close?’ Not to slice my throat, like she keeps trying to do? I don’t say that last part out loud.
‘Danger, yes, always,’ the goddess says. ‘Danger and doom and death, but also victory. It might be hard to tell the four apart, from where you stand. An ant caught on a thread cannot discern the loom’s grander design – yet it can change the pattern with its presence.’
At these words, a wind rises, whipping at my hair, blocking out my sight.
Everything fades to a familiar black, as if my inner world, the darkness that I’ve always felt coating my heart, has leaked outside.
I don’t feel sinister or frightened in it; I just feel …
myself. A self who bristles at being called an ant, who knows I can be more, oh so much more, if only I embrace my nature fully.
A voice whispers in this sudden darkness, the voice of countless ravens cawing in a chorus.
Thunder met and thrice a threat, yours is the path of claret.
Ah, I remember now, the little senseless rhyme the witches chanted in the woods back home.
I can almost feel the birds’ beaks pecking at my spine, as if they mean to wake me up, hold me higher, help me soar.
Then, as abruptly as they came, the ravens leave, the blackness dissipates, and I am back.
At the cliffside beach, with Claret, and with that witch-turned-goddess who now smirks at me, satisfied.
My head is spinning, but something tells me I must keep what I experienced a secret.
Mine alone. Claret, for one, appears oblivious.
‘You’re calling us ants, Spinner,’ she says now, gaze locked on her knife. ‘I’m not suicidal enough to disagree. Yet let me point out, with respect, that you seem to have gone to considerable trouble to make our paths converge, to bring these two mere ants together.’
‘Have you ever seen an ant nest, little thunderous one? When they work together, there is no ground they can’t erode, no structure safe from collapsing.
And so, in this allegory I can see neither of you appreciates, there is no danger that the two of you together cannot face.
’ She gives us a look as if we’re her most promising pupils and we can surely glean what she’s not telling us.
Unfortunately, we do. As far as lessons go, this one is quite repetitive.
I didn’t even need this last reminder of ravens, to guess as much.
‘The holding of our hands … But why, O wise Spinner? Why did you make it so?’ Claret asks, before I can. Annoyance, incredulity and something else, some deep upset, lace her voice.
‘Call me Clotho, for now. It’s easier, and you two are experts in renaming things. What’s in a name, after all, but an intention to uncover one’s true essence?’
Claret and I steal a sideways glance at one another. Her gaze doesn’t cut, not exactly, but it feels damning. Laden with implications. She renamed me ‘Queen’; I renamed her ‘Blood’.
Clotho smiles. ‘I’m not scolding you. Bringing you together may have been my finest work yet – certainly the most rebellious.
But why I did it shouldn’t matter. It’s done.
You can still undo it, in due time, return to your separate worlds, your separate stories.
Not quite yet,’ she interrupts me as I’m about to say yes, let us do that.
‘Neither of you is ready at the moment. There is still more of you to cook, to coax, to bind, to burn. More than you can conceive.’
Her words contain a certain truth that’s hard to argue with, given the raven vision I just had. Claret bows her head – in acceptance or defeat, it’s hard to tell. ‘What happens now?’ she asks, her voice a low brewing storm. ‘Will you leave us at this beach until we’re … ready?’
‘Would that I could.’ Clotho’s face darkens. ‘Unfortunately, there are limits to what I can protect you from. To whom I can protect you from. If you stay here, you will be found. The door is open still; they can smell an errant story worlds away.’ Her gaze turns upward, to the sky.
My heart starts beating faster, remembering where we fell from. ‘Who will find us?’
‘Wraiths. Creatures of shadow and burned dreams, stories gone astray …’ Clotho points at my blackened fingers. ‘My sisters and I arrived too late; I see you already met one. Not many survive such an encounter.’
My breath catches. ‘I thought we killed it … You’re saying there are more of these … wraiths?’
‘We didn’t kill it, Anassa. I did,’ Claret says, her proud eyebrows arching high enough to reach her hairline. ‘And I will kill its siblings too, if they decide to come for us.’ She only gives Clotho the briefest look, as if to ensure her defiance is permitted.
‘No one doubts your killing skills, little thunderous one,’ Clotho says, and if Claret is offended by that repeated appellation she does not let it show.
‘Though I’m afraid it’s not that simple.
You can’t stay here; this is not your storyworld.
The soil itself will fight you, the longer you stay.
It will strive to abort you, with tooth and rock and claw and never-ending sand. ’
Sand … ‘That’s why we kept walking, yesterday, never reaching anywhere?’
Clotho nods. ‘You can trick it for a bit, when you work together. The rules are mostly made for single stories – with your hands entwined, you can pass through the seams. Catch glimpses of things beyond your understanding, survive in worlds not your own, open doors that shouldn’t open.
How do you think you understand each other’s language?
But even that has limits. That’s why it’s crucial to find your guide, the one who’ll take you where you need to go.
’ Clotho gets up, indicating we should do the same.
We obey once more. I should be questioning my willingness to please her, shouldn’t I?
Clotho’s eyes find mine. ‘I see my spell is waning fast,’ she says. ‘Soon you’ll be seeing what you always saw; the old hag that he wrote, not my true self … Never mind. Here, let it be known I keep my word: put your hands inside this cauldron, one at a time.’
I shiver, conscious of my ruined fingertips. ‘Must we?’
Huffing at my indecisiveness, Claret shoves me aside and sinks her hand inside the cauldron. Her impressive brow furrows. She removes her hand reluctantly, holding a key. A claret-coloured key. ‘What is this?’ she asks, fear and anticipation orbiting each other in her tone.
‘This, my dear, is the key back to your storydoor. The place from whence you came.’
I can’t hide the resentment in my voice. ‘If we’d had this earlier, when we were chased by that wraith, eager to open any door …’
‘It wouldn’t have worked. Even if a door did open, like I said, neither of you is ready.
It would be akin to carving wings from wax and flying to the sun.
And besides –’ Clotho holds up a finger in apparent warning, ‘even if you could, you shouldn’t use it yet.
Not unless you’re determined to balance the scale for your crimes; save an innocent.
Until that time … your cloaks have hidden pouches.
Keep your keys there, and you shall never lose them. ’
Claret’s face could have been carved from rock.
She stands still, holding the key gingerly in her fingers, and I can tell there is a war raging inside her – a war she’s losing.
Eventually, the woman I sincerely thought was a demon not so long ago deflates.
She grabs that vermilion cloak, wears it, and slips the key inside an inner pocket. ‘I understand,’ she says.
That makes one of us, I want to scream, because I really do not understand at all.
Balance the scale for our crimes? Save an innocent?
I don’t know the extent of Claret’s crimes, but mine were justified; ordained by these very witches – goddesses?
– who promised my lord husband greatness.
There was no other way to rule as prophesied …
Was there? Uncertainty coats my tongue. I swallow the dryness in my throat and place my hand inside the cauldron. Thankfully, nothing burns me.
There is a key for me as well – predictably, mine’s raven black. I try not to think of ravens, fluttering about, whispering things no one else can hear. Following Claret’s example, I put on my cloak and secure the key inside. ‘Is that it, then? Where do we go from here?’
Clotho doesn’t answer. She looks up to the sky, where the sun now hides behind a billow of bitter-looking clouds.
‘When shall we three meet again,’ she whispers, ‘in thunder, lightning or in rain?’ She looks so incredibly sad; even the flowers on her hair are wilting.
Her skin is quickly losing its previous radiance, echoes of the witch I met back in the woods flickering under it.
‘I’m afraid we’re out of time,’ she croaks.
‘She’s on her way. Quick, get into that cave, both of you; her reach can’t cross its threshold.
There’s a torch next to the entrance; take that and use it as you navigate the tunnel.
And no matter what you see or hear – keep going. ’
‘Whose reach?’ I ask, but Claret is already ahead of me, doing as she was told.
With no choice but to comply, I head to the cave’s entrance as I hear thunder rumble.
When I turn around, gracing that strange ebony beach with one last glance, Clotho has disappeared.
A scent of singed paper lingers in the air, increasing by the second.
A wild wind whooshes along the beach, removing any remnants of our campsite.
Transfixed, I watch the wind swirl faster and faster, picking up black sand in its path, moulding it into a shape that looks like an animal, prowling my way.
A big cat, a tiger or a leopard, made up from storm and sand and those black pebbles, with holes of empty space where its eyes should be.
The wind sounds more like screaming now.
I don’t need to linger any longer, wait and see if this apparition will become tangible enough to leap, to claw, to bite, like the wraith was.
I back away as quickly as possible and follow Claret into the cave. She has picked up the torch Clotho mentioned from near the entrance and is lighting our path ahead: indeed a tunnel, high enough to walk in.
I consider whether I should tell her what I saw, about the cat-shaped storm approaching us.
But when I look back to confirm whether we need to run, the beast is just beyond the threshold.
Tail wagging, teeth drooling, paw batting at a barrier I cannot see.
Transfixed, I look at it rising on two legs to fall on to the threshold with more force – but it dissolves into the sand and pebbles it was made of.
I let go of a breath that was locked in my throat. We’re safe.
I turn around and realize Claret never saw what happened.
Instead, she has been looking forward, studying this new terrain, whispering something I can’t hear.
The torch’s flame burns steadily, painting the walls with glistening shadows, like we’re inside another beast’s slippery mouth.
And when I gaze upon the cave’s walls, all my previous thoughts of safety are forgotten.
‘Claret …’ I try to keep my voice calm, even, only slightly flabbergasted. ‘The walls … the walls are bleeding.’