Chapter Nine Travelling Moon
Chapter Nine
Travelling Moon
Kensa slept the whole day. Now night had come again.
Her body said, Move. She obeyed. Her limbs were stiff from the long wait in the sheepcote and the long sleep after.
There was dung in her nostrils and the seat of the chaise longue was hard beneath her.
Isolde’s movements in the kitchen summoned her to rise.
On the table were low candles below the moon’s height, which rounded its fullness through the window and across the two women.
There was a brittle quality to Kensa’s walk.
She was heavy, all at once, with loss. Her skin smelled of sheep, of urine, of the Weaver’s grief.
And her own, too. Because she had not done it.
Cured the ewe. In those hours, she had convinced herself that if she willed hard enough, the animal would live.
It had not. She was not a real healer. But she had known that since the beginning, hadn’t she?
Did everyone suspect it – even Jack? Why, even the Bad Books knew it.
If she had been a wise woman, she would have known what to do: she could have spared the ewe.
‘I need to speak to you.’ Kensa’s voice was dry with sleep and strangled enough to pause Isolde’s preparations, her head tilted as a hound’s. ‘I shouldn’t be here, I don’t belong here, I lied—’
‘You weren’t there to save it, Kensa.’
In the night-time quiet, the sea was loud in her ears. As though it wished to drown her out, to hold her full confession back. ‘I don’t—’
‘We cannot stall death,’ said Isolde. ‘We can only be present for it and for those whose lives are touched by it.’ She put her thumbs to her tongue and, one by one, put out the candles in the kitchen. ‘You did all I wished.’
Kensa sniffed. ‘Then I am still to be a wise woman, as you are?’
‘You will be better than I.’ There was a feverish quality to Isolde’s movements as she kicked off her shoes, barefoot and wild.
‘Tonight we mark spring.’ Her gnarled hands reached into the blanket box and withdrew several shawls and throws, which were heaped into Kensa’s arms. ‘This is April’s full moon and it is our duty to greet it. ’
Time had moved quickly, with a month having passed since she began her training.
Kensa’s body confirmed it, with a deftness to her hands and a quickness to her mind.
She cuffed her damp nose with a sleeve and wiped her eyes with her palms, pushing hard into the sockets until lights sparked beneath her lids.
This was not failure, then; Bohortha would remain her home and she would not need to leave it.
‘Stop your crying, girl.’ Isolde pushed a crudely carved wooden cup into her grasp. ‘There is a witch’s work to do tonight.’
At first, Kensa assumed the draught she took would calm her.
It did far more than that. Spice, brandy and a looser substance hit her tongue, unwound her thoughts and retied them differently.
Her fingertips tingled happily. Oh, this was mischief, this was power, this was magic – this was drink.
Isolde began to talk. Oddities, secrets, revelations that made little sense to Kensa or concerned strangers she had never met.
She laughed all the same. Outside, a wind stirred the clouds to cover and reveal, cover and reveal, the shining lunar disc in a playful pattern.
‘Come,’ said the sky to Kensa and through Isolde’s lips it spoke.
It’s spring, it’s spring, it’s spring—
Giddy, drunk and high with the starlings, the pair took the trail to Towan Beach.
It was a hard path, prone to slippage, oft tread by smugglers who wished to hide their loot, as well as witches when the mood took them to be called thus.
Up came the sea to meet them at the shoreline.
For a beat, the tide lingered at their toes, then remembered its rhythm once more.
Mr Aldridge had once warned the village about powers such as this.
Bellowed tales about a dancing maiden who summoned Evil and his entities, drank blood and sipped a man’s marrow through his nethers should he succumb to her wiles.
This was not that. Here were two women and the skies and Cornwall come a-gathering, in a ritual as old as breath and a womb’s first shedding.
It was night and the stars were naked and the moon was naked and the two witches, young and old, followed suit.
Isolde shook her limbs from her clothing.
Her hair was silver and her body bare, but for the dirt on the soles of her feet.
She was glory as a woman is glory, as age written upon a woman’s body is glory.
Her skin wore its years in warm shapes, a downwards pull with marks and mottled patches.
There was a weight to her breasts, a rounding at her stomach and a large scar, old and puckered, that marked her right calf.
Kensa freed herself from her own garments, hearing the waves and the wind and Isolde’s rattling laugh. She had never been naked outside. Bare. Seen fully by another. She was timid and not timid, to be looked at and to look in turn.
Isolde was not thatched as Kensa was and grinned at the younger woman’s questioning observation. ‘It lessens with age, the thick of it.’
‘Do you ever miss it?’
‘Being haired and impatient and wanting?’ Isolde let out a grand sigh. ‘Yes, I do.’
Change. It had taken Isolde’s body and one day it would take Kensa’s own. She chipped her hand to her own hair, legs, pits, sex.
‘Is it wrong to fear it?’
‘Only the dead refuse to age,’ said the old woman, who wore scars as a diary held its pages. ‘A body is a life lived, so live in it.’
Kensa nodded, shared her own small scuffs, a knee with a nick in it, a healed line at her hairline.
Flaws earned through needing to be first, through a desire to do what others had not.
Of course, now she understood there were no firsts.
All the children before her, now grown, had thought themselves first too, as had the children before them and the children before them.
Here was a circle as round as the moon: birth, life, death.
Out came the cup once more, the drink within bitter and sweet and blowing Kensa’s pupils wide until she could pull the firmament inside them.
The older woman fixed their hands together and spun them both, until they stumbled on sand and pebble and shell.
Under the Budding Moon they danced, their shapes blurred and the lines between definitions, between age and shape and gender, were chased away.
It was a sisterhood of sorts. One which brought to mind Elowen’s face, Elowen’s hands, Elowen’s laughter.
Kensa hated it, banished it, drank until she barely felt the sea’s patient chill.
Isolde was already in the water.
Waves ran their cold hands up Kensa’s arms, across the plane between her breasts and the meeting at her thighs.
A sense, kin to lust, bid her to draw away from the shore’s reach, curious and yet fearful.
Isolde was beside her, years shed as coats.
In her place, a younger woman, no less wise, waded further into the sea.
Arms spread, head tilted back, mouth wide as she screamed fury at the ocean.
Kensa could not look away. The next wave ran to rolling against their bodies and revealed Isolde’s former self, with rich brown hair and skin as warm as rose.
Here was a woman of seduction and intrigue, who could conjure terror and did so now, stalling Kensa in her tracks.
Here was a witch whose former dealings had been under horse-pelt and princely towers, in a time of black mirrors and sorcery and political alchemy.
Oh, she had been terrible, hard and cruel.
Memories shone against the sea’s churning surface and Kensa saw them as though she herself had lived them.
The clearest poison tipped from a lace cuff.
A crow-haired lady with blood on her hands.
Fire purging wisdom from a wild man with rosemary eyes.
Monstrous actions, betrayal and madness, until the moment faded and Isolde was herself again.
Old and gently worn, as a shoe thinned with stepping.
‘I should not have liked to know you in your youth.’ Kensa stumbled, her ankle catching on unseen rocks.
Exhausted, tired with knowing, she let the sea pull her in.
Its cool embrace was familiar and comforting tonight – almost a friend, filled with reassurances and counter to the sea she’d known all her life.
‘I let no one know me,’ said Isolde, solemn and prideful and unrepentant.
Here was another lesson: bad women need not seek forgiveness.
Neither recalled wading too far out until their feet no longer knew the sea’s bed.
Their bodies floated, hands linked with one another, hair lashed with seaweed.
And neither recalled swimming into the sky, although their fingers caught on starlight and the ocean, somehow, had a mouth to meet theirs.
Kensa’s head spun hard enough to break from its moorings, heaving it into limitless space.
She remembered drinking more. A sweet syrup brewed with roguery and stormy weather.
She looked up to where the blackberry bushes pulsed with unspent foliage, their fruit yet to thicken at the stem.
When at last Kensa returned to shore, she found a fire lit and Isolde beside it.
Flames gummed and gurgled at the stones hemmed around it, warming the water from their bodies.
Sand flies nipped at the backs of Kensa’s knees and grounded her.
She crouched opposite her mentor, the heat placed between them, blankets on their shoulders.
Isolde revealed a small basket of savoury pies, which they bit down to crusts.
‘Why choose me?’ There was no need to summon sentences around the question.
Both knew it referred to that first wind-whipped meeting here on the Towan, years earlier.
‘There are many other girls in the village who could do the task as well as I.’ Flames sparked in sea colours, dyed by the salt in the driftwood Isolde had collected.
‘The ones who are obedient and kind and reasonable, those girls?’ A laugh, that same rattling laugh. ‘How about your sister, Elowen, should I have asked her?’
Kensa’s head turned fast enough to pull at a tendon, shooting pain down her back. Her blanket slumped around her and she wore only the firelight, skin cast in molten shades.
‘Calm yourself, I meant it in jest.’ Isolde’s meanness crumbled as old wood beneath a fingernail.
‘There were nights I dreamed you’d come to tell me you’d found another to help you,’ confessed Kensa, ‘and I was not to be a wise woman after all.’
‘Ah.’
Crackles, the fire’s shift, an eon until Isolde continued.
‘There was only one person I would’ve chosen to be here with me,’ said the wise woman eventually. ‘When I saw you beside the Morgawr that morning, with no fear or its accompanying follies, I saw the woman you could become.’
‘Even though I lost the knife?’
‘It was never lost.’ A hard slap reverberated on the beach as Isolde clapped her bare thigh.
‘I found it on the sand after you’d fainted, picked it up and hid it from you.
As soon as I considered you old enough, I watched your movements and placed the blade where you would see it sooner or later.
’ Here came a wide, yellow-toothed grin.
‘And I was right, wasn’t I? You did find it. ’
Kensa surged to her feet, head spinning. ‘You—’
‘Here’s another lesson about becoming a wise woman,’ said Isolde, straightening her spine.
‘Appearance is what matters, that others believe in you is what matters. You must take each chance to lean into mysticism, to find the connections – the joins in the world – and stitch them together. Most will call it chance, others will name it fate, while the foolish shall dub it devilry.’
‘It was a lie?’
If the blade had never come to her of its own will, was she even—
‘Remember, there will be many who try to fool you, cloud your vision and write their words across your tongue,’ said Isolde, merriment gone, her tone biting once again.
‘Do not let them.’ As much as the old woman spoke on falsehoods and trickery, her next movements were not that.
With a flourish, she reached into nothing – into the blanket at her shoulder – and took out the bone-handled knife as though pulling it free from the folds of eternity.
The Old Ways. Magic. Raw power, unyielding and ever-present.
The ocean bubbled up the beach, past the tidelines, as though it sought to pull the blade from Isolde’s grasp and drink from the well of her power.
Kensa could not look away from it, her mind unspooling and rewinding in new patterns and understanding.
She eyed the blade with mistrust, exactly as she did her teacher. Both were sharp, their origins unknown.
Kensa’s limbs were heavy with self-doubt. The bone-handled knife was no truth-seeking talisman; it had not chosen her, despite her lie. Kensa had been tricked, the same way she had tricked Isolde. It was fitting, somehow, and damning, too.
‘Will you fool me again?’
‘Yes,’ said Isolde.
‘And what if I fool you?’
Dawn was edging the sky and the birds were waking in chorus.
‘Then we’ll be here again on this shore, two mad fools dancing naked in the moon-glow, as I always hoped we’d be.’