Interlude 8
You are a witch.
By the time the day that will change everything dawns, you have accepted this.
Embraced it. This island is your home, your domain, and with only your trusted son for company, you no longer bother concealing your magic, nor your strangeness.
When you gather water from the creek, your reflected eyes churn with the colors and memories of a hundred thousand souls.
You have returned to the customs and tongue of your origins, a language and traditions not seen or heard in millennia, teaching Pares the same.
Your son may be unhappy, you may be hurtling toward an uncertain future, but for now, you are content.
And you are busy. Having mastered the baking of a coarse, hearty bread from the kernels of the tall grasses that grow between the hills, you make loaf after loaf for your constantly hungry, growing son.
You are setting it to bake on the rocks surrounding your cookfire when Pares races up the path snaking through your thriving garden.
“Amah!” he cries. “There are people on the beach!”
And indeed, there are.
Two men, half dead, have washed up among the crude remnants of a wooden crate.
You are apprehensive, Pares is ecstatic, and for his sake, you tend to the men instead of letting the tide take them.
They are dazed, bewildered, grateful to be alive but heartsick to learn that this is an island with no means of escape.
They have wives, children, lives to return to, and you assure them that you understand, that it will take time to settle into the rhythms of their new world.
For a while, it seems as though the men understand this.
It is a pleasant surprise, a revelation to have new blood.
They cut wood to bolster the walls of your home, to build sturdy furniture.
The captain has a steady hand with a slingshot and so he takes over hunting, teaching Pares the same.
Sailors, you learn, are not afraid of hard work and do not balk at helping to garden, to harvest, to cook.
They have quick fingers with a needle and if you still wish for wool, for spinning and weaving proper cloth, it is good to have more blankets and garments of stitched animal hides on a cold night.
Besides, your nights are not so cold anymore.
Longing for touch, for pleasure, you have taken their captain with his steady hands to bed.
Neither of you trust the other. He believes you are otherworldly, has asked Pares outright if you are a goddess, a spirit, a witch.
Neither do you think him entirely innocent: for should a good captain not have gone down with his ship, saving others?
But this distrust does little to dampen your delight in one another.
You teach each other your tongues and when another wreck washes into the bay, empty of souls but rich in cargo, the group of you celebrates with your first taste of wine in years, in draping one another in beaded necklaces and inhaling the sweet smell of dried cinnamon quills.
There are also tools: iron nails, rope, some canvas.
The men’s eyes alight with ambition as they drag the wreck ashore and set to stripping it.
Hope kindles in you. If other ships can find their way here, perhaps there is a future to be seized. A new settlement to be built among waves of refugees and scavenged goods.
But neither the sailors nor Pares are thinking of a future here; they still plot an escape, ignoring your warnings.
What do women know anyway? Is not the weaker sex prone to hysteria, to superstition?
And after a night of too much drink, the second sailor sets off into the hills, determined to discover if the griffins you speak of with hushed terror truly exist.
The captain and Pares find him disemboweled the next morning.
They bring him, clinging to life, to your door, shouting for aid. You do what you can with your knowledge of local herbs and healing, but your magic has never extended to the knitting of bones and flesh, and you cannot stop the running of his blood into the sand, the dimming of his eyes.
With little recourse, you race to retrieve your spindle.
The captain and Pares are confused but you ignore them as you try to call to your old talents, to see if in the great haze of futures, you might spin a thread in which this man survives.
You have not dared call upon this power, this urge that has sustained you for eons.
But as with your other magic, you find this one transformed.
You see no future possibilities; indeed, where you once glimpsed futures, a great heap of numerous twining strands, you now simply see the sailor’s self.
His soul? His spirit? You are not certain how to describe it; there are too many competing theologies in your head.
But you suspect that it can be plucked from the ether, that if you had fiber to spin, you could pin him down, pull him back from death’s gate.
You try, a palm against his bloody belly, your other hand twirling an empty spindle . . .
The sailor abruptly sits up. A few torn pieces tumble out of his ruined abdomen, but his wound has stopped bleeding.
He doesn’t seem to notice. There is a stilted light in his eyes and with great shock, you realize you can see out of his eyes as well.
That you can lift his hand, that you can give the shade of what remains of his spirit instructions and he will dutifully follow them.
So what if he seems little more than a walking corpse, if he doesn’t remember his name? You remember his name.
He is called Mitanni.
With rabbit gut, you sew up his midsection though the stitches will never heal. Then you try to assure Pares and the captain that you will learn to fix this, that they need not fear. By the time you are called upon to do this again . . .
The captain is aghast. “Again? I do not want this done to me.”
Pares looks equally horrified. Frightened—and you realize you have made a terrible mistake, speaking openly in front of them. Two humans, two mortals who cannot be expected to understand what is best for them.
So, you lie. “Of course not.”
You try to return to normal; to cook their meals, to mend their clothes. To be a more accommodating lover, a more supportive mother. To do all the things men like in those who feed them, love them, serve them. You speak less, smile more.
But you also keep the spindle close—in a pouch around your waist, hidden beneath your ragged skirt of fur and feathers. One cannot risk something so precious and the spindle is your body, your heart, far more than this mortal form.
Besides, you may need it again.