The Witchery, page 42
I placed all the Books of Shadows into the crates in which they’d come.
We carried Marian to the Mourning Suite, and stocked that room with fresh ice.
And so on…Calixto and Luc saw to the Soror Mystica, speeding to completion repairs they’d begun post-Gotham but bringing aboard lengths of chain and extra anchors as well.
Finally, there was naught to do but wait.
Too late to sail, Grania had Seen that the storm would come from the southwest. Now it was nearer, Leo could divine its path by those same means she used to site wrecks. And so we were able to chart the storm’s progress upon the witchery floor:
It would hit Havana. “Hard,” said Grania. Thereafter it would stir the Gulf and Straits to a froth, and sit overhead a long and drenching while. “I See three days with little blue above,” said Grania; and by chaomancy—from the Greek chaos, but meaning “the atmosphere,” as read by wind direction, squalls, dust devils, and such—which Leo had been learning at Grania’s knee, she, Leo, saw the streets of the town running like rivers.
This Sighting upset Leo terribly, and after it she slept for several days; for, ever since her northward sail, she’d suffered nightmares of death by drowning. No: Rather it was surviving drowning that she feared, sinking to the seafloor alive, or floating as shark-meal, all the while attendant upon the sole thing—besides exsanguination by bullet or blade—that will kill a witch: the Coming of the Blood…. Such were her nightmares; and so it surprised us all somewhat when she announced she’d ride out the storm not in the Witchery with us, Grania and me, but aboard the Soror Mystica with Calixto and Luc.
And indeed, early that morning of October the eleventh, when first the winds picked up, the trinity took our schooner from her slip out into the harbor, there to let her suffer the storm at anchor. Others soon followed suit, owing not so much to imitation as that old saw holding that in storms ships are safer at sea, where there isn’t the worry of being dashed against the wharves by the wind and waves. The open sea relieved us all of that particular worry, perhaps; and one less worry was welcome after two weeks of worries in which some of us had Seen but all of us had learned the fate that none of us carried to articulate: The life we’d known, and which had suited us so well, was about to end. Ironically, it would be taken from us by those same elements that had brought it: water and wind. Further irony: If either Grania or Leo Saw the effects of fire upon our common fate, neither spoke of it…. Would that they had. Perhaps I’d have been more wary.
Fire…Water…The marriage of the two…I’ll approach these subjects with…subtlety, yes. You’ll grant me that, surely, sister, as it’s myself I eulogize here.
…Grania and I discussed fire the morning of the storm: We thought it unwise to leave the witchery as it was; for what if events-to-come brought strangers to it as it lay, whole or in ruins? What then? And so we resolved to pack the cinder pit with our pharmacopoeia, and all our most damning paraphernalia. Into the pit went jars of pickled this, pots of powdered that, et cetera. Need be, we’d douse and burn it all.
By midday the storm was upon us, and the wind sounded (so said my Grania) “like somethin’ crossways between all the island cats being crucified and some ol’ crone keenin’ her husband home.” Daring the tower, we looked out at the Soror Mystica in the harbor; but we dared not tarry at the shuddering sill, as it seemed the dead-panes might pop and shatter at any second. From the smaller windows of the third-story witchery we watched the sea encroach upon the streets, and saw the winds render cannon shot of coconuts…. Later, it’d be seen that a one-by-four piece of the wharf had been driven by the wind through one of our own coconut palms, such that the tree was now cruciform four feet up its slender trunk: a Calvary perfectly suited to that cruel end Grania had imagined for the islands’ many cats.
“Waves,” said Grania in wonderment. “Damned I am if those be not waves down there in the street!”
“Then damned you are, my dear; for those are waves, I fear”; whereupon, portentously, I recited two lines of Ovid’s that came to me then:
And flowing water filled the final space;
it held the solid world in its embrace.
And unhappily, unfortunately, I am able to report that the water, the waves, had already risen as high as the fifth step of our stoop, leaving but three more before the porch would be covered and the first floor breached. Embraced, indeed. This I’d learn as a result of what next Grania exclaimed:
“Me poor pet!” said she. “Cuchulain!”
“What of him? He’s in the loft, is he not? As high and dry as any man or beast could hope to be?” We’d all discussed the best place for Cuchulain to be in the coming storm, and had deemed that the warehouse; for, being his witch’s familiar, he watched the weather as closely as she and barked at it rather vexingly. Truth be told, no one wanted him about, barking back the wind and water. No one but Grania, that is.
“Aye, but he’s leashed to the loft’s ladder down low, as it was the wind gettin’ into the warehouse that worried me the more. Oh, but now ’tis the sea risin’ so as to…Goddess be damned! Why didn’t I bring him here?”
“We discussed this and—”
“I know full well what was discussed, me love, but now me pet is there and I’m here, with the sea risin’ to separate us.” Her Eye had turned. “I don’t like it, ’tis all. And if you’d a familiar, you’d know….”
“Parbleu, not that again,” said I, regrettably; for those were the last words Grania Bynre would hear from my mortal mouth, in my mortal voice.
Exasperated, I turned from Grania toward the witchery’s windows. It was true, and frightfully so: Here came the sea. And the winds had risen, too, such that houses had begun to be unroofed: Sheets of tin spun above the flooded streets. I could no longer see the Soror Mystica; for the rain came on sideways now, and sprayed the windows with the force of buckshot. Something heavy hit the house, down low. I remember thinking that the windows of the tower would not, could not last for long; but when I turned to say as much to Grania, she was gone.
“Grania?” No response. I climbed to the tower. She was not there. I called out again, “Grania!” but I could hardly hear myself over the howl of the storm…. Could it be…? Could she have…?
The term a fool’s errand seems hardly to suffice for what next I did; but let me spare myself the self-scorn and repeat what already is known: I was in love; and therefore twice, thrice, four times the fool I’d otherwise have been. Only love could have sent me out into that storm in search of a dog that, though I wished it no ill, certainly, was the last, the very last of the Shadow-kin I’d ever mourn.
…But that’s what I did; though at first—having sought Grania high and low within the Witchery—it was my witch I was after, ready to chide her for braving the elements on behalf of her Cuchulain. Familiar or no, she ought to have known better. And I was keen to tell her so, and carry her back to safety if need be.
Once I stepped off that fifth, flooded step of our stoop, and waded down into hip-high seawater, I could not even raise my face to peer down Caroline Street toward the warehouse, toward where, surely, Grania waded before me; for the wind and rain came on painfully. My spectacles blew from my face. In an instant I was soaked through. But still I waded toward the warehouse, leaning into the storm and doubtless seeming as set upon my course as a ship’s figurehead.
I never caught up to Grania, because she hadn’t gone out.
She’d slipped from my side not to sneak out to save her Cuchulain, but rather to retrieve, from somewhere deep in our common closet, a clay whistle that had been her grandmother’s, and had long been used to call Cuchulain’s sires home over the fields and fens, the tones of which she hoped would rise to the dog’s ears above the storm. Thusly would she—somehow—tell the dog to slip its leash. If told to do so, Cuchulain could and would obey, as he’d done the time Grania had sent him teeth-bared after the buttocks of Captain Roberts’s man. And then, freed of his leash, the dog could scurry up-ladder to the loft.
All this Grania effected when finally she found the whistle, slipped through the witchery—wondering where I’d gone—and climbed to the tower; where, crazily, she raised a rattling window and stepped through it, out onto the widow’s walk. She whistled as best she could. And turning back toward the tower window, wind-whipped and worried…well, it was then she saw me—my hair, said she, shone like a halo—fifty or so paces down Caroline Street: too far to summon home by whistle, by words, by any means she knew, though she tried, and cried my name from the tower till she feared the wind would take her and toss her out to sea.
Grania’s whistle worked on Cuchulain, yes; for I found the dog loft-high in the fast-flooding warehouse. From there he snarled down at me where I stood, soaked, rather more than disheveled and none too happy. I asked where his mistress was. Had she come? Was she yet at the Witchery? (Already I half supposed my mistake.) Verily, I made demands of a dog. As if he’d the power of speech. But all I heard were the boards of the wharf giving with groans, and sounding like breaking bones. I’d have to take the dog and quit the warehouse quickly, lest I lose access to land, land that already bore all the aspects of the sea. Or I could settle with Cuchulain and hope the warehouse held; but the flooded floor shimmered now in the scanty light—none can say what that scummed, slickened water held—and boards had begun to blow off its frame. In the short while I stood trying to summon down from the loft the snarling mutt, enough water came into the warehouse to float things—cracked barrels, broken crates, bottles slipped from their shelves…—and to move them far from where they’d been when first I’d entered the warehouse. The whole of the structure would go, surely, and the sole question was, or rather seemed, which element would take it: water or wind.
“Come!” said I to Cuchulain. He would not. I tried to imitate the Irish I’d heard Grania speak to him. Still, nothing. I wondered if he could not hear me over the storm’s din. I shouted louder. More snarling. Perhaps he could not see me well enough to know I was not an intruder, the which he’d had to ward off on occasion. So it was that I cast about for a lamp to light.
I found one beneath the loft: a large lamp whose glass belly was gravid with oil. Lit, it would have illumined half the warehouse. I took it down from its hook, drew a long-handled match from a tin hammered to the fast-faltering wall, and struck it upon a strip of sandpaper, once, twice, thrice…. The lamp lit; but still I was raising its wick when I stepped out from under the loft, looked up, and saw the collie coming down upon me.
Owing to the weight of the dog, or the rising water, or my own fears, I lost my balance and fell backward. Though my fall was broken by the trough of sawdust and wood shavings into which I fell, my head met its wooden frame hard, very hard. The last things I recall are Cuchulain, barking, weighty upon my chest, and seeing the lamp I flung as I fell. Weighted as it was, the lamp went end over end toward the wall, spinning like a tomahawk. Doubtless it burst as it hit; and what had been light was reduced to its more incendiary components: oil and flame.
As for what those flames found first—the salt, the sulfur, or the mercury of the prima materia—I cannot say; for I lay unconscious atop that too conductive sawdust and tinder…. Perhaps it was the salinity of the seawater. Perhaps it was the storm-seasoned rain. In any case, it seems to me that water in one of its forms must have been the magisterium, that agent that provoked or leastways allowed the alchemical change…. Enfin, soon the fire had found the three elements of the prima materia and water as well, and so all the colors came, and when next I knew consciousness—what else to call it?—I saw that finally, finally the work of Queverdo Brù was done:
I was his Rebus, that alchemical vessel in which, in whom, his Great Work was achieved. Done, yes.
And though I’ll never again live, neither will I die a second time.
Chapter Thirty-eight
Nonne Salomon dominatus daemonum est?
Had not Solomon dominion over demons?
—LEONTIUS OF CONSTANTINOPLE
EVERYONE SAW THE WINDOWS OF THE WAREHOUSE GO red—the trinity, my three, saw it from the cabin of the Soror Mystica whilst Grania set her spyglass to the eye of a dead woman and watched from a tower window. Both witches sickened when the high windows of the warehouse blew, and the inrush of wind fed the flames; for they knew, physically, my distress. Of course, only Grania knew what had happened. Or supposed it…. So it was she keened along with the wind.
…As for the fire itself, well, I wrote about that as best I could and did so first, in what Grania refers to as the “pro-lo-glue” of the current volume. I shan’t correct her either; for her way with English—which, at times, seems hardly our common tongue—charms me. And she, having been born to an oral tradition, is yet wary of all things literary—indeed, she knew nothing of the Books of Shadows till she learned of them from Leo. Now she keeps her own, of course; the which no one is let to see, not even me. Yes, she recommended that I write of the fire up front. “Put the worst of it first,” said she, “as not every witch is wise, and not every witch can be counted on to dig down to the seed of the tale.”
…The seed.
It was sown by Queverdo Brù well nigh a decade before my death, and lay more or less dormant a long while, wanting only the confluence of fire and water to…Enfin, I suppose if Brù had had his way, if he’d been able to see his plan through and slip me—whole or cleaved into pieces, and somehow wedded to water—into that athanor of his, I’d have ascended sooner…. Et pourquoi? To serve him like Azoth, the demon Paracelsus is said to have trapped in the crystal pommel of his sword? Or simply as proof positive of all his puffery, of Perfection?
No matter now. The alchemist did not have his way with me, and if I am his Success, well, he knows nothing of it. I lived ten years beyond my escape from his house, from Havana. Alive, I learned the ars vivendi. Dying, the ars moriendi. And now there stretches before me all eternity. So far the state suits me. It has been…sweet, merci bien. Neither will I bemoan any bad luck; for, after all, and as Proverbs 3:16 puts it:
Longitudo dierum in dextera ejus et in sinistra illius divitiae et gloria; or: Length of days is in her right hand, and in her left hand riches and honor.
What witch would ask for more?…
Oh, but there is one thing that troubles me time and again: What will the death of my beloveds bring? I fear—if fear it be—a loneliness greater than any I knew whilst alive; for who will I watch over when they ascend in their turn? Will they all achieve the Summerland, sans moi? Will I be let to follow? If not, well, I suppose I’ll simply stay in death’s dream state and no longer descend into borrowed bodies; as I did, for the first time, within a week of my death in the warehouse, brought back by the brass bells, the spells, et cetera, and all else Grania and the trinity tried in summoning me home.
Oui, oui, oui, and blessed be, they all survived the storm, Grania in the Witchery and the trinity at sea…. Less fortunate was the Soror Mystica: Weakened as she was, she finally went down and slumbers at “full fathom five.”
…Grania, la pauvre, for a whole day she thought she’d lost us all. I was gone. She knew it. Still, needing to see the scene of it, once the waters receded and the streets—though chockablock with barrels, boats, and even bodies—were passable, the waters only knee-high, she went to where the warehouse had stood. She found naught but timber, both charred and soaked. And standing in the drizzle to which the storm had ceded, beneath skies cruelly blue, she looked down to find Cuchulain at her side. How he’d escaped the fire and flood, I cannot say; but if Grania sought further confirmation that I had not died, she had its opposite now from her familiar, who told her, by the tone and pitch and length of his howl (ololygmancy, this is, oft referenced by sisters more familiar with canine familiars than I) that I was indeed gone; whereupon, she sank into the sea of the street and…—
Stay: I’ve no wish to speak of a grieving Grania.
Instead let me say that she learned the same way—from Cuchulain, who quieted as she whispered their names into his triangulate ear—that the trinity was alive, albeit at sea, and unseen from shore. Summoning what strength was left to her, she hired a search party, put Simon at its fore, and sent them off in one of the island’s few floatable boats.
They were found some three miles northwest of the harbor, in shoal water, sitting upon the scarred hull of the tipped Soror Mystica. Strewn about were other boats that had gone fully bottom’s-up, a three-masted square rigger that had rolled onto her side, several dismasted schooners, and a broken-up brig. (Admittedly, some consolation came when later we learned that the storm had tossed Captain Roberts’s Eliza Catherine onto Key Vaca.)
The afternoon prior, as, I suppose, Grania and I hunkered down within the Witchery, and the winds came on, the Soror Mystica rode to two anchors—starboard and port—with nine hundred feet of chain out. They’d brought down the yards and secured them on deck, so as to lessen the windage aloft; but as the worst of the winds buffeted the old gal, she swung broadside to the direction of the wind, and in so doing put too great a strain on her anchors. By the time I reached the warehouse, the risen sea would have been washing over the Mystica’s decks; and by the time Luc thought he saw fire on our wharf, water was already rising in the hull, and the trinity—yes, Léopoldine as well—were busy bailing as best they could. Soon afterward they abandoned their efforts; for the starboard anchor chain parted and the Soror Mystica began dragging her port anchor. The compasses were wild, and the storm precluded mortal sight; so it was that we, my three and I, were all set adrift at the same hour, they across the harbor, and I across the sky.
Many wreckers went down that day, and nearly all the island’s boats suffered some degree of damage. When once again the Hecate was afloat, she and the Persephone towed the Soror Mystica into deeper seas; and there we sank her. The moment her mast went under, two dolphins broke the surface, as if to say they’d see our good schooner down, and home.
