The Green Witch

Chapter Six

     That evening, back in her cottage as she curled up in her favourite chair, she heard the wind blowing outside, steadily growing in strength. There was a storm coming. A chilly breeze was already pushing its way in through tiny gaps around the doors and windows and she pulled the shawl tighter around her shoulders to keep warm. She had lit an oil lamp, standing on the small table beside her, and its yellow light illuminated the pages of the book she was reading just enough for her to make out the crabby, handwritten text.

     She owned nine books, all of which had belonged to her mother, and some of them had belonged to her grandmother before her. Family heirlooms passed down from generation to generation. Each one an individual, hand crafted work of art in this world that still lacked the printing press. The one she was reading, angling the pages so that they caught the light better, was a collection of the sayings and life experiences of Goodwife Gelda, an old woman whose daughter had been a friend of her mother. In the passage Tala was currently squinting her eyes at, Gelda was recounting her experiences of the raising and breeding of pigs, passing on her wisdom to someone who hadn't been born when severe arthritis in her hips and knees had left her homebound with nothing else to occupy her time but carefully and meticulously putting her life down on thick, heavy parchment.

     It occurred to Tala, as the wind howled and battered the trees outside, that what she was holding in her hands was more magical than anything that any witch had ever done. With a book, a woman who had died thirty years before could speak to her as if she were still alive and sitting in the room with her. The bishops and priests who preached in their pulpits every Sunday morning accused witches of necromancy, of communicating with the spirits of the dead (something that, to the best of her knowledge, no real witch had ever been able to do) but what was reading a book if it wasn't exactly that? And the real miracle was that it didn't require any magic at all. All that was needed was to learn to read; something that anyone, even the greatest simpleton, was capable of.

     There was a rattling clatter from outside as something metal was blown along the crazy paved path that led to the outhouse. The lid of her waste bin, probably. She must have forgotten to put the rock on it to weigh it down, or perhaps the foxes had pushed it off to get at the uneaten remains of her morning's breakfast. She sighed. She'd spoken to them about it time and again but the lure of food was just too great for the creatures to resist even though it was bad for their stomachs. The number of times she'd found puddles of fox vomit in her herb garden...

     She should go out and find the lid before it was blown all the way to Merrin, she thought. She actually rose from her chair, but one glance out through the window, whose curtains were billowing slightly in the wind that found its way in through the badly fitted glass, was enough to put her off. It was full night out there, but enough light from the oil lamp filtered out through the slightly green glass to illuminate trees that waved like demented demons in the wind that had now reached gale force. She definitely didn't want to go out in that. The animals would help her find it when the storm had passed, she thought. Especially the foxes. They'd caused the problem. They would help her fix it.

     She was jolted out of her thoughts by a loud crack coming from outside the window. The wind had broken a branch of the huge and ancient ash tree that grew just outside, in the garden. She would have some clearing up to do in the morning when the storm finally abated, she thought. Half the tree was dead, and every time the wind blew with any force twigs and small branches rained down to litter her garden. If a large branch was getting ready to fall, as sounded likely, she would have to cut it up into neat lengths with the steel saw she kept in the shed at the bottom of the garden. It would be hard work because the saw had long since lost its full sharpness and dead ashwood was hard. Brittle but hard. On the plus side, though, she would end up with enough firewood piled up outside the kitchen to last her a good way into the winter.