Equal Rites Read online

Page 4

  She wandered around the dark kitchen until she found a scrap of dip candle and a tinderbox. After a great deal of effort she managed to light the candle and stood it on the table, although it didn't really light the room, it simply peopled the darkness with shadows. Then she found Granny's rocking chair by the cold fireplace, and settled down to wait.

  Time passed. Nothing happened.

  Then there was a tapping at the window. Esk took up the candle stub and peered through the thick round panes.

  A beady yellow eye blinked back at her.

  The candle guttered, and went out.

  She stood stock still, hardly breathing. The tapping started again, and then stopped. There was a short silence, and then the doorlatch rattled.

  Something nasty comes, the boys had said.

  She felt her way back across the room until she nearly tripped over the rocking chair, and dragged it back and wedged it as best she could in front of the door. The latch gave a final clonk and went silent.

  Esk waited, listening until the silence roared in her ears. Then something started to bang against the little window in the scullery, softly but insistently. After a while it stopped. A moment later it started again in the bedroom above her- a faint scrabbling noise, a claw kind of noise.

  Esk felt that bravery was called for, but on a night like this bravery lasted only as long as a candle stayed alight. She felt her way back across the dark kitchen, eyes tightly shut, until she reached the door.

  There was a thump from the fireplace as a big lump of soot fell down, and when she heard the desperate scratchings coming from the chimney she slipped the bolts, threw open the door and darted out into the night.

  The cold struck like a knife. Frost had put a crust on the snow. She didn't care where she was going, but quiet terror gave her a burning determination to get there as fast as she could.

  Inside the cottage the crow landed heavily in the fireplace, surrounded by soot and muttering irritably to itself. It hopped into the shadows, and a moment later there was the bang of the latch of the stairway door and the sound of fluttering on the stairs.

  Esk reached up as high as she could and felt around the tree for the marker. This time she was lucky, but the pattern of dots and grooves told her she was over a mile from the village and had been running in the wrong direction.

  There was a cheese-rind moon and a sprinkling of stars, small and bright and pitiless. The forest around her was a pattern of black shadows and pale snow and, she was aware, not all the shadows were standing still.

  Everyone knew there were wolves in the mountains, because on some nights their howls echoed down from the high Tops, but they seldom came near the village - the modern wolves were the offspring of ancestors that had survived because they had learned that human meat had sharp edges.

  But the weather was hard, and this pack was hungry enough to forget all about natural selection.

  Esk remembered what all the children were told. Climb a tree. Light a fire. When all else fails, find a stick and at least hurt them. Never try to outrun them.

  The tree behind her was a beech, smooth and unclimbable.

  Esk watched a long shadow detach itself from a pool of darkness in front of her, and move a little closer. She knelt down, tired, frightened, unable to think, and scrabbled under the burning-cold snow for a stick.

  Granny Weatherwax opened her eyes and stared at the ceiling, which was cracked and bulged like a tent.

  She concentrated on remembering that she had arms, not wings, and didn't need to hop. It was always wise to lie down for a bit after a borrow, to let one's mind get used to one's body, but she knew she didn't have the time.

  “Drat the child,” she muttered, and tried to fly on to the bedrail. The crow, who had been through all this dozens of times before and who considered, insofar as birds can consider anything, which is a very short distance indeed, that a steady diet of bacon rinds and choice kitchen scraps and a warm roost for the night was well worth the occasional inconvenience of letting Granny share its head, watched her with mild interest.

  Granny found her boots and thumped down the stairs, sternly resisting the urge to glide. The door was wide open and there was already a drift of fine snow on the floor.

  “Oh, bugger,” she said. She wondered if it was worth trying to find Esk's mind, but human minds were never so sharp and clear as animal minds and anyway the overmind of the forest itself made impromptu searching as hard as listening for a waterfall in a thunderstorm. But even without looking she could feel the packmind of the wolves, a sharp, rank feeling that filled the mouth with the taste of blood.

  She could just make out the small footprints in the crust, half filled with fresh snow. Cursing and muttering, Granny Weatherwax pulled her shawl around her and set out.

  The white cat awoke from its private ledge in the forge when it heard the sounds coming from the darkest corner. Smith had carefully shut the big doors behind him when he went off with the nearly-hysterical boys, and the cat watched with interest as a thin shadow prodded at the lock and tested the hinges.

  The doors were oak, hardened by heat and time, but that didn't prevent them being blown right across the street.

  Smith heard a sound in the sky as he hurried along the track. So did Granny. It was a determined whirring sound, like the flight of geese, and the snowclouds boiled and twisted as it passed.

  The wolves heard it, too, as it spun low over the treetops and hurtled down into the clearing. But they heard it far too late.

  Granny Weatherwax didn't have to follow the footprints now. She aimed herself for the distant flashes of weird light, the strange swishing and thumping, and the howls of pain and terror. A couple of wolves bolted past her with their ears flattened in grim determination to have it away on their paws no matter what stood in their way.

  There was the crackle of breaking branches. Something big and heavy landed in a fir tree by Granny and crashed, whimpering, into the snow. Another wolf passed her in a flat trajectory at about head height and bounced off a tree-trunk.

  There was silence.

  Granny pushed her way between the snow-covered branches.

  She could see that the snow was flattened in a white circle. A few wolves lay at its edges, either dead or wisely deciding to make no move.

  The staff stood upright in the snow and Granny got the feeling it was turning to face her as she walked carefully past it.

  There was also a small heap in the centre of the circle, curled tightly up inside itself. Granny knelt down with some effort and reached out gently.

  The staff moved. It was little more than a tremble, but her hand stopped just before it touched Esk's shoulder. Granny glared up at the wooden carvings, and dared it to move again.

  The air thickened. Then the staff seemed to back away while not moving, while at the same time something quite indefinable made it absolutely clear to the old witch that as far as the staff was concerned this -wasn't a defeat, it was merely a tactical consideration, and it wouldn't like her to think she had won in any way, because she hadn't.

  Esk gave a shudder. Granny patted her vaguely.

  “It's me, little one. It's only old Granny. ”

  The hump didn't uncurl.

  Granny bit her lip. She was never quite certain about children, thinking of them - when she thought about them at all - as coming somewhere between animals and people. She understood babies. You put milk in one end and kept the other end as clean as possible. Adults were even easier, because they did the feeding and cleaning themselves. But in between was a world of experience that she had never really enquired about. As far as she was aware, you just tried to stop them catching anything fatal and hoped that it would all turn out all right.

  Granny, in fact, was at a loss, but she knew she had to do something.

  “Didda nasty wolfie fwiten us, den?” she hazarded.

  For quite the wrong reas
ons, this seemed to work. From the depths of the ball a muffled voice said: “I am eight, you know. ”

  “People who are eight don't curl up in the middle of the snow,” said Granny, feeling her way through the intricacies of adult-child conversation.

  The ball didn't answer.

  “I've probably got some milk and biscuits at home,” Granny ventured.

  There was no perceptible effect.

  “Eskarina Smith, if you don't behave this minute I will give you such a smack!”

  Esk poked her head out cautiously.

  “There's no need to be like that,” she said.

  When Smith reached the cottage Granny had just arrived, leading Esk by the hand. The boys peered around from behind him.

  “Um,” said Smith, not quite aware of how to begin a conversation with someone who was supposed to be dead. “They, um, told me you were - ill. ” He turned and glared at his sons.

  “I was just having a rest and I must have dozed off. I sleeps very sound. ”

  “Yes,” said Smith, uncertainly. “Well. All's well, then. What's up with Esk? ”

  “She took a bit of a fright,” said Granny, squeezing the girl's hand. “Shadows and whatnot. She needs a good warm. I was going to put her in my bed, she's a bit mazed, if that's all right with you. ”

  Smith wasn't absolutely sure that it was all right with him. But he was quite sure that his wife, like every other woman in the village, held Granny Weatherwax in solemn regard, even in awe, and that if he started to object he would rapidly get out of his depth.

  “Fine, fine,” he said, “if it's no trouble. I'll send along for her in the morning, shall I?”

  “That's right,” said Granny. “I'd invite you in, but there's me without a fire -”

  “No, no, that's all right,” said Smith hurriedly. “I've got my supper waiting. Drying up,” he added, looking down at Gulta, who opened his mouth to say something and wisely thought better of it.

  When they had gone, with the sound of the two boys' protests ringing out among the trees, Granny opened the door, pushed Esk inside, and bolted it behind them. She took a couple of candles from her store above the dresser and lit them. Then she pulled some old but serviceable wool blankets, still smelling of anti-moth herbs, from an old chest, wrapped Esk in them and sat her in the rocking chair.

  She got down on her knees, to an accompaniment of clicks and grunts, and started to lay the fire. It was a complicated business involving dry fungus punk, wood shavings, bits of split twig and much puffing and swearing.

  Esk said: “You don't have to do it like that, Granny. ”

  Granny stiffened, and looked at the fireback. It was a rather nice one Smith had cast for her, years ago, with an owl-and-bat motif. Currently, though, she wasn't interested in the design.

  “Oh yes?” she said, her voice dead-level. “You know of a better way, do you?”

  “You could magic it alight. ”

  Granny paid great attention to arranging bits of twig on the reluctant flames.

  “How would I do that, pray?” she said, apparently addressing her remarks to the fireback.

  “Er,” said Esk, “I . . . I can't remember. But you must know anyway, don't you? Everyone knows you can do magic. ”

  “There's magic,” said Granny, “and then again, there's magic. The important thing, my girl, is to know what magic is for and what it isn't for. And you can take it from me, it was never intended for lighting fires, you can be absolutely certain of that. If the Creator had meant us to use magic for lighting fires, then he wouldn't have given us - er, matches. ”