The Gallows Curse

The cunning woman's cottage was the last in the village, tucked among the trees, built hard against an old oak. In fact, you might say that the ancient tree was her cottage, for a great branch of the living tree came right through the thatch and formed the beam which supported the roof. Like Gytha herself, the cottage half belonged to the village and half to the forest.

It was a fair stride from any of the neighbouring crofts, for though land was scarce people were reluctant to build too close to her. Healer she may have been, but what might happen, the villagers asked themselves, if you accidentally crossed a woman like that? Supposing your chickens wandered into her toft and uprooted her seedlings, or your children broke her pots in a game of football? An ordinary villager might get angry and demand compensation, or might even break your own pots in revenge. But there was no way of knowing what dark magic a cunning woman might weave if she took against you and gave you the evil eye.

Although they were wary of her, that still didn't stop the villagers hastening to her door when they or their cattle fell sick, or they wanted a charm to protect their crops. Elena had been to Gytha's croft several times over the years. Her mother had taken her there as a baby when she'd fallen ill with the quinsy and later with agues and fevers. A neighbour had carried her as a child with a deep stab wound to her thigh when she had fallen on the prongs of a dung drag. If such a wound had festered, Elena might easily have lost her leg or even her life, as many a strapping man had done.

But Gytha had dressed the cut with herbs and then she had taken a rosy apple and thrust twelve thorns into it to draw the poison from the wound. And it had worked; the deep wound had healed without festering, though Elena still bore a silvery-white scar in the shape of a rosebud on her hip. A sign of hope and promise, everyone said. What better omen of future love and happiness could any young girl be blessed with?

Now Gytha sat sideways to Elena on a low stool, trying to catch the last of the fading winter light from the open doorway as she picked over a bowl of beans. She was a tall, lithe woman, with hair as dark as a raven's wing and slate-blue eyes, colder than steel in winter. Her mother occupied the single bed in the corner of the cottage which was heaped with blankets and threadbare cloaks piled over her against the cold.

The old woman, once a great healer herself, sat upright in the bed, her blue eyes now milky with blindness. She mumbled constantly to herself, her twisted fingers fumbling with a heap of bleached white bones in her lap, the vertebrae of cats, foxes and sheep mostly, though some in the village whispered that there were little children's bones among the pile. All the same, they pitied the poor old woman for her infirmity. Gytha and her mother had cures for every ailment a man could suffer, so the villagers said, but they had no cure for old age.

Gytha tossed a handful of beans into the pot bubbling on the fire in the centre of the earth floor. 'So how does this dream of yours end?'

'I pick the baby up . . .' Elena faltered, twisting a handful of her thick russet kirtle.

Gytha glanced sharply over at her. 'And then?'

'That's all. Then I wake up.' Elena watched the orange • flames running lightly over the branch on the fire. She could feel Gytha's eyes on her, but she was afraid to meet her gaze in case Gytha read something in her face, something Elena did not want to hear uttered aloud.

'So in this dream you hear a bairn cry and you pick it up.' She snorted in disbelief. 'If that really were all, lass, you'd not have come to me.'

Gytha laid aside the bowl of beans and crossed to where Elena sat and pulled her to her feet. Before Elena could stop her, she was pressing Elena's belly.

'Thought as much. Three or four moons gone, I reckon. Was well timed. Green mist babies are born small, but they thrive better. Does that lad of yours know his seed's sprouting?'

Elena bit her lip and nodded. 'But no else knows in case word gets back to the manor. Don't want to leave afore I have to; we'll need all the money we can get when the baby's born.'

Gytha looked down at her, her already hard eyes narrowing. 'So you've not come to me to get rid of the cub?'

'No!' Elena stumbled backwards in horror. 'No, I'd never want rid of Athan's baby. I love him. He's so proud that he's to be a father. He says he'll love me all the more for giving him a child and I want to make him glad he chose me. I want his child more than I've ever wanted anything, that's why . . .' she gazed wildly round, as if the words that eluded her were hiding somewhere among the crocks and bunches of herbs, '... that's why the dreams frighten me. The same one night after night, it must be an omen. Something must be wrong. . . the baby might be in danger.'

Gytha pulled a stained and patched old cloak from her mother's bed and laid it on the floor. 'Lie down and I'll see what I can see.'

She took a shallow bowl carved from yew wood from the shelf, poured water into it and, motioning for Elena to pull up her skirts, laid the bowl on her bare belly. Gytha's fingers briefly touched the silver rose scar on Elena's thigh.

'You still have the scar from when I tended you as a bairn. So many moons ago that was, yet gone in an owl's blink.' She glanced over at her mother, and the old woman's fingers quickened as they scurried among her bones.

'Hold the bowl still, lass.' Gytha broke an egg into the bowl and then, pulling down the front of her kirtle, took her knife and slashed a small cut in her left breast, letting a few drops of blood fall into the water.

She swirled the mixture with an ash twig and stared down into the bowl. Elena watched the furrows between Gytha's eyes deepen.

'No, that can't be . . . the spirits must be wrong,' she murmured softly to herself. 'Rowan will speak the truth.' She rose and fetched another twig from the shelf. Then she bent over the bowl again, squeezing the cut on her breast so that more drops of blood fell into the mixture as she stirred with the new twig. Finally, she rose and took the bowl from Elena's hands, pouring the contents - water, egg and blood — into the supper pot of woodcock and beans bubbling over the fire.

'Did you see anything?' Elena asked fearfully, pulling her skirts down.

'You'll be safely brought to bed, you and the child. You've no need to fret on that score. You can tell your Athan that he'll have a fine son to his name,' she said, still with her back to Elena. She turned, scrubbing her hands briskly on the coarse homespun of her kirtle, as if she was trying to rid herself of a stain. 'I'll take the dried apricots in payment, and you'd best get yourself back to the manor now, afore it gets too dark to find the track.'

'No . . . you saw something else, I know you did. I can see it in your face. Tell me what else you saw, I have to know.'

Gytha glanced over at her mother in the bed. She had turned her sightless eyes in their direction and seemed to be aware for the first time of their presence.

'Madron, have the spirits spoken to you?' Gytha asked.

The old crone extended a trembling hand towards them. On her palm was a bleached white vertebra bone. It might have been the remains of the old woman's supper, except that it was stained with a wine-red mark, a single letter it looked like, though Elena, unable to read, could not make it out.

Gytha groaned and spat three times on the back of her two fingers. 'Three times — ash, rowan, bone — and each time the same. It is sealed. No power on earth can change it.'

'But what is sealed?' Elena demanded.

'There's a shadow on the heels of the boy.'

'Everyone has a shadow.'

'Not like this. Not a human shadow, the shadow of a fox. It's a portent of deception ... a thing to be feared. The fox is the Devil's sign.'

Elena gave a little wail and crossed herself. 'My baby ... what. . . what's going to happen to him?'

Gytha shook her head. 'The portent may not be about the bairn, but what will follow in his wake. The dream, you say you have it every night, and it's always the same?'

Elena nodded dumbly.

'Then you must finish it — see what happens to the child in your dream, then you'll know.'

Elena rocked back and forth where she sat, her face buried in her hands. 'But I can't finish it; I always wake up as I pick up the child. You can see the future. You have to look in the bowl again, please —'

'Wouldn't do any good, the spirits'll tell me no more. It's your dream, only you can see the way it ends.' Gytha crossed back to the fire, stirring the iron pot so that a rich aroma of woodcock and thyme rose from it in a cloud of steam. 'But I might be able to help you stay longer in the night-hag's world to see what you must see more clearly.'

Again she looked across at her mother as if silently asking her something. The old woman was leaning forward in her bed. She licked her lips like a hungry animal, and there was such an expression of greed on her withered old face that if she'd been younger you might have called it lust.

Gytha crossed to the end of her mother's bed and reached into the narrow space between the foot of the bed and the wattle wall. She seemed to be groping for something, and finally pulled out a small wooden box. She opened it and held up a shrivelled black root, roughly formed into the shape of two legs, two arms and a body, with a head made by the withered knot where leaves had once grown.

Yadua. Some call them mandrakes. The male is white, but this is the woman, black and precious as sable. Comes all the way from the hot lands across the sea.'

Gytha was honest about that much at least. It was the genuine article. There are many bilge-spewers and piss-filchers who, through ignorance or greed, will try to pass off bryony root as mandrakes. Any fool holding them in his hands can feel they are as lifeless as drowned kittens and about as much use. But that cunning woman was no fool and she had enough respect for what we could do to give us our proper name, for an immortal deserves a godlike appellation.

Gytha cradled the mandrake in the palm of her hand as if it was a baby. 'You must take a drop of your blood drawn from your tongue and a drop of white milk from a man, smear them on the head of the creature, then hide her beneath the place where you sleep. She'll strengthen your dreams so that you will hear the spirits speaking to you and see the shadows more clearly.'

Elena scrambled up, holding out her hands for the mandrake, but Gytha swept it away from her reach.

'I told you, they grow only in the hot lands. Men risk madness and death to capture them, for they scream as they are dragged from the earth, a sound so dreadful that it shatters a man's reason. Yadua is costly, worth far more than a few dried apricots.'

'But I only want to borrow it for a night, if it shows me what —'

Gytha laughed. 'She can't be lent or borrowed. A fetch will only bring visions to the one who owns it. You must buy her from me and once she is bought, you can only rid yourself of her by selling her in kind, for the same price at which she was bought.'

'I have money. Lady Anne gives me coins and clothes, ones that she has finished with, and pretty silver pins too.'

Gytha shook her head. 'You think I bought Yadua with money or jewels? Where would I get such things? No, you may take her now and one day in the months or years to come, I'll ask you to perform some small service for me. That will be the payment. Are we agreed?'

Elena hesitated, as well she might. It's foolish to strike a bargain when you don't know the price. And everyone knows you must never fail to pay a cunning woman, unless you have grown weary of living. It's as dangerous as swimming in the mill race or killing the king's venison; worse, for even a slow hanging is quicker and less painful than the death that a cunning woman will send you. But, so Elena reasoned, Gytha had refused payment.

'Swear on the bones.' The voice from the bed was cracked and shrill.

Elena jumped. She couldn't remember ever having heard the old woman speak before.

The old lady was leaning, forward, her white, sightless eyes fixed on Elena's own as if she could see right through to her soul. 'Unless you see where the shadow of the devil fox is running, you'll not be able to protect yourself or the bairn. You need Yadua. Swear you will do what my daughter says.'

Both women were watching her intently. Elena found herself nodding, and the old woman relaxed against the bed as though she could sense the movement of assent. Gytha took her wrist and led her, stumbling, to her mother's bed. The old woman fumbled for Elena's free hand and pushed it down upon the heap of bones so hard that it felt as if she was trying to impress her skin with the seal of them. Elena winced, but the old woman's hand held her fast like an iron shackle. 'Say it.'

'I sw . . . swear.'

They released her. Gytha wrapped the mandrake in a piece of rag and thrust it into her hands.

'Remember first you must feed her — a drop of his seed, a drop of your blood.' As Elena walked away, Gytha called after her, Yadua has other powers, great powers which she can turn against those who do not pay the price for her. I warn you, do not betray her.'

Gytha leaned against the door post of her little hut, watching the twilight gather up Elena's slender figure as she disappeared into the shadows. Then the cunning woman dragged herself upright and wandered over to the fire. She stood warming her hands over the flames.

'Have I chosen right, Madron?'

'The choice was never yours to make,' Madron spat. You think you have that power? The day Yadua healed her, Yadua marked her.'

Madron heaved herself upright in the bed. From under the filthy covers she pulled a small wizen apple dried to the lightness of a feather over the smoke of the fire. A scrap of bloodstained cloth torn from a child's shift was tied about it. The wizened fruit was pierced with eleven black thorns. The twelfth thorn was now ash blowing about the land wherever the wind would drive it.

Madron held out the dried fruit in her wrinkled palm. 'Her apple. She was the one who came when you burned the thorns. Of all those girls you made apples for, she was the only one to come when you summoned her and on the very day the spirits warned us. She must be the one Yadua has chosen.'

Gytha took the pierced apple and rolled it in her hands, pressing the thorns deeper and deeper into the dried withered flesh. 'I can summon any living creature to me, be it man or beast, but getting them to act against their nature is not so easy.'

'You must make it her nature. She has Yadua now. So you must make her do what we need. Yadua will not let us rest in this world or the next till she does. It's not just Yadua's screams that send men mad, as well you know.'

'But how am I to make her, Madron? She's not —'

'That's your trouble, lass, always wanting to know how and why and when. Too impatient to let anything brew to its full strength. What have I always told you? You have to raise a skeleton one bone at a time afore you can set it dancing. We've waited many years, but now at last we've proof that the spirits are stirring. The first bone has come to us already, the next is yours to summon. Trust the spirits, they'll show you how.'

Gytha dropped the wizened thorn apple with its scrap of blood-soaked cloth into the ancient scrip hanging from her waist. She scowled. Madron still treated her as a child, even though Gytha was the one who had to nurse her now. But in their own way mother and daughter did have a fondness for each other, for who else did they have to cling to in life? And there were other ties that bound them too. Some bonds are much stronger even than love or death. For words are not the only gifts the dead bequeath to the living. Madron had suckled Gytha on the rich milk of hatred and now it ran like poison through both their veins.

The old woman turned her head, trying to sense what her daughter was doing. 'My supper? You fetching my supper? You've been at it long enough.'

'Patience, Madron, you'll just have to wait for it to brew, isn't that what you always taught me?'

Her mother spat angrily into the rushes. Gytha smiled and slowly stirred the pot, letting the rich aroma of the woodcock waft across to the hungry old woman. She had her own ways of tormenting her Madron.