Daughter

The witch Silkiena came down the winding stairs from her house at the top of the hill. The night sky was bright with stars, and the wind fresh and cold, just as she liked it, but Silkiena barely noticed. Her eyes were bright with unshed tears, and she buried her head between her white fur cap and the white fur cloak that she had draped around her shoulders. Her eyes were fixed on the lights of the distant town, and her heart was heavy with dread and sorrow.

The stairs ended at the platform of rock which she had bound about with spells; guardian spells to keep her and hers from harm, and other guardian spells that were meant to prevent her from harming, inadvertently, those who came to her. The spells hung in her vision, little wisps and mists of colour, like the transparent breaths of ghosts. They clung around her and to her, doing what they had been created to do. She brushed them away, hardly noticing. Her feet in their thick fur-lined boots were already pointing in the direction of the town.

The path down to the town was steep and rocky, deliberately so, because the witch Silkiena did not wish to make the journey easy for her visitors. The twists and turns of the way were well-known to her, of course, so well known that she could, and often did, negotiate them in complete darkness without a stumble. By the time she reached the town the lights had begun going out; the people were early sleepers. A tram rattled by on its rails, the overhead arm shooting out a brief shower of sparks. A car drove by in the distance, its headlights painting the walls of houses as it rounded a corner. Silence fell.

The witch Silkiena walked through the silent streets, looking neither to left nor right. A tear escaped from the corner of her eye and trickled down the wrinkled black skin of her cheek and down to the necklace of flat blue stones at her throat. She made no move to brush it away. She walked past a couple of prostitutes, late out in the cold, who stared after her curiously; she walked past a gang of teenage street toughs out looking for a fight, but they moved aside silently, shivering suddenly and not with the cold, and let her pass. She noticed none of them.

By the time she had gone right through the town the streets were completely deserted. The moon had just risen, an almost invisible slice of silver, and the splinters of light the stars threw down illuminated a large bare field, on the other side of which rose low hills covered with thick woods. She walked off the street and on to the field. The grass, wiry and stiff with the frost, crunched under her boots. She did not notice it either.

On the far side of the field, deep in the shadows under the line of trees, she stopped at last and looked around. “Come out,” she said, “if you are here, as you were summoned to be.”

The creature that emerged from behind a tree was almost invisible in the dark, showing as an almost featureless silhouette. It was dwarfish, squat and broad, so much so that it seemed almost as broad as it was tall, and it rolled rather than walked. It stopped a little away from the witch Silkiena and raised its bullet head toward her.

“In the name of the Great One,” said the witch, and made a sign with her fingers. “If you know where she is, I command you to lead me to her.”

The squat creature did not move. It hunched its misshapen shoulders and looked at her with eyes that gleamed a faint yellow, even in the darkness.

“If you know which way she has gone,” amended the witch, and made the sign again, “show me the way.”

The squat creature turned silently and rolled away. Its thick short arms swung to the sides as it went, moving with such deceptive speed that Silkiena found it difficult to keep up with it. It led her deeper and deeper into the woods. The trees crowded around them, the ground was invisible and uneven, but Silkiena moved now as the thing that led her moved, stepping where it stepped, turning where it turned. As she went, she made a number of other signs with her hands and muttered under her breath, making incantations to ensure her own protection from the silent, lumpish thing that led her onwards.

The silent dwarfish creature seemed tireless. It led her on until it seemed to Silkiena that surely it must be morning already, but the darkness seemed more profound than ever. Then, suddenly, the squat form scuttled down a short slope and disappeared.

The witch Silkiena was surprised only for a moment. Then she reached under her white fur jacket and took out a tiny round object. Holding it between her hands, she breathed on it, and instantly the air all around her glowed a transparent bluish shade. She could see the creature then in all its repulsive ugliness, waiting in a fold of the earth for her. It pointed down the hill.

In the middle distance, the darkness suddenly thickened until it was as though it had solidified. Silkiena looked at it until she could make out its outlines. She looked back at her guide. “Did she go in there?” It nodded its great shaggy head, venom drooling down its matted beard.

“Then,” she told it, “in the name of the Great One, depart for your own place. Now!”

For a moment nothing happened. Then, with excruciating slowness, it began to stretch and elongate. In a moment it was like a thread, reaching up to the sky. And then, it was gone. In her mind she could only hear a faint echo like the shadow of a wailing scream.

Then she went down to the shape of darkness down the slope.

It sharpened and became more solid as she approached it. It was low, only a little higher than she was, and it wrapped itself round the trees as though they held it up. The edges of it were angular, but so indefinite that it was impossible to tell whether it was a hut or a tent or something else entirely. It looked like a shape made of darkness.

Yet, as she approached it, lights appeared. They were tiny and yellow and twinkling, and they shifted and swirled back and forth and drifted almost close enough for her to touch. When she peered at them, each point of light turned out to be a tiny winged creature, like an infinitesimal man surrounded by a halo of light. They looked at her and flew around her head and upper body. She ignored them after a moment and continued on her way.

A split appeared in the dark structure before her. Inside was a dull red light, and the light widened and drew her in.

She stood in the centre of a large room, the walls of which were hazy and indefinite, flickering and pulsing, and through them she could glimpse vague and fantastic shapes. There was furniture in the room, but it too shifted and shimmered so that she could not see it clearly.

“Kozhi,” she asked quietly, “are you here?” She didn’t expect a reply, and so it surprised her when the wall opposite her opened and someone in black came in. “What is your pleasure?”he asked.

He was tall, thin, and bald, with a pointed head and ears. Under a high arch of eyebrows were slanted deep yellow eyes and a hooked nose with flaring nostrils. His mouth was a red slit in his pale skin.

“Where is she?” the witch Silkiena asked. “She has been through here. Tell me where she is.”

The pale man with the pointed head did not ask to whom she referred. “She has gone,” he said. “Where the world ends you may find her, at the far edge of reality. She has decided on another life.”

“Show me,” Silkiena said, “how I can find her.”

The man beckoned, smiling. “Come.” His teeth were small and even and all the same shape and size. She followed him through the rent in the wall opposite and into a slanting corridor. It sloped upwards, receding into the distance, and there were doors set into either side. It cluttered with nameless junk and was far too high and long to fit into the shape of shadow Silkiena had glimpsed in the forest, but she had long since realised that the ordinary rules did not apply. Unobtrusively, she made a sign of protection, and hoped that it would work here.

The bald man gestured down the corridor. “Unfortunately,” he told her, “I can’t take you further. But the world’s end can be reached where this passage ends. Only be sure not to open any of the doors – no matter what you may see behind them.” Smiling again with his strange small teeth, he stepped back and disappeared.

The witch Silkiena stood in the corridor, alone. She waited for a moment, listening to the squeaks and grunts that came from behind the nearest door. There was a small window set in the door, covered with thick glass, and something that gleamed a faint luminous green looked at her through it. She hunched her shoulders further under her white fur coat, even though it wasn’t cold, and began climbing the corridor.

It went on a very long way. It was perfectly straight and climbed evenly and smoothly. From behind the doors on either side came low murmurs and shrill howls, and strange things gibbered at her from behind the thick small glass windows. Once, she looked back. Far away, she could only just see a point of red light, which she took to be the chamber where she had met the bald man.

“Please,” someone said in low pained tones, “help me.” The witch Silkiena’s head snapped round. She listened, and went to the nearest door and looked in.

The child looking out at her was probably about eleven. She was dressed in brownish rags and had a livid weal across her forehead. Tears trickled down her cheeks as she looked out and gestured. “Help me,” she said. “Please.”

There was a small handle inset in the door. The witch Silkiena’s hand gripped it automatically and began to push the door open, without conscious thought. Then, as her mind caught up with her body and she remembered the bald man’s warning, she paused a moment.

“Open it,” said the girl, a strange light in her eyes. “Open, quickly.”

The witch Silkiena looked at her and then spoke an ancient word, a word so old that eons had passed and civilisations risen and crumbled to dust since it had first been articulated. She pointed one of her thin black fingers at the girl and spoke it again.

The girl’s face crumbled. Her features began to run together like melting wax, and her eyes elongated until they flowed down her cheeks and became two vast and glittering patches of moisture. Her mouth drooped downwards like a short elephant trunk. She scrabbled desperately at the door and howled.

“Goodbye,” said Silkiena, and shut the door. Without another look at the creature that had pretended to be a girl, she moved on up the corridor, and this time she shut her eyes and ears to the noises and sights behind the doors.

At last the corridor ended. It ended at a small door, perfectly round, set in a blank wall, just beyond the last of the doors with the inset windows. There was no handle or other apparent way of opening the round door. She tried an Opening Spell, but it stayed obstinately shut. She stared at it, baffled.

“It can’t be opened from this side,” someone said behind her. She turned and stepped back in momentary shock.

The corridor behind her seemed filled from wall to wall and from ceiling to floor by a mass of feathers. It shuffled slowly up towards her, turning from side to side to squeeze itself along. From the centre of it a long thin beak bent towards her. There were no visible eyes or other features.

“No,” the mass of feathers said. “You can’t go through, I’m afraid.” The long beak opened, showing a rippling ribbon of reddish tongue. “You’re stuck here, aren’t you?”

There was only one thing to do, and Silkiena did it. As the mass of feathers shuffled close enough to be able to reach her with its beak, she stepped quickly to the door at the side, wrenched it open, and stepped inside.

The bottom seemed to fall out of her world.

She fell in perfect darkness and silence. After a while she seemed to be no longer falling but floating on air. She lost all sense of time. And yet she fell, and the darkness pressed in on her, so that she began to feel difficulty breathing and thinking. Everything began to squeeze together in her mind, and the air caught in her chest, and she squeezed her eyes so tightly shut that she saw pinwheels of colour. Those pinwheels were good. They helped to paint the darkness.

When she opened her eyes she was lying on a beach of white pebbles. To her left, a high white cliff reared, under a sky across which tattered white clouds fled as if pursued by devils. On her right, as she turned her head, she saw a grey-green sea which stirred and gathered itself and beat on the edges of the beach, sucking at it.

Slowly, she sat up. The beach stretched before and behind her as far as she could see, bound by white cliff on the one side and the grey-green sea on the other. Except for one thing, there was nothing else to be seen.

The one exception was a dark shape that lay, partly in the water and partly on the beach, a short distance from her. As she came closer she saw it was a small ship or large boat, without oars or masts, only a hull that lay tilted on its side, its timbers rotten and splintered. And in the shadow of it she saw something more, a splash of white, but not the white of the pebbles on the beach.

“Kozhi,” she said quietly, without surprise.

Her daughter turned her head slowly. “Yes.”

“I’ve come looking for you,” the witch Silkiena said. “I’ve come to take you home. If, that is, you want to come.”

Her daughter sat as she had, hugging her knees, and looked out at the sea. “And if I don’t want to come?” she asked at last.

“I don’t know,” Silkiena said. “I might go home without you. I might stay here with you. It’s up to you to decide, either way.”

Kozhi turned her face away from her mother, so that all the witch could see was her white fur-clad shoulders and cap. “Might I ask you a question?” she said.

“Go ahead,” Silkiena replied. “You know you can ask me anything.”

“Why do you want me to wear the witch’s blue necklace in my turn?” Kozhi asked.

“Don’t you want to?” Silkiena thought about it. “If you didn’t, all you had to do was tell me. I’d have been disappointed, of course, but it wouldn’t have been the end of the world.”

“You know – you never asked me that before. Whether I want to or not isn’t the point; the point is that you never thought it worth the while to ask.”

“And so you decided to run away here to this place?”

“Not to this beach,” Kozhi said. “Across that sea, I’ve been told, is the Island of Eternity, if only one can find it. But I’ve been here and waiting, and all I’ve found is this wreck of a boat to cross the sea with.”

“I don’t think it’s possible to find eternity, Kozhi.”

Her daughter shrugged and stood up slowly, still not looking at her. “So far,” she said, “I haven’t really found anything, have I? No love or friendship or companionship, not even from you. So why should Eternity be different?”

“I’ll try,” Silkiena said. “That’s the best I can promise – that I’ll try.” She felt uncomfortable and separated from her daughter by a widening chasm. “Don’t you want to be a witch?” she asked.

“No,” Kozhi answered. “But I’ll come back with you.” She walked back to her mother and twined her arm round the witch’s looking at her from the corner of her eye. “I’m glad you came,” she said. “I appreciate it. I know it wasn’t easy.”

Silkiena smiled for the first time. “I’m glad I found you,” she replied. She looked up at the high cliffs. “Any idea how we get home from here?” she asked.

“Whistle, and you shall find what you seek,” Kozhi replied, suiting the action to the words. Nothing happened except that the shrill note she whistled went echoing around the cliffs. Both women burst out laughing.

Silkiena hugged her daughter and let the tears flow, at last; but now they were tears of joy. “I’m glad you’re coming back,” she said.

“So am I. Eternity would be boring, don’t you think?” Kozhi pointed to a narrow track snaking up the cliff face. “I came down that.”

“Let’s go then.” Her arm still twined round her daughter’s, the witch Silkiena walked across the beach toward the track, her heart full of joy.