Book

When the angry mob broke down his door, they discovered how a man could keep a book locked within bird-cages. 

Robert Watts was not supposed to have the spellbook, and the book had tried its hardest to make that felt. A witch’s grimoire has a will of its own, and if you want to use it freely then it must come to you freely. It had belonged to Anne-O-The-Blackthorn, a generous woman as witches went; she’d work her cures for the kindly asking, and it took a lot of provocation before she’d curse anyone, and there had been times in the past where another witch had wanted to learn something of her and she’d lent her grimoire. That was all right: the grimoire knew it was being passed safely from hand to hand, and lay in the embrace of its borrower like a stroked cat, its cover barely twitching. Anne-O-The-Blackthorn’s friend or pupil would study the page, take the lesson, and go home to practice the charm, and the charm would work the way it was intended.

Taking a book without leave is another matter, though. Anne-O-The-Blackthorn meant to leave the grimoire to her niece Eyebright-Jenny, who had borrowed it before and got along with it very comfortably. The night she died Anne-O-The-Blackthorn had gone to bed feeling so unwell she’d resolved that in the morning, when Eyebright-Jenny had promised to visit, she’d write her niece’s name on the front leaf to seal the gift and put it straight into Eyebright-Jenny’s hands. It would have gone over quite tame. 

Unfortunately that was the night Robert Watts waited in Anne-O-The-Blackthorn’s garden. He’d heard her coughing for days, and he was a wicked man. In her life she’d refused to work him several curses. So when the coughing finally went quiet, he was in her house and stealing the book before morning.

If he’d been less greedy he’d have thought about why Anne-O-The-Blackthorn never locked her door. It wasn’t only because she was a welcoming woman.

The grimoire shuddered in his hands, and when he tried to read the pages their edges cut his fingers – quite a feat for a book so old, but it knew it wasn’t where it should be. Robert Watts put on gloves, determined. He had neighbours he wanted to curse and properties he meant to obtain. 

A spell is a difficult animal to handle. If it’s in your hands out of trust then it’ll take your commands docile as a good dog, but it doesn’t like to be forced. You can drive them unwilling, but they’ll resist as much as they can.

The first person Robert Watts had his eye on was his neighbour Sue Jones, who he considered a scold since the time she shouted at him for hitting her children. There was a tongue-knot spell in the grimoire and he knew that, but the question was finding it. To get to the right page he had to read each leaf, and they weren’t willing to yield up their secrets.

He tried to read the first entry; it was a list of herbals. He hadn’t got further than ‘comfrey’ before the ink curled up off the page, twining into dark, leaf-shaped curlicues like a drawing on the air, and pinched his eyes shut. It wasn’t painful – comfrey is entirely a healing herb – but it was sticky enough that his eyes were gummed black for a whole day before he managed to wash them open again.

The book’s leaves bristled. It had given warning. But Robert Watts was a stubborn man.

He passed over the list of herbals, looking for the next section. It was about working the bones; how to heal or harm, how to understand, and how to hear their echoes if you knock the right words against them. The pages contained some instructive drawings of the skeleton: the kind found in a man, the kind found in a child, the kind found in a dog, the kind found in a cow, horse, sheep and rat. 

Robert was reading from a careful distance now, not wanting bone hands to pinch his eyes, but before he could take in much information he found his own bones twitching. His muscles had nothing to do with it; they pulsed and spasmed in protest as his thighbones lifted themselves from the chair, the jumble in his feet crunched their way across the floor, and his skull knocked itself hard against the nearest wall.

Most men might have given up, but as well as a thief and a rogue Robert Watts unluckily was resourceful. He remembered the way the letters of the word ‘comfrey’ had shaped themselves into pinching leaves – but he also remembered that the entry said that comfrey was good for pain. When he was able to stagger to his feet he went out to his garden, picked some comfrey leaves and pounded together a rough poultice for his aching head, and lo and behold, he soon felt quite a bit better.

From this he collected one of the more regrettable truths about a stolen grimoire: you can still force use out of the spells. They just don’t want you to. A horse that hates you will bite as you try to slip a bit in its mouth, but if you get behind it and crack the whip it’ll still pull; it can’t hate away its own strength. 

So Robert Watts realised that the spells would work for him if he could only find a way of getting them to give up their knowledge without being ink-mauled first. 

The simplest solution would have been to make someone else read them for him, but that would have meant admitting he’d stolen the book. There were a few in the village that would have hanged him for a witch on the spot, and even those that had loved Anne-O-The-Blackthorn knew that her grimoire belonged to Eyebright-Jenny. If anyone knew he had it, the very best he could hope for was that the book would be taken from him and handed over to a young woman who had good cause to punish him.

Robert Watts had an idea, but it needed a little magic to push it along. He tried threatening the grimoire into obedience by holding it over the fire, but the thing almost leaped straight out of his hands into the flames: evidently it disliked him more than it disliked burning. Then he tried holding it over water, and the threat of that cruel fate – the warp of page and melt of ink until your words run together and you no longer say what you were meant to say – was too much for the grimoire. Trembling, its pages fell open at the very thing he wanted:

How to draw in a child.

This was a spell Anne-O-The-Blackthorn had used mostly for finding her neighbours’ sons and daughters when they got lost. There had been one occasion where Billy Thomas wouldn’t stop pulling the tails of cats and tearing the wings off butterflies, and she’d drawn him in and sat him on the spot for a day and a night to teach him a lesson about how it felt to be helpless – but that was as cruel as she’d used it, and Billy Thomas himself always said it had done him a kindness. He was a fine drover now who had the deftest touch with his herds and his dogs adored him, but back then he’d been drifting towards wicked habits and if she hadn’t pulled him up sharp when he was still young, he’d never have prospered. 

The spell fought back pretty hard: the letters unravelled every T-cross and G-tail to make a thread and stitched Robert Watts to his chair. But pain and all, he mastered the spell. Then he cut himself free, put comfrey on the bleeding wounds, and got to work.

In a small village it would be too conspicuous to draw in his neighbours’ children. But the road to market wasn’t far, and it was one along which beggars walked, hoping for charity.

Little Tommy Jones was seven years old and wanted his mother, but once Robert Watts had him in captivity he couldn’t flee. He couldn’t read either, but Robert only fed him when he studied his letters, and unluckily for Tommy he was clever and learned fast. 

‘Here,’ Robert Watts said one day, pushing the grimoire into Tommy’s shaking hands, ‘read to me. Find a page on . . .’ He considered for a moment, needing a safe test. ‘On bringing rain.’

‘If I do can I go back to Mama?’ Tommy pleaded, and Robert Watts threw a shoe at him and told him to get on with it. 

The grimoire’s leather binding cringed a little as Tommy did, and when the little boy opened its pages it didn’t attack him. It missed Anne-O-The-Blackthorn almost as much as Tommy missed his Mama, and it lay in his hands with fellow-feeling.

Unharmed, Tommy read out the spell to Robert Watts, and Robert gathered and worked, and his neighbours gardens were flooded almost to marshland. He was delighted, and ordered Tommy to read him another. 

Tommy read him a spell about making animals swarm; Robert had no one to keep house for him and was a lazy sweeper, and rats had been giving him trouble. Sure enough, he was able to send the writhing brown rioters out of his house in a flood, but they churned up his path so much that Robert decided a rainstorm might help flatten the earth down again.

He turned to his worktable and searched his memory. 

He could remember how to make animals swarm. But he couldn’t remember how to bring rain. And despite how many shoes he threw at the boy for forgetfulness, neither could Tommy.

The grimoire was willing to yield a spell at a time to Tommy; it could feel his hands trembling around it. But it didn’t belong to Tommy either, and one spell was as much as he could hold. 

Robert Watts sat angrily down at his worktable and considered.

Stealing away one little boy had answered: Tommy’s Mama was a woman without home or money and had no one to help her. But Robert Watts knew he couldn’t count on finding an index-worth of such waifs, and even if he did, he hadn’t the house-room to keep them all. 

The grimoire was resisting as hard as it could, and a better man would have recognised that he had now two beings unwilling under his roof and shown mercy. But Robert Watts instead thought it over, and thought it over, and then he kicked the door of the cage where he’d been keeping Tommy to wake him.

‘Boy,’ he said, ‘would you like to go back to your Mama?’

‘Y-Yes please, sir,’ Tommy quavered. He said it a little fearfully; asking usually got things thrown at him. 

Robert shoved the grimoire at him again. ‘Look for pages on birds,’ he said. 

Anyone who passed Robert Watt’s garden for the next few days saw that he was busy building cages. If he’d been a less hateful neighbour they might have asked him about it, for he’d never been a man who kept chickens or loved pets. 

No one was up at the dawn chorus, though. If they had, they would have seen strands of ink cast up in the sky like fishing-lines, each dangling a glimmering moth of thought. The birds sat on their twigs and shouted, but a few of them couldn’t resist the curious temptation, and flapped up to take a bite at this new kind of bait. 

Thrushes and tits weren’t much use for spells, and Robert wrung their necks and tossed them out of the door, but his plan had one solid core to it: the more clever a creature, the more curious. Most of what he caught over the next few dawns were crows and magpies – and those are birds that can, when limed with magic and shown just how quickly a little neck can break, quickly learn the tongues of men. Enough, at least, to remind a witch-man how to work a particular spell.

Tommy wept, but Robert had made sure to wring the thrushes’ necks where he could see it too, so he didn’t plead any more. He held the grimoire in trembling hands as he recited each spell to the ink-meshed bird whose cage had been set before his, and then when it had learned its lesson, Robert Watts hung it up beside him.

Soon enough his floor was a scabbed wasteland of bird-droppings and dander floated in the sunbeams thick as smoke, and from his rafters hung cage after cage, each holding a living page of spells cheeping in sorrow.

The next day Sue Jones found herself with a knot in her tongue. Even if she’d wanted to scold her neighbour Robert Watts for boxing the ears of her little daughter, she couldn’t any more: she couldn’t say a word. All she could do was flap her hands, spreading her fingers like wings.

Jenny Brown’s cow wouldn’t milk. Robert Watts didn’t like the price of her butter, so the cow went dry, and when Jenny tried to get a blessing cast over it, there was a muster of crows seen on her barn roof, and the cow laid down and died.

Mary Samson was only six, and her neighbours excused her by saying that many children of six are young for their age. Her mother was sure Mary would be ‘young for her age’ for ever, and in this she was right, but Mary was a good girl, and when she disobeyed it was only because one thought in her head drove out another. She had been told to keep out of Robert Watt’s garden; she’d been told to keep out of many gardens. But it was only after she wandered in to pick dandelions from Robert Watts’s that she fell so sick they thought she might die.

Eyebright-Jenny wasn’t blind to any of this. She had her own knacks, and she’d been building her own grimoire, but that was the trouble with grimoires: each had its own character and no spell from one was the same as another, and so she couldn’t just counter Robert Watts’s spell. It would have been like ordering your dog out of the sheepfield and expecting someone else’s dog to obey. She worked the best cure she could manage on Mary Sampson, but while it saved her life it didn’t make her well, and as to the others, there was nothing she could do. 

Except that she could watch the birds. 

Eyebright-Jenny wasn’t a bird-worker herself; all her magic in that direction was for helping chickens lay. She had her suspicions who’d taken the grimoire, but if she was right then he’d equipped himself well enough that it wouldn’t be safe to just go in and ask. So she watched the skies. She saw that birds roosted on the thatch to the right of Robert Watts, and the thatch to the left, but that they left his own house bald-pated empty of their company. 

So she did the only bird-thing she knew how to do: she encouraged laying. It was a benevolent spell, except that a lot of eggs cracked down on Robert Watts’s head. But that was enough to provoke him and turn his eyes towards Eyebright-Jenny. 

Robert opened the grimoire, ignoring its struggles. He was of the opinion that he had handled it much like a difficult horse in need of breaking, and that gave him another idea. After all, Eyebright-Jenny must have a grimoire of her own.

And there were plenty of spells in Alice-O-The-Blackthorn’s book that applied to livestock. They’d been written as cures, but Alice-O-The-Blackthorn was too diligent a caster not to have recorded that each could be worked as curses if you turned the ingredients upside-down. 

The first spell he cast was for swine fever. Alice-O-The-Blackthorn’s book had a good fat spine, and that put him in mind of pigs; he drew down the magpie that knew the swine fever spell, shook its jewelled wings against the bars until it surrendered the information, and then cast towards Eyebright-Jenny’s house.

Eyebright-Jenny’s pig died. 

Eyebright-Jenny shed a tear and called in the butcher to salvage what he could of the meat, and shared out sausage and ribs with all her neighbours. These lasted weeks longer than you’d think; Eyebright-Jenny had a spell in her book to ward off the spoiling of foodstuffs. 

Robert Watts ground his teeth and kicked the bars of Tommy’s cage, and took down the cage containing another chapter. This was a spell for wasting in goats: with a bit of success, Eyebright-Jenny’s book would grow so thin it could hold no pages at all. 

Eyebright-Jenny kept no goat, and nor did her nearby neighbours. Since Robert Watts was going on words repeated by a poor crow that didn’t understand any of them, words were all the spell had to work with, and it fell on the closest excuse it could find. A goat-willow tree withered, its catkins blistering and its trunk paltering down to splinters, and then crashed through the roof of the smithy.

Matters were coming to a crisis, but Robert Watts had gone months now without speaking to anyone he couldn’t threaten, and he’d lost sight of the fact he might just be making mistakes. Eyebright-Jenny must be counter-spelling him; it was the only explanation he could think of, and for that, she would have to die. He would take her book once and for all, and then he would curse her right out of this world. 

He got the idea from little Tommy. Tommy, by this point, was thin as a twig-bundle and mute with fear at the sight of him, and without the birds above him he might have gone mad altogether, but because of his fellow-prisoners, he still had something to love. Tommy croaked up to the crows and magpies, and when he had food he tried to toss them up scraps, and in return, when he called to them, they’d turn their dagger-beaked heads and gleam their black eyes, hopping grey-footed and tender to the sound of his voice. 

Evidently animals could be called, so Robert went through his cages, shaking each and demanding to hear its contents, until a little snow-jacketed magpie chattered out a spell for charming dogs.

It was a useful spell, and one that could be done quickly, for it was one of those you needed to be able to work in a moment of crisis: cast right, and the wildest hound would stop its snarling and trot peaceful at your heels. Robert recited it, changing the word ‘dog’ for the word ‘book’, and he aimed all his malice at Eyebright-Jenny’s house. 

Eyebright-Jenny sat beside her fire. The blacksmith was with her; he could serve no one until they’d repaired his smithy. The butcher was with her; he’d had his share of good sausage when he butchered her pig, and he didn’t like to see a fine fat animal drop dead so early in the season when in the natural course of things it could have been finer and fatter still. Mary Samson’s father was with her; his little daughter was still sick, and Eyebright-Jenny’s tinctures kept her from pain even if they couldn’t give her the strength to get out of bed. 

So it was noticed by several pairs of eyes when a plain leather book sat up on Eyebright-Jenny’s table and shook itself. It stretched open its covers and waved its pages to and fro like an eager tail, then tipped on its end, trotting corner upon corner towards the door.

‘Shall I stamp on it?’ demanded the blacksmith, appalled at this latest turn of events.

‘No, no,’ said Eyebright-Jenny, standing and dusting off her skirt.

‘I could cut its backbone,’ the butcher suggested, feeling he should offer the skills of his trade.  

‘No, no,’ said Eyebright-Jenny, walking quietly after it.

‘Madam,’ said Mary Samson’s father, soft and respectful, ‘do you think yourself quite safe if you follow it?’

Eyebright-Jenny turned and looked at all of them rather hard. ‘Perhaps not,’ she said. ‘Perhaps I’d be the safer for some big strong men at my back.’

The book loped down the road. Once it was in the open air it developed a gait for itself, leaping from cover to cover with a doggy bound, and it would have been too fast to follow if it hadn’t been somewhat hindered by the puddles. At each damp spot it stopped, shuddered a little and then tiptoed round, one edged tip at a time. Then, with a shake of its dog-ears, it was off again.

So by the time it was halfway to Robert Watts’s house, it had quite a few more followers. Sue Jones’s tongue was too knotted to say anything about it, but she followed very determined, and Jenny Brown – well, since her cow had dropped dead, that was one less chore to take up her day. It was a muttering and angry crowd that arrived at Robert Watts’s door, and if the book was narrow enough to slip under it and they weren’t, they weren’t too weak to kick it down.

The room stunned them all for a moment. It was a tangled forest of bars. Cages hung thick as herb-bunches from every rafter, swaying and shivering with a bundle of black feathers screaming for help within. On the ground was a cage just big enough to hold a boy, who stood gripping the bars, screeching like a bird and staring at them all with eyes in the darkness that looked black as a crow’s. 

Everywhere, thick as snow, rained soft, dark feathers. And in the middle of the room was Alice-O-The-Blackthorn’s book. 

Everyone was too shocked for a moment to know what to do. In that moment, Robert Watts reached up and took from his rafters the cage of a huge black raven.

Truly, Robert Watts was a terrible man; it was later discovered that raven could recite a spell for the curing or casting of smallpox. But in that moment, Eyebright-Jenny’s book stood up on its back cover, wagging a happy page, and then leaped onto the table.

Alice-O-The-Blackthorn’s book lay there for a moment, too beaten and discouraged to turn a leaf. But Eyebright-Jenny’s grimoire nudge, nudge, nudged it with the tip of its binding, fluttering its pages to and fro with the sound of a jolly pant, and then Alice-O-The-Blackthorn’s grimoire sat up. 

It shook its binding, huffing at the weight of itself. And then, as one, the two books leaned back, and their stitching stood on ends like hackles.

Well, they’d had a moment of being someone’s dog. And what dog of any pride doesn’t like to chase birds?

The leap of those two grimoires up to the rafters was enough to smash the first few cages right away; crows and magpies flew free, swirling around the room and pecking at Robert Watts’s eyes. The books threw themselves from wall to wall making merry havoc, and while pages and feathers flew and everyone sensible shrieked, Eyebright-Jenny took a hasty path to the cage holding the little boy and broke the latch.

‘There’s a brave lad,’ she said, putting her arms around him. ‘Don’t you fret, dear. I can find your Mama as soon as my book remembers itself. But I think we’ll let it play a little first, don’t you?’

The aftermath of Robert Watts’s bird-books took a fair amount of time and trouble. Eyebright-Jenny had no difficulty calling Alice-O-The-Blackthorn’s grimoire to heel once it had some time to express itself, and it was already firm friends with her own collection. It was a period of patient study before she was fully mistress of all the spells Robert Watts had wrought, but having learned them it was simple enough to undo them; they hadn’t wanted to be tied around their victims in the first place. 

What was left of Robert Watts after his bird-pages had finished with him was, in the butcher’s professional opinion, ‘Not good for much but pig-fodder,’ but that was only his way of speaking; they buried Robert Watts according to their own ideas of dignity rather than his. He got a grave, and if it was on the north side of the church with the sinners and suicides, well, nobody had any objections to that. 

Little Tommy stayed with Eyebright-Jenny while she summoned his mother. It took a bit of time, as his mother had ranged far and wide looking for him and living on what alms she could gather, but Eyebright-Jenny got her feet pointed in the right direction, and by the time the good woman arrived Eyebright-Jenny and Tommy had become friends. His Mama knocked on a door with no hope of anything beyond a strong sense that this was the place to beg from, only to find herself leaped upon by an overjoyed little boy and then welcomed in by a practical woman who sat her down to a supper ready-prepared and suggested that, since her son turned out to be a clever fellow who had learned to read in the time he’d been away, perhaps his Mama might live alongside him with Eyebright-Jenny so he could be trained up to be, one day, a man who knew his own book? 

So much was festivity, and it should have been a place of absolute thanksgiving. But nothing is perfect in this life, and the community had to resign themselves to the fact that they now lived with educated birds. There are places that leave out cream for the fairies and places that leave out salt for the spirits, but a place that doesn’t want its goats cursed or its women tongue-tied learns very fast to leave out nuts for the birds. 

Still, there are worse things. On Eyebright-Jenny’s shelf, two volumes, one old and thick and one young and slim, nestled side by side, quiet as two sleeping pups. 

posted by Kit Whitfield  # 8:36 am