10.2 The Shetland Witch, or, Atropos Wants Her Shears Back
In which Maggie shows Atropos the Feather Haa.
The clearing looked straight out into the bay. The sea chopped blue-grey in the wind, and washed up briskly against wind-bitten black cliffs running north and south in a broad swoop.
Far out to sea, Atropos could see a giant ship passing along the horizon, and the flashes of the fixed markers that kept the ships from the rocks. She was shocked. Those ships were enormous. They could not be real. Nothing could be that big and still float.
She wondered why Maggie had brought her here.
‘Rough seas down here as well,’ Maggie said, eyeing the waves. ‘But there’s not much wind. I wonder what’s causing the swell.’
She turned to look at the bare rock wall. Two kittiwakes looked down at Maggie. Maggie smiled at them and said a sentence in a language Atropos did not know. Atropos waited.
Slowly, in shades of water and air, an outline emerged from the rock wall, in patches. Lines appeared, showing what a building might look like if it were fitted into that space. Then, like smoke, the walls were shaded in, in colours of sand, bleached wood, lichen and bark. The edge of an opening became visible on the seaward side and filled itself in as a small square window with glass, more wrinkled than the glass in Ishabel’s house. A white cloth was hanging inside.
A small bronze face appeared, hanging in the air, and then Atropos could see the heavy lintel of the door, and the stonework framing a curving house wall. It was as high as the kittiwakes’ nests, and as straight as the gannet’s flight that crossed the water in front of them. The bleached wood of the door was the last to appear. Now the knocker gleamed at them with a flash of smiling teeth.
Atropos laughed out loud. She had heard of places like this, that became visible to the people who had the right of entrance.
‘Is it the house of a sorceress?’ she asked. Maggie had knocked at the front door, and it was opening lightly.
‘It was,’ Maggie replied.
She closed the big door behind them, and Atropos drew a deep breath. She turned slowly in a circle, staring.
Light streamed down from a round glass window in the roof, and each white-painted wall and each of the four wooden doors nearest her was covered in shells, seaweed, bones and feathers. The panels on the walls had small soft breast feathers laid in patterns, looking as plump and warm as if they were about to breathe. The shells were pale grey, dull pink, sand-coloured, separated by columns of dark blue mussel-shells, ornamented with the crow-blue, rook-black, and brown and green of duck feathers. The seaweed was sewn into plaits and tassels, thick glossy kelp ribbons and the delicate dangling mermaids’ purses. The bones hung in fringes across borders and the four doorways, and tiny animal skulls decorated the shell work like pearls. Atropos ran her fingers over the feathers which sank at her touch, and yet stayed soft and luxuriant. She felt she was in a place she understood, though it was unlike anywhere she had ever seen.
‘What is this place?’
Maggie grinned. ‘Many years ago in human time a witch called Mrs Sinclair lived in the big hoose up the track. Her folk became angry: I don’t know why. So she and a great lady built this small hoose for her to live in in secret with her daughters. But then Mrs Sinclair died defending her bairns, and the hoose was burned. The bairns and their nurse lived here, protected from all who would burn them, and the nurse and the great lady taught the bairns magic, and they became witches too. Ishabel comes from that family. She told me the story. And this house belongs to the witches of Shetland. It is full of secrets. And voices. And things that are hidden.’
Maggie looked at the featherwork affectionately. ‘We don’t know who made all this, but it might have been the daughters. It looks like the sort of useless early nineteenth-century craftwork that fine ladies did.’ She stroked a black feather with a purple sheen. ‘All this would have rotted in this climate without the spells laid on them, centuries ago.’
She turned to open a door, and Atropos saw a small white room with doors in the walls, and a fireplace. There were three green chairs, and long white curving bench with cushions under the window. Light streamed in from glass in the ceiling. She crossed the floor to peer through the window and saw nothing but the sea.
Maggie was prodding the wood laid ready for a fire. ‘The firewood’s still dry. Good. Any smoke from the fire will look like mist or spray from the rocks. No-one will see. Here are the matches. You get the fire going and I’ll get the lunch from the car.’
When she was left alone, Atropos looked uncertainly at the firewood and the small rattling box Maggie had given her. Maggie came back in carrying a bag. Atropos watched her make the fire and looked at the boxes and packets in the bag. She left them alone, not knowing what to do with them, or what they were.
When Maggie began to open them, Atropos recognised bread and meat and cheese, and understood what lunch was. They ate, hungrily, sitting on Mrs Sinclair’s white window-seat with the food laid on a small spindly table in front of them.
‘I don’t understand,’ Maggie said, licking her fingers, ‘why Zeus hasn’t come after you yet.’
Atropos nodded. ‘Now that I have them, he will come again for the shears, and I will be ready. Even if the trow wants them too.’ She looked at Maggie. ‘He will not win. But I need to find a way to defeat him. And I need to learn to live here.’
Maggie took the last piece of cake. ‘Sure you don’t want this? Right. There’s a bed through in the next room, so you can live here for now. I’ll show you the way to open and close the front door. When we come and visit we’ll bring food and I’ll show you the way to the shoreline to get driftwood. Although,’ and here Maggie looked uncertain, ‘I expect you can catch fish from the sea easily enough?’
Atropos grinned at her. ‘I can. I eat birds and fish.’
Episode 10.3 will follow.
The Shetland Witch © Kate Macdonald 2024.
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