11.2 The Shetland Witch
In which Atropos tells tales about the gods.
Now Hazel had fixed the echoes of the voices in her memory, she turned to look at the door of the room.
There it was. She heard an echo, of something like a laugh, but also something like a screech. Hazel jumped and looked at Atropos in a panic.
Atropos was now on her feet, listening hard. She stalked to the door and looked out into the feathered hall. Hazel crept behind her. The echoes were muffled here. Then they stopped.
Atropos looked tired. ‘I don’t know. I want to know, but I cannot.’
Hazel listened again. There were no more sounds.
They went for a walk in the pouring rain. The winds had not let up, and nor had the seas.
‘Are you managing OK with food?’
‘I have enough. Sometimes I fly inland and catch things to eat, but the winds get too strong when I do that. Zeus is watching. He cannot touch me, but he can blow me back to the ground.’
Hazel noticed that the bigger birds ignored Atropos; they only flapped away when Hazel approached. A whimbrel on the edges of the peatland just looked at them and stalked away through the wet. There were no small birds in sight. Hazel wondered what Atropos had been catching to eat.
Rain didn’t seem to soak Atropos. When Hazel cautiously touched the surface of Atropos’s coat, she felt a gentle fizzing of a repelling surface. Atropos smiled at her and carried on walking along the crumbling cliff edge.
Hazel turned to go back to the Haa.
She hung her dripping coat on a hook in the hall. She listened, carefully, but nothing disturbed the warm silence of the little house. She noticed a picture frame hanging by the door, but there was not enough light to see what was in it. She lifted the frame down and took it through to the drawing room, and peered at it by the window, wiping the glass clean with a dampened cloth from the kitchen. The paper was wrinkled, but the colours were bright and clean. It was a map, painted in clear watercolours with tiny hand-written notations in ink. Hazel could see the deep voe further south, and a large house on the coast, and a small feather inked in at the shoreline. The drawing of the house was labelled Houlis House, next to Houlis Voe. She looked at the OS map on her phone. There was no Houlis on the modern map, and nor were there any of the small roads on the painted map that led down into the voe.
She looked again at the painting. The inked feather must mark the position of the Feather Haa.
The rain thrashed against the window, and Hazel went back to the hall to hang the map back in its place. She felt irritated with the state of the rooms, cluttered and dusty. Atropos might as well be living in a cave.
Maggie had shown them all where the dustpan and broom and the cleaning things were kept, but Atropos had clearly never touched them. Hazel had a try at tidying but stopped. She was wary of the piles of feathers and drying plants; she didn’t know where they should be put. And the grasses; there were mounds of drying grasses with different seed heads and colours and thicknesses of stems, lying in clumps and swathes on the floor in the kitchen, a room Atropos clearly only used for storage. Perhaps she was taking up botany with Ishabel.
Hazel contented herself with collecting obvious rubbish in a bin bag and scrubbing the working surfaces with hot water from the kettle boiled over the fire. She swept the floors in the other rooms and started on the dusting.
The physical work soothed her mind, and she stopped fretting about the excavation and the safety of the mound. She took an old newspaper from beside the hearth and began to polish the windows. Nobody would be going to the excavation site in this weather, except Zeus, and she was not going to be able to prevent anything he did. At the thought of Zeus she grunted in aggravation, and scrubbed harder at a mark on the window glass.
What was this? By the looks of it, someone had been using a diamond ring.
When Atropos came back indoors, her coat was merely damp. She accepted a glass of hot water and honey from Hazel.
‘Did you hear the voices again?’ she asked.
‘Not this time.’
Atropos shook her head and said something in a language Hazel didn’t know. Then she said the words again, but as a question.
They waited, but nothing happened, and Atropos frowned. ‘I cannot reach them.’ She slapped her hand in frustration on the arm of her chair.
‘Careful! These chairs are really old.’ Hazel was alarmed.
‘I know. I am sorry. I have broken one already,’ Atropos looked round severely at the other chairs in the room. ‘They are not strong, not good. Pretty, yes, but not made to be used.’
‘Not made to be used for hundreds of years,’ Hazel agreed. ‘Try this one instead, it’s a bit sturdier. And I’m lighter than you.’
‘Can we read more?’
After some discussion Hazel began to read The Iliad to her from a download on her phone while Atropos followed the words in the black paperback they’d found in the cupboard.
Atropos contributed a commentary.
‘We sang at their wedding.’
‘The Fates sing?’
‘Of course. Our songs are powerful. They make the vines grow and the flowers bloom. Very good for a wedding.’
Hazel continued to read aloud. Atropos continued to comment on people she had known.
‘Apollo is a bully, just like his father.’
‘Athene always does that. She is good at stopping arguments.’
‘I often felt sorry for Great Hera, but she knows what she is doing.’
Hazel felt emboldened to ask a question, though inside she was telling herself how impossible it was that she could be even asking it.
‘It says here that the Fates were there, at Troy. But if you stopped working as Fates after Thetis’s wedding, and her son was at Troy as a man –’
Atropos nodded, peering at the small print. ‘Was he? Humans and gods expected us to be at all the battles. Whoever made this story was saying that we did things when the gods did them.’ She flexed her hands absently. ‘Go on with the tale of the ships.’
Episode 11.3 will follow.
The Shetland Witch © Kate Macdonald 2024.
Please get in touch if you want to reproduce any part of this or any other published episode.
The Shetland Witch is a reader-supported publication. As well as taking out a free subscription for the novel, you can subscribe to the paid tier for In Achaea and Mrs Sinclair and the Haa, the two worldbuilding novellas that unpack and develop some aspects of the story and characters.
New! The Shetland Witch will be published on 9th September 2024 as an ebook and as a paperback. You can preorder here. In Achaea and Mrs Sinclair and the Haa will be published together on 9th September as well, as a separate ebook and paperback. Subscribe to stay in touch for updates.