13.4 The Shetland Witch, or, Atropos Wants Her Shears Back

In which the witches have landed.

Dawn stretched its cold fingers over the sea, and the surging waves were streaked with pink and gold. Maggie was there. Avril was holding Ishabel tightly in her arms. Together they touched down gently onto the wet earth, first on one foot, and then the other. Maggie crumpled to the ground and staggered upright again, but Avril landed lightly like a gymnast, with no impression of effort. Fragments of shadow encircled them, and Atropos followed. They all looked exhausted and were dripping with water. Ishabel was shivering violently, and Hazel rushed towards her. She helped Avril to pull off Ishabel’s soaked coat to replace it with her own warm jacket.

‘I’ll get you down to the house –’ she began, but Ishabel shook her head.

‘Look behind us,’ she croaked, coughing. ‘In the air.’

Now Maggie was standing upright with her feet braced on the wet grass. She had been holding strange grey ropes in both hands. They were tensed around a rolling mass of iron-grey cloud hanging suspended in the air. Moment by moment, Hazel could see a faint pattern of webbing enclosing it. A thin jolt of lightning was flung out in their direction, but it missed the land and fizzled out in the sea. Zeus’s rage was drowned out by the sound of the crashing waves.

‘Caught a god, did you?’ Tornost sounded gleeful, but Hazel noted that he was staying well behind her.

‘Come here, Tornost,’ Ishabel said, in a weak voice. ‘I need your help.’

Tornost scuttled over to her.

Hazel brought down the grass sphere to rest in her hands, and she looked at Atropos enquiringly.

Atropos smiled at her. She raised her hands and the sphere flew to them, glowing yellow.

The wind was rising again. The trapped god hung in his webbed cage, and now Hazel was beginning to hear great raging bellows seeping out from the gaps in the web. Hazel moved slowly and carefully towards him, stepping sturdily, her feet gripping close to the earth. If she did not, she would be blown into the North Sea.

Ishabel threw an instruction into Hazel’s mind.

<Maggie will separate him from the web. But you have to deal with him. We haven’t the strength.>

<Now?> Maggie panted.

Hazel breathed deeply, and again.

<OK.>

<Now.>

Maggie let the ropes go. They whipped up into the air as the web was pulled inside out and the god escaped.

He leapt out in the air, his arms and hands rigid and outstretched, crackling with lightning, but Avril was faster. Her arms spread out wide to pull at the edges of the web, curling it into a thick, crackling mesh shield. It wrapped around the witches crouching on the ground, protecting them from the god’s fury. Avril held the bulwark firm.

<Yours, Hazel!>

Zeus roared, voluminous and billowing as a thunderhead of storm cloud, towering above them, poised to strike. Great fingers reached towards the ground to tear the cliff apart, to hurl stone and soil into the sea.

But Hazel was kneeling in front of him on the wet soil, laying her hands on the grass. She pressed into the mass of sand and rock beneath her. She pushed her hands through the mosses in the bog and the sedge grass growing at the edges of the path. She built solidity, a buttress that could not be torn apart. She reinforced the roots by sending her conviction to pump through its mycelium networks. Silver patterns flashed behind her eyes and the hyphae deep underground responded to her confidence and belief. The earth worked with her, hugging close its cracks and calming the tremors she could feel deep underground. Raging vibrations from the god’s furious attack had begun to penetrate the soil. She would not let that happen. She and the soil were solid and resilient, and they held the whole cliff-edge firm.

The gripping strength that Hazel had set in motion in the ground under her body flexed through the land around her.

Hazel held firm. But she was tiring. How much longer could she hold the earth together?

The god raged and gouged, trying to break the cliff apart and throw it into the sea. But it could not. Stone stayed firm. Earth held the roots and the grasses held on to each other. Sand grains cohered. Every root fibre worked with its neighbours and the soil stayed tight in their grip.

‘It’s not just root action,’ Hazel thought, ‘There’s more going on under here than I’d known.’

She spoke reassuringly to the earth beneath her (It’s all right, earth, we’ll send him away). She knew she was going to have to tackle the next stage of the plan, although she was quailing inside. But there was no other way. There was no other witch with the strength to do it.

She stood up and she walked towards the god.

If she had not been held to the ground by the earth’s accepting grip Hazel knew she would have been whirled away towards Norway, and the cliff would have crumbled backwards into the sea. But she stood while the god’s anger raged, waiting for the moment, letting him thrash and push.

He spent the winds’ energy blasting at her still figure. The hem of Ishabel’s apron flapped quietly around her knees; she coudn’t believe she was still wearing it from the washing up, hours and hours ago. Someone was bellowing furious words in her ear, but she didn’t need to hear what it was saying.

The air was turning thick again, a powerful build-up of pressure and fullness, of a mighty force that waited to be released. Hazel shook her head. No time for that nonsense. She had to focus on him, not fear what he might do. She shoved that sense of imminent dread aside.

Beyond the edge of the cliff, the sea was crashing behind her, and the waves were being whipped up, as if great forces were being roused, as if the sea itself was coming for her.

‘He’s pulling together everything he’s got,’ Hazel thought unhappily. ‘He’ll throw the sea at us next, and I don’t have it in me to battle that too.’

But there was something strange about this sea. The sea knew her. (Sea, I greet you, but how do you know me?) The sea was waiting, but for what?

Episode 14.1 will follow.

The Shetland Witch © Kate Macdonald 2024.

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