Hana did not know how many victims there would be. Usually it was two or three but once, she had heard Deely say, it had been twenty, all women accused of being witches. The smoke that day, Deely said, had risen in a brown cloud and settled on the burrows and the smell had lasted until the winter rains washed it away. Deely’s hands had writhed as she told her story, and tears slid into the wrinkles on her cheeks. Now Deely was one of those who would burn.
‘There are no witches,’ Mam had told Hana. ‘There are only women who want to learn all the things that have been forgotten.’
‘Like what, Mam?’
‘Like how to stop the bone rot and the belly rash and the eye scale and the twisting in the gut that kills our children, all those things. And make plants grow and seeds not die and the earth not sicken. And how to make walls stand and roofs not fall. And how to clean the ponds. How to make pots. How to make wheels. Ah, Hana, there are so many things. How to breathe into hollow reeds and make the sound of birds. Music, Hana. You have never heard music.’
‘I hear birds. But there aren’t many. Only crows.’
‘The birds are gone. But I remember women breathing through reeds and men beating drums – and it is lost. The Limping Man has taken it away.’
‘Why, Mam?’
‘Because . . . because he wants to leave no place for us to go. There must be no room in our heads for anything but him.’
‘Where is he? Can I see the Limping Man?’
‘No, Hana. No. Never go near him. He will take you by your throat and never let you go. Or he will burn you.’
Hana remembered every word of that conversation and every sad and fierce expression on Mam’s face.
‘There’s a circle round him, Hana, as wide as his mind can reach. Never go inside. If you do he’ll find you and he’ll hold you forever. He’ll make you love him. He can do that.’
Hana did not believe it. I’ll see him, she thought, I’ll see him now and he won’t see me. Then I’ll get away. And one day I’ll come back . . . She spat like a wildcat into a corner. She melted into the shadows and came out in an alley empty of people. She and Mam had explored Blood Burrow several years before, on a day when the men had been called to the hill to worship the Limping Man. They had travelled by a roundabout way to People’s Square where Mam knew a hiding place. She had wanted to see where the witches were burned and, Hana realised, perform a ritual of sorrow and remembrance inside herself. Hana had memorised every hollow and crawlway, and she set herself to find them now. Mam’s voice guided her: ‘This way, Hana, under these beams. Now, jump, you can do it. This was a stable once, see the hay rack, see the chain.’ Hana found it again and crept through. The chain was gone. Then, ‘Quiet now,’ Mam had whispered. ‘There are women here. See how they rest when their men are gone.’ The women had lain like bundles of rubbish in the pale sunshine. Today there were none. They were in their shelters while their men went to watch the witches burn.
Hana heard shouting far away. She approached carefully until only a row of buildings separated her from People’s Square. A doorway leaning like a drunken man led into a room that seemed to have no outlet. She slid behind a fractured wall and found a stairway leading down. At the bottom a room opened out, with stone walls and a paved floor and a broad fireplace set in the wall. Mam said it had been a kitchen. There were worn patches where barrels of flour and salt pork had stood. When Hana wanted to know what those things were Mam could not say, they were words she had heard as a child when old people remembered old, old days. They were things long gone and forgotten.
Mam had led her into the fireplace, which was large enough to hold a horse and cart. They climbed – and Hana climbed now, alone, bracing her feet on the chimney sides. She rested on a ledge, feeling soot fall like rain on her head. Higher up, light as thin as a knife-blade cut the darkness. She climbed towards it and found the ledge she and Mam had balanced on. The light was cold when she put her hand in it. Outside, Mam had said, the chimney crawled up a wall on the northeast side of People’s Square, then rose like a tower over gaping roofs. Hana put her face into the light. She peered through a crack in the stones into People’s Square.
The beaten earth beside the pond was thronged with spectators. Every man in the burrows was there, and every boy on the edge of manhood. Some of the men carried boy-children on their shoulders. A few cooled their feet in the pond, where the rushes were trodden flat. Others threw stones from their pockets at the marble head, half-covered in weeds, that rose in the centre, beside an arm holding a broken sword. The game was to land a stone in the statue’s mouth. Then money changed hands – the thin brown coins of the burrows.
Opposite Hana, new-built benches rose to roof height, with red-painted steps climbing to a platform where the Limping Man would sit on his throne. The benches were already taken by early comers and the seats around the throne by men dressed in ways Hana had never seen before and could not have imagined – men in robes of red and yellow and blue, in hats decorated with ribbons and feathers and pieces of glass that flashed in the sun. Their skins were red or white or black – blacker even than her own, which must now be covered in soot. They were tribal chiefs from the south and east, come to see the witches burn.
Hana peered at them with hatred. Her eyes threw flashing knives of hate. Then she almost screamed, almost lost her footing in the chimney, as she saw the posts sunk in the cobbled ground below the throne, each with chopped wood piled at its foot. Six. Hana closed her eyes. Morna and Deely, and one post for her mother even though she was dead. Who were the other three?
A huge shout deafened her. It rumbled like thunder, then died away into the clatter and sigh of two thousand people falling on their knees. The Limping Man’s entourage came through a gate. A phalanx of armed constables beat a path through the kneeling men. They used leather whips and the flat of their swords. Behind them walked the Limping Man’s courtiers, men from the city beyond the burrows, then his generals in cloaks and shining boots and belts hung with swords in carved scabbards. The crowd waited on its knees, breath held in, ready to shout their praise when the Limping Man appeared.
Hana, straining for a wider view, almost fell. Soot whispered into the depths. She kept her grip on the edge of the crack and regained her place, bracing her hands and feet on the stones. She was aware of shouts in the square, with an underlying beat. What were they saying? Not his name, he had no name. They were crying ‘Man’ in unison, a word that rang with the sound of an iron hammer beating on stone: ‘Man, Man, Man.’ Hana could not see him. His banner, held high to catch the breeze, came into sight through the black hole of the Western Gate. Its device, a crooked line beside a straight, shone as red as blood on its yellow ground. Then his litter came, borne on the shoulders of four men. The top was closed like a lid and scarlet curtains on the sides hid the
Limping Man.
The constables beat a path. The bearers carried the litter around the pond and set it down at the foot of the timber steps. Others had carried the throne down from the platform and placed it ready. The courtiers and generals climbed to their places. A man – a giant of a man, dressed in black leather – raised a horn to his lips and blew a long blast. The crowd fell silent.
Two men, stick-thin, like insects, parted the curtains at the side of the litter and the Limping Man appeared.
No one helped him. No one touched him. The silence in People’s Square was like the midnight silence of the burrows. The Limping Man placed a carved stick on the cobbles and levered himself to his feet. He stepped down from the litter and stood for a moment, making sure of his balance. Hana could not see his face. He was a small man, dressed in blood-red robes with yellow flames crawling upwards from the hem, and a cloth crown rising in folds and bulging at the back, where ribbons drooped over his shoulders like a waterfall. She had never seen a man dressed so foolishly. How could he hide? How could he get away when someone chased him? Then she remembered that he did not need to.
The guard lowered his horn and the people bellowed, ‘Man, Man, Man,’ as the Limping Man walked to his throne, helped only by his stick. At each dipping step he seemed to fall, then he righted himself and the people roared. They loved him for limping. They wanted to lift and carry him, but he progressed by himself; reached his throne by himself; sat by himself and settled his stick between his knees. Four new bearers carried the throne up the steps, where they turned and set it down at the centre of the platform.
Hana saw the Limping Man’s face, and it was – ordinary. She strained her eyes – eyes that Mam had said were sharper than a hawk’s – but still there was nothing to see, no strength, no authority, nothing in the mouth or nose or forehead, nothing in the eyes, watery and red-rimmed and pale, nothing to make people worship him. Yet the crowd, on its knees, continued its deep-throated roar of gratitude and love. She could not understand it. A round-faced little man with soft cheeks and weak eyes and a leg that tipped him sideways at every step, and yet two thousand people roared his name as though he stood so far above them that their arms, held rigid, their fingers clutching air, could never reach high enough to touch him.
He smiled. The crowd howled louder.
Then Hana felt something sticky crawling on her face like a midnight grub. It crossed her lips and paused as though looking for a way into her mouth. She shook her head to toss it away. A grub could not hurt her. She felt it on her cheek, then by her ear, and she released one hand from the stone to brush it into the darkness. There was nothing there. But the soft crawling continued and seemed to move through her skin and wriggle into her head. She gave a cry of fear and inched her way down the narrow chimney. This sticky touch must be the Limping Man reaching out for her. What had Mam said? He would make her love him. It was why the men in the square fell to their knees and spread their hands longingly and bellowed his name. He crawled inside their heads and made them love him. Hana felt the emotion seeping into her brain and she used all her strength to force it out. It was like someone tying her up. It was like a spider spinning a web around her. She fought it away with the memory of Mam.
She heard, dimly, the sound of the crowd die to a murmur. She felt Mam, like clean water, wash the Limping Man out of her mind, but knew also that he had relaxed his demand, and that was why the crowd had stopped its shouting and she and Mam had won their battle. If she had been closer, down with the men in the square, he would have swept her away. Again she remembered what Mam had said: the circle round him spreads as wide as his mind can reach. Hana must have been at its very edge and had managed to keep outside.
She stayed in the chimney with her eyes closed until her legs and arms began to ache. She must go or she would fall. But her need to see Mam overcame her fear. She climbed again and put her eyes to the crack. Roars of delight came from the crowd. It took her a moment to see why. Waist-deep in the pond, a quartet of naked guards were drowning two men. Hana was sickened. She closed her eyes, blotting out the sight. She had forgotten this part of the ritual, but remembered how Morna had said the entertainment always began with the drowning of men who had lived with the witches. When she looked again the guards were wading out and two bodies floated face down on the green water.
A shadow fell on Hana. Claws scraped as a crow settled on the chimney. She knew why it was there: to pick at the bodies when the crowd was gone; to hunt for scraps of flesh in the embers.
‘Go away, crow,’ she whispered harshly, and reinforced it with a push of her mind. The crow flapped away, cawing angrily.
On his throne, the Limping Man was smiling again. His round mouth opened, his red lips slid, and his slanting teeth gleamed in the sun. He raised his finger to the black-clad attendant, who bowed deferentially. The Limping Man whispered and the man, the crier, straightened, puffed his chest and bellowed in a voice louder than his horn: ‘Bring the witch.’
Over by the farthest gate the crowd parted and four men marched through, carrying something – carrying Mam. Hana almost screamed. They held her by the wrists and ankles. Her head hung back. Her hair brushed the cobbles. The men handled her carefully, as though she were precious and yet as though she had never been alive. They laid her at the foot of the steps leading to the throne.
It isn’t you, Mam, Hana cried inside herself. And then more calmly: It isn’t you. That poor dead figure in its scraps of rag wasn’t Mam. Mam was gone, Mam was free. She floated in the air. She whispered in Hana’s ears: Get away from here, my child.
There was no harm the Limping Man could do Mam.
Yes, I will, Hana whispered back. But I want . . . She meant that she needed to say goodbye to Morna and Deely.
The Limping Man had risen from his throne. He leaned on his stick and whispered to the crier. He spoke for a long time, banging the butt of his stick on the platform, and the crier listened with bent head. Then he stepped away and blew his horn. The hooting and jeering and cries of hatred stopped. ‘Listen, men of the burrows,’ he cried. ‘I am the voice of the Limping Man and this is my word. Hear no other. Hear only me. I will feed and clothe you. I will keep you safe from the darkness rising in our midst. Do not go near the contamination. Do not listen to the witches. You have seen two men drown – two who broke the prohibition. The pond is wide. There is room for more.’
The crier paused and the crowd whooped and bayed its approval.
‘I will find you. I will find all who disobey.’ He paused again, then pointed at Mam with his horn: ‘As I found her.’ The Limping Man, seated again, gave a little smile and patted his cloth crown. ‘She was the chief witch, men of the burrows. She was the evil one who poisoned women’s minds, and men’s minds too . . .’
No, no, Hana cried, inside herself. All she did was try to find out how to cure sick people. How to feed ourselves, how to live . . .