Tithe (1)

He is ready. Or so he tells himself. But he’d said that before and still he waits. “It should be done!” he tells himself and grinds his jaw, hoping that though it fails to ease his tension, at least it does not betray him to the others waiting their turn.

The last he let go before him exits and gives him a smile. A curious gesture. Not of thanks nor friendship, for they do not know each other, but of … commiseration. It angers him and as the emotion flares the note is heard that signals that the next, he, should enter.

Enraged, his charge in his arms, he strides through the leather covers and into the tunnel.

Dark at first, damp, stale and musty, it unwelcomes him but now there is no turning back.

Torches cast spasms of light, like twisted bodies swaying arrhythmically from nature’s gallows to the breeze of jackdaw wings and hunting insects.

Though outside it is winter here it is not warm, but bearable. A constant feeling that is not comfort but which numbs his skin so that he knows he need not concern himself with the cold.

And ahead. On a stone that is shaped like a chair never to be sat in, by man at least, is who he seeks.

His footsteps pound as his heart pounds and each sounds in tune with the other, repeating its partner’s beat and making his uneasy steps seem to be the panicked run of a defenceless hunter from his enraged quarry.

And as he stands in front of the bleached twig of gnarled womanhood and brings himself to look on her, she speaks:

“Trust no-one!” she cackles and her foetid smile makes him retch even as it enthrals him in its incongruence, so human, so true.

He does not feel himself smile, but wonders if he does, if again a reaction gives him away.

“That’s right! Trust no-one!!” The cackle rattles in his ears like her thinning bones rattle in her scrawn, her gourd, her wine-sack of ripped and scrunched flesh and the humour she so evidently feels is repugnant: how can such a witch as this, someone so physically unpleasant be allowed anything but misery? But pain and suffering and hate and fear? She has the power of fear it is true, but it is the respect she has too that keeps her alive.

As he is who he is the thought comes to the fore: “So if I should trust no-one…?” but she knows how minds work and knows which will ask which questions and so he need not ask it.

A phlegm-coated laugh is her response to the question that must have caused a ripple on his brow, a breeze of doubt to push past his hair, displacing it an iota. “Hah!-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah!”. How she can have lived so long with such an affliction as only the mortally ill can have, he cannot say but she has and despite all that says she is, frail and holding on to life by the merest of threads they both know that what it would take to break that thread is something she does not possess: the desire to die.

She looks at his charge. The reason he has come. His Firstborn.

To come for naming and blessing; that is how his people believe their sons and daughters will know good fortune and more. So they come and pay the witch her tithe. They come as they have for generations and true or no, their belief is what keeps them safe, at times. And so they come.

And the witch? It is forbidden to say what happens when she casts her magic, and ill-will befell all who once sought to explain. Sudden and bloody, or slow and dreadful; whatever the end, none who sought to say could ever do so. And now none try: life is too precious and death too final for any to want to submit to the caprice of gossip and deny themselves the joy so few feel at this time of year.

“You have it?” she asks, her voice creaking like a door nudged aside by a hesitant wind.

He nods and motions to the pouch at his side. Upon her unmoving gaze he looks to remove it, but is stopped as she makes it plain now is not the time with just a twitch of her eye. Or is it the flicker of the torchlight?

Her crabbed claw raises itself in a ‘come hither’ gesture and he approaches, but is met by a feeling, a force that makes it hard for him to move forward and he pauses, seeing nothing but air between them.

With a nodded head, the witch motions towards the child and he understands. He reaches out as far as he can and lays him down, only to see that the ground that once was the stone where his son was to lay has become flesh and the child is cradled in the witch’s arms.