Kill the Witch (opening chapter)

After a deadly plague, a village is searching for a scapegoat.

To understand that night, you must first understand that the plague left the village in ruins. I don’t mean the walls and roofs and fences - those stood just as well as ever, still vigilantly guarding nothing much from even less. It was the people who were ruined, even those who were left, their minds flaying apart from too much grief, too fast. Families lay shattered into helpless limbs beneath the loss of mothers, or curled like wounded animals around the loss of children. Those other ties, the threads which ran from household to household, bound us together and made us villagers, were stretched far beyond the point of fraying. The priestess, her acolytes, the elders, the medicine-man- anyone who could have woven us back together again lay rotting beneath the earth.

Until one night, that night, the gathering-bell began to toll.

The sound of the bell, that night - it was like a memory from before, calling out across the dark. It awoke something in us, perhaps the only thing deep enough and sturdy enough to survive the agony of the past year. Dozing eyes blinked open, broken hearts quickened with something other than pain.
One by one, the doors of the cottages breathed open. People trickled forth in two and threes, at first just to stand, dazed, upon their varied thresholds. But the sight of their neighbours, blinking back at them, was another spark, another awakening, enough to bring them shuffling forward. Nobody spoke. Nobody needed to. Drops merged to became rivulets, which all came in time to pool in the gathering-place.

By that point, the sight of so many together created a kind of glow in the air, a shimmering bubble-skin of something akin to comfort. More than one villager burst into silent tears. It was proof, you see. Proof that some part of the world, rent and broken as it was, still worked.

The bell had sounded, and the village had gathered. That was how things were, and how they had always been.

Eventually, of course, every eye turned to see who was ringing the bell - which only slightly deflated the tenuous joy of the moment. Phineas stood with clenched teeth, gripping the cord with his right hand, hammering it over and over long after the last of the likely attendees had slid into place. His left hand coiled around a burning torch, which stood in stark relief against the darkening sky. The light of the fire licked against the faces of those closest to him, casting them half in shadow. Behind him, several rings of onlookers away, the ancient stone shrine stood at the northward edge of the gathering-place. Its silhouette was barely visible beneath the heap of desperate offerings from the now-dead. The stench of rotting fruit and flesh drifted forth to claw and our tongue and nostrils.

Phineas was a man of little talent and littler sense, and it was clear that some part of him knew this. His ailing father and elder sister had spent most of their days deflecting his erstwhile attentions from their fields and animals, and so he spent his days flitting from house to house like a magpie, picking up whatever crumbs of gossip he could, before dispersing them wherever they might cause the most anguish. 

He released the bell, finally. He was a great pacer, was Phineas, particularly when he was in a fit about something, but the small platform attached the bell-post had no room for pacing. Instead, he gripped the wood of the bell-post, and leaned out as far as he could, swinging like some southlands ape, his torch aloft.

“My friends, my neighbours, my family of families. The time has some to avenge our dead.”
If you could have felt it - the chill we all felt at those words. The gathering had pulled us away from the nightmares that were our homes and heads, just for a moment. Now Phineas was inviting the grief in, entwining it into whatever he wanted to say.

“We all lost someone in the pestilence. My father, gone. The priestess, gone. Half our children, gone. Amyntas, Galene, Adamantia, Elias, Styliani - all gone.”
He almost lost them. People flinched away, their gazes skidding along the ground. Those who still had spouses or siblings huddled against one another. The reminder was too raw, too painful. But then-
“Meanwhile, she walks free! She sits in her house, perfect fine, laughing at the rest of us!”

For a moment, the entire world seemed to float in the balance. Some eyes searched out and found one another. Others flew back to Phineas, suddenly rapt.

Phineas cast his torch in a wide arc, then back again, illuminating one or the other knot of faces. Then he raised his free hand in a broad gesture of frustration.
“Come on! I know you’re all thinking it. I’ve heard half of you say it! When are we doing to do something?” He cast the flame of his torch above a wideset, middle aged man. “Stel, help me here!”
The crowd’s attention curled around Stel, far more readily than it had Phineas. For a moment, Stel could only stammer, mopping cold sweat from his brow.
“Oh, well, yes. Yes, I thought she had given my wife the evil eye.
“And then?” demanded Phineas.
“And then- then she died.”

Phineas took no moment to savor this victory, instead sweeping his torch westward to a youngish farmwife, newly widowed and childless, ghostly in her grief.
“Helene! You’ve always known what she was, haven’t you?”
Helene spoke more readily than Stel, but through thick tears.
“Oh, she’s always off in the deepwoods, or talking to thin air. I mean, we’ve all seen it!”
This last, plaintive cry, drew an answering call from deep in the crowd.
“She was never scared, was she? Not like the rest of us! It’s like she knew!”

I tried. I promise you, I swear by all the gods, I did try.

“She’s just a harmless old woman,” I said, calling out from behind high shoulders. This too drew an answering cry - but not the kind I wanted.
“She killed my pig! Years ago, I told you! You none of you listened!”
“I spoke with Pagona, not long ago.” This voice, more than any of the others, drew a stir. The late priestess’s husband, the only one who would ever call her by name, stood before the bell-post, half-obscuring Phineas himself. “I told her my suspicions.” He raised his arms wide, splaying his palms, his hands and his pause saying what he wanted to say before he ever got there with words. “Then the pestillence was upon us, and Pagona was gone!”
“You see!” Phineas thrust his torch directly upwards know, pulling all the attention back to him. “She thinks she’s beaten us. She’s murdered half the village. Will you stand for it?”

A great hailstorm of shouts came now, the anger of a dozen dozen individuals swirling together, growing hotter and hotter. Any objections, like mine, were immediately drowned out, each serving only as provocation for a dozen more half-truths and we-all-knows. 
As the buzzing reached its peak, Phineas leapt from the platform. A hushing of voices rippled out from where he landed. He handed his torch to a nearby lad, and lead him in a slow, silent walk through the crowd. The crush of bodies parted effortlessly around him, this drunken halfwit having become a talisman of the village’s rage. 

Phineas made his way to the shrine, and reached behind the rotten mass of useless offerings. Between this and the knee-high brick wall of the gathering-space, he had hidden a a great bundle of spears and rakes and hoes. 

I know not how to describe the sound which passed through the crowd at the sight of the weapons, for I have never heard its like before or since. It was half-jeer, half-growl, guttural and elated. You might compare it to a dog who knows it is about to be fed, if the dog were as vast and vicious as a storm.

Phineas made great show of distributing each weapon, lifting it high over his head, seeming to point it to one man, then the other, before tossing it through the air to his chosen accomplice. The crowd followed the process with rapture, a uniform cheer building and hushing and peaking as he made each choice.

“You can’t do this!” I tried again, shouting myself hoarse over the crowd. “It’s murder!” 
“It’s justice!” someone shouted back. 
“One life for dozens!” cried another.

I pushed through the crowd and ran to Old Man Gethe, who was staring at some vague spot somewhere to the left of Phineas’s performance.
“Uncle, it’s Andromeda. They’re talking about Andromeda.”
“Eh?” he said. “Andromeda?” he looked around, as if seeing the crowd for the first time. 
“What are you all doing?” he cried. “Andromeda’s not a witch. We used to feed the cows together.”
“See!” I looked from face to face, trying to catch someone’s attention, anyone’s. “She’s just an old woman who’s lived here all her life! She’s no witch!”

But the time for talk was over. The weapons had been distributed; the men who carried them were marching through the crowd, deterred only by the congratulatory shakes and slaps of their neighbours. 
Phineas, having seized possession of his torch again, was pushing through to lead them. They marched forward, and the mob surged behind them, a seething, boiling mass of shouting and stamping and hate. The din of shouts and screams honed, and sharpened, until the mob was crying with a single voice: 
“Witch!”
“Witch!”
“Witch!”
“Witch!”

The orange torchlight shrank to a dancing point, scarcely visible through the thicket of heads and arms, leaving only the silent gaze of the stars. 
Barely half a dozen of us were left. I ran a few useless steps after the crowd – but what could I have done? Scolded one or two of the stragglers? Somehow overtaken the crowd and thrown my body before Andromeda’s, only to be tossed aside or killed along with her? 

I turned back to the gathering-place, both my hands clenching in my hair. Of those who stayed behind, two were at the altar, offering prayers for mercy or forgiveness, as useless as the rotting fruit that now stained it. Most were simply wandering home. Only Old Man Gethe was still facing the direction of the mob. His mouth was moving, as though he were mumbling under his breath in thought.

All at once, his hands flew to his chest, and he sank to the ground, wheezing. 

I ran to his side, bracing my body against his before he could collapse completely.
“Gethe? Gethe, can you hear me?” 
Someone else ran to his other side, I forget who, and we lifted him to his feet. Without speaking, we walked him the three dozen paces to my home, to my sick-table and shelves of herbs. It shames me to say it, but I think I was relieved. At least there was something to do, someone I could actually help.

So I wasn’t there to see when the mob reached the house of the so-called witch. But you deserve some account of what happened, so I will try my best to picture it.
She was a tall woman, even with the stoop she had developed, with strong, fine features. I always picture her sitting in her seat in the corner of the cottage, sewing. She was always sewing something or other.

I don’t know who of the mob entered the house. There would not have been space for more than three of them, maybe four. Every time it is spoken of, the story of who stabbed her first always changes. 
She would have risen, tottering, to her feet. She would have asked what they were doing there, demanded they leave. But she would not have begged, or screamed. 
I saw the body afterward, as you know. I could not count the wounds. I only pray that one of the early stabs cut something vital. The mob would have quieted, bit by bit, as she died, the force of their hatred breaking upon her body.

I suppose Glykus must have been one of the ones who killed her, because everyone agrees it was he who spotted the crib.

All I know for certain is that, some time later, as I was helping Old Man Gethe eat a paste of berries and herbs to ease the pressure on his heart, someone knocked, very politely, on my door.
I opened it to see Glykus, Phineas and the priestess’s husband. Glykus was holding a bundle of cloth. He held it at arm’s length, dangling from one hand, as if it contained something noxious. But something about the bundle’s shape sparked a suspicion, more than a suspicion, in my mind, even before it started to cry.

I dove forward, hands outstretched. Glykus dropped the baby into my arms. I found its face, and stroked it with a finger. I tried to remember my mother with my younger brother, and made shh-ing noises. I bounced up and down on the spot. Eventually, the baby’s eyes found my face, and her cries became burbles. I remember tiny, sticky hands exploring my face.

“You see?” came the priestess’s husband’s voice, from the distant edge of my awareness. “I told you this was the right thing.”
“I still think we should kill it,” Phineas muttered. That caught my attention, and I whirled round to face them, holding the child close to my chest. 
“Nonsense.”, came the oil-smooth reply. “This is fate. Poor Agathe lost her husband, and any chance to bear a child of her own, thanks to the witch’s plague. Now, thanks to our actions, she has this child to raise instead.”
They walked away, leaving me with a sleeping Gethe, a burbling baby, and the enormity of what had happened crashing over me. 

Yes, you worked it out, didn’t you? The baby was you. That was how I came to be your mother.