by Rab Foster
in Issue 151, August 2024
Gudroon lowered the telescope and said, “Bad magic.”
“How bad?” Ordinarily, Farmer Airdwel’s voice was nasal and hard-to-listen-to. Today, anxiety had given it yet more of a whine.
“Very bad. See for yourself.”
She passed him the telescope. Airdwel was reluctant to take it because she was a witch, which meant the instrument could have supernatural properties. Finally, holding it gingerly, as if he expected it to come alive and bite him, he put it to his eye. He squinted into the objective lens while the eyepiece pointed up the valley. Gudroon sighed, took the telescope off him, turned it around, and gave it back.
Airdwel managed to focus on something. “Unbelievable!” he cried, snatching the telescope from his face. “It catches faraway things in its tube and makes them big and clear!” He looked at Gudroon admiringly. “We’re lucky you chose this valley for your home.”
His excitement roused even the interest of Farmer Karnwik. A hint of curiosity appeared on Karnwik’s face, whose features were small, immobile, and almost lost on the expanse of his large, sun-reddened head. He lumbered over and reached for the telescope. But Airdwel, who’d been so scared of the device a minute ago, had become selfish with it. He kept peering through it and whooping at the magnified things he saw. They made a strange pair – Airdwel tall and skinny, his clothes loose and flapping as if they were hanging on a pole, and Karnwik broad and stout, his outfit stretched over his flesh and looking ready to burst.
All the time, Airdwel pointed the telescope nowhere near the scarecrow. “The old sycamore by the quarry,” he exclaimed. “I can see every leaf on it. And there’s a sheep…. It could be standing right next to me!”
Taspar, the third farmer, stood apart from them. He was a big-bellied man, as heavy as Karnwik, though his garments fitted him properly. He’d been chewing a wad of sage and mint leaves, a combination he believed healthful for his remaining teeth. Spitting this out, he muttered, “Idiots.” Then he addressed Gudroon. “That instrument is one used by seafarers. It has two lenses, at either end, which enlarge the images of distant things. Am I right?”
“You are, Farmer Taspar.”
“Where did you acquire it?”
“On the South Hasparkian coast.”
He raised a grey, hairy eyebrow. “Really? A lawless and dangerous part of the world. Surely too dangerous for a lady like you.” Then a look of understanding appeared on his florid face – what she could see of it behind his unruly beard and moustache. “Ah, but I’m forgetting. You’re a witch. A former member of the esteemed Grand Coven. No doubt that coast was the scene of one of your many adventures…”
Their conversation was interrupted by a shriek from Airdwel, who’d finally managed to aim the telescope at the scarecrow.
Taspar’s expression changed to annoyance. “What is it, man?”
Airdwel was suddenly keen to rid himself of the telescope. He pushed it into Karnwik’s big, sausage-fingered hands. “It’s hideous!”
“Obviously, it’s hideous,” Gudroon said. “I suspect it’s the work of Prooshkan craftsmen. The Prooshkans are known to commune with the spirits of the unseen realms. And to incorporate the dark knowledge they obtain into their handiwork.”
“But,” Taspar fumed, “what’s such a thing doing up there by the road to Terryk Head? How did
Rassilbay get his hands on it? And what was he thinking when he erected it?”
“Some Prooshkans travel around and trade. Maybe a group set up camp on his land and did business with him. He probably got the scarecrow without knowing the extent of its powers. He just wanted something that’d keep the birds away from his crops. It’ll certainly do that.”
Airdwel shuddered. “That thing? It’ll keep everything else away too.”
“It’ll terrorize humans and animals alike,” Gudroon agreed. “Even at his distance, I can feel its malevolence. Also, it’ll exert an influence over Rassilbay and his household. They won’t be aware anything’s wrong and will be deaf to pleas that they take it down.” She sighed. “Of course, the consequences of it remaining there could be catastrophic.”
Airdwel nodded sagely, then looked more anxious than ever. “What consequences?”
“The scarecrow’s a focal-point. It harnesses the energies of the unseen realms and projects them into our world. But if it keeps doing that, a time may come when it stops being a focal-point and becomes a portal. When the barrier between the worlds breaks around it, creating a hole, through which the denizens of the unseen realms can pass. And we don’t want that – those denizens roaming our valley, wreaking havoc.”
“Well,” Taspar said, “that’ll only happen if it stays up. And it has to come down now. It’s already a menace. That road gives access to the head of the valley. My son tried riding that way yesterday and his horse refused to go any further when they came in sight of the damned thing. Also, we need to be able to communicate with Rassilbay. He’s the second-most important farmer in these parts.” He left it unstated that he, Taspar, was the most important.
For the first time, Karnwik spoke. “What,” he rumbled, “do we do?”
“We fight its magic with our magic.” Gudroon corrected herself. “My magic.”
Taspar shook his head disgustedly. “Honestly, why did Rassilbay let those Prooshkans anywhere near his farm? Though in some ways it’s unsurprising. I’ve heard reports he’s failing physically, and it was only a matter of time before his wits started failing too. And the man has no sons. At Terryk Head it’s just him and his three daughters, cooped up together in a farmhouse. Living in such proximity to women all the time would soften any man’s head.”
Then, remembering the company contained a woman, he altered his tone. “Of course, we have to think of the welfare of Rassilbay’s daughters too. Those poor young girls, cut off from the outside world by that horror of a scarecrow.” With unconvincing gallantry, he concluded, “Destroying the thing isn’t just for our benefit. It’s to rescue them.”
That evening they assembled at Gudroon’s cottage. When she told the farmers she planned to conduct a ritual, Taspar asked, “Will this one work?”
“All my rituals work,” she retorted. “The problem on the previous occasions was your reluctance to supply the necessary materials.”
Last year, shortly after she moved into the cottage and the farmers learned her identity, they approached her with a request for weather-magic. Could she end the weeks of unrelenting rain that was turning their valley into a mire?
“Yes,” she said, “we could do with a little sunshine. Let’s see… For the ceremony, I’ll require beeswax candles… And a variety of flowers. Sunflowers, of course, and marigolds, sneezeweed, gloriosa daisies… Also, some juniper twigs, saffron, mistletoe, rosemary… And not forgetting the most important item. A heart.”
“A heart?” squeaked Airdwel. “A human heart?”
“Well, the heart and the sun are closely connected. The soul is believed to radiate out of one, across the body, and light radiates out of the other, across the world. So, yes. To effect such a change in the weather, I’ll need a heart.”
That project came to nothing.
In the spring of this year, the farmers arrived at her door again. This time they wanted the opposite. Recently, it’d been abnormally hot and dry, and they needed rain for the growing season.
“Certainly, I can conjure up a storm. One with thunder, lightning, and plenty of rain. Here’s what we’ll need…” The final thing on her list was a length of human intestine. “I’ll bind three knots along it and undo them during the ceremony. The undoing of the third knot will ensure your valley’s doused in rain.”
The farmers hadn’t been enthusiastic about procuring a human intestine either. “Look,” Gudroon said irritably. “This magic works on the many correlations between the human body and the different forms of weather. The heart and the sun. The intestines and storms. The lungs, and the air inside them, and mist and fog. The body’s extremities, the fingers and toes, and snow, ice, and frost. You can’t expect me to change the weather if you won’t respect those principles – and provide the necessary body-parts for the ceremonies.”
After that, she hoped the farmers would leave her alone. She desired a peaceful retirement and this year planned to establish a garden behind her cottage, one with cabbages, turnips, beetroots, onions, beans, and peas in its main area, and banks of herbs at its sides. She didn’t want to be disturbed by those three old fools, looking for favors.
And they didn’t intrude on her again, until the matter of Farmer Rassilbay’s scarecrow.
Taspar, Airdwel, and Karnwik looked relieved when she told them this evening’s ceremony wouldn’t require any body-parts. Then she qualified that. “Come to think of it, a part is needed. A small part.”
Gudroon produced an artavus, sank the tip of its blade into her thumb, and caught the resulting dribble of blood in a goblet. She did the same to her visitors. She hadn’t flinched when she’d pierced her thumb and she enjoyed the sight of the farmers trying, and failing, to look unruffled while she pierced theirs. After that, she tipped the goblet’s contents into a bucket. Already in the bucket was a mixture of ashes, from some burnt alder-wood, and water, taken from a sacred spring. She stirred in the blood.
Once their punctured thumbs had been cleansed with vinegar, and wrapped in strips of linen, she had the farmers sit inside a pentangle she’d outlined on the flagstones of the cottage’s main room. They occupied three of its points and she installed herself in the fourth. Chalked in the fifth point was an equilateral triangle that contained a spiral.
“What’s that?” Airdwel asked.
“A common symbol of Prooshkan magic. During the ceremony it’ll represent the scarecrow.” She noticed Taspar’s bearded jaws in motion and snapped, “Empty your mouth. No foreign substances are allowed within the pentangle.”
Scowling like a chastised child, Taspar spat the glob of chewed leaves onto Gudroon’s hearth.
She started chanting in some foreign tongue whose guttural tone the farmers found unnerving. She’d warned them not to move and, as they sat on the flagstones in the same positions, their joints ached and their muscles grew cramped. Finally, the chant reached a caterwauling crescendo and ceased. Gudroon stood up. With a strangely vacant expression, she lifted a stick, dipped it in the mix of blood, alder-ash, and water, and used the stick’s dirtied end to draw four lines inside the pentangle. All the lines began at its center and ended at the Prooshkan spiral-within-a-triangle. They followed four different courses that twisted, curved, and zigzagged.
Gudroon emerged from her trance and stared at the lines she’d drawn as if seeing them for the first time. “Success.”
Airdwel asked hopefully, “It’s finished?”
“It’s merely started. This was a ceremony of divination, to find out how we can get close to that thing without being harmed. Close enough to conduct the real ceremony, which will destroy it. Now, I asked you to bring a map of the valley…”
Taspar produced the map and Gudroon copied onto it the four lines she’d created in ash in the pentangle. She drew them, with their varied and eccentric courses, from the spot where they’d used the telescope that morning. The lines’ end-point was where the scarecrow stood. To get there, they cut through fields, bogland, and woodland, crossed streams, hedges, and fences, and went up and down slopes, rocks and screes. “The ceremony tonight has given each of us a route we can follow concealed from the scarecrow’s gaze. If we keep to those routes, it won’t see us approach or use its powers against us. We can get safely to the site of the next ceremony.” She sounded excited. “Then the real action will happen.”
Her companions didn’t share her excitement. Taspar ventured, “You’re proposing we all travel up to Terryk Head? Cross-country?”
“Yes, tomorrow. We set off in the late afternoon and arrive at the site at dusk. Is that a problem?”
“Yes… Well, no… It’s just that these routes you’ve sketched… They look arduous. Dykes and fences to climb over, bogs to navigate, water to wade through… Obviously, I can do that, but… To manage it in the time you’re proposing, you might want to use a younger… a slightly younger man.”
“He’s right,” Airdwel said. “We’re robust for our ages as you can see. But we’re a little past our primes. Your plan would work better with younger participants.”
Karnwik rumbled his agreement.
Gudroon was indignant. “You can’t back out of this now. You all took part in the divination ceremony. It involved your blood. And those concealed routes were calculated specifically for people with your blood in their veins…”
Then something occurred to her.
“I suppose, though… The routes would be navigable by other people with the same blood in their veins… People from your bloodlines…”
“Our offspring?” Airdwel queried.
“Yes… Though they’d need both vitality and courage. Enough to get to the site and then withstand what the scarecrow flings at them during the ceremony.”
Taspar brightened. “Well, that settles it. My son will accompany you. He’s strong and will barely break sweat getting up to Terryk Head. He’s got pluck too. He’ll give you his full support when you act against that thing.”
“And my eldest lad,” Airdwel said, “will play his part too. Much as I’d love to help you tomorrow, Mistress Gudroon, you’re better off with someone slightly more dynamic than I am.”
Karnwik mumbled something about sending his son to assist tomorrow as well.
That was how Gudroon mounted her assault on the scarecrow not in the company of the three farmers, but in the company of the three farmers’ sons.
Gudroon arrived first. She came pushing a handcart that contained four packs. While waiting for the others, she peered towards the scarecrow’s distant silhouette. It stood perched on the edge of a shelf in the upper valley-floor. Flanking the shelf were steep slopes that, after another mile, converged and brought the valley to an end.
As she’d done at this spot yesterday, Gudroon took out the telescope and studied the scarecrow more closely.
She couldn’t decide which feature looked most monstrous. The luminously white skin? The fanged grin that made her think of the jagged iron blades in an animal trap? The twin horns slanting up from the brow above the yellow eyes? The clumps of sickle-like fingers protruding from the ends of the outstretched arms? The tapering body that, instead of having legs as it descended to the ground, became a serpentine tail twisting around the post that held it up? Or the way the end of the tail seemed to burrow into the ground, so that the scarecrow looked like a growth sprouting from the soil rather than a dummy planted in it?
After she’d put the telescope away, the farmers’ sons appeared one by one. They were as she’d imagined them.
Young Airdwel was as foolish as his father, but also vain. He wore a tunic embroidered with gold thread. Cowhide shoes with copper-tipped toes enclosed his feet. As he came close and greeted her with banal pleasantries, she saw the powder and smelt the perfume on his skin.
Then came Young Taspar. He lacked his father’s ruddy face, riotous beard, and immodest belly, for now at least, but had all the old man’s arrogance. He wore a hunting outfit of waxed green cloth, knee-high boots, and a cap with a pointed brim and pheasant’s feather. A cruel sneer distorted his otherwise handsome features. Gudroon supposed the beasts he hunted got no mercy.
Ignoring her, Young Taspar hailed Young Airdwel: “So, Vurdon, you’re ready to rescue the three lovelies of Terryk Head from the clutches of that evil scarecrow? Well, don’t bother about Anjal. She’s the sweetest of the bunch and mine to rescue.”
Young Airdwel cackled, his voice as shrill as his father’s. “And Anjal’s also the eldest, in line to inherit most of Terryk Head. It’s not her beauty you want your paws on, Daryen. It’s her land.”
Both guffawed. To her surprise, Gudroon found herself missing their fathers. Even the company of those old buffoons was preferable to this.
Lastly, Young Karnwik arrived. Dressed in coarse, woolen clothes flecked with hayseeds, and cracked, leather boots crusted with dirt, he was the only one who looked like a farmer’s son. He carried a smell of cowsheds, a contrast to the fragrances Young Airdwel was doused in.
“Romadar!” Young Airdwel exclaimed. “Dressed for the occasion, I see. No doubt Rassilbay’s daughters will swoon when they see you rushing up the valley to liberate them.”
Again, he and Young Taspar guffawed. Young Karnwik gazed at the ground and said nothing. His sunburnt face was already too red to show embarrassment. Gudroon felt a pang of sympathy and wondered if Farmers Taspar and Airdwel had mocked the silent, bovine Karnwik the same way when they’d been young.
“Well, gentlemen…” She pronounced the second word without enthusiasm. “I’m sure your fathers have briefed you on today’s mission. It only remains for me to give you your directions.” She handed each youth a sheet of paper with instructions on it. Momentarily, she wondered if Karnwik had bothered teaching his son to read, but he seemed to understand what she’d written. “Stick to the routes described. They’re tracts of blindness in the scarecrow’s vision. It can’t see you as you move along them, and can’t harm you.”
From her handcart, she passed them three of the packs. “Once we get to the scarecrow, we’ll conduct a ritual to disable it. These contain the equipment for the ritual, the robes, candles, wands, chalices, and so on.” The fourth pack she strapped onto her own back.
For the first time, Young Taspar addressed her. “And what about you, old girl? Will you be able to get up there? You must be as advanced in years as my father.”
“I’ll make it,” Gudroon retorted. “Never worry.” She spoke to the three of them again. “When the final directions bring you to the area in front of the scarecrow, wait until all of us are there. And stay put. Don’t go any closer to the thing. Otherwise, you’ll leave your concealment. So… Good luck!”
The youths headed in different directions, following three of the courses plotted by last night’s ritual. Before Gudroon embarked on the fourth course, she took a final look at the misshapen figure jutting above the high valley-floor.
“I hope this works.”
Young Airdwel soon despaired of his twisting, turning route.
The ground he was on belonged to Daryen Taspar’s father, who rented it to a tenant farmer. The tenant did what he could with its unpromising soil, growing turnips on the best of it, grazing sheep on the rest. Now Young Airdwel found himself repeatedly traversing a long strip of turnips. Gudroon’s directions sent him from a point in the field on one side of the turnips, through them, to a point in the field on the other side. Then they sent him back through the turnips to the first field, to another point hardly any further along than the point he’d left before.
The latest directions said: “Turn back the way you came. Cross the strip again to the sheep-stell.” He groaned. He imagined the turnip-strip was a wound and he was a surgeon’s needle zigzagging across it, pulling a thread between the two edges of skin. Back and forth, back and forth, barely making any progress…
Meanwhile, the scarecrow rose over the land above him. It seemed to stand at the top of the turnip strip, though since the turnips were in Taspar’s land, and the scarecrow was in Rassilbay’s, this was only how the topography made it look. In reality, the turnips ended far short of the thing.
Again, Young Airdwel traipsed through turnip-leaves. Halfway across, he felt a chill breeze and turned in the direction it came from – the upper valley, Terryk Head. It perturbed him how the turnip-leaves writhed. They formed a squirming green carpet, one that seemingly stretched all the way to the scarecrow.
He clambered over the wooden fence at the strip’s side and went to the stell. This was a round, stone pen where sheep could shelter during bad weather. He climbed onto its wall and sat there. Littering the circle of ground inside it were sheep’s droppings, tufts of sheep’s wool, even sheep-bones including a ram’s skull and two ribcages.
Young Airdwel released the pack from his aching shoulders. He cursed the old witch. What did his father say her name was? Gut-rot? Gung-hole?
Then he consulted the directions and cursed her even more. “Turn back the way you came. Align yourself with the summit of Beshkel Hill and walk towards it. Cross the strip again and stop twenty strides beyond.” He looked towards the summit and calculated he’d be only yards closer to the scarecrow than he was already.
“Unbelievable!” he cried.
The breeze intensified. As it blew down the valley, he saw it’d become flecked with white. Flying through the air were copious scraps of wool, which suddenly made him feel he was in a snowstorm. Then, behind him, Young Airdwel heard a sound – one somewhere between a hiss and a chuckle, what he imagined a snake would make if it attempted to laugh like a human. He looked back into the stell and his eyes widened.
So many wool-scraps had landed on the ground inside that they formed a long mound. At the mound’s end lay the ram’s skull. On either side of it, two thinner mounds stuck out perpendicularly and extended to the two bundles of sheep’s ribs. He imagined the debris deposited by the breeze as a body and outstretched arms, the skull as a head, the ribs as two sets of claw-like fingers…
The skull transformed. Its horns no longer curled at its sides but straightened and stuck up above its eye-sockets. Its lower part acquired a grinning mouth, packed with sharp teeth. Then, though the figure consisted of unconnected parts, it began to rise as a single mass.
Young Airdwel sprang off the stell and backed away. He saw the metamorphosized sheep-skull, then the woolly body, emerge above the wall. Its arms remained outspread, as if it wished to give him a hug. Yellow eyes coalesced within the skull’s sockets and the rib-claws sprouting from its wrists twitched hungrily.
Shrieking, Young Airdwel spun around and ran for his life. Moments later, blind with fear, he smashed into the fence at the edge of the turnip-strip. The old, brittle wood in its rails snapped. He stumbled further, tripped over a ridge, and crashed down amid the leaves and purplish bulbs of the turnips.
When he dared to raise his head, he realized the air was clear and saw nothing lurking in or around the stell. He clambered to his feet. Yes, he was alone. He must have imagined the apparition. But how? He’d sometimes escaped the boredom of living in the valley by partaking of substances – mandrake root, devil’s trumpet, henbane, absinthe, opium, certain mushrooms. But it’d been weeks since he’d last smoked, chewed, eaten or drank such things. He couldn’t explain what he’d seen that way.
He noticed the real scarecrow no longer stood in the upper valley. It’d vanished. And while he was puzzling over its absence, he heard the same sound, a half-chuckle, half-hiss. This time, it was even closer.
Young Airdwel flung himself down again. He ended up lying along a furrow with ridges of turnips on either side. He prayed the leaves sprouting from the tops of the vegetables were enough to conceal him.
The hissing-chuckling repeated itself, and kept repeating, until it became a chorus emanating from many places. Some places sounded right beside him. He twisted his head leftwards and rightwards and discovered the turnips on the adjacent ridges had changed. Their purple surfaces had been replaced by white faces, identical ones, all with yellow eyes, fanged grins, and horns jutting from their foreheads. These hideous visages leered at him from under the straggly plumes of the leaves. The nearest ones were inches away.
Young Airdwel practically popped up out of the furrow and landed on his feet. He raced to the bottom of the strip, then continued to race down the valley. He went as fast as he could, intent on getting as far from Terryk Head as possible. A seemingly endless wail left his lips like steam whistling from a boiling kettle.
Young Taspar paused and listened, wondering if he heard a faraway cry. Perhaps some new bird or animal had found its way into the valley and would be worth hunting? But a vigorous breeze was blowing and made it impossible to hear any more of the sound. He resumed his trudge across the bogland.
There were stories about this area. Supposedly, it was the result of a failed project by his great-grandfather, who’d diverted water from the Terryk Burn, the valley’s river, and tried to improve its soil and make it cultivatable. Too much water had seeped in, though, and instead it’d become a wasteland of mosses, rushes, wildflowers, frogs, snails, and dragonflies. Young Taspar had never explored the place before. He had no interest in hunting amphibians, mollusks, or insects.
People had lived here prior to his ancestor’s botched attempt to irrigate it. Now, following Gudroon’s instructions, he made his way towards the ruins of a cottage. While his boots sank into the mossy turf, he experienced an odd feeling. It was a feeling of being followed, of being hunted. He’d observed that feeling in other creatures. For instance, when he was stalking a deer… How it suddenly froze and looked around, its fearful eyes scanning the landscape for predators.
Like the deer, Young Taspar froze and looked around.
He saw nothing move amid the moss, rushes, and speckles of yellow flowers, except for an insect buzzing around him. He swatted at it, expecting it to be a dragonfly, but it was really a wasp. Then something on the ground caught his eye. Sprouting a little way behind him was a stunted plant, consisting of curved, pointed stalks. It looked like a bundle of claws. And about two yards from it, he spotted a similar plant with curved, sharp stalks – again, like claws.
He continued towards the cottage. Beyond, in the distance, the scarecrow had been visible, but now it’d disappeared. He’d obviously reached a point where the valley’s contours hid the thing from view.
A minute later, he noticed another sound – an oozy, slurping one, as if something was wriggling through the boggy ground behind him. Again, he looked back. Again, he saw nothing unusual… Except for the two, claw-like plants. They looked as close to him as they had before, which couldn’t be right. He’d moved on from where he’d seen them previously. They couldn’t have moved too.
Those plants were two yards apart… Young Taspar lifted his arms. That was the length from one wrist to the other if you stretched your arms. Stretched them wide, like a scarecrow did. Briskly, he walked the remaining way to the cottage. He wasn’t afraid, he told himself. He was merely impatient to get out of this benighted part of the valley.
The cottage was a roofless shell. Moss slathered the remnants of its walls. He produced the paper with Gudroon’s instructions and read aloud: “From the cottage, go to the grove at the bog’s northern edge.” His voice had to compete with the buzzing of a pair of wasps that’d taken an interest in him.
He saw the grove ahead. A handful of aged trees raised a few limbs and branches and supported a smattering of leaves. They stood where the bogland gave way to the bottom of a grassy slope.
But before he could leave the ruins, a new sound assailed him – a weird, sibilating laughter.
Young Taspar put up his fists. “Who’s that?” he demanded. “You’d better reveal yourself. Otherwise, you’re going to get a thrashing!”
The laughter multiplied, so that it came not from one direction, but several. Young Taspar lowered his fists and drew a hunting knife from a sheath on his thigh. He looked around, searching the broken cottage-walls for signs of mischief.
Several white snails emerged onto the moss on top of those walls. The snails were enormous, as long as his hand and bearing shells the size of hens’ eggs. The laughter couldn’t be coming from them, of course, but it was bizarre how they’d appeared during it. He approached a wall that rose to the height of his face and inspected a snail there. Its head exuded two horn-like feelers. Less snail-like were its yellow eyes and wide mouth, which opened and closed in synchronization with the laughter. Open, it showed sharp teeth.
Damn! It was laughing!
Something alighted on the wall nearby. This was a gross, white frog, similarly horned and yellow-eyed. Its gash of a mouth also opened and closed with the laughter. Again, fangs appeared each time the mouth opened.
Spluttering in disgust and horror, Young Taspar tore across the remaining bogland. He’d had no interest in hunting amphibians and mollusks, but perhaps they were interested in hunting him.
He didn’t stop until he got to the grove. There, he tripped over a root and fell on his face. He struck solid ground because the bogland was behind him. The laughter had stopped by the time he pushed himself up onto his knees. He glanced back. Now the bogland seemed wrapped in stillness and silence.
Then he saw what was in front of him. Somehow, the scarecrow had transplanted itself to this grove and become gigantic. He gawped up at it, at its outspread arms and bunched claws, at its round, white face with horns, grin, and yellow eyes. He remembered the knife in his hand and, giving a defiant cry, flung it up into the face.
But he wasn’t before the scarecrow. He was before a tree, a denuded one with only a few branches, two of which stuck out from either side of the trunk and ended in clusters of gnarled twigs. Young Taspar had no time to fathom what was going on. Something dropped from the point on the trunk where he’d seen the scarecrow’s face. The falling thing was also round and white. It was a wasps’ nest that his knife’s blade had just skewered and dislodged.
The nest thumped onto the ground before his knees, its residents buzzing in fury.
Young Taspar shouted, “Oh no!” and leapt to his feet. Even as he started running, the first wasp stung him on the back of his neck. The insects were hunting him too.
With a cloud of them in pursuit, he bounded back across the bogland, past the cottage, and away from Terryk Head.
Young Karnwik’s route required him to wade across the Terryk Burn. While he sat on its bank, removed his boots, and rolled his leggings above his knees, he worried about the duties he should have been carrying out then on his father’s farm. He fretted most about the milking of the cows, which he oversaw in the early evenings. This evening, he wouldn’t be there to supervise the farmworkers. One cow was suffering from a disorder that’d caused her teats to chaff and blister and, though he’d rubbed ointment onto them, he was concerned an over-zealous worker might handle them too roughly over the milk-bucket and cause more damage.
Still, Old Karnwik had been adamant. He was to do whatever the witch told him. And Young Karnwik always obeyed his father.
He entered the water, boots now dangling about his neck with the ends of their laces tied together. The river frothed past his knees and, feeling its force, he raised his arms and stretched them from his sides to help maintain his balance. Posed like that, he happened to glance upstream. The Terryk Burn made its way down the valley by a series of cascades, tumbling from one level to the next. In the distance, where it looked no thicker than a silvery thread, it seemed to emerge from under a small but significant figure – the scarecrow.
The scarecrow stood with its arms outstretched as if mimicking his stance.
Young Karnwik didn’t have much imagination and this didn’t disturb him unduly. He continued wading. The river climbed higher up his legs and buffeted him more. Then he halted because above the gurgling water he heard a curious, susurrating laugh. He looked upstream again and tried to work out what was different about the scene. It dawned on him. The scarecrow had disappeared.
He heard the laugh again, only now it’d proliferated. There were many laughs, happening simultaneously, and they loudened as if the things making them were quickly approaching.
Amid the spray and foam of the closest cascade, he glimpsed several white shapes. They plunged with the torrent and then, clear of it, cruised towards him. Before Young Karnwik could decide what to do, the shapes reached him and swirled around him.
They appeared to be fish, but he’d never seen fish as white as these.
One fish-head broke the surface. Weirdly, its eyes were on its front, not its side, and were able to stare straight up at him. Worse, those eyes glowed yellowly, and two horns were mounted above them, and a mouth grinned and bared tiny fangs below them. Then other heads burst up into view. Their visages were identical.
Young Karnwik panicked, lost his balance, and fell. The moment the water closed over him, the current seized him and whisked him away.
After much kicking and flailing, he managed to get near a bank, where the river was shallower and less forceful. He scrambled to his feet and pulled himself up onto the grass of a field. He spluttered out water and gulped in air. More water oozed from his sodden garments and hair. His boots and the witch’s pack he’d been carrying had vanished, no doubt even further downstream than he was now.
Young Karnwik assessed the situation and decided it was best to head home. He might even get there in time to administer the milking of the cows.
The farmers waited a long time outside Gudroon’s cottage before they heard the wheels squeaking on a handcart. Farmer Taspar raised his lantern. The light showed Gudroon pushing the cart up the path from her gate. Her face was caked in dirt and crisscrossed with cuts and scratches. Leaves, thorns, and pieces of twig were snagged amid the shambles of her hair.
Taspar demanded, “What went wrong?”
She released the shafts of the handcart and said, hoarse with exhaustion, “The scarecrow is too damned strong. The divination ritual we did yesterday is one regularly performed by the Grand Coven. The Grand Coven! There’s no circle in the human world able to command higher levels of magic. The ritual gave us routes supposedly invisible to that monstrosity. Yet it was able to see into the routes and act against us.” Her perplexed tone gave way to one of concern. “But never mind that. Your sons. Are they safe?”
Airdwel spoke tearfully. “My poor Vurdon’s been traumatized. At the moment, the boy’s too scared to even step outside his bedroom.”
Taspar was less dramatic. “My lad had a misadventure with some wasps. Came home with stings all over him. Bleating with pain and feeling very sorry for himself. It won’t do him any harm, though. It might even cure him of his arrogance.” The farmer said this as if arrogance was an affliction that’d never troubled him.
Karnwik mumbled something about his son getting a ducking but still managing to milk the cows tonight.
“But,” Taspar pressed her, “how is this possible? How was it able to outsmart you? You with your skill and experience in magic?”
“It didn’t outsmart me. It overpowered me. The Prooshkan craftsman who put that thing together must have been in some truly dark places. Communing not just with spirits, but with demons.”
Airdwel lamented, “What can we do?”
“Nothing. There’s absolutely nothing we can do, except stay away from that infernal scarecrow. Avoid provoking it, avoid making it apply its magic. That way, hopefully, it’ll remain as it is – a focal point, not a gateway that unleashes chaos.”
Airdwel was aghast. “But Rassilbay? And his daughters?”
“You’ll have to leave them be. They’re on the far side of that horror and it’s madness – literally madness – to try to get past it.” Gudroon sighed. “You may not see them again.”
Taspar bowed his head like a funeral mourner. “Such lovely girls. Such a waste.”
Earlier, while daylight remained, Gudroon had arrived in front of the scarecrow. She contemplated its white face, yellow eyes, horns, claws, snake-like body. She also saw features that’d been less apparent when she’d viewed it through the telescope. These were three ramshackle belts around its waist, or where the waist would have been on a figure with legs.
First was a belt made of string, threaded through dozens of small bird-skulls. The skulls were finely inscribed with esoteric symbols. They faced in all directions and directed malignant energy towards the surrounding fields, full of Farmer Rassilbay’s crops. Any bird alighting there wouldn’t want to stay long.
A second belt held in place a single, larger skull, that of a horse. It bore only a few symbols and was pointed towards the road Young Taspar had tried to ride up two days before. Its influence was weak, perhaps enough to affect a horse that was already agitated by something. Young Taspar was known for agitating his horses. He drove them hard.
The third belt held three human skulls. Plastered with symbols, these were positioned at the scarecrow’s front, so that their eye-sockets gazed down the valley in three different directions – ready to send psychic force at anyone approaching along three different routes. Gudroon unfastened the last belt and placed it inside her pack. Hopefully, after today, it wouldn’t be needed. The whole valley would be talking about the scarecrow, exaggerating the guff she’d told the farmers tenfold. Besides, she wanted to perform a ceremony that would put the souls who’d once inhabited the skulls at rest. A Prooshkan trader had sold her the belt. She didn’t know what he’d done to create it, but she suspected it hadn’t been good.
Gudroon waited, but the three farmers’ sons didn’t appear. Eventually, she passed the scarecrow – which, unlike its three belts and despite its extreme ugliness, was harmless – and made her way through the fields of Terryk Head Farm.
Rassilbay and his daughters were in sight when she got to the farmstead. The eldest daughter, Anjal, was pushing a dung-laden wheelbarrow from a cowshed. The second daughter, Chamdra, sat with her father on the farmhouse verandah. She nursed a book and was reading aloud to Rassilbay, who had a blanket wound around him from his shoulders to his feet. And the youngest daughter, Elariss, had set up an easel and canvas at a spot where she could see the entire lower valley. From a palette, she dabbed paint on the canvas before the twilight made it impossible to continue.
Seeing Gudroon, the three women hurried towards her. Rassilbay remained seated on the verandah, cocooned in his blanket.
“Well?” Anjal inquired.
“I think it’s worked,” Gudroon told them. “They didn’t make it to the meeting place so I assume the energy from the skulls, playing on their fears of the scarecrow, frightened them off. I put a few things in the packs they were carrying – effigies, certain plants, summoning words on scraps of parchment – to make sure it reached them and they felt it strongly… So strongly they won’t be coming near Terryk Head to pester you again.”
Anjal shuddered. “The thought of Vurdon Airdwel, descending on us conceitedly, expecting us to throw ourselves at his feet because of his fancy clothes, powder and perfumes.” She indicated a shovel that rested on the barrowful of manure she’d been pushing. “I was ready to pick that up and swing it into his smug face.”
Chamdra sighed. “And Daryen Taspar, riding up here day after day, bursting with arrogance. Regarding us like three creatures he was hunting.”
Elariss spoke more thoughtfully. “Romadar Karnwik was annoying, but I felt sorry for him too. He didn’t want to come near us. He wanted only to be on his farm, tending his animals. His father forced him here to try to woo one of us, even though he had no idea how to do it.”
“That’s the thing,” Gudroon said. “Their fathers were behind it all. Desperate to marry their sons off to you so they could add your land to their empires. You were property to them, not people.” Then she warned them. “After today, the valley will shun you. The other farmers won’t come to do business. And you’ll miss the company. The solitude won’t feel so bad at first, but it will later.”
Anjal reassured her. “Don’t worry. There are paths that nobody outside Terryk Head knows about. Leading through the high hills and into other valleys. We’ll head elsewhere when we need to sell our produce, or hire new labor, or simply mix with human company.”
Gudroon looked towards the verandah. “And your father?”
“He’s the same,” Chamdra replied.
“I’m afraid he won’t get any better.” Gudroon removed some bundles of herbs from her pack. “But perhaps I can slow the rate at which he gets worse. I’ll advise Shorna on how to prepare something for him.” Shorna was the Rassilbays’ cook and housekeeper, half of an elderly couple who these days were the only folk on their payroll.
Then Gudroon allowed herself a rare smile, a mischievous one. “And after that I’m going to crawl through a particularly thick hedge. I need to look disheveled when I face the fathers of your tormentors tonight.”
Elariss protested, “Mistress Gudroon, your payment for this doesn’t seem fair. Indeed, it’s paltry. After everything you’ve done for us…”
“Don’t worry. All I want is a supply of manure for my garden. And if you wish me to renew the scarecrow’s mantle of bird-skulls, so it frightens away birds during the next growing season too, you can keep supplying me with manure.”
She thought about it and added, “But make sure you deliver it to me well after dark. I have some nosy neighbors down there.”
Gudroon was weeding the cabbage-plot in her garden when she heard a clip-clop of hooves and then a deep voice: “Mistress Gudroon!”
Her hands tightened on the shaft of the hoe. “Damn it,” she whispered.
Farmer Taspar sat on a shaggy-maned, white-and-brown draft-horse. It was the only beast capable of supporting his weight. “May I have a word?”
Gudroon planted the hoe upright amid the cabbages. “Very well, Farmer Taspar.”
Once he’d clambered down the horse’s side, and before he entered her cottage, he noticed a hillock of manure festering in a corner of the garden. “That’s a fine midden you have.”
“Assembling it wasn’t difficult,” Gudroon explained. “There’s a lot of excrement in this valley.”
In the main room Taspar didn’t sit down. He stood in front of her hearth, clearly intending to say something important. He remembered he was chomping a swab of sage and mint leaves and turned and spat it into the embers of her fire. Wet with saliva, the glob sizzled. Then he declared, “Mistress Gudroon, I’ve come to tell you I’ve made up my mind. I’ve decided.”
“Decided what?”
“To marry you, of course.”
“Marry me?”
Her surprise irritated him a little. “Well, who else would I marry? It makes sense when you think about it. I’ve been a widower for many years and, though I enjoy my solitary life, free of the silly chatter and fancies and vanities of women, there are times when… I feel lonely. There, I’ve said it. I’m a sensitive man under this tough exterior and I’ll admit to loneliness. Anyhow, you have all the attributes that make you a suitable wife for me.”
“I do?”
“Oh yes. Don’t underestimate yourself, Mistress Gudroon. You have your wits about you for a start, which is more than can be said for many women your age. Also, you’re a witch. Obviously, I can’t expect you to weave powerful spells requiring human hearts and intestines and the like, but I’m sure you can enact a few minor ones that’ll help my business to prosper. Another thing… As a witch, you’ll be skilled at boiling and baking and brewing things. I’m sure you’ll make an excellent cook, able to rustle up a good dinner for your husband when he needs one.”
Gudroon didn’t reply, so Taspar thought he’d better list more of her attributes
“You’re in good physical condition. That’s important for a farmer’s wife. Not that I’d send you to work in the fields every day, of course, but whenever we were short-staffed you’d be expected to buckle down and get your hands dirty. And…”
While Taspar prattled on, Gudroon found herself glancing through the window, into her garden. It occurred to her that those vegetables and herbs could be doing with a scarecrow.
© August 2024, Rab
Foster was brought up on a farm among the hills of southern Scotland, but now he works in education and lives far away from Scotland. His fiction has appeared in Aphelion, Blood Moon Rising, Fall Into Fantasy 2023, Legend, Schlock! Webzine, Sorcerous Signals, Swords & Sorceries Volume 3, Whetstone, and previously in Swords & Sorcery Magazine.
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