The Wise Woman Read Online Free PDF

storms. The gurgling holes where the sluggish water seeped away in summertime became springs and fountains in winter, whirlpools where the brown water boiled upward, bubbling from the exploring pressure of the underground streams and underground rivers flooding from their stone cellars.
    “Old Hob is down there,” Tom said fearfully, his eyes dark.
    Alys had snorted and spat disdainfully toward the darkness before them. “I ain’t afraid of him!” she said. “I reckon Morach can deal with him all right!”
    Tom had crossed his finger with his thumb in the sign against witchcraft and crawled backward out of the hole and into the sunshine. Alys would have lingered longer. She had not been boasting to Tom; it was true: raised by Morach she feared nothing.
    “Until now,” she said quietly to herself. She looked up at the clear sky above her and the sun impartially burning down. “Oh, Mother of God…” she started, then she broke off. “Our Father…” she began again, and again fell silent. Then her mouth opened in a silent scream and she pitched herself forward on the short coarse grass of the moorland. “God help me!” she said in a grief-stricken whisper. “I am too afraid to pray!”
    It seemed to her that she lay there in despair a long while. When she sat up again and looked around her the sun had moved—it was the middle of the afternoon, time for nones. Alys got to her feet slowly, like an old woman, as if all her bones were aching. She set off with small, slow steps up the hill to where the buds of early heather gleamed like a pale mauve mist on the slopes of the hill. A lapwing called overhead and fluttered down not far from her. Higher again in the blue air a lark circled and climbed, calling and calling, each higher note accompanied by a thrust of the little wings. Bees rolled drunkenly among the early heather flowers, the moor sweated honey. Everything around her was alive and thriving and joyful in the warm roil of the end of summer—everything but Alys, icy Alys, cold to her very bones.
    She stumbled a little as she walked, her eyes watching the sheep track beneath her feet. Every now and then she moaned very softly, like an animal in a trap for a long, long night of darkness. “How shall I ever get back?” she said to herself as she walked. “How shall I ever get back? How shall I ever learn to bear it here with the dirt and the cold and my hunger?”
    At the edge of the moor, where the land flattened in a curved sweep under the wide, unjudging sky, Alys paused. There was a little heap of stones tossed into a cairn by shepherds marking the path. Alys squatted down on one dry stone and leaned back against the others, closed her eyes, and turned her face up to the sun, her face locked in a grimace of grief.
    After a few moments she narrowed her eyes and looked southward. The moorland was very flat, bending across the skyline in a thousand shades of green, from the dark lushness of moss around a bog to the pale yellow color of weak grass growing on stone. The heather roots and old flowers showed pale gray and green, a bleak landscape of subtle beauty, half pasture, half desert. The new heather growth was dark green, the heather flowers pale as a haze. Alys looked more sharply. A man was striding across the moor, his plaid across his shoulder, his step determined. Alys got to her feet quietly, ready to turn and run. As he saw the movement he yelled out, and his voice was whipped away by the steady wind which blew over the top of the moor, even on the calmest of days. Alys hesitated, ready for flight; then he yelled again, faintly:
    “Alys! Wait! It’s me!”
    Her hand went to her pocket, where the beads of her rosary were rounded and warm. “Oh no,” she said. She sat down again on the stones and waited for him to come up to her, watching him as he marched across the moor.
    He had filled out in the four years she had been away. When she had left he had been a boy of thirteen, lanky and awkward