The night visitation in her garden haunted Meg, mainly because she couldn’t be sure if it had been part of her dreaming. Its reality was also aching inside her; returning to her marital bed had been a mistake. She had gone back to sleep next to the stinking Cluvmux, sandwiching her starlit conversation between nightmares. All the contradictions of significant movements in other worlds were now turning in her. But the strongest memory that insisted on staying was the sadness her explanation had caused in Yellow Hat. She hadn’t meant to disillusion the poor creature so. The combination of uncanny knowledge and regret had produced a conundrum, a thing little known to her. Even though it was uncomfortable, it was somehow reassuringly matter-of-fact. She thought of a windmill that caught the wind to turn a stone to crush a seed into the flour that made the daily bread.
Meg was in Grietje van der Elzen’s garden at the very edge of the town, sitting on a tree stump, watching a nearby windmill and listening to the grumble of its wooden gears. Grietje’s house was boarded up, desolate; her precious plants overgrown and unwatered. This was where they had always talked, away from gossiping ears. All knew Grietje was a Wise Woman, and great care had to be taken on how that was perceived.
Women like her had to watch their actions and pretend to know their place. Women who were wise in the old ways but who had married into the world of men and the church. Her eyes had been kept low for so many years that they had taken on an unbalanced weight, swollen outside the squint that marked their servitude.
Meg had seen many women less wise than Grietje, humiliated in village ponds, half drowned in rivers, and turned to screaming cinders by pious louts. Opinion was a dangerous thing to possess; its slippery temper had a way of hissing out and marking the speaker as at the least a troublemaker, at the worst a demon suckler. Opinion was generally removed from all females of her rank between the ages of eleven and fifty, so they could concentrate on more important things like stoking their wombs into constant activity and pampering their husbands’ ambitions into whatever profiles they consider right.
Most Wise Women lived outside such drudgery and imprisonment, seeking seclusion and anonymity beyond the boundaries of villages and towns. Their distance earned them reputations for strangeness and conflict. The wild woods and the looming mountains were no place for the fairer sex. All these pronouncements were bleated by men who had no wisdom at all. They also said that such women were known to converse with the animals and the spirits that dwelled in those places. Some grew bark and vines about their bodies. All developed warts and crooked spines to blend in with the gnarled, unkempt boscage in which they hid. Or so said those in town.
Over the years many Wise Women had been dragged from their hovels and accused of satanic practices. Their homes were ransacked for evidence, as their neighbors and other goodly folk found great offense in their unnatural uniqueness. What sane woman could live like this? Shut away behind closed doors? Everyone else kept their windows open, curtainless, to prove that the same nothingness occurred in exactly the same way in each of their identical spotless hutches. This had been their last conversation, and it was only now that Meg began to understand what her friend was trying to tell her. Remembering more and more disjointed fragments of their talk as she sat alone with the wind gusting between her and the windmill.
Grietje had been strikingly powerful, both in her independence and in her beauty. Those were dangerous qualities in a repressed community that hid in its grayness.
“Do you feel safe out here by yourself?” Meg had asked while her friend was examining the quality of a big bunch of leaves.
“Safe as any, and I am not always alone.”
“I was thinking about someone to protect you.”
Grietje stopped looking at her leaves and squinted at Meg. “What, a man, you mean?”
“It has benefits.”
“Benefits? Having an oaf under my feet all the time, making demands that would turn me into a slave or a whore. Benefits!”
“There are a lot of strange animals showing up, and some of them look dangerous. A man could see them off for you.”
“I’d rather have their company than a man’s. They might have something more valuable than a prick and a bad temper.”
Then, out of frustrated perplexity, Meg said, “Sounds like you been talking with them.”
“I have and frequently do,” said Grietje. “ ’Tis part of what I am; it’s always been like that. You should know, it’s strong in you, too.”
Meg made small sounds of denial that refused to solidify into words. So Grietje continued, “I use all my talents and powers and have grown sick of hiding them.”
Suddenly finding her tongue, Meg insisted, “But that’s what you could use a man for. His normality could shield you.”
“Not from the Inquisition, it couldn’t. I know what I am. There is nowhere left in our world to hide. It is coming to take me. The best I can do is to prepare my revenge.”
“You could go farther away.”
“Where?” Grietje laughed. “Most of the Wise Women I know have died. The patrols of the Caballistas del Camino scooped up anyone in the surrounding lands that had the faintest wisp of unorthodoxy or paganism. Or were just humble, shy, and scared. The Spanish invaders, their king, and all else did so under the great power of the Inquisition. Its fires had to be continually fed with the confessions of the blasphemous and the bodies of those who refused to kneel. Those who lived alone, outside the city walls, no longer exist, and soon the soldiers will be coming in this direction. My home, like my sisters’, will crumble and give a dwelling to other beings, and become a sanctuary for the birds of the air and the beasts of the woodlands.”
Meg could no longer hear the rumbling of the windmill. The only sound was the pumping of her heart. All Grietje’s words had come to pass.
The caballistas did turn their attention to the less obvious, to those who concealed their witchcraft in the poorer alleys of the growing towns. Meg had known three women who died in the pyres, and she had heard of countless others who had been ducked or weighted and drowned. Almost all had been innocent of the charges brought against them, but the last one, Grietje van der Elzen, embraced her guilt and admitted to every shocking accusation. Then she had startled the courtroom by adding lurid details of her licentious communion with dark forces. Some of the clergy had to shield their ears, and others left the chamber in disgust. Toward the end of her list of transgressions, she had modestly announced that she had also sat as a model for the great master of ’s-Hertogenbosch, the Brabantisch Lame-Vanger himself—and that the combination of her comeliness and the contortions she performed gave birth to at least seven Filthlings from the promiscuous tip of the artist’s pencil.
Grietje knew she had nothing to lose as the last flame rose around her, so her descriptions became more and more lurid under the insistent questions of her tormentors. Scribes transcribed the details in thick ledgers that would eventually join countless others, giving a massive weight of proof to the Inquisition’s holy purpose. As she burned, she spat out her name like a flag along with the names of every devil she could remember. As she fell away into ash, a vortex of what she had been erupted, focused, and inseminated a vengeance of change into the world.