Short Story: “The Necromancer’s Sabbath”
It had been hard, almost impossible, for a long time now, for her to care overmuch about how she made her living. She did the best she could; the things she did, though furtive and usually against the Law, were to help people cope with the evils of the world, if they could. She furnished dubious potions to jilted women and talismans of protection and imprecation to farmers whose cows were being rustled; once in a great while for the bereaved or the desperate she would call up the spirits of the dead. By the dead she suspect herself unloved; they were content, usually, it seemed, to be undisturbed in that state. She was relieved when things went otherwise, when it felt as if someone was thanking her for giving a last look backward at the land of the living, under the streaming sky. Cold lips had kissed hers, once, after her husband had died; that woman’s shade had felt sorry for her, she thought. It was pretty to think so, of course; it flattered her and made her feel a sneaking kindness towards herself for reasons of which she was not fully sure. “Have some fish,” she would always say to people; “you look tired; you must be hungry; have you come a long way?” Seldom to herself. That was something easy to notice, that ungenerousness with herself, and she thought it was common enough among decent people, everyday people, unimpressive people. It seemed so nice, too nice, to think that that shade might have wanted to recompense that a little, but it was hard not to suspect so, and to hope.
In any case, she would say to people, “I’m doing it as toil, I’m doing it because life is very hard, I’m doing it because if I do then you don’t have to.” It was true, or at any rate true that she thought so, and she was glad to think so. Others who did these things for people could seem so slimy and acquisitive and inane. They thought nothing serious, real, or kind for the jilted women, the cow-proud men, the grieving friends and kinsfolk of the defunct—and sometimes, she worried, she felt nothing for them at all. That might, though, have been a courtesy in its way, for at times when she thought and knew more about them it would have been easier for her to tell on them to the judge and to his protégé the king.
She liked the king, and she saw the country as a place for higher hopes under him. “The times are good, maybe,” people would say to her, “but they are too good for you. He’ll put the likes of you in chains, you know, or to the sword. He’s been commanded to, you now; he knows the Law and so do we and so do you.”
“I know full well and I don’t think my work is so good he mustn’t touch it,” she said to her friend Dinah the weaver-woman once when Dinah had just made this kind of point to her. “I work with hard people and people hard done by. None of us should want that there should be many such people, if we’re at peace…” She shook her head and chuckled at herself for talking such a way, like a public person. Then she asked Dinah if she might like help with her weaving, though she knew full well, also, that Dinah was to be a woman alone at her loom. And Dinah laughed and said no thank you and asked her after her storm-tossed children.
Her children were prisoners, or slaves, or had been; some now were once again happy and free, she had heard. “You should always hope they’ll be home on a day, Tamar,” Dinah would tell her, and she did so hope. Their prayers together, for that, had gone into every thread of a covering that Dinah had woven for her doorway; Tamar, house-proud of her hovel, had saved up special for that. To comfortably afford that had taken her fees for two callings of the shades that she would not have taken on otherwise. It was always something like that coming up, and her expectation of going honest declined bit by bit to intention, and then to hope, and then to wish.
“You could sell the door hanging,” the living and the dead would always say to her, and eventually Dinah got around to saying it to her as well. “Sell it back to me, even,” Dinah said, “and I’ll pay you back more for it than what you first paid me, and make a new one for you also, only simpler and without a pattern that uses any murex.”
“But I simply do not want to sell you back the door hanging, Dinah,” Tamar said to her dearest friend, “even for more murex than I could shake a stick at in seventy lifetimes.”
“I didn’t say that you wanted to, or even that I think you ought to want to. I said that you could and that if you did it would solve one of your problems. I’ll allow that it could make news problems for you instead, of course; I’d never tell you otherwise.”
“What are these new problems, do you think?” Tamar asked then, and it was a question that she asked in full knowledge that she would not have wanted an answer had one been possible. “I don’t think anything bad would happen; it would upset me, that’s all, as so much upsets me…all the people I see are just so sad, don’t you know? Almost all of the time, especially me, and even you, Dinah, if you’ll pardon me for saying so.”
“No need to pardon the truth,” Dinah said, though Tamar felt that maybe if she was going to say something like that then she should have said it in a rather grimmer tone of voice. “Life can be hard to face, just as death can—can’t it? We are born to trouble like sparks are born to fly upward. I might know about that but you would know better, begging your pardon.”
“No need to pardon the truth,” Tamar said. “It is not even what feels worst, you know—hosting the shadows like that. This life and this death can get so much the crueler.” She shook her head. “But no need to get into it. All we ever really have is being here, I guess.”
“Being here, being there.”
“Yes; being here, being there.”
Tamar after visiting with Dinah went in the cool of the day to the wells, then home under house-shadow and door-hanging shadow, in the cooling evening and night. She slept along with thought and memory and rumor, or maybe that way of putting things was over-wise, as thought and memory and rumor themselves could be over-wise. The mind picked up; if often did at night in this hilly home of hers. A cat came in with a tail depending from betwixt its teeth, and Tamar scratched the soft twin bumps of the crown of his little head. She called the cat Miu, when she called him anything at all.
❦
That night she got the worst sleep she had had in many years. Shades, unhateful but unbidden and unwanted, came to her all hours. They stood and brooded, mostly, but one or two tried to talk to her. Yes, two—one looked like a mask to her, the other, a glimmer such as one saw deep in a well, or a heat-haze, maybe. They tried to question her, as she was wont to question the likes of them, and she did not fear them; she felt something else, So was spent half the night, at least. What they seemed to be asking was, “Do you miss them?”—and she hadn’t a good answer for that. The next day was the eve of the Sabbath.
❦
The spirit of God had been poured out upon the king and he promised glory for the people and redemption for their captives from alien hands. She believed this promise and had confidence that her children would be free and whole and with her once more in this little town of theirs so high up here in these sun-baked and wind-withered hills. She wondered in her more self-unkind moments if they would have wanted, really, to be back in such a place with their tired old mother, but it wasn’t as if they had really many, or any, other good options. She who had reared them and had been their hearts’ haven rom their earliest and most inarticulate infancies became for them now, in her own fears and imaginings, a last resort. They had not said this, of course; how could they ever have done? She did not expect them ever to say it; how could they do that either? Yet she could ever say it to herself. It did prey on her, this idea and worry and knowledge that children might forget their parents even if parents did not forget their children.
If her children came home and did not want to be there and with no regard for her blithely went off again, it would have been consolation enough for her that they were safe and that they had been here. Love could thus bloom in uselessness, as it could in usefulness to others at the expense of one’s own heart, she thought. It was good for her to know at least a little of the feeling of both.
She listened to hoopoes and to warblers; she ate dates and honey and figs and barley and pomegranates and grapes and olives, in their seasons and praying always and to all powers for those seasons’ rightful weather. The hoopoe, the warbler, the nightjar, the owl, the rock dove, the turtledove, the gull. It was a lonesome life but sometimes letting her be free. Those ever were her watchwords, that kind of coming and going, taking water and light and storm-clouds in their hours. She took good or took death; she took wickedness or took life. She mourned and she hoped. When the king made clear as water that he would put all mediums out of the land she accepted it and made it her business and suffered for it. The dead had passed into her hands, or through her hands, and now they passed out of her hands, and she meant it more than she thought she had meant it in the times that were now past and away, when she had merely wished it. She ate from the fruit of the other difficult things with which she gave people her aid. It was scarcely better, and it was truly less easy. So it had to be.
So she passed all that by, and did no more witch-work till the king himself so commanded her.