A Harvest of Ghosts
The sun was peering over the line of the mountains as Mirian went to collect the night’s harvest of ghosts. She paused for a moment, breathing the frosty air. The sky was brightening behind the hills; over there, in those places she would never visit, it was already daylight.
The wires surrounding her family’s homestead moaned in the early morning breeze. The crop was small: a few tattered fragments snagged by the blackthorn tangles that her mother had knotted around the wires, one every ten paces, enough to snag any ghosts drifting by on the night’s air, keeping the spirits away from the house so Mirian and her family could slumber untroubled inside.
She approached the nearest. There wasn’t much to it: a twist of mist in the cold, like the breath escaping from her mouth, yet somehow remaining whole. If she was lucky, her mother would give her a few of the scraps, and she could seal them into glass jars to sell as night lights. Their glow would wax and wane along with the phases of the moons, and they’d fade to nothing eventually, but people liked to buy them for decoration. A string of them brightened up any winter room.
She untied a ghost trap from her belt. It was the size of a late-autumn apple, a woven globe of wire. A little hinge allowed the whole thing to split in two to capture the ghost. As a young girl, she’d liked to sit in the forge watching her father make them, the red glow from the furnace lighting up his face as he weaved new traps with a pair of cruel iron pliers.
Once she’d asked, “Why don’t they escape through the holes?”
Her father hadn’t taken his eyes off the object he was fashioning.
“The iron is a barrier.”
“If we built the whole house out of iron, we’d be safe?”
He had a ready laugh, deep-chested, but his voice had remained level.
“Do they worry you, little one?”
The children on the valley whispered stories to each other when the adults weren’t around. The ghosts drifted into your ears and breathed lies into your dreams. They sent you mad, turning your own thoughts against you. All the homesteads had their encircling wires to protect those living within.
Out loud she’d said, “I just wondered.”
“The spellknots have kept us safe for generations. There are many dangers in the wide world, beasts and beings that would harm us, but our traditions protect us. It is good to continue the old ways.”
Her people had once wandered the lands, escaping terror after terror. Eventually, they’d settled in the quiet valley to let the outside world pass by, like the waters of a turbulent river watched from the bank. It was good. Her life was good.
Now, Mirian eased the trap around the ghost, locking the two halves of the cage together with the catch. As her mother had shown her, she cut the wire, pulling the ends free so they could be tied back together. Breaking the line for even a moment sent worry bubbling through her, but the sun was rising, and the ghosts hated the light. Even so, she kept one wary eye on her surroundings as she worked. As the blackthorn tangle was pulled out of the cage, away from the smudge of smoke, a sound of something exhaling, tiny as a mouse, came to her ears. The ghosts always did that. The sound was oddly human, like sadness or disappointment.
One day soon, when she came into her magic, she’d be able to work the spells herself. She knew the words, the actions, but nothing happened when she tried. Her mother told her to be patient, it would come, but Mirian was a year older than her mother had been. The fear, unspoken by anyone, was that Mirian didn’t have the craft. And that meant, one day, there’d be no one to set up the traps – or do the hundred and one other things that magic did for them. And what then?
Mirian completed her rounds, collecting two more hazier ghosts and also one much larger one, writhing like an angry cat on the line behind the stable. When she teased it off its line, it howled with fury.
She returned to the house, taking the thirty or forty paces carefully so she didn’t trip and accidentally release her harvest. Back inside, her mother held up the large ghost by its chain to consider it. The swirling cloud of silver sparkled as flecks of livid blue cut through it.
“It’s in good condition. I can work something from this, a glowing headdress, perhaps, or a set of ornamental sashes for some empire soldier. Perhaps, even, the start of a gown.”
Mirian sat on the three-legged stool by the fire to watch, savouring the heat on the side of her face. The glow lit up the spiky whorl of the seashell that they kept for decoration on the table. It was nearly the size of Mirian’s head. She’d always liked to run her hand over its sparkling surfaces, put her ear to its opening in the hope of hearing the echo of distant shores, although it could slice your skin open if you weren’t careful. She touched it now, the familiar roughness of it, as she watched her mother work.
People came from miles around to buy clothes from her mother; it was said that princesses and princes in distant palaces would wear nothing other than her mother’s shimmergauze clothes to their processions and dances. Mirian liked to imagine them in their marvellous ranks, candlelight and moonlight sparkling from them.
Her mother impaled the large ghost on the spike, then sent the shaft spinning with a practised flick of her hand. The whorl on the spindle whirled into a blur as she worked, drawing out the ghost into thread as delicate as spiderweb. The sighing sound the ghosts always made at this point rose to a crescendo; it was as though they were screaming as they were stretched and stretched into thread. The pitch of the wail rose until it made Mirian’s teeth hurt, but her mother paid the sound no attention, unless it was in the slightest frown playing across her features.
Mirian had asked her grandmother about it years before, in the days when she’d first shown Mirian how to work the threads.
“Why do they scream? I hate it.”
Her grandmother had glanced up, amusement nesting among the wrinkles on her face, but her hands had kept working away like busy spiders.
“Oh, they’re not screaming. It’s just what they do. It’s like the hissing sound wood makes when you throw it on the fire. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“They sound as if they’re in pain.”
“Little poppet, can a log feel pain? It’s nothing. Once you get older, you’ll no longer hear them.”
Little poppet was her grandmother’s private name for Mirian. No one else ever called her that.
“Don’t you hear them?” Mirian asked.
“Not for years, no. There are advantages to getting older.”
“They’re alive.”
Her grandmother had shaken her head. “Ghost is just a word. They’re a crop, like the logs we chop or the wheat we grow.”
Had there been a hint of doubt in her grandmother’s voice – or was that something Mirian had added for herself afterwards? Now, the drawn-out screaming and her mother’s calmness too much, Mirian rose and padded off. Thinking about the old conversation made her want to sit in her grandmother’s room for a time.
They still called it that. Eventually, though, the room would become someone else’s. They couldn’t afford to keep it sitting empty forever. The door resisted briefly, creaking as she pushed at it. The room still smelled of her grandmother: warmth and blankets and the herbs she’d rubbed into her aching joints in later days. Mirian’s mother had created a doll, a kitchen witch, weaving scraps of cloth and hair around a skeleton of sticks, working incantations to give the stitches and knots the wrinkled face and crooked appearance. They’d passed the little doll through the smoke up on Burial Hill three days earlier, capturing something of the essence of the old woman in order to bring it back home. It would watch over them, stay with them. Her friends had looked horrified or fascinated when Mirian had told them about it. The children knew stories about the kitchen witches, too: they came to life at night; they filled your head with spiders and earwigs; they stole you away.
At night, they lit candles around the effigy. But, one day, this little ritual would also cease, and her grandmother would be forgotten. No one lit candles to any of the generations that had gone before. When did it stop? And when Mirian was gone, how long would people remember her for?
She missed the old woman with a weight of pain in her chest. Her grandmother’s stories had given Mirian glimpses of the wider world. The old woman always knew the right words to say when someone was upset. It was another kind of magic. Towards the end, her hands were bony knots of rope, and she could no longer work the spindle, but that had given her more time for Mirian. They’d sat in the room together often, Mirian whispering her dreams for the future, the old woman replying with memories of all she’d seen and done.
Mirian would occasionally catch her grandmother lost in some reverie, gazing out of the window at the mountains.
“What are you thinking about?”
“Oh, just remembering people I once knew. It’s a habit of the old.”
Recalling that, Mirian opened the shutters of the room, letting the cold air flow in, just as her grandmother had liked. She sat there the rest of the day, turning the tiny fragments of ghost she’d collected, along with a few offcuts her mother had to spare, into decorative lights.
As the short day faded, she held up the string she’d made, seven of the ghosts sealed inside jars. She watched them sparkle, delighted with her work. They pulsed in time to each other, as if they were conversing. For some reason, the thought seemed to darken the room. Mirian carried the lights back into the kitchen, to be taken to market next day.
That night, she couldn’t sleep. The lover moons rose together over the mountains, as they did twice a year. Their combined light was almost as bright as day. She wondered about all the places the moons shone on, all the people she’d never know who were also staring up at them.
She remembered with alarm, then, that she’d left the shutters open in her grandmother’s room. She’d promised her mother she would close them for fear of moths tattering the bedclothes. The other windows in the homestead had glass to keep the weather out, glass Mirian had once enjoyed peering through, amused at the warped landscape their imperfections created, imagining other worlds. Her grandmother, though, had preferred the open air.
As Mirian pulled on the left-hand shutter, always stiff, its hinges rusting, a sound from outside came to her ears. Moonlight suffused the scene: the bare soil where they’d plant crops when the days warmed, the low stone wall marking off the homestead from the moors and clumps of woodland, the low shapes of the other dwellings, the distant curves of the mountains like a person lying, waiting, on their side.
She saw where the sound was coming from: a ghost had caught on the wires. It writhed on the blackthorn knot, the line shaking from its desperate efforts to free itself. It was small, a smudge in the moonlight, but some desperate energy animated it.
There was something odd about the sound, too, a note that sent a thrill of both fear and delight through her. It took a moment to work out why: she was hearing it in her mind, not in her ears. It was what happened when you came into your magic: your senses expanded; you saw the world in new ways. Her grandmother had told her that magic was how the world turned, how lives changed. The sound became clearer, and she found that she could close her mind to it or listen to it, as she wished. She played with it in her mind, fascinated, delighted.
Then she realised what the sounds really were. They were a voice; there were words there. Words that she recognized.
The ghost was breathing her name.
Afterwards, she couldn’t recall how she ended up outside, the cold air cutting through her thin nightdress. The words from the ghost were clearer and clearer. It glowed on the blackthorn tangle. Mirian reached out, put her fingertips to the patch of pearly light. The radiance brightened, and her fingers tingled from the contact, as if she were touching a cold flame.
She hesitated, and then an impulse came over her. A part of her mind objected, horrified at what she was about to do, but her hands moved anyway. She would do this. She didn’t have a blade with her, so she teased the knot apart with frozen, clumsy fingers. Eventually, she got it. She let it fall to the ground, a few useless twigs. The freed ghost bobbed, then drifted past Mirian’s face. Heading for the house.
Mirian followed, running to keep up. Everyone else was asleep, oblivious to the ghost she’d allowed inside. What had she done? What had come over her? The light flew faster as she chased it, through the open door, up the stairs. Into her grandmother’s room.
And then, into the doll. Mirian stared at it from the doorway, helpless, an odd mix of horror and wonder tumbling through her. The little doll jerked, slumped, jerked again. The face lit up, the woven features of cloth and stitch becoming a tiny version of her grandmother.
The voice was as soft as rustled cloth.
“Mirian, Mirian. You must hear me. We’ve been so wrong, so wrong for so long. I was so wrong.”
The doll on its shelf was level with Mirian’s head. At the thought of what she’d done, something seemed to grip Mirian’s stomach and clench it tight.
“No. This … you can’t be her. Whatever you are, leave us alone. Please, leave us alone.”
“Little poppet, little poppet, please, you must hear me. You always liked to hear my stories.”
“How did you know she called me that?”
“I know because I made the name up for you when you were a babe in my arms.”
“No.”
Mirian grasped the kitchen witch and, stepping carefully between the familiar creaks in the floorboards, hurried back outside. She crossed the shadowy garden, the light of the moons turning everything to bone and silver. She held the doll in her hand, preparing to hurl it over the wires.
“Please, Mirian. Look up. See.”
Mirian looked up. Between the ground and the stars, the sky was ablaze with dancing lights, like the sparks from a winter’s fire. Hundreds of them. Thousands, streaming overhead, some magic allowing her to see what she normally couldn’t.
The sight stopped her.
“What are they?”
“Spirits of the dead from all across the world, caught on the winds. This is what we’ve been afraid of, all this time. Fear of the outside. We’ve been so sure of ourselves, haven’t we? The lives we’ve lived, hiding away here.”
Mirian still hadn’t thrown the doll over the wires.
“I don’t understand.”
“I’ve soared high,” said the soft little voice. “Finally, finally, up over the mountains, seen all the lands, laid out like a map. So many marvels. It’s time to let the voices speak, don’t you see, child? All the voices. Once the spirits were welcomed in. That’s what they’ve been trying to tell us all this time: how other people live and what they are. Their stories and their lives. We wouldn’t hear, would we? Too afraid of what we might be told, too afraid of change. Instead, we used them, turned them into baubels and shiny cloth. It must stop. You must do this.”
“Do what?”
“Take a knife, cut the lines. Destroy the spellknots and weave no more. Let the world in. Listen to the voices from near and far.”
“I can’t do that. Don’t ask me.”
“Hiding away, living in fear, there’s the real danger. Do this, little poppet. I have come to tell you while I can, before I’m blown a thousand leagues away. You and me both, we always secretly wished to travel, see the world. I had to pass on to do it. I don’t want you to wait that long.”
There was a look on that stitched face in her hand that Mirian had seen often growing up: an expression somewhere between amusement, disapproval and expectation. It said, Here is what you should do, but I’ll leave it for you to come to that conclusion yourself. The mountains glowed with moonlight, stretching around the horizon like a wall. Her life and her family’s life: they were safe, perhaps, but they were small.
The motes of light streamed overhead, but Mirian’s mind was calm. Her magic was a light inside her, a warmth, and she knew what she had to do. She dipped her head. The doll cradled in one arm, she walked inside to find a knife for the lines.
Simon Kewin’s works have appeared in Analog, Nature, Daily Science Fiction, and the Cloven Land fantasy trilogy, The Genehunter, steampunk Gormenghast saga Engn, the Triple Stars sci/fi trilogy and the Office of the Witchfinder General books, published by Elsewhen Press.