I Shall Wear Midnight

it is not them who are going to be killed and generally they don’t get much entertainment. In fact, it’s pretty much another day at the office, except that the girl being tied to the stake by the apprentices has caught his eye and is now watching him very carefully, not saying a word, not even screaming a word, not yet.’
    ‘Does he have a sword?’ asked Tiffany.
    ‘Yes, he does. May I continue? Good. Now, he walks towards her. She is staring at him, not shouting, just watching, and he is thinking … what is he thinking? He is thinking, “Could I take on both of the guards? Will the apprentices obey me?” And then, as he gets nearer, he wonders if they could make it to the horses in all this smoke. And this is a moment eternally frozen in time. Huge events await his decision. One simple deed either way, and history will be different and you are thinking it depends on what he does next. But you see, what he is thinking doesn’t matter, because she knows who he is and what he has done, and the bad things that he has done and is famous for, and as he walks towards her, uncertain, she knows him for what he is, even if he wishes he wasn’t, and reaches with both hands smoothly through the wicker basket they’ve put around her to keep her upright, and grabs him, and holds him tight as the torch drops down onto the oily wood and the flames spring up. She never takes her eyes off him, and never loosens her grip … Would you like a fresh cup of tea?’
    Tiffany blinked away smoke and flames and shock. ‘And how do you know so much about it, please?’ she said.
    ‘I was there.’
    ‘A thousand years ago?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘How did you get there?’
    ‘I walked,’ said Miss Smith. ‘But that is not the point. The point is that then was the death – and birth – of the thing we call the Cunning Man. And he was still a man, to begin with. He was terribly injured, of course. For quite some time. And witchfinding went on – oh my word, didn’t it just. You couldn’t tell who the other witchfinders feared most: the witches, or the wrath of the Cunning Man if they didn’t find him the witches he demanded and believe me, with the Cunning Man on your heels, you will find as many witches as he wants, oh yes.
    ‘And the Cunning Man himself could always find witches. It was quite amazing. You would have some quiet little village where everybody got on reasonably well and no one had noticed any witches at all. But when the Cunning Man arrived, suddenly there were witches everywhere, but unfortunately not for very long. He believed that witches were the reason for just about everything bad that happened, and that they stole babies and caused wives to run away from their husbands, and milk to go sour. I think my favourite one was that witches went to sea in eggshells in order to drown honest sailors.’ At this point Miss Smith held up a hand. ‘No, don’t say that it would be impossible for even a small witch to get inside an eggshell without crushing it, because that is what we in the craft would call a logical argument and therefore no one who wanted to believe that witches sank ships would pay any attention to it.
    ‘It couldn’t go on, of course. People can be very stupid, and people can be easily frightened, but sometimes you find people who aren’t that stupid and aren’t that fearful, and so the Cunning Man is thrust out of the world. Thrown out like the rubbish he is.
    ‘But that wasn’t the end of him. So great, so fearsome was his hatred for anything that he thought of as witchcraft that he somehow managed to live on despite finally having no body. Though there was no skin to him, no bone any more, his rage was such that he lived on. As a ghost, perhaps. And, every so often, finding someone who would let him in. There are plenty of people out there whose poisonous minds will open for him. And there are those who would rather be behind evil than in front of it, and one of them wrote for him the book known as The Bonfire of the Witches .
    ‘But when he takes over a body – and believe me, in the past, there are those unpleasant people who have thought that their terrible ambitions would be furthered by allowing him to do so – the owner of the body soon finds they have no control at all. They become a part of him too. And not until it is too late do they realize that there is no escape, no release. Except death …’
    ‘Poison goes where poison’s welcome,’ said Tiffany. ‘But it looks