As we grew close enough to distinguish words, I recognized that the chanting was in Greek, which Shakespeare did not understand but I understood very well. I chose to be a classically educated marquis and translated for the bard in whispers when he asked me if I could make sense of their babble.
“It’s an invocation to Hecate, pleading for her guidance—no, her personal guidance. As in guiding them, in person, right here! They are trying to summon her.”
“A summoning! For what purpose?”
“I know not.”
We were close enough now that I, with my aided vision, could distinguish shapes in the darkness; I doubted that Shakespeare could see anything, except something that kept moving in front of the firelight.
There were three witches circling the cauldron, naked but smeared with dark streaks—blood or animal fat would be my guess. Their ages were indeterminate; by appearance they were somewhere on the happy side of middle age, but I knew that in reality they could be much older than that. As they circled the fire they also spun around, raising their arms and voices to the sky. I wondered how they kept from getting dizzy.
Their right hands each held a short dagger—no special curved blades or gilded guards, nothing you might call an athame; they were merely sharp, efficient knives.
“Master Shakespeare,” I whispered, “they are armed, and I do not doubt they will attack if provoked. We should probably keep our distance.”
“How can you see anything, Marquis? I can only see shadows in the dark. My eyes need some assistance and I must see better; this could prove to be a fine provocative sauce for my play.”
I could hardly cast night vision on him without revealing my abilities, so I sighed and said, “If we’re going to get any closer, I suggest you put out that torch.”
I expected a protest but he complied instantly, jamming it into the mud behind me. He dearly wanted to get a closer look; to this point he hadn’t seen nearly so much as I had.
We inched forward, ignoring the filthy ground, fascinated by the lights and the ritual playing out before us. I was fairly certain by then that I would have no official role to play as a protector of the earth, but playing protector to Shakespeare could be even more dangerous if we were discovered.
The cauldron, I noticed, squatted in the middle of a crossroads, but the three-way sort to which Shakespeare had alluded earlier. What possible need the witches could have for Hecate’s personal appearance I could not imagine. Their hair was tied and queued behind them, and I perceived that they wore theatre masks straight out of ancient Greece, albeit with visages of bearded men strangely attached to what were plainly female bodies. Masked rites might make them Thracians, but if so their presence in England was especially bewildering.
The only possible motivation I could come up with to conduct such a ritual near London was the upset or even overthrow of King James’s reign, but I was surprised that Greek cultists would care about it. Perhaps they didn’t care but were doing this on a mercenary basis—I had heard there were plots boiling all over the country, mostly by Catholics opposed to King James’s very existence. We were only twelve months away from the Guy Fawkes Gunpowder Plot, after all. But if those witches were Catholic, then I was the son of a goat.
“What token of hell is this?” Shakespeare breathed next to me, his eyes wide and fixed on the spectacle. We were crouched low to the ground on our haunches. “Bearded women cavorting and, and…” He fell speechless. Sometimes there simply aren’t words, even for him.
“Draw no closer,” I warned him, listening to their chant. “Their words have changed. The invocation is set and now they are waiting.”
“What are they saying?”
“They are literally saying that they are waiting. Periménoume means ‘we wait’ in Greek, and they’re just repeating that, spinning around.”
“For what do they wait?”
“My guess would be a sacrifice. Maybe they know we’re here and they’re waiting for us to get closer, and then they will sacrifice us to their goddess.”
Shakespeare did not fall for my scare tactics. “Did they not sacrifice something already? There has to be something in that cauldron.”
“Aye, but a chicken or a newt will not summon a goddess to English shores. It will only secure a flicker of her attention. They need something bigger.”
“How know you this?”
“I am a witch-hunter of sorts myself,” I said, “though I confess I did not expect to find any tonight.”
“You doubted me, m’sieur?”
“No, I doubted the stories you heard.” But now that I heard the witches were “waiting,” I wondered how long they had been coming out here during the new moon to wait. Those stories of lights and croaking hags looked to be true now.
“Why not simply bring the necessary sacrifices with them?” Shakespeare asked.
“It is a matter of power,” I said. “If the sacrifices come to the crossroads willingly, it would be better for their purposes.”
We heard the neigh of a horse behind us—quite probably one of ours. The witches heard it too. They didn’t stop their chanting or their ritualistic circling of the cauldron, but their masked faces pointed in that direction—in our direction, in fact. I didn’t have to tell Shakespeare that he shouldn’t say another word. We emulated the movement and speech of stone gargoyles in the darkness and kept our eyes on the coven.
Soon the approach of hooves reached our ears, a soft rumbling thump in the mud, and an angry voice shouted, “That has to be them up ahead, or someone who saw where they went!”
It sounded like Fire Face to me. Apparently he had recovered from thinking I had slain him and now he wanted a piece of both of us. Chucking Will on the shoulder, I gestured that we should get off the road, and we rolled in the mud until we were naturally (rather than magically) camouflaged in a sodden field of disconsolate cabbages.
It was Fire Face, all right, riding my horse, and riding double on Will’s were Cheek Boil and Pigeon Liver, a surprise guest. The latter must have returned and offered to make up for his earlier cowardice. And Fire Face’s spleen must have been full of rage to pursue us so blindly and abandon their leader somewhere behind. Fire Face was the de facto leader now and clearly not expecting to find three naked, masked, and dancing witches at a crossroads in Finsbury Fields. The leader had been left behind with his broken collarbones, and were he there to witness what happened next, he would have counted himself fortunate.
The witches stopped chanting “We wait” and each said in turn, “The time is now,” and then, in concert, “Hecate comes!”
The bandits reined in short of the fire, and Cheek Boil exclaimed, “What the bloody hell?” shortly before it all became a bloody hell.