THE
MYTHICAL
WITCH
DULA
("HILDULA
HAUNTWELL") |
She travels in a hut that
walks on spider legs, talks in poetic riddles, and wields powerful magic that
disregards conventional boundaries between good and evil – Dula the Witch
inspires fear and fascination in children and adults alike. She is a prominent
figure in Southern Sarvonian peasant lore,
and appears in countless stories, songs, and sayings. Although unmistakably
human, neither goddess nor
demon, she is said
never to age, as she possesses the secret of eternal youth.
Santharian witches hold Dula lore in high
regard, and believe that much wisdom can be gained from it. In fact, Dula has
been called the daughter of all witches: the wise child that every witch has to
find within herself, and whose subtle and wayward voice she must learn to
follow.
Yet most ordinary people are wary and resentful of Dula, citing tales that
illustrate her moody character, her inclination to vengefulness, and her twisted
morality. She is a friend of the feeble, the ugly, and the outcast, and is said
to help misshapen children, cripples and oddballs more often than respectable
folk. Yet even Dula’s most fervent detractors may, at times, hope for her help,
when unrequited love pierces their heart, when their marriage remains barren, or
when all other healers have failed to cure a sick loved one.
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Many Santharian peasants firmly believe that Dula the Witch has, at some point in the past, visited their village, and that she may return at any time. Most clear-thinking minds, however, argue that she is a figure of myth. And yet we cannot ignore the rumours that link Dula to a historical person by the name of Hildula Hauntwell, a mysterious but doubtlessly real researcher of renegade magic. It is probable that Hildula was but a macanti or an ordinary witch, albeit a talented and learned one; yet some say that Hildula and Dula are in fact the same person, and that Dula the Witch likes to take on the guise of the plain “Hildula” when she leaves her spider-legged hut to visit cities and to partake in debates among sages.
Appearance.
Dula the Witch is always described as a young woman, almost yet a girl. But as
far as nearly everything else about her appearance is concerned, the stories
vary widely and, indeed, wildly. Sometimes she is beautiful, at other times
ugly, and most often ordinary. Her hair is blonde, black, or red. She is tall or
small. Her clothing is rich and ornate, or simple, or even bedraggled. Yet for a
youthful witch skilled in the art of love charms and wise in the ways of
fertility, it seems remarkable that no description has ever suggested that Dula
was a seductress. Neither men nor women seem to have found her erotically
alluring. She has the aura of a wise child, and of someone who may know all
about other people’s desires, but lives in a world apart, ruled by cravings
unintelligible to ordinary souls.
Dula is credited with the power of seeing beneath the surface of the world.
People who claim to have met her often report that at first they thought her
cross-eyed, until they realized that she was looking not at them, but
into them. Apparently, no-one can hide their thoughts and designs from
Dula’s penetrating gaze. Hence, if an
Erpheronian tells you that you
have “Dula’s Eyes”, he is paying a double-edged compliment: he means to say that
you have uncommon insight into people’s hearts; and he also means that he
therefore won’t trust you.
Personality. According to popular belief, time and space do not
pose the same limits on Dula as they do on ordinary humans. Throughout Southern
Sarvonia, you will find many an old gaffer
or hag who will allege that they have met Dula twice in their lives – once in
their childhood, and once in old age – and that Dula’s appearance had not
changed at all in the interval. If you express incredulity, you will be
confronted with further testimonies, handed down from grandmother to
granddaughter, and alleging that Dula has always been, and always will be, the
young woman that she is, and that the teeth of time have no power over her.
Dula never stays in one place for long. She lives in a hut that has eight legs,
shaped like those of a giant spider, and capable of walking day and night
without tiring. In this hut, she travels about the land, covering long distances
at magical speed. In one story, the hut is said to have wandered from the
Thaelon Forest to the Rimmerins Ring in a
single night!
In short, Dula lives anytime and anywhere, all the time and everywhere. Theories
about her origins have only two things in common: each contradicts the others,
and all are equally implausible. In Nermeran, folks believe that Dula originally
came up from Manthria; the
Manthrians place her origin in Enthronia;
in Enthronia, Dula is commonly suspected of being an outcast of the
Ximax Academy in Xaramon, while in Xaramon it
is customary to hint at barbarian magic originating up in
Nermeran.
Wherever she appears in the popular imagination, Dula is an outsider. Her
arrival is greeted with wariness, and her departure with relief. For although
one may be anxious to seek her wisdom, and hopeful of her help, her tendency to
side with the weak and the outcast means that the bullies, the abusers of power,
the selfish, and those that turn a blind eye to others’ suffering (that is, much
of humanity) tend to fear Dula’s vengeful retaliations. Dula, it is said, has no
tolerance of the everyday cruelty and indifference without which ordinary life
would not go on. She may hex warts onto the noses of children who have taunted a
crippled boy; bring the gout to a woman who chose to ignore a sick
kuatu she found by the roadside; and cause a
family man’s teeth to fall out, because he has let his senile father rot away in
a back room on small rations of gruel, reserving the best food for his children
and himself. Dula’s view on human weakness
often seems unkind, and her punishments cruel. Yet if you discuss this with
actual witches, you may be confronted with the argument that there is a
metaphorical meaning to such stories. “Dula is naught more than what’s in
people’s hearts themselves,” one witch told us. “What is it that keeps folks
awake at night? It’s their worries, their regrets, their remorse. It’s them
doubting if what they do is right. And that’s what Dula is. That’s what the
story is about. People’s hearts.”
Another common complaint against Dula is that she does not, like decent people
do, favour humans and humanoids over animals.
Many Dula-stories feature the witch as a helper of little creatures, even if it
be at the expense of people. Although her sympathy extends to all kinds of
animals, Dula is especially associated with bees and spiders. If this seems
paradoxical to the reader, who may wish to point out that in nature, spiders and
bees are enemies, we recommend trying this argument on
Santharian story tellers. If one does so,
one is quickly admonished that between them, spiders and bees symbolize the
whole contradictory range of Dula the Witch’s qualities and powers: for spiders
represent death, poison, trickery, weaving, slyness, solitude, patience, and
bitterness, whereas bees stand for life, nourishment, cooperation, building,
straightforwardness, community, industriousness, and sweetness. All these
qualities are Dula’s, one will be told, and what she uses them for is beyond
simple human notions of good or evil. In
Erpheronia, the popular
Sarvonian tale of
“The Boy
Who Was Good For Nothing”, which famously features a wizard who commands
both bees and spiders, is sometimes told with Dula in the role of the wizard.
While Dula’s association with spiders is most prominently symbolized by the
eight spider-legs of her hut, her association with bees often manifests as the
belief that she can communicate with hivelings – apparitions whose bodies are
made up of a multitude of small flying creatures, such as bees. In fact, some
stories go so far as to ascribe to Dula the power to conjure up such
hivelings – calling on the bees
to create a body that allows an otherwise ethereal nature spirit to take form
and communicate with Dula. Bees, in their search for nectar, travel far and wide
and learn much that they are unable to either understand or tell, unless their
collective experiences are drawn together in the single body of a
hiveling, and expressed by a
hiveling’s mysterious voice. It is said that from her dealings with these
spirits, Dula can divine many things about a place – such as the best place in
the forest to find plants with healing qualities; or what curse has caused a
field to remain barren; or the source of a pestilence that has befallen a
village.
Magic.
Folklore ascribes to Dula considerable magical powers, which she uses sometimes
to help, sometimes to harm, and sometimes to play tricks, according to the
inscrutable whims that inspire her designs. Her sorcery often involves the use
of language, music and dance to unfold its effects. Songs, incantations,
ecstatic dancing, the muttering of rhymed spells over potions or charms – these
are Dula’s magical methods of choice.
Furthermore, many stories tell of the power that Dula can gain over people if
she gets hold of something that belongs to them: a lock of their hair, a
treasured possession, or even the cushion on which they rested their head last
night. And if these things are freely given, rather than obtained by theft or
deceit, then Dula is sure to have the owner in her thrall. This aspect of Dula’s
magic is well illustrated by the beautiful story of
“Kelder
and Bryella”, which tells how Dula tricks a treacherous woman into handing
over not only a lock of her own hair, but also a lock from the hair of each of
her two daughters – with disastrous consequences for all three. Even to “give
away” your name to Dula is thought to be dangerous, and it is all too easy to do
so unawares, as Dula often leaves her conspicuous hut behind and wanders about
in the guise of an ordinary woman, talking to unsuspecting folk and entrapping
them in her designs.
So what are the witcheries that Dula engages in? What are the effects of her
magic? If the fairy tales are to be believed,
Dula can make the crops on the fields grow or whither, and knows the secret of
making your livestock barren or fecund. Even the wombs of women are said to be
susceptible to her powers. Dula also makes potions and charms to bring about the
most unlikely love matches. And her gaze, it is said, can see through the mask
of your face, enabling her to know your innermost desire more clearly and more
fully than even yourself. If you anger her, she is capable of putting a curse on
you so that your children will hate you but forever pretend to love you; that
your parents will forget your face, and think you a stranger; that every spider
will bite you, that every bee will sting you; and more. But if it pleases her,
she can also help to lift even the most ancient curses, and when wailwomen or
white ladies haunt the nights, people pray that Dula may come and release the
unhappy spirits from their plight. In short, Dula’s powers are of the type
traditionally ascribed to witches, although the mythical Dula is, of course,
infinitely more powerful than even the most experienced real witch.
Many sayings record beliefs about Dula’s witchery: “He’s been to Dula,” peasants
might say of a man, whose doubtful character and unfavourable looks make them
wonder why the prettiest girl in the village chose to marry him over the many
other, more reliable and more handsome men that would have been available to
her. – “Dula has spit on the fields,” the farmers grumble, when the harvest is
poor even though the summer has lacked neither rain nor sunshine to make the
bredden grain grow. – And what of a girl who has stolen a jar of redberry jam
from the larder, and who is being questioned by her father as to the whereabouts
of the jam? Why, she would surely reply: “How should I know where that jar
walked off to? Am I Dula the Witch?”
In the fairy tales that are told about Dula, the outcomes of her trickery are
often unexpected, and even bizarre. The popular
Nermeranian story “The Duke’s Love Song” exemplifies this.
In the tale “The Duke’s Love Song”, the young Duke of Astran asks Dula to help
him win the favour of a cobbler’s daughter, whom he has taken a fancy to. Dula
agrees and bewitches the girl, so that the duke but needs to sing a certain
song, and she is flying into his arms. Thus the nobleman gets his fling with the
pretty commoner, intending never to see her again. However, Dula has secretly
supplied the cobbler’s daughter with a similar charm. The betrayed girl enters
the duke’s palace, sings the magic song, and thus makes the duke fall in love
with her. Unable to hide his feelings, the duke confesses them to his family.
They, of course, disapprove; a marriage between a nobleman and a commoner is
impossible. So the pair elope. They drive off into the night in the duke’s
coach, with his enraged relatives and heirs in wild pursuit. But during the
chase, which lasts several days, the charm loses its magic: the pair’s love
wanes, and the duke and the girl decide to go separate ways. However, each has
learned something from the escapade, and the cobbler’s daughter settles in
Ximax to become a mage (“never again to be
powerless in the face of another’s magic”, she says), while the duke changes his
name and starts a successful coach business in Elsreth (“helping people escape
the fetters of destiny by going places”). The duke’s family fail to catch either
of the two runaways, but they do find out who started the whole affair. They
return to Astran and try to punish Dula, but she sings her
magic song to them, making each family member
fall in love with some unlikely person or creature. The duke’s mother woos an
old, smelly rat-catcher; his uncle pursues a blackhog; and so forth. The next
day they all wake up embarrassed and determined to forget the whole affair. The
duke is declared dead, and his eldest sister is given the throne. It takes her a
week before she dares to face her subjects (who all too well remember her recent
and very public infatuation with a
hobbithorse). Then, while
on a coach ride through town, her eyes fall on a tanner’s son... and there the
tale ends.
Thanks to travelling theatre troupes of
Black Butterfly Rovers, who have made the story into a farcical comedy play,
the tale of the “Duke’s Love Song” has become known far beyond the borders of
Nermeran. On village greens and market
squares throughout Santharia, people like
to laugh at the enchanted nobles that woo drooling geezers and bewildered
animals. It is therefore not surprising that performance of the play has been
declared illegal in the whole of Nermeran,
as well as in several duchies of Manthria
and Enthronia.
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Familiars.
A corbie sitting on a nearby fence
inclines its head when you talk, as if it could understand the words. – A
spider weaves a peculiar web, making a
pattern that resembles letters; and as you look more closely, you realize that
they spell: “Stay away.” And you know that this advice is for you. – A
kuatu leaves the safety of its tree and
walks straight past a dog, who does not dare to approach it. – A
cat sits with its back to a mirror,
its bright green eyes sparkling within its deep black fur; and from the mirror
glass, the same two eyes stare at you. – A
flittermouse hovers in front of your window at night, knocking its head
against the shutters, and you know what it means. You don’t know how you
know this, but you do.
If something like this should happen to you, and if you’re sure that you’re not
just imagining things, then it is clear that you are a character in a Dula
story, and have just met one of her familiars. There is always something
unsettling about them, and people intuitively feel that although the familiars
are animals, they are at the same time also more than animals. They are Dula’s
spies, some say. Her messengers, say others. They are forest spirits whom she
has given a body. They are the ghosts of people she has killed. Or they are
enchanted princes or duchesses or tailors who tried to trick her, and were
banished into an animal’s body as a punishment.
Birds probably feature most frequently, especially those kinds that have a
reputation for cleverness, such as corbies,
scoffles, and wood owls. But
aelirels and
doves also sometimes appear, and we have even
heard a story in which Dula is accompanied by an exotic “talking bird” – a
description which would seem to fit the gossiper, a R’unorian and
Northern Sarvonian species that is
almost unknown in Santharia. Other types
of familiars sometimes associated with Dula are
cats,
flittermice, dragonfly lizards,
rainbow serpents, and even
kuatus,
forest twotails, and fairy mice.
In short, Dula’s companions are as varied as her character. Sometimes they even
speak. And if it’s you they speak to, you know that you have no chance of
getting out of this story before the end, and must hope that Dula will think
that you are one of the good ones.
Apprentices.
A child born deaf, or with six fingers on each hand, or who, being seven summers
old, still does not speak more than a handful of words – these are the sorts
that Dula the Witch takes on as apprentices. “She was sent to Dula” is a
euphemism for an unwanted child that is taken to the forest and abandoned there
to fend for itself (which means, in all but a few cases, death). If Dula had
indeed received all the wretched children that have allegedly been “sent” to
her, and had turned them all into witches, there would now be more witches in
Santharia than
rats. Nonetheless, the legends of Dula’s
apprentices do contain a grain of truth, since many real witches do indeed look
for magically gifted children, and seek to teach them the art of witchcraft. And
since real witches, just like Dula, are viewed with suspicion, and families
therefore unlikely to entrust their child to a witch, it turns out that witches’
apprentices are indeed often children whom Avá has dreamed disfigured faces or
bodies, or who have odd minds that their families do not understand.
Not all Dula-tales feature an apprentice. And the witch never has more than one
helper at a time. Many stories mention an apprentice but in passing – for
colouration, as it were: how a visitor to Dula’s hut is greeted by a one-eyed
boy, how Dula sends a leprous girl to deliver a curse, and so forth. Yet
occasionally an apprentice features as a protagonist. In particular, many a yarn
has been spun around how Dula acquires her apprentices in the first place.
Remarkably, it often remains ambiguous whether Dula “takes” or even “steals” the
children, or whether they come to her of their own accord. Does she catch them
like a spider, entangling them in her web of illusions? Or do they find her like
a lost bee finds a hive, happy to serve their true queen rather than languish in
the wasteland that, for them, is ordinary human company? Like many aspects of
the Dula myth, the issue of her apprentices inspires the storytellers and their
listeners to debate and doubt, rather than to certainty and firm belief.
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The Hut
that walks on Spider Legs. Famously, Dula the Witch lives in a
wooden hut that walks on spider legs. The legs are said to be eight in number,
just like a real spider’s, and each to be as long as a young tree. Legend
ascribes this hut a mind of its own, and anyone who wants to research its lore
should be warned that they are going to spend many a tiresome evening at town
inns and village bonfires, listening to arguments about whether the hut moves
where Dula wants it to go, or whether, on the contrary, Dula ends up wherever it
pleases the hut to take her. Go to any northern
Santharian village, and you will meet
people who claim to have seen it, often at dusk and from a distance, walking
over a ridge of hills, or making its way through a forest, breaking the branches
of trees that stand in its way. Most tales say that the hut shuns the people’s
gaze, and hides in forests or secluded valleys by day, preferring the night for
journeys across open country.
As to the size of the hut, most accounts are vague, and those descriptions that
do exist contradict one another, although there is a certain method to the
confusion: for it seems that those stories that only mention the outside
of the hut describe it as small, no larger than a broom-cupboard, whereas those
that feature the hut’s inside tell of a large space like a king’s hall,
filled with furniture arranged all higgledy-piggledy, leaving plenty of nooks
and crannies, where wise-eyed animals and flittering apparitions lurk.
Relationship to the Twelvern Gods.
Dula the Witch seems to be her own story, and may originally have had little to
do with the Twelvern faith. Nonetheless, by and by popular imagination has
sought connections between her and some of the Twelvern Gods. And where
imagination starts to seek, it will certainly find something and, what is more,
will stubbornly insist on keeping it, even if it be the greatest humbug between
moon and sun. Thus, Dula the Witch is often associated with
Etherus, God of Desire and Excess; with
Jeyriall, Goddes of Harvest and Fertility;
and with Seyella, Goddess of Destiny. And
indeed, Dula’s habit of creating romantic chaos and unlikely liaisons would make
her seem to be sister-in-spirit to Etherus;
her alleged power over the growth of crops, livestock and wombs links her to
Jeyriall; and her waywardness and
unpredictability to Seyella.
Dula’s alleged congeniality with Seyella
has even been evoked among the learned. In the words of the historian Artheos
Mirabilis Federkiel, who, as we shall presently see, had reason to look into
these matters: “Dula the Witch is the sort of person that
Seyella, Goddess of Destiny, would have
become if she had chosen to try and live as a human being and behave as
ordinarily as possible, which, Seyella
being Seyella, of course doesn’t turn out
to be very ordinary at all.” Some scholars have interpreted the Dula legends as
parables, whose hidden meaning points to the failure, so common among
humans, to understand one’s destiny. And
indeed, the humans that meet Dula the Witch are often left confused by the
encounter, and even if they gain some help or wisdom, they usually find that
some other aspect of their lives, which they previously were quite certain about
and content with, now seems doubtful and unsatisfactory. Dula’s character thus
seems to stand for the inscrutability of fate, and her fickleness reminds us
humans that it is our lot to make life’s most
important decisions in ignorance of the consequences.
The "Hildula Hauntwell" Phenomenon.
After all that has been said up to now, serious scholarship would seem to have
an easy job of classifying Dula the Witch as a mythological figure. Yes, we can
find plenty of individuals and even whole villages that claim to have
encountered Dula – but these reports can be explained as fruits of the wild
imagination that a peasant’s life of hardship, drudgery and boredom tends to
give rise to; and we have personally seen more than one nifty
macanti who, cognizant of the power of folk
beliefs, used the name of Dula so as to better sell her fake potions and snaffle
the coins of the credulous – performing ludicrous and useless ceremonies,
variously promising to remove warts, to make sure that a woman’s next child is a
son, to bring rain, or to bring sunshine.
In short: most so-called “evidence” for appearances of Dula the Witch turns out
to be, on closer inspection, mere hearsay, superstition, and charade. Yet our
academic contentment is unsettled by the ample historical record concerning a
certain scholar of witchcraft and magic, a human woman who called herself
Hildula Hauntwell. This Hildula is most famous for her works exploring what she
referred to as “nature magic”, including
druidic magic, some aspects of witchcraft, and the (alleged)
magical abilities
of creatures such as swamphags, grass rippers, and uglings. Her work “The Ugly
Thing and the Beautiful Dreams” (Lorehaven,
823 a.S.) remains the single most important source on ugling lore to this day.
Moreover, Hildula has distinguished herself with writings on superstitions and
on popular prejudice against magic practitioners, including witches. Most
notoriously, her debates with the self-declared “witchfinder” Malleus Mallefiz
about the evil ear superstition degenerated into a deadly enmity. Records from
the Lorehaven mayoral office suggest that,
in the late 840s, Mallefiz was suspected of having hired an assassin to kill
Hildula. But, as the records also show, the investigation was abandoned when no
proof of Hildula’s death could be found.
Indeed, the question of Hildula’s death – how it occurred, and even if it
occurred – is unsolved to this day. And this, in fact, is the source of
speculations that “Hildula” may indeed still be alive, and that the assiduous
9th-century scholar might not have been what she seemed to be, but was in fact
but a guise assumed by Dula, the witch that stays young forever.
For it seems that Hildula, after she had allegedly passed into
Queprur’s realm, merrily kept on
publishing. More remarkably even, the dates of the publications attributed to
her span no fewer than eight centuries – longer even than most elves’ lifetimes,
not to speak of a human’s. Her earliest work, a little known treatise on the
"firedance" phenomenon in red druidic magic, dates from 811 a.S. After that, a
period of extraordinary productivity sees her write one major book every two or
three years, until almost 30 years later, in 840, she publishes the enormous
tome that more than anything else incites Malleus Mallefiz’s wrath: her “Concise
Encyclopedia of Superstitions, Rumours, and Slanders against Witches and other
Honest Folk”. Then, after her alleged death in the early 840s, there is a long
silence.
But in 932 a.S., Hildula’s name appears again, this time as the author of “The
Spirits of Revenge: Curses and How to Thwart Them”. Another period of frantic
publishing activity follows, and ends in 945 a.S. with “To Make Your Loved One
Want You: Amorous Enchantment in Seven Times Seven Easy Steps” – a book of
verse, all written in the form of incantations to be used in the concoction of
love potions. (Whether any of them are effective we are unable to give an
authoritative opinion on.) Over the following seven hundred years, Hildula
Hauntwell appears about once every century, publishes an astonishing number of
works within a period of two or three decades, and then vanishes. The last of
these spells ended rather recently, namely in 1666 a.S., when a pamphlet
entitled “The Arts of Warts, or: How to Take Revenge on the Infuriatingly
Pretty” appeared in New-Santhala. This
book is widely believed not to deal with actual magic, but rather to be a satire
designed to mock vain and superstitious folk who desire
magic creams and powders to make them
beautiful, as well as to criticize the macanti charlatans who take advantage of
such folk by selling them fake wonder drugs. And yet we have heard reports that
after the pamphlet’s publication, an epidemic of warts broke out among merchant
families in the New-Santhalan trade
quarter.
As far as Hildula Hauntwell is concerned, it is of course possible that each of
her “incarnations” was in fact a different person, and that each took the name
and guise of an earlier scholar in order to lend mystery and credibility to her
work, or conceivably in order to maintain her anonymity. Yet serious researchers
have argued that Hildula Hauntwell is but a cloak worn by Dula the witch when
she leaves her usual haunts in countryside and semi-wilderness and enters the
cities, and in particular the world of scholarship and
magical learning.
Supporters of the “Dula” theory cite a curious fact: although we have few
descriptions of the appearance and character of “Hildula Hauntwell” from any
period, those that do exist always describe her in the same way: namely as a
young woman, girlish in appearance although sharp in wit, and with a gaze that
made people feel uncomfortably as if the woman’s eyes could see straight into
their hearts.
The historian Artheos M. Federkiel has eloquently summed up the mystery that is
Hildula Hauntwell. In his seminal work “Histories of Witches and Witchcraft” he
asks:
“How can we explain the
following pair of historical records: one from 1291, when the Gravioness
of Starmiran, in her diaries, describes her encounter with one ‘Hildoola
Houndwell’, author of an ‘amusing little book’ entitled ‘101 Things to Do
with Lizard’s Tails’, and emphasizes that she had ‘never met a more
learned and reasonable young woman’ – and another from 1323, fully 32
years later, when Marcogg’s mayor
Skeijorn Herrhal Marmarsek issues an arrest warrant for ‘Hilldulla
Hontwel’, accused of Vilification of the Thane’s Officials, and describes
her as a ‘young woman of no more than 20 summers, infamous for scribbling
that vile pamphlet entitled 101 Things to Do with Lizard’s Tails, which
promotes black magic, the abandonment of
traditions, and bad cooking, and which contains receipts for abominable
dishes whose stench, thanks to their unintelligible popularity, now wafts
through the streets of our beloved Marcogg
like a pestilence’? Shall we assume that there were two young women, both
calling themselves Hildula Hauntwell, and both claiming to be the author
of the same work? Or do we conclude that both descriptions refer to the
same person, who was fortunate or skilful enough to preserve a youthful
appearance into the sixth decade of her life? Or, as a third possibility,
must we believe the unbelievable: that Dula the Witch, the eternally
youthful, wandered around in the Manthria
of the 13th and 14th centuries, politely conversing with gravionesses in
one place and insulting mayors in another, leaving behind mischievous
traces that have befuddled historians ever since?”
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Artheos Federkiel finds that
he is unable to settle the question; and so, we must confess, are we.
Importance.
Dula the witch and her spider-legged hut wander through the landscape of
northern Santharian folklore like the
rootless spirits that they are. Sometimes they appear on a distant hill, a
shadow against the sinking sun, reminding us that there are more things between
the disk and the sky than we will ever know. At other times they walk through
the main town gate and straight to the market place – and if they do, you can
tell that the tale is going to be one of magic,
mischief and gallimaufry.
Apart from providing many a story to scare children into eating up their dinner
and staying indoors at night, Dula is significant as an archetypical image of a
witch. Due to the immense powers that folklore ascribes to her, ordinary people
often overestimate what a real witch is able to do – a misconception that may
sometimes work to the real witches’ favour (because folks are careful not to
offend them, and wary of a confrontation), and sometimes do just the opposite
(when a witch is unable to meet a customer’s expectation, or when folk suspect
her to be guilty of the most devastating enchantments that far exceed an
ordinary witch’s powers).
Witches, for their part, put the blame for the prejudice they face on
human witlessness, rather than on Dula lore.
As one witch told us, with a twinkle in his eye: “If
humans hadn’t invented Dula,
Avá would have had to dream her into
existence, for she is too good not to be in the world.” Apparently, witch’s
apprentices, when they start off, often believe that by becoming a witch they
would one day be shown the secret place where Dula retreats with her hut, and be
invited in, and see the wondrous abode and its mistress with their own eyes. But
they are soon taught that Dula is far too important to bother herself with the
insipid malarkey of actual existence, and that all one can learn from her is
contained in the stories people tell about her. “Be like Dula,” the witches say,
“and follow your desire as determinedly, as blindly, as a child follows a
flitter-twitch that it wants to catch. Doing this, you will lose your way, and
only once you’re lost you can find yourself. And if you find yourself, you will
never grow old. That is Dula’s lesson.” Naturally, nobody except for witches
understands any of this humbug – a fact that doesn’t perturb the witches in the
slightest.
We cannot conclude our account without reporting that the mysterious Hildula
Hauntwell has become a figure of importance in her own right. This is because
the works ascribed to her have recently enjoyed a baffling rise in popularity.
In the cells of Lorehaven’s scholars, in
the offices of Cavthan’s merchants, in the
chambers of New-Santhala’s courtiers,
in the cabins of Ciosa’s sea-captains, and in
the suites of Nyermersys’ army officers –
wherever people can read, copies of Hauntwell’s titles may be found. From the
Academy of
Ximax, one even hears whispers about secret gatherings of young magic
students discussing Hildula’s works and dabbling in non-Ximaxian
theory. But the most ardent readers of works like “The Arts of Warts” and “To
Make Your Loved One Want You”, it seems, are to be found among the literate
daughters of well-to-do patricians. A proportion of these young women, we have
heard, are bored out of their wits by conversations about dresses, flower
arrangements, husbands-to-be, dowries, weddings, and the like, which their
mothers and aunts and elder sisters impose upon them day after weary day.
Thirsting for adventure, but disinclined to stray more than half a morning’s
carriage ride from the wealthy streets that they call their home, they have
taken to the colourful, tradition-defying, and often obscure writings of Hildula
Hauntwell like parasitic limpets to a piece of exposed skin. That Hauntwell’s
works are considered risqué is, of course, a big part of their attraction. Yet
it is the whole spirit of Hauntwell’s prose that makes it so enticing: every
line oozes irreverence to authority, and every paragraph hints at the
possibility that anyone may dive below the surface of humdrum everyday life and
discover deep currents of her own soul that, if properly channelled, can be
brought up into the light, freeing an inborn
magical energy, which will burst out in joyous sprouts like the majestic
outbreaths of the first-singers that rise out of the sea. Indeed, the excitement
about Hauntwell’s “philosophy” has spread widely enough to spawn, in cities with
a sizeable wealthy population, such as
New-Santhala, Lorehaven, and
Ciosa, a veritable fashion, the expressions of
which are decidedly not to everyone’s taste. To wit, the venerable compendiumist
Valan Nonesuch has been heard lamenting his encounters with “… young geese, who
one day decide to call themselves ‘follower of Dula’, stick their hair into
preposterous shapes, don fanciful black dresses… And if you remark on their
silliness, or try to bring them to their senses, they put on self-important
mysterious smiles, and dismiss you with exalted gobbledegook. One of them had
the audacity to tell me: ‘May Etherus
teach you how to enjoy your life’. And she didn’t even giggle!”
Astute marketeers and hucksters, on the other hand, being more practically
minded than compendiumists,
have found ways to make a pretty coin from the Hildula-craze. Bookbinders
prepare cheap copies of Hildula’s tomes; herbalists, who may not be able to
read, confidently proclaim that this and that herb on their display is mentioned
in this or that of Hildula’s works; and macanti
purport to sell potions prepared from Hildula’s recipes. In
Lorehaven, in the summer of 1667, the
eagerness of traders to make a profit, and the credulousness of their customers,
brought forth particularly strange flowers – and quite literally, too. It so
happened that a hitherto little known work by Hildula Hauntwell had been
discovered in the Lorehold Library. This work, entitled “The art of the rose:
clairvoyance of the soul” claims to reveal the secret of how to read other
people’s emotions, and in this regard makes much of the properties of the
R’unorian rose, which is alleged to
change its colour and its scent in response to the feelings of the people around
it. Now, the remarkable incident was this: that once news of Hauntwell’s book
had spread, on the very next market day all the flower girls of
Lorehaven had suddenly contrived to
acquire R’unorian roses. As the
perceptive reader will surmise, these allegedly magical flowers sold like hot
butterball delights. It is not far-fetched to suspect, however, that many an
ingenuous customer, once they had returned to their home and sat down to admire
their purchase, found that their magical rose looked rather a lot like any old
rose they might have bought from the very same flower girl during the previous
summer, or even in the previous week. Whether in response to the proliferation
of these roses Lorehaven’s populace was
seized by a sudden surge in empathy is not reported.
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