Chapter 9 : Our Homes… So Far Away: Ishandra, Part 1
"Ishandra," says Flora softly, "I have heard you often speak of your home in Italy on Terra but you have never told us much about it other than that. What is it like?"
"Yes," says Stella, her interest piqued, "I would love to hear about it and especially about the styles and what's in fashion."
"So would I," says Bloom, having awoken from her short nap on Ishandra's shoulder. "I was sent to Terra from Sparx by my sister, Daphne, but you were born there. It must have been quite different for you while you were growing up."
"Well, where to begin?" begins Ishandra. "Yes, I was born and grew up on Terra but I did not live during the same time or even on the same continent as Bloom. I was born on a peninsula, which is shaped like a high boot, called Italy in the port city of Taranto which is in the arch and just before the heel of the boot. The best reckoning puts my date of birth, according to the system used on Terra, as sometime in the spring of 1798. We think it was about mid-April."
"You're not sure when you were born?" asks Flora with a look of disbelief. "But why?"
"You have to be aware that infant mortality was high in those times and mothers often died from childbed fever and other complications shortly after giving birth," explains Ishandra. "After giving birth in those days, one was more concerned about whether mother or child or both would survive the ordeal than about the actual date of birth."
"Being a Witch in those days was perilous," continues Ishandra. "There was no tolerance for Witches as there is on Alfea and other worlds and, if one was caught, she would be put to death by being drowned, being burnt at the stake or garrotted. My mother was a Witch who always lived in fear of being caught and when it became obvious that I also had powers she made me swear never to use them in front of the populace and especially not in front of my father."
"Why?" asks Tecna. "Would your father have betrayed you to the witch hunters if he knew?"
"No, nothing like that, Tecna," Ishandra tells her. "We did it to protect him because, among other things, a man could be executed for harbouring a Witch. My mother told me that my father would do all he could to protect his wife and his little girl even if he knew our secrets but there was only so much he, as one man, could do and also, being at sea much of the time, he was not always around to protect us. It is for these reasons and for our great love for him that my mother said that we had to keep secret from him our true natures."
My mother still used her knowledge of witchcraft to do a lot of good as a healer and she was also teaching me the healing arts so I could follow in her footsteps. However, when a servant girl killed her aged mistress using medicine my mother had given her to help the old woman's ailing heart, she was accused by this girl of practising evil witchcraft. The matter got dragged into court where the girl played all trusting and innocent. My mother had to explain how she created the medicine using a blue flower that is common to our region but she also had to explain to the court how the medicine had to be administered with great care. "Too little," my mother told the court, "would not help the old woman but too much would kill her and the line between the two extremes was a matter of a few drops." The court ruled that the old woman's death was accidental and also, because she was so old, it may have simply been her time to pass on whether or not it was before or after taking my mother's medicine.
Even though my mother was acquitted, rumours about us began to fly rampantly about the village. All of a sudden, the entire village had something to say about us and our natures. We were suddenly too tall, too graceful and too beautiful and our ears where just too pointy to be natural so we must be witches. If animals died or crops became blighted, it was our evil doing. If someone had bad fortune then it was we who jinxed him. When mothers miscarried then it was because we cursed them. And it went on but not openly. Then, when the shop owners in the marketplace finally stopped selling to us out of fear that while in their shops we would give them the evil-eye, we started to raise our own vegetables and fell back on our knowledge of edible wild plants and insects. But even then we could not escape the rumour mill. People saw us harvesting the large and potentially deadly tarantula spiders and assumed it was not because they were a source of high quality protein. No, we wanted to absorb the spiders' poison so we could spit it into people's faces and cause them to die. And when both my mother and I lost what little domestic fat we had from hard work and our vegetable and insect diet and acquired a look of chiselled beauty then the women of the village became even more jealous of us and spread stories that we used unnatural means to achieve it. And the rumours fed upon rumours and the more outrageous they were, the more people believed them, until the whole village had worked itself into a lather of fear of us.
And then we began to be hounded by people who were glad to find out that we could be witches. They were wicked people with only evil in their hearts who wanted us to cast hexes and curses on people we didn't even know for what seemed like no reason at all. There were some who wanted my mother to use her extensive knowledge of herbs to create exotic poisons so they could use them to commit murder and get away with it. There were those who wanted charms and talismans and those who wanted us to transmute lead into gold, raise people from the dead, and tell them their fortunes. But my mother refused to have any dealings with them and turned them all away. Then, if things were not already bad enough, Lady Brocia accompanied by her entourage shows up at our doorstep and demands that my mother make a love potion for her so she could have the man she wanted. My mother refused to do it telling Brocia that there was no such thing as a love potion and if there was it was no less than a philtre that would make the man her unwilling slave but not her lover and she refused to do that to anyone. Then Brocia starts wailing and blubbering that she will never have the one she wants without my mother's help at which point my mother explodes.
"Look, My Lady Brocia," she tells her, "no man will ever love you until you make yourself loveable and here is the witchcraft to do it. Firstly, amend that pompous, whining, spoiled bitch attitude of yours and learn to treat everyone with respect no matter what his or her station is in life. Secondly, get off that fat, lazy butt of yours and get some exercise. Thirdly, when you eat your meals, use a fork not a shovel. Fourthly, take a bath at least once a month and, lastly, after you have devoured a mess of pork spareribs with garlic sauce then at least do us all a favour and rinse your mouth out with some perfume. There's your answer and you can start to work on it right now."
"How dare you!" screams Brocia. "How dare you speak to me thus!"
"Well, I just did, didn't I," snarls my mother. "Now you have your answer so get out of my house!"
