Beguilers Read Online Free Page B

looked at me, that’s what he thought, anyway. My allergy meant that we couldn’t have chuffies in the house the way everyone else did, because if I was in an enclosed space with one my watering eyes and sneezes progressed to a full-blown attack of asthma and I had to be taken out on to the mountainside until I could breath again. People had got pretty much used to me, but from time to time, even then, someone would cast aspersions about ours being an unhappy household because of there being no chuffies in it; and then the whole business of me being different from everyone else would rear its ugly head again. They all thought I was suffering desperately, you see, because I couldn’t spend half my life snuggled up with a chuffie the way other people do. And I suppose that in some ways I did suffer more than the others. The thing is, though, I never saw it as a bad thing the way they do. It’s not the end of the world to feel sad or disappointed now and then. It doesn’t feel nice, but it proves that you’re alive and growing and changing in a way that you’re hardly aware of when the chuffies snuff everything out and make you feel good. And if things got intolerable I could always go out and spend a few minutes with Tigo, and that would take care of the worst of it. I liked to sit with him in the yard from time to time in any case. He was my friend, even if he did make me sneeze. When I was really confused about the beguiler thing I liked to go out and lean against him so that he could feel how I was feeling. Chuffies understand everything. But that’s not the same thing as approving. He thought I was nuts, and the way things are in our village and always have been, I had to agree with him.
    Because stating that your Great Intention is to catch a beguiler is the equivalent of admitting insanity. I wasn’t the first to try it, not by a long shot. On average there is one in every generation who does it and they are spoken about in hushed, disapproving tones on long, leaf-lantern evenings in the warm fug of winter fires. It’s a sort of an idiom around here; if someone isn’t behaving according to the local ethics, or if someone gets a bit over-wrought about something, what the others say is, ‘He ought to watch out, that one. The next thing is he’ll be off hunting beguilers.’ My mother said it to me, once. ‘You calm down, young lady, or it’s off after beguilers you’ll be.’ Maybe she shouldn’t have said that. Maybe it put the idea into my head.
    It didn’t matter, though, where the notion came from. I had no respect for the things that the other people were doing. I would rather have died hunting beguilers than capitulated and entered an unwanted marriage or the dusty old priesthood. After all, what’s the point of being human and having choices in life if everyone just ends up behaving like cattle?
    There were two names in my lifetime that were associated with beguilers. The first was Dabbo. He came to the village from time to time, I’m told, but I don’t remember him. He died when I was young. The other name was Shirsha. She wasn’t dead, but lived on her own in the Lepers’ caves beside the were-forest, just below the snow-line. People came across her now and then. They said that she was mad, without a doubt. They shuddered when they mentioned her name. I preferred not to think about her.
    Instead I tried to turn my mind to the water problem. Each evening when the household tasks were finished, I sat alone with a few scraps of paper, trying to put my theories into some sort of practical form. I produced all kinds of fascinating sketches, but none of them were close to working designs. On the evenings when we watered the crops I sometimes became immersed in my speculations, and would watch the water pouring from the spout of my can, so absorbed by the possibilities that I forgot why I was there. Eventually my father got so angry that he made me carry the bucket pole across my shoulders for a few