VII
Forth from the chimney-top flew Cassandra astride on the soft hide of a black goat. Ravished, panting, with exaltation filling her soul, she screamed like a young swift, plunging for the first time through the blue air.
'Garr-r! Up! Up! We fly! We fly!'
The deformed and withered body of Aunt Sidonia flew beside her on a broomstick; her thin hair streaming in the blast.
'To the north! To the north!' yelled the hag, managing her broomstick like a horse.
Cassandra burst into peals of laughter, remembering poor Messer Leonardo and his cumbrous mechanism.
Now she ascended, and the black clouds rolled together beneath her; now they burned blue in the flashes of jagged lightning. But above the clouds the sky was clear. A full moon shone, huge and round as a millstone, and so near she could touch it with her hand. Affrighted, she guided the goat downwards again, and he plunged with her headlong into the void.
'Devil of a wench, you'll break your neck,' screamed Sidonia.
Now they were skimming so close to the ground that they brushed the rustling meadow-grasses; will-o'-the-wisps guided their course past old tree-trunks gleaming with rottenness; while the owl, the bittern, and the goatsucker mourned plaintively among the reeds.
Presently they flew across the summits of the Alps, their icy spars glittering in the moonshine; and again they dropped to the surface of the sea. Cassandra, scooping water in her hand, tossed it in the air, and rejoiced in the sapphire splashes.
Momently their pace increased, and they came up with and distanced fellow-travellers; a sorcerer with long grey hair, in a tub; an ecclesiastic on a muck-rake, red, gorbellied, jovial as Silenus himself; a golden-haired, blue-eyed lass on a broom, a young and red-haired vampire on a grunting porker, and a hundred others.
'Whence come you, little sister?' cried Sidonia, and twenty voices answered her.
'From Candia! From the Isles of Greece! From Valenza! From the Brocken! From Mirandola, Benevento, from the caves and the fjords!'
'Whither go ye?'
'To Biterne! To Biterne! For the marriage of the great goat, the Buck of Biterne. Fly! Fly! Haste to the supper.' And they passed over the dreary plain like a cloud of rooks on a whirlwind. The moon shone purple, and against it in the distance gleamed the cross upon a village church. The vampire hurled herself against it, tore away the cross and the great bell, casting them far off into the swamp, where they sank with a despairing clang. The vampire barked like a joyous dog, and the flaxen-headed lass on the cantering broomstick clapped her little hands with glee.