"Why--" said Tom, and was stymied.
"Wits," said Moundshroud. "Intelligence. That's all it means. Knowledge. So any man, or woman, with half a brain and with inclinations toward learning had his wits about him, eh? And so, anyone too smart, who didn't watch out, was called--"
"A witch!" said everyone.
"And some of the smart ones, the ones with wits, pretended at magic, or dreamed themselves with ghosts and dead shufflers and ambling mummies. And if enemies dropped dead by coincidence, they took credit for it. They liked to believe they had power, but they had none, boys, none, sad and sorry, 'tis true. But listen. There beyond the hill. That's where the brooms come from. That's where they go."
The boys listened and heard:
"The Broomworks makes
The Broom that looms
On sky in gloom and rising of the moon
That broom which, groom to witch, flies high
On harvestings of stormwind grass
With shriek and sigh to motion it
In ocean-seas of cloud, now soft, now loud...!"
Below, at full-tilt, a witch-broom factory was filled with commotions, poles being cut, and bound with broom-brushes which, no sooner tied, took off up chimneys in flights of spark. On rooftops, hags leaped on to ride the stars.
Or so it seemed, as the boys watched and voices sang:
"Did witches feel the night wind in their bed
And reel and dance with devils and the dead?
No!
But that is what they bragged and claimed and said!
Until whole continents, hellbent
Named 'witches' of the Innocent,
And did conspire
To burn old women, babes, and virgins in a fire."
Mobs raved through villages and farms with torches, cursing. Bonfires flared from the English Channel to the Mediterranean shore.
"Through all of Germany and France,
Ten thousand so-called evil witches
Hung to kick their final antic dance
No village but what shared a dread uproar
As each side named the other for a devil's pig,
Old Satan's sow, the Demon's maddened boar."
Wild pigs, with witches glued to their backs, trotted roof tiles, flinting sparks, snorting steams: