The Samhain Feast

I. The Last Harvest

The Wheel turned, as it always does, and the cauldron feast of Venus's day passed into memory. The moon waned on toward the dark and then filled again, round and bright over the pines, and then began once more to wane. The sun walked out of Libra, the Scales, and down into Scorpio, sign of death and hidden things. The sweetgums dropped the last of their gold and scarlet stars. The scrub oaks rattled bare. And Samhain came to the hall at the edge of the pines.

Samhain is the last harvest and the witches' new year. It is the night the old year dies so the new one can be born out of the dark, the night the veil between the living and the dead hangs thinnest, and the dead walk the roads to visit the homes they loved. It is the night the Horned One rides out across the sky with the Wild Hunt, and his great black hounds bay over the treetops. And it is the night, as the people of the hall well knew, when a small black dog who had once been one of those hounds remembers what he is.

That year, Samhain fell on a Saturday. The Sound-Weaver smiled when he reckoned it, for Saturday is Saturn's day, named for the grey old lord of time and endings. Saturn rules the turning of years and the closing of doors. There is no better day for the old year to die.

He reckoned the hours the night before, with Gweeny stretched long across his feet. The sun would rise at thirty-four minutes past seven and set at twenty-three minutes past six, so the daylight was short now, and each of its twelve planetary hours ran only fifty-four minutes. On Saturn's day, Saturn takes the very first hour after sunrise. That was when the Sound-Weaver would begin, so the feast would be laid down in the hand of the lord of endings himself.

And he followed the procession on through the day in his mind: Jupiter after Saturn, then Mars, then the Sun, Venus, Mercury, the Moon, round again through Saturn and Jupiter and Mars and the Sun, until Venus held the last hour of daylight and handed it to the dark at sunset. And then, as the first hour of the night began, the crown would pass to Mercury.

The Sound-Weaver sat with that for a long moment. Mercury is the messenger of the gods, and in the oldest tellings he is also the guide of souls, the one who walks the dead down to the underworld and back again. On Samhain night, the first hour of darkness would belong to the guide of the dead. So that was when the fellowship would sit down to eat.

All that remained was to choose what would go into the Cauldron.

The fellowship talked it over around the Talking Glass, and they came quickly to the boar. The boar is the beast of the Wild Hunt, sacred to the Horned One, who would ride that very night, and of all beasts it is the one most honoured at the great harvest tables of old. With it would go apples, the fruit of Venus and of Avalon, where the honoured dead sleep beneath the orchard boughs, and sweet cider pressed from them.

As for onions, the fellowship had no love for them, and everyone in the hall knew it. The bulb itself was not welcome at their table. But the fine dust of it, ground and dried, they would allow, for it carried the onion's virtue of Mars without its offence. So the onion would come to Samhain as a powder, as a spirit comes, present but unseen.

And so the word went out along the swift roads to the Far-Travelling Carters, and the provisions came to the door, and the hall made ready for the longest night of the old year.

II. The Rite of the Morning

On Samhain morning the sun rose late and low, at thirty-four minutes past seven, and the Sound-Weaver was at the door to meet it. The air had a bite to it now that it had not had at Mabon. Frost had touched the wiregrass in the night, and it crunched faintly under his bare feet on the step. The pines were silent. No wren sang. Only the crows were talking, somewhere off in the treetops, in their rough black voices, as crows always do on the day of the dead.

"Hail, Sun, rising in Scorpio," he said. "Hail, Saturn, lord of this day and of this first hour. The old year is yours to close."

Then he went to the hearth, and Gweeny went with him, though more slowly than usual. The little dog had been restless since the night before, his great ears swinging toward the door at nothing, his long body pausing in the middle of the floor as if listening to something very far away.

The Sound-Weaver laid his altar for Samhain. A black candle for the Crone and for Saturn, whose colours they both wear. An orange candle for the last of the harvest fire. A white candle for the dead. He set the iron key there for Hecate, as it had been laid at every working since the night Gweeny came to the Star-Reader's door, and the antler tip for the Horned One, who would ride before the night was out. And he laid there the names of the honoured dead of the fellowship, written and spoken, those they had known and those they had only heard of, so the ancestors would know they were remembered.

He cleansed the space with rosemary smoke, and Gweeny sneezed and hid under the table, as he always did. He grounded himself, rooting down into the deep earth where Persephone now sat beside the lord of the dead, and reaching up to the wandering stars. He cast his circle with salt, three times round, and called the quarters, east and south and west and north, and he called the powers of the night. The Crone. Hecate of the crossroads. The Horned One of the Hunt. Persephone, Queen Below. Cerridwen of the Cauldron. And grey old Saturn, whose hour it was.

Then he laid out his reagents in a row along the stone.

The Flesh of the Wild Boar came first, a great shoulder of pork, three pounds and more, heavy and cold and marbled through with fat. The boar belongs to Mars and to the Horned One, and on this night of all nights it was the right flesh for the Cauldron. Beside it went two Apples of Avalon, crisp and round, Venus's fruit and the fruit of the Isle where heroes sleep. Then a Flask of Pressed Gold, a cup of apple cider, sweet and cloudy.

Then the dusts, each in its own small measure, for the anointing. Earth-Sugar, two spoonfuls of dark brown sugar, sweet and soft, belonging to Venus. Salt of Saturn, two small spoonfuls, the purifier and the binder, whose lord ruled the day. Black pepper, a spoonful, Mars's banishing fire. Garlic dust and onion dust, a spoonful of each, both Mars's great protectors, the onion present only as a spirit is, unseen. Smoked red pepper, a full spoonful, Mars again, carrying the smoke of the Samhain bonfires. And half a spoonful of cinnamon, bark of the Sun, for warmth to carry them all through the dark.

The Sound-Weaver mixed the dusts together in a small bowl with his fingertips until they were one colour, the deep red-brown of fallen oak leaves. Then he took up the boar's shoulder, patted it dry with a cloth, and began the anointing.

He rubbed the dusts into the flesh with both hands, sunwise, every side and every fold, pressing them deep, and as he worked he chanted under his breath.

Saturn's day and Saturn's hour,

fading leaf and fallen flower.

Boar of Hunt and apple bright,

feed the hall on Samhain night.

Living, dead, and all between,

sit together, seen, unseen.

Sunwise round my hands shall go.

As it is above, below.

Gweeny came out from under the table at the smell of the boar and sat at the Sound-Weaver's feet, trembling. "Not this either, little one," the Sound-Weaver told him. "The garlic and onion dust would curse you, same as before. You'll have yours tonight." Gweeny sighed the long sigh of a dog who has heard this before.

The Sound-Weaver cut the Apples of Avalon into thick wedges, skins on, and laid them across the bottom of the Cauldron's inner vessel like a bed of gold. He set the anointed shoulder on top of them, with the fat side facing up, so that as it softened through the long day it would baste itself. Then he poured the cider in around the edges, not over the top, so as not to wash away the anointing. No mist of canola was needed this time. The boar would ward its own vessel with its fat.

He set the lid on the Cauldron and turned it until it chimed. He turned the Breath Valve to venting. He pressed the rune of Slow Cook, set the heat to Normal, and gave it ten hours, for the boar is a mighty beast and does not yield quickly. The Cauldron sounded its note and began its labour, still well within Saturn's hour, and the Talking Glass took up the same count.

He laid his palms on the lid and spoke the binding. "By Saturn who closes the year, by Mars who gave the boar, by Venus who gave the apple, and by Cerridwen whose cauldron this echoes, be a feast for the living and the dead. As above, so below. So mote it be." Then he sang Awen three times into the steel, and released the quarters, and opened the circle. The three candles he left burning, the black and the orange and the white, to keep watch through the longest day of the dying year.

III. The Long Day of the Dying Year

The whole fellowship worked that day, for on Samhain a house must be made ready not only for the living who dwell in it but for the dead who will come to call.

While Jupiter held the morning, his partner and the housemates carried in wood and swept the hearth and the threshold clean, for the dead do not like to cross a dirty doorstep. While Mars had the sky they hauled a great orange gourd up onto the step outside the door and carved it with a knife into a face with a candle inside it. In the old countries, the Sound-Weaver told them, it would have been a turnip, but the lantern's work was the same. It was there to light the way for the dead who were welcome, and to frighten off anything that was not.

The Sun took the crown at midmorning, and a little after, Venus, and in their warmth the Sound-Weaver set a lone candle in the window that faced the road, so any soul walking the dark would see the light of the hall from far off and know there was a place laid for them.

When Mercury came round just past noon, the Sound-Weaver put a second pot on the stove for the drink of the feast. He poured in cider, sweet and cloudy, and dropped in sticks of cinnamon bark for the Sun, a scatter of whole cloves for Jupiter, and rounds of orange for the Sun again, its gold and its fire. He set it low, so it would steep all afternoon without ever coming to the boil. Soon the smell of it rolled through the hall and met the smell of the boar and the apples rising from the Cauldron, and the two together made the whole house smell like an orchard on fire.

In the Moon's hour, as the afternoon began to lean toward evening, the Sound-Weaver turned to the old Samhain arts of seeing. On this night of all nights the veil is thin enough to glimpse what lies ahead, and the old ones have always used it. The sighted scry by staring into dark water for pictures. The Sound-Weaver listened instead. He filled a black bowl with water from the dawn well, sat with it in his lap, and hummed a long low note across its surface. Then he listened to the ring the water gave back, and to the shapes in the silence after it, and in them he heard the year to come. What he heard, he kept to himself. But when he set the bowl down, he was smiling.

All the while, Gweeny would not settle.

He walked from the door to the window and back again. He sat by the chair at the head of the table that had been left empty for the dead, and got up, and sat by it again. He went to the hearth and lay down, and his ears would not lie down with him. Once, in the middle of the afternoon, he went to the closed door and stood there with his long body rigid and his nose pressed to the crack beneath it, and he made a sound that none of them had heard from him before. It was low and very quiet and old, a sound that might have come from something much bigger, far away, a long time ago.

"He knows," said the Sound-Weaver's partner softly.

"He knows," the Sound-Weaver agreed. "He was one of them, once."

When Saturn took the crown again after the first hours of afternoon, the light outside turned thin and grey. The wind came up through the pines and set them hissing, cold and steady, and dead leaves skittered across the sand and piled against the step around the lantern. Somewhere beneath the sink, very faintly, the Grinding Beast began to hum, as it always did in Saturn's hour, low and grumbling, as if it too could feel the old year going.

And through it all, the Cauldron worked on in its corner. By midday the burbling had begun, low and slow, the fat of the boar melting down over the apples and into the cider. By Jupiter's afternoon hour the burbling had grown rich and steady, and the smell of pork and apple and smoke and cinnamon had soaked into every beam of the hall. The housemates came and stood beside it and breathed it in. His partner circled it, as was tradition now. Gweeny paused once on his rounds from door to window and whined at it. But no one lifted the lid. The fellowship knew better by now.

IV. The Pulling of the Boar

Venus took the last hour of daylight a little before half past five, and soon after, the Talking Glass sang and the Cauldron sounded its final note and slipped into the Rite of Keep Warm. Ten hours had passed since the sealing. The boar had yielded.

The Sound-Weaver pulled on his thick cloth gauntlet, checked the Breath Valve, and lifted the lid away from himself. A great cloud of steam poured out, carrying the whole day with it, smoke and sweet apple and cinnamon and the deep savour of the boar, and it filled the hall to the rafters. Down in the vessel the juices simmered all around the edges with a slow, thick murmur.

He took two iron forks and reached down to find the shoulder. It was so soft now that it began to come apart the moment the forks went in. He did not try to lift it whole. He worked it apart right there in the Cauldron, pulling the flesh into long, tender strands, feeling with the forks for any hard knots of fat that had not melted and lifting those out onto a plate to be set aside. Beneath the meat, the Apples of Avalon had gone soft as butter and sunk into the cider, and when he pressed them with the back of the rowan spoon they fell into a thick golden sauce.

Then came the matter of the fat.

A boar's shoulder gives up a great deal of it over ten hours, and it had risen in a warm golden layer over the juices. The Sound-Weaver could feel it with the spoon, slick and loose on top of the thicker cider sauce beneath. He tilted the vessel gently and skimmed it off spoonful by spoonful into an old jar, until most of it was gone. He would let the jar cool and harden and then cast it into the midden, along with the knots of fat from the plate.

Not one drop went down the drain. Below the sink, he could have sworn he heard the Grinding Beast stop humming for a moment, as if surprised.

"Not for the Beast," the Sound-Weaver said, to no one in particular. "Not tonight."

Then he stirred the pulled boar back through the apple sauce and the juices, sunwise, until every strand was dark and glossy, and set the lid back on to keep it warm.

Outside, the sun was going down. It slipped toward the western horizon through the pine trunks, toward Avalon, and the light in the hall went from gold to copper to grey. At twenty-three minutes past six it was gone, and Venus laid down the crown of the day, and the first hour of the night began. The hour of Mercury, guide of souls.

In that same moment, Gweeny got up from the hearth.

He did not hurry. He walked to the front door, slowly, with great dignity, as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world, and he sat down in front of it, straight up, his ears high and still. He was waiting now, the way a doorkeeper waits at a gate he has been set to guard.

The Sound-Weaver lit the candle in the lantern on the step and the white candle at the empty place at the head of the table. Then he called the fellowship to sit down.

V. The Silent Supper

The Samhain feast is not like other feasts. On this one night the old ways call for a dumb supper, a meal eaten in silence, so the dead can come to the table without being frightened off by the noise of the living. No blessing is spoken aloud until it is over. No stories are told. The living eat, and listen, and let the dead speak if they wish to.

Before the silence began, the Sound-Weaver told the fellowship what would happen, and they agreed. Then he ladled the mulled cider from the stove into five cups. The first cup he set at the empty place at the head of the table, beside the white candle and the sprig of rosemary, for the ancestors. Then he filled the first plate of pulled boar and apples and set it there too. Only then did he serve the living, piling the dark, glossy meat onto soft rolls, a portion for his partner first, then for each of the housemates, and last for himself. Gweeny's own supper went into his bowl by the door, for the dusts that had anointed the boar would curse a hound. Gweeny did not touch it. He was working.

Then the Sound-Weaver sat down, and the silence began.

It is a strange thing, a whole table sitting quiet. The Sound-Weaver had always found it beautiful. With no voices to cover them, the small sounds of the hall came forward. The fire settled in the hearth and popped. The wind hissed in the pines beyond the walls. Forks touched plates. Somebody breathed out slowly after the first bite of the boar, because it was very good, and nobody could say so. The mulled cider was hot and sweet, and the cinnamon and cloves warmed all the way down.

They had been eating in silence a while when the door opened.

No one had touched it. There was only a soft iron click, the sound the people of the hall knew well by now, and the door swung inward on the cold. The candle in the window guttered. The lantern on the step flickered. A breath of night air came into the hall, smelling of frost and pine needles and something older underneath, like a closed room opened after many years.

Gweeny stood up from his post by the door. He did not bark. He looked up at nothing, or at something none of them could see, and his tail moved once, slowly, side to side. Then he turned and walked across the hall to the empty place at the head of the table, as calm and unhurried as a steward showing a guest to their seat. He sat down beside the chair and looked up at it.

The white candle at that place leaned, very slightly, as if someone had sat down and their passing had stirred the air.

No one spoke. That was the rule. But the Sound-Weaver felt it, the way he felt everything, through the fine skin of the air against his face, and through the hair standing up along his arms. The cold had settled at the head of the table. It was the cold of someone who has walked a long way through a frosty night and is glad, at last, to be sitting by a fire.

Later, much later, when they could speak again, the Sound-Weaver would wonder if it was the old woman, the one Gweeny had guided home through the pines on the night he first came to the hall. He would wonder if she had come to the hall this time, on purpose, to see the little dog who had once found her in the dark. He would never know for sure. But Gweeny stayed by that chair all through the supper, and every so often he pressed his nose gently against the empty seat, the way he had once pressed it into a cold hand by a creek.

They were nearly done eating when the Hunt came.

It began as a sound so far away that it might have been the wind. Then it came closer, rising over the pines from the west, and there was no mistaking it. Horns, long and wild and terrible, blowing somewhere high above the treetops. The thunder of something galloping across the sky with no ground beneath it. And under all of it, rolling down over the hall and into the earth, the baying of hounds. Great hounds, deep in the chest, a whole pack of them, their voices shaking the very glass in the window.

The Horned One was riding, and Hecate's hounds ran with him.

The fellowship sat frozen in their seats, cups halfway to their mouths. The housemates did not breathe. His partner's hand found the Sound-Weaver's under the table.

And Gweeny lifted his head.

He had no howl in him. He pointed his nose at the ceiling and he sang, that thin, sweet, rising note of his, half a whine and half a song, the sound that had given him his name. Gweeeeee. It went up through the roof of the hall and out into the night, small and clear against the thunder of the Hunt.

And for one moment, high over the pines, the great hounds answered him.

It was only a single bay, from a single deep throat, there and gone. But it came straight back down out of the sky to the hall at the edge of the pines, and it was the sound one hound makes to another across a long distance, the sound that means I hear you. I know you. Well done.

Then the Hunt swept on toward the east, and the horns faded, and the thunder rolled away over the far trees until there was nothing left but the wind in the pines, and the fire popping, and the little black dog sitting very straight beside the empty chair, looking extremely pleased with himself.

VI. The Crossroads and the New Year

When the plates were empty, the Sound-Weaver lifted his cup of mulled cider, and the others lifted theirs, and he broke the silence.

"To the dead who came to our table tonight, and to all the dead who could not. To the Horned One and his Hunt, and to Hecate and her hounds, and to the smallest of them. To the earth that grew it, the boar that gave itself, the apples of Avalon, and the Cauldron that changed them. And to the fellowship gathered here. May we never hunger."

"May you never hunger," they answered, and their voices sounded very loud after so long.

"The old year is dying," the Sound-Weaver said. "The moon is waning. Whatever we carried through the light half of the year, let it go now, and let it die with the year." They sat a moment in the quiet, each of them letting something go. Then the Sound-Weaver smiled. "Happy new year," he said, and they said it back to each other all around the table, the witches' new year, born out of the dark.

After that, the talking came back all at once, the way it does after a silence. The housemates wanted to know if anyone else had felt the cold at the head of the table, and everyone had. His partner wanted to know if Gweeny had really been answered by the Hunt, and everyone agreed that he had. Gweeny, who had finally eaten his own supper now that his work was done, accepted the praise with a long, satisfied sigh and lay down across the Sound-Weaver's feet.

Later, a little before the hour turned again, Gweeny got up once more, crossed the hall to the empty chair, and then walked slowly back to the door. He sat there very formally for a moment, as if seeing someone out, and the white candle at the head of the table straightened and burned still again. Whoever had come had gone home.

It was full dark and very cold when the Sound-Weaver gathered the offerings: the ancestors' plate and cup, the hearth spirit's share, the rosemary, a treat for Hecate, and a handful of Gweeny's own biscuits for the hounds of the Hunt, in thanks. He pulled on his coat, and Gweeny went with him, out past the glowing lantern on the step and into the night.

The frost had come back hard. The fallen needles on the path crackled underfoot instead of hushing, and the air was so cold and still it seemed to ring. No crickets sang now. The wiregrass was silent. Overhead the stars were sharp and many, and in the east, just clearing the tops of the pines, the waning moon was rising late, lopsided and pale. Far, far away to the east there might still have been a horn, very faint, or it might have been the wind.

They walked down the path to where it met the road, and there, at the crossroads, the Sound-Weaver laid the offerings on the cold sand. He poured the ancestors' cup of mulled cider out into the earth, and it steamed in the frozen air as it sank away. He set down the biscuits for the hounds and the treat for Hecate. He spoke his thanks to the Crone, to Saturn who had closed the year, to Mercury who had guided the dead, to Hecate, to Persephone below, to the Horned One, and to the spirits of the land.

Then he turned and walked home without looking back, as the old custom demands.

Gweeny looked back twice. The Sound-Weaver let it go.

Inside, the fellowship had cleared the table and were washing up, and the Sound-Weaver went straight to the sink to make sure the jar of boar fat had gone into the midden and not down the drain. It had. Beneath the sink the Grinding Beast was humming to itself, low and almost contented, in Saturn's key.

He snuffed the altar candles one by one with thanks, the white for the dead, the orange for the harvest, and last of all the black for the Crone and for Saturn. The leftovers went into the Cold Sanctum within the two hours, where they would keep for three or four days. And the Ever-Patient Cauldron was wiped clean and set back in its corner to rest.

The old year was dead. The new one had been born in the dark, as it always is. The Wheel turned on, slow and certain, toward Yule and the longest night, when the sun would be reborn.

And the Sound-Weaver, his fellowship, and Gweeny, smallest of Hecate's hounds and guide of souls, went to bed in the hall at the edge of the pines, with the lantern still glowing on the step to light the way for anyone else who might be walking home.

Blessed be.

The Recipe: Slow Cooker Apple Cider Pulled Pork

Serves four, with leftovers. Made in an Instant Pot on the Slow Cook setting; any 6-quart slow cooker works the same way. No onions, just onion powder.

Ingredients

• 3 to 4 lb boneless pork shoulder (Boston butt)
• 2 apples, such as Honeycrisp or Gala
• 1 cup apple cider
• 2 tbsp dark brown sugar
• 2 tsp salt
• 1 tsp black pepper
• 1 tsp garlic powder
• 1 tsp onion powder
• 1 tbsp smoked paprika
• ½ tsp ground cinnamon
• Soft rolls or buns, to serve

Method

1. Mix the brown sugar, salt, pepper, garlic powder, onion powder, smoked paprika, and cinnamon in a small bowl.
2. Pat the pork dry and rub the spice mix into it on every side.
3. Cut the apples into thick wedges, skins on, and lay them across the bottom of the pot.
4. Set the pork on top, fat side up. Pour the cider in around the edges, not over the meat.
5. Lid on, valve set to venting. Slow Cook on Normal for 10 hours. Don't lift the lid.
6. Shred the pork in the pot with two forks, lifting out any hard bits of fat.
7. Skim the melted fat off the juices into a jar. Let it harden, then throw it in the bin. Don't pour it down the drain.
8. Mash the soft apples into the juices with a spoon, then stir the pork back through.
9. Keep warm until serving. Pile onto soft rolls. Refrigerate leftovers within two hours; they keep 3 to 4 days.

Mulled Cider

Pour half a gallon of apple cider into a saucepan with 2 cinnamon sticks, 6 whole cloves, and 1 orange sliced into rounds. Keep it on the lowest heat for at least 30 minutes without letting it boil, and ladle it out warm.

The garlic and onion powder make the pork unsafe for dogs, so give any four-legged familiars their own supper instead.