The Dragon's Tapestry

Prologue

Grondil, the Oldwife, felt Srill’s eyes upon her, felt the young woman listening intently to every word she said. Sometimes a movement, a breath, the slightest change, and Grondil would stop and, with her hand on Srill’s belly, would measure her pain, share it. The magic felt strong.

“The child’s life thread is a long one,” Grondil said, measur­ing out the first of the threads to be laid beside the inkle loom in the order that she would need them. She did not see Srill smile. The warp had already been wound around the pegs in readiness, but her hands would need to be quick in order to finish the tapestry before the child was born.

For years, since the death of her mother, Grondil had been alone, but during a birthing there would often be many hands to help and her house would be full. For Srill who had no husband, however, there would be no help and no hands but Grondil’s own to deliver the child and work the tapestry. It was dangerous having no witness to the tapestry. If it were lost or destroyed, it could not be remade. But Srill had seemed almost glad when she had come to Grondil, full of pain and joy, alone.

Grondil’s fingers felt heavy and clumsy as she passed the shut­tle through the sheds of the loom. Her head felt light, her neck muscles tense. She had known Srill a little, though the girl was younger. She was a quiet thoughtful lass, slow to speak like her father, dutiful and dogged like her mother, and lacking Grondil thought, the ability to laugh. But Grondil admired her, for when she spoke in her soft voice, never in gossip, everyone listened and often agreed. Srill was devout, always attending to the magic, and was kind to Grondil. One day a black-haired traveler had come through the village—what had his name been?—a lithe and lively poet with a voice like summer wind, and before he went away, he had left a child in Srill. Never mind what the villagers said, Grondil would do her best for Srill in the tapestry making. Every child received a tapestry at birth. Without it one had no soul. But for Srill’s child Grondil would do her best work.

The tapestry was everyone’s most treasured possession. Some said the symbols woven into it predicted one’s destiny, others said they guided agency. But all believed that each symbol and design was to be carefully understood and followed. The tapestry was a sacred thing, each one a poem of prophecy not to be displayed, shown perhaps only to loved ones or to the Oldwife. At one’s death the Oldwife would fold the tapestry and place it under the head of the corpse so that the spirit could carry it and with it find safe passage to the lands of the dead. Only two had Grondil seen unfulfilled. Remembering those two times made her shudder.

Grondil uttered a brief spell on her hands and searched her mind for a Song. At first the words came to her lips clumsily, whispered and toneless:

The walls seemed to fall away, and Grondil was in an abyss of magic. She felt safe here, having been here many times and knowing that in the mind of the magic her will was not her own. The abyss was deep, but this time she went deeper than she had ever been before, deep into the ancient voids where the oldest magic boiled. Grondil went white-blind with tears in the joy of it. She stopped to let the tears dry in her eyes and to look at Srill. The young woman was still, her brow knit in concentra­tion, her breath coming in soft pants, her lips oddly twisted. Grondil gave herself up to the tapestry making, allowing the magic to use her. No sooner had she done this than a picture began to fill her mind: the seven moons of Ve, symbolizing womanliness and beauty. The child would be a girl. She thought of the verse she had learned as a child to remember them by:

She portrayed them as she had last seen them in winterdark: Epsilon, a great airy ball of celestial sapphire, Opo and Non like two pink eyes askew above the horizon, Orbica like a jade bowl in the star-sugared sky.

As the moons began to take shape, Grondil sang her soft chant. She tell capable of her calling, aware of the magic that used her in fathom the being of this new baby and to speak its destiny.

After the moons came flowers, sunrise-colored humelodia and brilliant white ice gozzys. Grondil wondered for a moment why the two appeared together, the one symbolizing life and the other death. Other symbols came: a crown, a key, a rare and beautiful tree such as she heard grew in the mountains of Verduma.

Time dissolved until she felt the warmth of the estwind on her back and arms through her spidersilk.

Hours had passed.

The Song died in her throat, and Grondil realized that she was thirsty, but there would be no food or water until the tapestry was completed upon the baby’s birth. As her own voice became still, she heard Srill’s breath come in rageful gasps. Grondil looked at her. Rivulets of sweat on the young woman’s temples ran into her hair, her eyes were unseeing and her hands were white knots of muscle. Grondil saw but only as if from a great distance. Muttering a spell of comfort, she went back to the tapestry, to the little world she was creating in color and thread.

The magic had never been so strong with her. Everywhere she looked she knew more clearly than ever before the names and beings of each object that fell into her vision. She wondered and waited for the image that would be the next part of the tapestry.

It was a mountain, a true mountain of Verduma, peaked in snow and cloud, a god’s fist of bare jagged rock. Long life the mountain often symbolized, but Grondil had only seen Venutian hills woven into the tapestries.

She began to record it in detail: a tract of snow, a rock, a patch of dirt ... until it almost seemed as if she were there, the pebbles and plants beneath her feet....

Somewhere, she knew, her body still sat before the inkle loom, and her fingers, aided by spells, threaded in the image of the mountain. But Grondil was here. She was looking down into a shadowy valley, a valley that had appeared only as a streak of black on the tapestry. There was no wind, only an airless cold that breathed up from the valley. It was not dark but twilight, the stars pale. A scabbing lichen stained the raw-edged rocks at the lip of the cliff, and the smell of burning filled her nostrils.

“You come by an unknown path,” she heard a voice say slow­ly, a voice that sounded like wind in the grass.

Grondil turned around, her back to the abyss.

“Serpent!” she whispered.

A vast scaled creature haunched before her, lean-loined and diaphanous-winged. A beautiful curl of blue fire from its mouth burned in the air a moment and was gone.

“Who are you? Why have you brought me to this place?” Grondil asked.

“It is I who should ask, ‘Who are you?’” the Serpent hissed in a voice like wind in fire. “This is my prison. You are the intruder here.” The creature blinked its eyes slowly. “But no, I think I know you now—you weave the tapestry of one who will be mine.”

Grondil shivered in the cold windless air. Beyond the dragon she could see a wasteland of black rock thinly covered with grass. To the left was a forested area that stretched to the mountains and climbed to cloud-misted peaks. Trees. She had read about them, heard about them. There were no such trees in Venutia. But even the trees she noticed only vaguely, for the wonder of the dragon filled her vision.

The dragon spoke: “In the valley live those spirits whose tapestries are unfulfilled at the time of their deaths. I gather them like jewels to my kingdom. They are my treasure. The child and her father will be my most precious gems.”

Grondil looked furtively at the creature. Her stomach felt heavy and sick, as if it were filled with a cold stone.

“The souls that come here labor on, trying to fulfill their des­tinies, but it must be done without hope, for I am their king, a jealous master, and I love them. This child will be the jewel in my crown and will establish my throne, for there will be no one else to withstand me. Once there were many dragons in Ve. There shall be again.”

The dragon arched its sinuous neck, and a blazing breath of fire billowed into the sky. In its cold yellow eyes, Grondil sensed the weight of its evil, and she knew that her gentle powers were nothing against it.

Grondil began to run. She ran through the leafless trees, jumping over the whitened bones of broken tree limbs, weaving between bleached saplings that leaned toward the dim light like starving things. Fragments of fall’s left-over season still clung to the branches and crumbled as she brushed them. A scream seemed to come from the valley. She fell, and as she fell the dis­tant peaks became more distant until they were like the image woven on a tapestry, and it was Srill’s screams that filled Grondil’s ears. Her hands were again her own, though they con­tinued to work outside her will.

“A dream, a dream,” she whispered aloud to comfort herself, but before the words were spoken, she knew it was not a dream and that this deeper magic had taken her to a true place.

The tapestry before her was almost complete, as was Srill’s labor. Grondil stared at the tapestry, horrified. How could she put this mountain of shadows and half-death into the life of this new child? She looked at Srill who shuddered and was still as the pain eased for a moment. She smiled feebly at Grondil.

“My baby ... will she be great and good?”

Grondil said nothing. She turned back to the tapestry and forced her hands to weave ... weave ... weave the sign of the wingwand, which was the sign of power, of magic, the sign of the Oldwife. Perhaps with this lesser magic, Grondil’s own magic, the child would have some power against the dragon or better, power to fulfill her tapestry and avoid that land.

Far away she heard the dragon’s laughter. She knew it would not be enough. Only the wizard’s sign, the sign of the staff, was greater, and only one child could receive that sign—the wizard’s child. Grondil thought of the traveler, a Verduman she thought, from his dark coloring, and she remembered the laughter in his songs. Once she had surprised herself by allowing him to take and read her book, her Songs of the One Mother, and when he returned it, he had drawn dragons in all the margins. In that moment she knew that the poet had indeed seen a dragon, for the drawings were true. She remembered his eyes, how beneath the laughter one day, she thought she had seen a deep sadness. All these things filled Grondil’s mind, numbing her awareness of anything else while she threaded in a wingwand, a white arthro­pod with bloodred eyes. Then Srill called out: “The child is born! Help me.”

Grondil stood on weakened legs.

“Peace, Srill,” she said. Her fingers shook as she cleared the baby’s mouth of mucous, tied the cord and cut it with a white-hot knife. Wrapping the child in a warm blanket, Grondil put the baby to Srill’s breast. The child sucked lustily, and Srill fell asleep quickly and heavily with the child in bed beside her.

Grondil became more aware of her surroundings, above all the smell of sweat and blood. Intense fatigue made her legs tremble, and she sat down at her loom. She knew she should tie off the tapestry immediately after tying the umbilical cord, but her fingers were too weak, and at last she dozed with her head on the base of the loom.

While she slept she dreamed, and in her dream she saw the poet, the father of the babe. He was walking away toward a land of mists and twilight, and in his hand he held a staff, a wizard’s staff.

A soft shuffling step at the doorway woke Grondil. She did not move. She had heard this step before: a mild crippled gait that was slow and sure. It was the Taker, the old mistress of death. Twice or three times Grondil had seen her. But this time she was too tired, and she feigned sleep, still leaning uncomfort­ably against the loom. She waited for the footsteps, now belong­ing to two, to leave her house. With a great weariness, Grondil slept again.

When the baby wailed two winds later, Grondil woke with pain in her head and neck but feeling rested. She felt no sadness as she administered to Srill not the rites of new motherhood but the rites of the dead. As she spoke the Death Song, she remem­bered the depth of the magic into which she had fallen while doing the child’s tapestry, and she remembered the dragon’s laughter and the dream of the poet carrying a staff. Gently she picked up the baby. Her cry was deep and sad. Of course it could not be, but then Grondil was astonished for she saw tears on the baby’s face. Infants produced no tears. Then another tear trickled down the baby’s cheek—Grondil’s own.

The child’s mother was dead, and with no father’s house to claim the child, she would be left in the hills where surely the Taker, with her shuffling crippled feet, would find her and gath­er her up into her stiff arms and take her to the babe’s mother.

The infant turned her head to Grondil’s breast, searching for milk. “Already you have nursed on death’s milk, poor wee one,” she said touching the tiny fingers. From her midwife’s stores she drew, knowing she should not, a cloth dug. She soaked it in a pail of settling goat’s milk and offered it to the baby who suck­led noisily. Some hard place inside Grondil relented, and from that moment she loved the child and knew the child’s destiny.

“Marwen you shall be called,” she whispered.

She went back to her loom, placed the infant in her lap and began to weave once more.

Along the top like a border, she wove the sign of the staff. When it was done, she dug a hole in the dirt floor of her kitchen, and wrapping the baby’s tapestry in oilcloth, she placed it where no one would find it.