The Dragon's Tapestry

Chapter Fourteen

Camps of refugees had sprung up in the hills and valleys, ragged groups of men, women, and children who hovered around pale fires, their eyes and hands dragged down by dreams and fear, victims of the dragon’s violence. Among them, when she stopped to beg a lit­tle of their watery stew and hard bread, she first heard the rumors of the return of the wizard’s heir. They warmed their hearts and hands over this hope as over a fire, and Marwen lis­tened to them embarrassed, fearful, silent.

Marwen’s hair color alarmed many people, and she avoided them when she could, until she began to dream of warm bread and fresh cheese, soft blankets and hot baths. Then she would tell them her name, Marwen Oldwife, and she would be directed to the Oldwife of the community. There Marwen was sometimes able to obtain food and a place to rest in exchange for assistance in the tapestry making or in the soup making. Marwen enter­tained the Verduman Oldwives with Venutian tales of magic, but she made no spells but for the spells of hiding. The Oldwives themselves were almost as skeptical as their people. They viewed the tapestries they created with an even temper, never amazed or disappointed because they did not believe in their truth. Once Marwen saw the tapestry judged at a death with much wresting of interpretation, and with a limited and earthly understanding of the symbols. But the further north and inland Marwen traveled, and the closer she came to Perdoneg, the less cynical the Oldwives became. At last, one day Marwen arrived on the outskirts of Rute, a land of long gulches and hollows and thick grazing grasses. Mothball was growing sleek, but Cudgham-ip was sleepier than ever, and his scaly skin hung on him, wrinkled and old. She eyed wearily dark storm clouds to the north. Asking at the east window of the first house for the Oldwife, Marwen heard a voice call out, “I am she. Have you not been taught the summoning?”

“Oldwife of Rute, let your hands be blessed,” Marwen said smiling to herself. “A sister desires rest and repast if it is in your power to give.”

As she spoke, a woman emerged from the shadows. She was probably about ten suns older than Marwen, but she, too, wore the knee-length braid of a virgin. Her hair and eyes were black as winterdark, her skin a warm dark brown.

“You are a sister?” the girl said. “Let me see your tapestry.” She did not mean the whole tapestry, she meant only the corner in which was inscribed the calling. Marwen thought this through rationally, calmly, while her stomach squeezed into a tight painful ball.

“This is the first time I have been asked while traveling in your land these many days,” Marwen said, and she tried to smile. It felt more like a grimace.

“Well, but I am a true believer,” the dark woman said, “and these are evil times.” Her accent was lilting, making each word sound new in Marwen’s ears.

“I, also, am a believer,” Marwen said, “but I have no tapestry.” She could not believe she had uttered those words, and she listened carefully to the silence into which they fell.

The dark woman’s face did not change.

After a moment Marwen felt she could not bear the silence, that she must fill it up with words and explanations and excuses. The wind pushed at her back. She felt her face twist a little, and she cleared her voice so that it might sound sensible and mature.

But before she could open her mouth to speak, the woman held up her hand, her palm, toward Marwen.

“I see that your story is a painful one, one that should not be traded for food and rest or even for compassion. Come in, and if we can be friends, I will share your burden.”

The woman’s name was Vijocka. She moved and walked with long graceful movements, taming the fire, quieting with a spoon a pot of bubbling mudbeans. Her demeanor was both queenly and plain, her speech was gracious and yet as familiar as family. She did not smile easily, and yet her laughter was quick and strong. She was large-breasted and tall, handsome. Marwen could sense her good strong magic.

Her home was sparsely furnished with a greatrug, pillows, and a clay table, but everywhere Vijocka had planted flowers in the broken shells of wingwand eggs: blue onion and liferoad, untamable mopple and soft brown leaflullen bloomed in the nooks and crannies.

She served Marwen fruit, beans, and porridge, then left to feed Mothball, while Marwen ate. When she returned, estwind was blowing dry and cool through the east window and with it came the scent of fresh-cut brome grass, as though a large wingwand herd grazed nearby.

“Do you have wingwands?” Marwen asked.

“I make a place for them to mate and lay eggs,” she said. “I do not own them, though when I am in need, they will often take me where I must go. I suspect by your accent that you have come a long way, and your beast tells me she is very tired. Why have you come so far?” She poured Marwen a bowl of tea.

“You can speak with the beasts?” Marwen asked timidly.

“They allow themselves to be understood by me,” the woman answered.

There was silence in the room for a time. Marwen listened to the wind. She shivered. Was it speaking her name?

“You live very near the dragon, Perdoneg,” she said.

Vijocka nodded. “The evidence of his destruction fills the northern sky,” she said. “Many of the people of the village Rune-dar have left their homes and fled southward, for the drag­on often comes to rest on a hill near their village. More leave every day, for their terror sears their hearts and devours their courage more surely than the dragon might do their flesh. I have spent many weeks now in prayers and fasting for the words of the spell that might protect the people. The words do not come. There is no magic to stay this fell creature—its magic is too great for those of our order.”

She said it with such quiet courage that Marwen knew it was true.

“It is strange then that the dragon does not use his magic but only his fire.”

Marwen stopped, her bowl of tea halfway to her mouth. Her reflection in the bowl was gold-skinned and lambent, aston­ished. It was true, but it had not occurred to her.

“He kills like a beast,” Vijocka continued, “with talon and tail, and with fire. But he uses no magic. His fire is weapon enough, though. He seeks the wizard and believes that the wiz­ard and his heir, if he has one, will come to do battle with him if he continues to kill. But it is more than that. It is vengeance upon Morda-hon, that great wizard of ancient days, for keeping him in his prison for many ages. It is sickness and hatred. It is darkness and evil.” Her head and neck were very erect as she spoke, and her eyes were lit with a quiet flame. “We will be without hope when the dragon uses his magic.”

The wind blew on Marwen’s tea, ruffling her reflection. She looked up. “There is one who is seeking a way to rid us of this evil,” Marwen said. “It is to him that I go, for I would help him.”

“You mean Prince Camlach,” Vijocka said. “He stayed with me on his journey northward, while his men slept in my fields. How do you, a Venutian, know the Prince?”

“I helped him once,” Marwen said. She warmed her hands around her bowl, swirled the muddy leaves at the bottom. “He asked me to help him stop Perdoneg, but I refused.”

“And now you have come to help,” Vijocka said. She shook her head. “You are brave, for had I lost my tapestry, I would not face death willingly until I had it again. Do you know what is in it?”

Marwen shook her head. “I have never seen it.”

Vijocka looked at her long and hard, and Marwen met her gaze.

“You do realize what would happen to you if you were to die before your tapestry were fulfilled?”

Marwen smoothed her skirt with her hands. “If I die without my tapestry, I know I must go to the land of the lost and labor in Perdoneg’s kingdom. Yes, I am afraid, but I am more afraid to run away.”

The dark woman leaned over and plucked a dead leaf from a stalk of leaflullen. Grondil’s hands on Vijocka’s arms, Marwen thought, strong and rough, steady as stone, and she thought then that she could utterly trust this Oldwife.

“Vijocka, on my way to the Oldest, the One Mother sent me a seeing. In it the dragon called me ‘daughter of Nimroth, heir to the wizard.’” The dead leaf in Vijocka’s hand crumbled to dust. “I think it might be me that the dragon seeks, for the wiz­ard himself no longer dwells among mortals.”

Vijocka rubbed the leafdust in her hands, back and forth, again and again, until it was gone. She closed her eyes, held her hands to her face, and breathed deeply.

Finally she said, “Prince Camlach told me that he thought he had found the wizard’s heir. I remember well his words, his hope.”

“I have no tapestry to prove such a thing,” Marwen said.

Vijocka looked at her but with the eyes of one who is seeing the past. Her hands rested still and spellwise on her knees. “The house of Nimroth, the poet, is not many miles north of here,” she said. “When I was growing and serving my apprenticeship, he would come of a year and sing and tell his tales and then be gone again for many suns. As a girl I remembered his visits with joy, for they were holidays, and the work would be put aside to listen and dance to his music, even by my mother, the Oldwife.

“One day I became ill, so ill that even my mother could not cure me. She had not always treated her calling with respect, but she loved me and searched the lore books day and night for a spell that would abate the fever that burned my life-fires lower each day. Finally I became delirious. I remember that, as my mother cast herself across my bed, weeping, a woman appeared inside the room. Old she was, wrinkled and crippled with years. Her shoes were the yellow of the sun, and her apron shone with the blue of heaven. She beckoned to me, and I longed to go to her. And then something happened: Nimroth, the poet, appeared in the open door of our house, only his face was not smiling and innocent as I remembered it from days past but sad and full of wisdom, and in his hand was a staff that glowed with a radiant white light. Gently, lovingly, he put his hand round the old woman’s shoulders and led her out of the house.

“Thereafter I returned to good health. My mother had been asleep with sorrow when all this happened, and so I carried my secret alone, letting it ripen inside me, leading me deeper into the magic. Nimroth did not speak to me of it when he came to the village as a poet, though sometimes he caught me looking at him. Then he would stop smiling, and the wisdom in his eyes would shine.

“One day he came through our village and to my window. He was going away, he told me, for a long time, perhaps forever. I offered to provide him with an heir (though shyly and clumsi­ly), but he merely smiled and seemed glad to know that I had not forgotten or thought it was delirium that day when I discov­ered he was the wizard. He told me that the dragon Perdoneg was growing in power, that one day he would escape his prison and come seeking to kill the wizard and his heir. He told me that if the wizard and the heir were killed, there would be no peace, neither in this life nor the next. He explained that what he was about to do would thwart the dragon. Then he would speak no more of it. I fed him and he left.”

Vijocka drained her bowl.

“But now, my friend, if you would so honor me, I will share your sadness. Tell me how you come to be without your tapestry, and if I have any magic to help you, I will.”

Marwen spoke haltingly of how her mother, Grondil, had hidden her tapestry so that the people would not offer her, a nameless orphan, as a gift to the Taker. She did not weep when she told Vijocka of her life as a soulless one, but she wept as she told of her joy when she discovered that she did have a tapestry.

“But it was destroyed,” Marwen said glancing toward her apron pocket.

“Was there no witness to your tapestry?” Vijocka asked.

“None at my birth and only one after.” She drew Cudgham-ip carefully out of her apron pocket and placed him on the ground. He yawned and blinked his bleary eyes and slowly began moving about the room, devouring insects that hid among the wild flowers. Marwen followed him with her eyes. “This is my stepfather, Cudgham. He showed me where my tapestry was hidden, and before I could see it, he thrust it in the fire. In my rage I cast a spell on him that did this. Later I tried to reverse the spell, but I could not.”

Vijocka watched the ip crawl about the room, his legs heavy and slow, his tongue quick.

“To reverse the spell, you must forgive him,” Vijocka said at last.

Marwen stared. She felt the heat rising in her face.

“Then he must remain always an ip,” she said slowly.

“Time is not your friend,” Vijocka said. “If you truly mean to do battle with Camlach against Perdoneg, likely you will die.”

“Yet I cannot forgive. Because of what he has done, I am doomed to live in torment.”

“We give ourselves up to torment, Marwen,” Vijocka said. “You cannot have forgotten that. If the spell is reversed, he can stand witness while I make you a new tapestry.”

Then Marwen was angry and her voice was sharp.

“What if he refuses? He burned it once, he may have some reason for not wanting me to have a tapestry. What if he lies, if he witnesses wrongly?”

“He tells me nothing,” Vijocka said calmly. “By way of a spell, I can know his mind concerning the tapestry. If he does not cooperate, return him to his ip form if you wish.”

The wind blew through the east window and carried the word wish off to be dropped on some soul far away.

Know his mind? Marwen had never heard of such a spell. To know the mind of another would certainly be great magic. She caught herself gaping and closed her mouth with a snap.

“Give me this spell,” she said.

“It is for all to know,” Vijocka said easily, gesturing toward her collection of lore books. “It is in the Songs of the One Mother, and its success depends only on the wielder of the words.”

Restraining her greed to know, Marwen calmly opened the pages of the ancient book. It was almost the same as her own, lacking only the pictures of dragons that had been drawn in the margins. “I will see my tapestry in Cudgham’s mind myself,” Marwen said. Vijocka’s finger stretched in one long plane to point out the passage. Marwen read and read again. She closed the book and said the words aloud.

She looked up and saw herself reflected in Vijocka’s dark eyes. The fear that suddenly sped through her veins like cold spring-water did not show, did not radiate from her like dark wings. Then she realized that it was not fear that coursed through her body after all but magic. Her bowels burned with an ice-born heat, and her mind filled with windsong. She felt the earth spin­ning beneath her, alive, not beastlike but womanlike. A whole and beautiful being whose tapestry was the sky and whose spirit blew like wind and cloud over its body of mountains and swelling ocean. And she knew that it spun for her and for all the children of the earth. She touched the mind of the One Mother and worshipped her.

Marwen reeled and felt Vijocka’s cool strong hands helping her to lay on the greatrug.

“Your mind is the tool,” Vijocka whispered in her ear. “You must use it, focus your thoughts. If you let your thoughts run free, you will not succeed. Think of the mind of the ip, of your stepfather. But be sure you are strong.”

Marwen reached out tendrils of thought toward the green and rust-striped lizard that crept on the floor beside her. Her vision clouded, as if breeze-blown mists were before her eyes. She felt her legs grow heavy, as though she herself were in the form of an ip, and she felt her tongue flick out as quickly as a flame leaping, felt herself floating as sparks and cinders on the wind.

Something was wrong. There was a tearing noise behind her eyes, and the sound of wind in her throat. She knew she was no longer in the mind of the ip. A deeper wish had transported her to a mind more powerful, a mind of darkness and misery, a mind bubbling with hot black magic.

When next she could see again, it was through the eyes of the dragon.

Perdoneg was unaware that he had been violated, Marwen knew. Marwen had come into the heart of the dragon’s psyche, and there, all around her like a raging storm, screamed the words, “My tapestry ...”

She was in the dragon’s mindbeing, its thoughts whipping and blowing like grass before the wind, like sand in a windstorm, and hate and fear squalled together in a tempest of emotion. Always at the center, like the eye of the hurricane, were the words, “My tapestry ... my tapestry ...”

Through the dragon’s eyes, she could see a hill and on the slope of the hill, a shack around which flowers bloomed in a mist of color. Flowers poured over the edge of the windowboxes, and even the roof was a cloud of petal, leaf, and swaying stems. It was the shack she had seen in the vision spring. But the eyes of the dragon did not see the shack and the flowers, only the slim shape of a man, a young man it seemed, dressed in a green tunic and fine brown boots who was stealthily crawling up the slope.

Marwen knew that the young man was Prince Camlach.

The dragon was going to kill him, of that there was no doubt. Unless she could distract him for a moment.

“Perdoneg,” she said with her mind.

Shock. Astonishment. Then glee. She felt the dragon’s eyes turn inward, away from the climbing figure on the slope, and the window through which she had come shut tight.

Above the din, quiet but piercing, came the dragon’s voice.

“Marwen.”

It was caressing, even lustful, and Marwen thrilled unwillingly to the sound of it.

“Marwen, child of power, you have come to me,” the voice rang. “You are mine.”

“No!”

“I have seen your tapestry in the lands of the dead, its spirit, its shadow, lost in a place where only the Taker could find it.” The dragon laughed, and his laughter echoed as if in a canyon.

Marwen felt herself shut in, trapped. Camlach would be safe now, but there was no way out for her.

Marwen cried, “You are evil!”

“What is evil? Do you not think evil has its own reward, as does good? That is the only choice you have—to choose your reward. Ask learning of me.” The voice was calm and utterly, utterly sane.

“Pity the dark and the untruth,” Marwen murmured, repeat­ing aloud from the Tenets of the Tapestry.

“Pity it not,” said the dragon. “It simply is. Without darkness and lies there could be no light and truth. I need not kill you, Marwen. I can take you alive to reign as queen of my kingdom. Only tell me where your father is.”

Marwen tried not to hear. His voice was seductive and beauti­ful. Behind it she could hear the storm raging on.

“Let me go!” Marwen shouted in a disembodied voice. The words were lost in the din of psychic noise around her, and Mar­wen was terrified. The spell included no words for protection from a mind stronger than one’s own. Her body lay in a death­like trance while her mindforce faced an eternity of entrapment in the haunted mind of the dragon.

She thought of spells of freeing, loosening, revealing, until briefly she remembered the hands of Vijocka, steady and magic-wise, and Marwen became still.

“Be calm,” she told herself. She remembered Vijocka’s coun­sel to focus her thoughts and be strong. In that moment she realized that the dragon could not hear the storm of his subcon­scious, did not know that she could hear it.

“I am the wizard’s heir,” Marwen whispered, and the words echoed in a hiss above the clamor. She felt power stretch from her like unfolding wings.

“I am the wizard’s heir,” she repeated. “Perdoneg, why do you not use your magic? Where is your tapestry?” Her voice rang softly like a musical note in a storm. The dragon did not answer, but the noise increased.

“You will free me, for only I can find your tapestry. It is my right, my gift....”

Though her voice was still and small, she knew the dragon heard. She waited.

When the window of the dragon’s mind opened, she flew away.

Marwen could hear, feel, smell for many winds before she could see or speak. She heard the soft steady chanting of Vijocka in trance and the plea of freshwind through the east window; she felt the warmth of the noonmonth sun on the left side of her body and the rough woven texture of the greatrug beneath her; she smelled the burning incense of Vijocka’s spellworking and new-blooming sweesle.

It was windeven when, emerging from the haze of her semi­consciousness, Marwen could see the form of Vijocka, cross-legged and hunched.

“It was you,” Marwen said, her voice croaking, her lips dry and sticky. “It was you that gave me wings....”

Vijocka’s chanting stopped abruptly when Marwen spoke. She slowly opened her eyes, but she did not move or speak for a long moment.

Finally she said, “No, Marwen. It was by your own power that you have done what you have done. I kept your body alive while you did it. Never have I seen such power. Not even the wizard Farrell of old could have done such a thing.”

“Where is my ip?” Marwen asked, not hearing.

“You—you were with Perdoneg....” Vijocka said softly, her eyes fixed and staring at the tray of smoking incense. Marwen nodded.

Vijocka opened her mouth as if to speak. Then in a fluid movement, she bent on one knee before Marwen and rose again.

“I honor the heir,” she said simply. “None other than the wizard could enter the mind of the dragon and return to tell of it.”

Marwen reached out to Vijocka. For a time they grasped each other’s forearms, quiet, desperate. Marwen laughed a brief breathless laugh, and Vijocka laughed, too, almost a gasp or a sob.

Finally Vijocka said, “What will you do?”

“I must go. He is seeking me. He will know now that I am close—hopefully, he will have no idea how close. His tapestry is the key,” Marwen said sitting up groggily. “I believe it is at my father’s house. Perhaps when I see the tapestry, I will know what to do.”

Vijocka watched her with unseeing eyes. “Yes, the lore books tell of Morda-hon hiding the dragon’s tapestry. I remember now. It is a little-known detail. Nimroth must have found it. But surely this dragon, who has lived century upon century and has memory of the beginnings and endings of kings and rivers, would remember what was in his own tapestry.”

“He remembers,” Marwen said. “His desperation has to do with its finding and its fulfilling, but I was not strong enough and did not penetrate deeply enough to know any more than this for certain.”

Still Vijocka had not moved, and Marwen noticed how sallow her brown skin had become, and her lips and fingernails were a dusky purple. Marwen felt dizzy when she got on her feet, but thirst drove her, and then she held out a cup of water for Vijocka.

The woman drank quickly, sloppily. Marwen put an arm around her to steady her.

“How long have you been like this?” Marwen asked stroking her black silky braid.

“You have been in trance for one windcycle,” Vijocka said. Cudgham-ip crawled into Marwen’s lap. Marwen sat very still. She put out one finger and stroked his leathery back.

“Cudgham-ip, the time has come to return you to your prop­er form,” she said. “Before I lived in Perdoneg’s mind, I touched the mind of the Mother. And I worshipped her. I worship her, Cudgham, the One who gives me my magic, who loves me ... and you.” Marwen closed her eyes and pursed her lips together. She opened them again. “For her I do forgive and free my heart to reverse the spell. Perhaps then you will help me regain my tapestry.”

The huge helmeted head of a man appeared in the east win­dow. He was bearded and sweating. “Oldwife of Rute, let your hands be blessed!” he bellowed.

Marwen and Cudgham-ip both jumped.

The man’s eyes touched Marwen and then rested on the ip that was running as quickly as it could across the dirt floor.

In less than two breaths, the soldier fit his bow and shot the ip, pinning it to the floor. It squirmed for a short time and died.