The Dragon's Tapestry

Chapter Sixteen

Marwen immediately began to weave a spell of strengthening on the hold of Perdoneg’s prison. She had been in the dragon’s mind once, and so she knew the way by which he had escaped. When she was finished her spellworking, Camlach led her into the wiz­ard’s house.

Soldiers and citizens flocked to the hill as word spread that Perdoneg had been vanquished, but Camlach would not allow them to see her. Only Torbil did he allow to kneel silently before her, professing his service and devotion in a gruff stam­mering voice.

Marwen was weak and dizzy, so much of her powers had she expended. But it was not only fatigue that filled her. She was mortally sick.

She lay in a pool of light that poured in the east window, and Camlach sat beside her, giving her sips of water. His face was drawn and dark and his mouth grim.

“I mourn Crob,” Marwen said.

Camlach didn’t answer for a moment. Then, “He came home to die. He told me. I didn’t believe him. I have learned about belief today. I have learned from you, Marwen.”

Through the window, norwind blew cool and constant, sil­vered with floating ash. Camlach leaned down and kissed her, a sad, hard, and needful kiss that made dying impossible to under­stand. He gathered her up in his arms and crushed his face against her hair.

“I want to live,” she said, suddenly angry. “I want to live.” She felt a cold numbness in her hands and feet, and far away, above the sounds of the gathering crowds without, she could hear music. The Taker’s music.

The door of the house burst open, and Camlach leaped to his feet.

“My orders were to allow no one to enter!”

It was Torbil with the dusky figure of the Oldwife of Rute at his side.

“Forgive me, Lord, but this woman has come. She is the only believer I know, and I thought perhaps she could help.”

Vijocka did not wait for permission from the Prince but walked regally to Marwen’s side. Without speaking she ran her hands lightly over Marwen’s body, stopping briefly at her fore­head, breasts, and abdomen.

“Get me fedderweed,” she ordered, “and water, good water, from the spring in the bowels of the hill. And bring to me from the fruit of the tree.”

Torbil stumbled through the doorway in his haste to obey the Oldwife, and Camlach fell back to give her room.

“Can you help me?” Marwen asked. Her throat was swelling, and the numbness had reached into her shoulders and hips.

“The only reason you are still alive is because of the power that is in you,” Vijocka said. “I have no spell that can aid you, but when magic fails, there is still skill.” All this she said while her hands worked steadily on the building of a fire. She stopped for a moment, looked at Marwen and then bent her face closer. Her voice was so soft it was heard by only Marwen.

“An Oldwife dies with dignity, a wizard with greatness of soul. Thou art both. If my art and thy magic should fail, die thou likewise.”

Marwen closed her eyes slowly and then opened them and, with every effort of her will, nodded once.

Vijocka tended the fire quietly, taming it until it was hot and even. When the cavewater boiled, she set to steeping the silver-green fedderweed. The steam of it filled the shack with an acrid earthy smell. Into the tea Vijocka sprinkled some juice from the white fruit in her hand. By the time she offered some of it to Marwen, the girl’s lips had become numb, and the liquid drib­bled down her chin as she drank. Vijocka took the rest of the bitter tea and flung it on the fire with a quick prayer. Then she began to hum and then to sing, as if remembering a lullaby from her youth.

“I have done all I can,” Vijocka said then. “The Taker decides now.”

Camlach and Torbil seemed far away, though they only sat against the wall on the other side of the room. It was the Taker who filled Marwen’s hearing and vision, for as Vijocka washed her face caressingly, the old crone shuffled through the door. The men obviously saw nothing, but when Vijocka bowed low and moved away, Camlach stood slowly. Marwen could hear his breathing coming quick and shallow, and the whisper of his sword as it was unsheathed. The fire smoked cold.

Marwen saw the Taker more clearly now than she had ever seen her before. Her slippered feet were yellow like sunbutter against the dirt floor, but now Marwen saw that they did not quite touch the ground as she hobbled along. Around her thin shoulders her green dress hung like a garment on two pegs.

Her hands, knots of knuckle and bone, appeared as though she carried something in them, grasped together before her as they were. Her apron was the blue of the noonmonth sky, and where she had knotted the apron strings at her waist, the bow hung down like a transparent wingwand in flight. Brown and crinkled in silent laughter was her face, and Marwen could see that her eyes were the color of the mist on sunrising. Always her head nodded in mindless agreement.

Marwen could not speak, for the illness had bound her tongue, but she kept her eyes open and her thoughts serene. She could feel her spirit struggling to be free of a body that was dying.

The Taker approached with her clasped hands outstretched, in the manner of beseeching, and when she was close to Marwen, she stopped still. Her toothless gums opened and closed, but no words did she speak.

“This is strange,” Vijocka said, and Marwen saw her come forward, close to the Taker’s hands. “What message, Mother Taker?”

The Taker knelt painfully before the dying fire and put her hands into the ash. With her stiff hands she worked the gray ash and the thin threads of smoke that rose into the shadow of something familiar, the ghostly image of a woven picture, the spirit of a tapestry. Marwen’s tapestry.

She knew it immediately, that it was her own, as one would know the reflection of one’s own face in the water. She tried to cry out, but she had no voice, and her lips would not move.

Vijocka knelt before the Taker so that the tapestry was before her eyes, and she began to memorize each image that shifted like sunlight on water between the Taker’s outstretched hands. Marwen could see blue and white moons in a black sky and foun­tains of flowers: humelodia, ice gozzys, and stempellows. In the center of her tapestry was a mountain, a high snow-veined pin­nacle of rock like the mountains she had seen far to the north of Rune-dar. Beneath the mountain was a white wingwand in flight, a key, a tree with white fruit, and ... a crown. Running the length of the tapestry was a single thread, the lifethread, the color of a summersun sky. At the top, like a border, was the sign of the staff, the wizard’s sign.

Softly murmuring to herself and outlining with her finger, Vijocka went over each symbol once, twice, three times before the Taker slowly folded the image into nothingness and lamely doddered out the door.

Vijocka watched her leave and then, her voice breaking, said, “The Mother has decided, Marwen. You live.”

From that moment on, Marwen gained feeling and strength quickly. Now the future was not a wilderness of fear but a road with a clear direction and landmarks along the way. True, at the end of the road would still be the Taker, but Marwen had seen her eyes, that they were not the color of a blood-drained evening but the color of the mists at sunrise. She would remem­ber that. The next windcycle, Camlach called for a feast in Marwen’s honor in the dry hills near Rune-dar, and she stood before the throng briefly as they cheered her. But the songs were irrev­erent and bawdy, and Marwen thought that though they were glad to have Perdoneg conquered, still they did not believe in the magic or revere the wizard. Nevertheless, the story of the dragon and Marwen spread quickly and was put to song and embellished until it became more than it had been in reality.

Vijocka set to work immediately to weave again Marwen’s tapestry, and when Marwen saw it, narrow and stiff with new threads, and touched with her own hand the sign of the staff along the top, she wept like a child.

“No wonder Cudgham burned the tapestry—the sign of the staff as clear as day. He must have thought he was doing you a kindness,” Vijocka said.

When she was strong enough, Marwen walked to the bottom of the hill and plucked a piece of the white fruit from the tree. The peel was translucent and smooth, holding the white rays of the summersun overhead, shining as if with an inner light like a tiny moon. She tasted. It was cool like milk or snow, sweet like sugar or cream, and the meat of it was like a burst of light in her mouth. She laughed and felt the juice run down her chin. She bit into the fruit again.

It seemed for a moment as if she dreamed awake, or perhaps she had a seeing, she could not be sure. She thought she saw Nimroth, her father, plucking of the fruit of the tree for the last time before he began his journey south, south to the ends of Ve and life, plodding on and on into the fields of pain and beyond that into the fields of fear, taking himself with eyes open into the land of the dead, an intruder by his art, so that he might foil the dragon once again by denying him the opportunity to fulfill the promise of his tapestry. But before Nimroth died, he had loved and left his heir.

The fruit strengthened her, and each day thereafter she made her way to the bottom of the hill and ate of its magical fruit.

All during the lavender skies of the eveningmonths, Marwen lived in her father’s house. She tended the flowers and dusted the books and planted a tiny garden. The villagers in nearby Rune-dar cared for her well, each day bringing her meat and vegetables and grain, and when they looked in the east window of a morn­ing, they would find her deep in the study of her father’s books. For she had found that in return for obedience, the Mother gave freedom—freedom to use the magic, freedom to feel, to know, and to be. She had passed through the narrow neck of the hour­glass and found another expanding world in the next chamber.

Camlach returned often. He and his men were traveling the countryside, helping the villagers to rebuild their homes and replant their crops, and many times he flew to be with her.

Since she had become well again, he was shy with her, but one day as they walked under a sky filled with lavender clouds, he tried to kiss her once again.

She placed a finger on his lips to stop him. “This is an intima­cy I save for the father of my children and the companion of my old age,” she said.

“But that is me,” Camlach said, half-pleading, half-indignant.

“What convinces you of this?” she laughed and then, teasing, she added, “Should you not first consult your tapestry?”

Camlach heard the teasing and grinned, but his eyes were shrewd and arrogant. “Yes,” he said. “Perhaps I should.”

Without taking his eyes from Marwen’s, he opened the pouch on his belt and extracted from it a narrow silken tapestry. He held it up before his face so that only the back threads, hint­ing at the majesty of design, were visible to Marwen’s eyes.

In a moment his eyes peered over the top of the tapestry.

“I was right!” he said. “It says here, ‘Do just exactly as you wish, Camlach.’”

Marwen frowned.

“Nonsense,” she said. “It is sacrilege to make light of the tapestry, Prince or no.”

“Perhaps, as an Oldwife,” he said, holding it out, “you would do me the honor of interpreting my tapestry for me.”

She sat on the grass and placed it on her lap, smoothing it, touching its silken threads, tracing its weft-faced patterns with her finger. It was opulent in design, a strong dense weave replete with symbols of power and justice, and washed in many blues. She said a spell for understanding and vision. The designs began to unfold in meaning before her eyes.

“So, shall I be a hero?” he asked sitting beside her.

She did not look at him. “A hero is not shown in his tapestry,” she said mildly. “A hero’s character is quietly woven from the threads of a hundred honest actions, a thousand selfless deeds.” He was silent. She felt him looking at her steadily.

She told Camlach of his heritage and the prophecies of his forefathers concerning his royal line; she told him of his strengths and talents and weaknesses. She showed him the dragonthread and the lifethread and told him that one day he would lead his people in war against a people who built great ships.

Her words flowed like song, without hesitation, with music. The magic was all around her like a charge in the air—her very hair felt alive, as though it could sense touch. And when Cam­lach spoke again, it seemed an irreverent intrusion on her trance.

“What, lady, means this white wingwand?”

She turned her eyes to the tiny white wingwand woven in a place of prominence. It was exactly like the soap carving he had given her. She had not seen it until now, and she puzzled over it for a time. It did not reveal itself to her, and she spoke a stronger spell for understanding.

Marwen saw the soap carving wingwand nesting in her tapestry pouch, and then Opalwing, still and white and beautiful in death. Then the vision was torn from her painfully. She knew what the white wingwand symbolized.

“It is my sign,” she whispered. She looked up. He was grin­ning at her.

She handed him his tapestry. “You knew,” she said, not smil­ing. She stood up. “The tapestry speaks an uncertain language at times.” She made to walk away.

Camlach grabbed her arm, stopping her.

“I am not free to love,” she said. It took no courage to say it. There was nothing else to be said. “I must judge Cudgham’s tapestry and bury him in his own land. I must sing the Death Song for the people of my village. I must be witness for Maug at his tapestry making. Besides,” and she hesitated, “you are the son of the king, Prince Camlach, and I am a Venutian exile.”

The scars on his face that he still bore from his torture in Kebblewok stood out starkly on his pale skin. “You are the wiz­ard,” he said.

“I am the wizard’s heir, yet to receive her staff, who still walks in the judgement of her home village. To the people of Marmawell, I was thrice a murderer. Before I can earn my staff, before I can love a prince,” and she looked up into his eyes, “I must vindicate myself. And I must study, Camlach. I carry a great responsibility now for the people of Ve.”

“I will go with you to bury Cudgham in Marmawell,” Cam­lach said.

She shook her head. “When you are near me, I forget the world, for you become my world. I forget the pain of others in my joy. And then there are still my little demons of doubt. Why is it that when you say I am pretty, there is still distrust in my heart, and when you say you love, I must struggle to believe? I am not finished my task, Camlach, not yet.”

He did not answer but took her hands in his and kissed the palms of them until her knees grew weak, and she begged him to leave her. He did leave straightway and did not say goodbye.

Days later, when she had made all preparations for her jour­ney to Marmawell, two wingwands landed nearby, one roped to the other, and a rider approached that Marwen knew to be Torbil when he came closer.

He bowed briefly and said in his gravelly voice, “I am under orders to accompany you, Lady Marwen, to wherever your jour­ney takes you and to continue as your guard until the Prince, in person, relieves me of my duties.”

Under his black beard and moustache, she could see his dark skin flush. “Prince Camlach sends you this gift,” and he gestured toward one of the wingwands. Only then did Marwen notice that it was pure white, with eyes like bloodred jewels. She laughed, a choked little sound at first.

“Is this some kind of punishment for you, poor Torbil, to guard a Venutian wench and on Venutian soil? What have you done to displease the Prince?”

There was a fierce pride in his eyes.

“No lady, this is a reward and an honor that I sought from the day that I pledged you my fealty.”

“Thank you,” Marwen said quietly. “I will need you.”

That day at windeven, they began their flight west and south to the enchanted hills of Marmawell where once one could sit in the arms of the earth and smell the spice gardens on the estwind. Marwen felt completely and utterly free, high in the deep evening sky.

They would arrive on the eve of winterdark, when the Stum­ble would be high and quick, when only Opo nested on the horizon, and Marwen would remember the huts aglow with hearthfire. Then she would sing of her love for Grondil and Crob and Camlach, and for the Magic. It was the first thing she would do.