The Dragon's Tapestry

Chapter Five

Cold and hunger were hard upon her waking moments when Marwen emerged from a black sleep. She lay still for a time, cradled in the earth’s arm. Above her the roof of the little hollow in which she had found shelter was filled with bared roots dangling like exposed nerves. The hollow seemed to have been scraped by some bisor beast that wandered these round and rolling hills. Further out Marwen could see that the hills became more muscled, with overhanging rocks protruding from the crests like brows.

She stood up. On the gold-grassed slope above her was an oldman rock, well-bearded with moss, pocked and splotched with age. She picked up a pebble and placed it at the foot of the rock.

“Venerable one, have you any words of wisdom for me?”

She waited long in silence.

“You are slow to answer. You must be wise.” She placed another pebble at the base of the rock. “You see, grandfather rock, I am Marwen who knows not the name of her father and whose mother has twice died.” A picture of Grondil walking with the Taker filled her mind, and she forced the thought away. “I have no tapestry, and that is bad. It is the worst thing that can happen, and it also has happened two times.”

Marwen was quiet then, listening. The rock did not invite her to touch it, so she listened.

Presently she heard the whisper of rushing water. “I must lis­ten for the water,” she said quietly. “That is your answer.” The sound of running water was coming from far off, and after fol­lowing the sound for a time, she found a tiny stream pouring like a bit of white lace from a lip of rock. She drank deeply and then followed the stream down into a shallow ravine that eventually led to a stream of shoals and shallows, more rock than water.

Opalwing was there on the bank, drinking.

Marwen ran to her, crying out. She wrapped her arms around the wingwand’s head and stroked her antennae, but the beast butted at the grass and swung its head so that Marwen laughed and let go. “It is a sign,” she whispered. She looked into the faceted eyes of the wingwand and saw herself broken into a hun­dred tiny selves, looking out as if from behind glass. “A sign, yes,” she said. “And I wonder why Grondil searched so long and far for you that she might give you to me—Grondil who never wasted an hour or an ounce of anything in her life.” She stood stroking the beast’s backfur distractedly until the wave of grief was gone, and she realized that she felt hungry and dirty.

Marwen stripped off her spidersilk and stepped into the water. In only a few moments, her feet and ankles ached with the cold. Clenching her jaw she lay down on the pebbly bottom, leaning her head back until only her face was above water. The water carried her hair downstream. When her breath was coming in gasps, she ducked all of her face beneath the water.

She emerged like a silver fish that flings itself on the bank and then heaves and mouths for breath. She pulled her spidersilk over her head, and as she did so, the ip fell out of her pocket and righted himself with slow snaky movements.

“Oh, Cudgham!” Marwen said. “I’d almost forgotten. Why, you are almost as loathsome and stupid a reptile as you were a man.” She put crossed fingers to her lips and frowned. “If Grondil heard me say that, she would make me read ten pages of the Tenets out loud for punishment.”

She looked around.

“What do you eat? Can I catch you a nice slimy slug or a many-legged insect perhaps?”

The ip answered by darting out his long tongue and captur­ing a jimmie, which it rolled into his mouth and swallowed whole.

“Ooo,” Marwen half-grimaced and half-gloated. “Wouldn’t it be fun to turn you back into a man while the bug is still in your belly.”

She took a deep breath and uttered the reversal of the spell. Nothing happened. There the lizard sat, unchanged and blink­ing with slow transparent eyelids. She tried again, again nothing.

Marwen shrugged, almost relieved. Just to be sure, she snapped her fingers once. She had meant to turn him blue or black, but she had never been able to snap her fingers very well. The ip turned a dainty shade of pink.

She covered her mouth with her hand to stifle a giggle and then forced her face to be serious. “No, that is too cruel,” she said, and she turned him back to his green and rust color.

“Well, perhaps the wizard can tell me the proper spell. All the more reason to find him.” Talking out loud about the wizard, a thing forbidden in Marmawell, made him seem more real to her, and she took heart. “Nevertheless, should you bite me, Cudgham, you shall be left like this forever. Do not forget.” The creature blinked again.

Opalwing was grazing morosely on the tough yellow stubble. “You are hungry, too, aren’t you?” Marwen said. “There is noth­ing but this dry wiregrass for you to eat and less still for me to eat.”

Her stomach rumbled as she looked around at the hills that spread from horizon to horizon. She could remember little of the few maps she had seen. She knew that Ve was surrounded by water on all sides, and most of the villages were nearer the coast where the soil was rich enough and the rain frequent enough to grow food. Marmawell was different from other villages because it was situated more inland where the soil was drier. There they grew the spices for which Marmawell was famous. The major trading cities, including Kebblewok, were more central, but even with Opalwing, it was too far a journey without provisions.

Marwen felt a chill of fear. Not even with magic could she produce food from nothing. She could, if she could remember the spell, make the wiregrass look and taste more appetizing. But it would still be wiregrass and could not sustain her long. She sorely wished that she had brought her Tenets and her Songs of the One Mother. They were her inheritance, precious treasures that Grondil would have given her on her deathbed.

Marwen remembered Merva Leatherworker’s words: “Return to us, and I will reconsider your fate....” True, Merva had not thought that Marwen would have a wingwand, but was that not a result of Marwen’s own magic? Had she not summoned the creature with her mind? Her magic was enough to save her, and besides, she needed to return for her books whether Merva allowed her to stay or not. Books and provisions: for these she would risk a second exile. And maybe, Marwen thought, maybe I shall not stay anyway, even if they allow it.

She stood. “Come, Opalwing, let us go. The dead are not served by our fasts.” She picked up a moss-slicked pebble from the river bottom, and ran and gave it to the oldman rock.

“Thank you, grandfather stone, for now my thoughts are as clear as the water. I shall return to the village and beg forgive­ness. I will search among Grondil’s books until I find the words to return Cudgham to his former state and get him to stand wit­ness at a tapestry making, my tapestry making.”

Marwen dug up a few stickstem roots from the bank of the stream and without magic made a small fire over which she roasted them. She pierced the outer hull and ate the soft meat inside, which, though bland, was filling and warm. It gave her strength to begin her flight back to Marmawell.

Freshwind was gentle in the constant sunlight of spring and summer, though in winterdark it often brought freezing rains from over the sea. Opalwing flew evenly into the saltsoft breeze, seemingly glad to be headed home. Her wings met at the top and the bottom during flight, as the wings of all well-bred wingwands do. Marwen filled with a lovely dizzying sensation of height at every wingbeat as the ground below was first hidden, then revealed.

About a third of the way to Marmawell, Opalwing began to slow her speed. When Marwen urged her to fly faster, the beast balked and reduced her speed even more. Opalwing was young and unused to flying long distances, Marwen knew, so she allowed the creature to land and graze for a time. While she waited for her to rest, Marwen noticed an unusual cloud in the south.

“What is that, Opalwing? Is it a storm cloud? Is that what makes you nervous?” she asked. But after the beast had eaten and slept, she still would not fly. Marwen cajoled and pushed and shouted, but Opalwing would not budge. There was little else she could do. A wingwand could throw its rider for mis­treatment received years before. It was better to humor the pow­erful intelligent creatures. Finally Marwen herself slept.

The cloud had disappeared when Marwen awoke, and Opal­wing willingly resumed the journey. Occasionally she changed direction nervously, as though she smelled a predator, and it took all Marwen’s skill and strength to steer her back on course.

When they were close to Marmawell, though still beyond sight of it, Opalwing landed without warning and without direc­tion to do so. She almost unseated Marwen and then disobeyed Marwen’s commands to fly. Finally, in frustration, Marwen punched the hard shell of the creature’s body.

“I should let Cudgham-ip nip your heels,” she said, close to tears. She was hungry and thirsty and sore from sleeping on the ground, and she knew Marmawell was just beyond the next hump of hills. She started to walk, stopping to look back occa­sionally, but the wingwand did not follow.

She had not walked far when a smell made Marwen’s heart pulse in her throat. It was a nauseating stench that drove away all thoughts of food. On the wind were shreds of black smoke like ghosts blowing by.

For two more winds she walked. She had her first sighting of the village at cullerwind. Cullerwind in winterdark often brought hail or blizzard or windwraiths—those freakish phantom winds that inexplicably tore the roof from one house or bore away one podhen out of an entire flock. In summerlight, however, cullerwind was usually benign, its worst deed winding the clothes round and round the drying poles until they looked like strange heavy fruits on an unnatural vine.

But there were no wadded clothes, no drying poles, no peo­ple, no huts. Nothing. Marmawell was gone, and in its place was a black stain on the loins of the hills.

The hills did a half-turn before her eyes, and she struggled to maintain her footing. A muscle in her temple twitched. Time and place lost all landmarks by which she understood them. She was unsure if this charred valley was really the place where her village had been, though looking more closely she could see parts of huts still standing. She was unsure how long she had been in returning, though the position of the sun told her it had been little more than a cycle of winds. She even doubted the events of the past few days and thought perhaps it had all been part of a hideous dream.

She peered into her apron pocket. Cudgham-ip slept, and she touched his leathery hide, as though she were touching reality itself.

“By the Mother!” she whispered. Where before a herd of wingwands had grazed, only a few charred lumps remained like blisters on the hillside. A summer windwraith scooped up some black dust and whirled it into the sky along with a feather and a strand of straw. But for the wailing of the wind in Marwen’s ears, there was complete silence.

She walked heavily toward the half-burnt remains of what had been her own hut. Halfway into the valley, she came upon a body. It reminded her of the clay dolls the little village girls made, dark and shriveled imitations of people. She opened her mouth to sing the Death Song, but no sound would come out.

After a while she continued walking. The wailing of the wind sounded more humanlike the closer she came to the hut.

Nothing was left standing but part of one wall. She saw that it had not been burned but crushed and that a number of other huts in the village still stood in various degrees of ruin. Then it was that Marwen heard a voice above the wind, a familiar voice, Maug’s voice.

For a moment she almost turned and ran. But she did not. A human voice, even if it be Maug’s, was a welcome sound. She rounded the wall and peered into the shadow. It was Maug, but his back was to her, and he was standing beside someone, some­one whose low moans mingled with the wind’s sighs. It was Master Clayware.

The old man’s white beard had been burned away, and the brown leathery skin of his face and neck was swollen and pearly white. He was struggling for breath, but when he saw Marwen, it was seemingly without surprise. He held out his charred hand to her and beckoned.

Maug looked behind him and jumped as if he had been bitten.

“You! How did you—?”

She did not look at him but knelt at the side of Master Clayware on the dirt floor.

“Tell me what happened,” she said.

He answered with a single word: “Perdoneg.” His breath whistled and wheezed, and Marwen could see he was dying.

“The dragon’s name is Perdoneg,” Maug said. He sounded as if the air had been knocked out of him. “I was digging Grondil’s grave, and Master Clayware was singing the Death Song beside me when he came. We hid in the grave—we could hear the peo­ple screaming.... Finally Master Clayware could bear it no longer, and he came out. He was burned.... The dragon ate some of the people.... I saw ...” There was a strange joy in his voice, though the skin around his mouth was white.

“Is anyone else left alive?”

Maug shook his head. He was looking at her with wild gleaming eyes, but she didn’t think of him. She turned back to Master Clayware. The magic was rushing through her body like wind in a tunnel, roaring in her ears, demanding to be used. For the first time, the magic had come to her unsought and unbid­den, and she learned much about the magic in that moment.

“I would relieve your pain,” she said.

“No pain,” the old man said, “but for that which is in my heart.”

“Let me help you,” she said.

He nodded, a faint but sure movement. “You will help me, but not in the way you think, Marwen. The gods have brought you back so I might give you a message.” The old man spoke with a huge effort of will.

“Years ago a man came to our village and stayed all during winterdark. A poet he was, silver-tongued and well-learned, with a singing voice that made the old ones weep and the young girls dream. He was witty and charming and looked as though he hadn’t a care in the world until ... until your mother and he fell in love.”

The wind blew some charred dust into Marwen’s eyes, and she held her breath against it. “Was the poet my father?” she asked.

Master Clayware nodded. “How I wish he were here now to sing my Death Song.”

Above the stench of burned flesh, the wind blew into her nos­trils the sweet scent of roast spices. Hadn’t she known it all along? Perhaps it was the way Grondil had looked at her when she spoke of him or the sadness in her voice when she sang a Song she had learned from him. Or perhaps the dragons he had drawn had spo­ken to her. “Why has he never come for me?” she asked.

“Child, you know that in Ve no weddings may be performed during winterdark and not a day sooner than Sunrise Festival. Srill and her lover begged the Council to forgo this tradition and marry them because he had a quest to fulfill, a deadly quest from which he knew he may not return. The Council rejected their pleas. Merva especially incited the Council against it, though it seems to me her first child came early.” The old man seemed to have forgotten that Maug was there.

“Grondil was young then. She looked with disapproval on the light-minded ways of this man, and she would not speak against the decision of the Council.”

He stopped to catch his breath. Marwen breathed with him, willing his lungs to take in air. The skin on her arms and back prickled.

“But the man boarded with me and was kind to me, and at last I could bear his pain no longer. As a member of the Coun­cil, I married them secretly, though how legal it was, I know not.”

The old man looked over at Marwen. His eyes were nearly swollen shut and his words came garbled and rasping from his burned lips.

“I tell you this so you may be comforted. Perhaps I should have told you long ago. But my message is this: before your father went away, he told me that he had conceived a child, that it would be a girl.... I shall never forget his face. All the laughter and levity was gone, it was as though he had been wearing a mask all that time and beneath the mask was a countenance full of wisdom and sorrow.”

The old man swallowed three times.

“He asked me to care for Srill and the child she would bear, for, he said, Srill will know what to teach her. But, he said, if the gods be so unkind as to take Srill away, tell my daughter to seek my home in Verduma, for in it is the dragon’s tapestry.”

The old man closed his eyes. Marwen waited, feeling as though her life and all its events were funneling to this point, to these strange words that Master Clayware spoke at his death.

“I thought, years later, when you were but a child and the charm of the man had worn from me with the years, that per­haps he had been mad. I thought that if dragons lived, it was far away across the sea. I thought how odd you would think me if I were to give you such a message. But now, I have seen. Eyes— spinning eyes full of knowledge and hate, and wings—wings of such expanse that I could not see them all in one glance. And claws and teeth ... ah, ah, where is the Taker? She stays so long!”

“Master Clayware, what was my father’s name?”

The old man sighed and looked past her, as though he were seeing someone, an old friend. He smiled a little, though on his face it became a grimace.

“Nimroth,” he said. “Your father’s name was Nimroth.”