The Dragon's Tapestry

Chapter Six

Marwen did not see the Taker. It is said that sometimes the spirit leaves a broken body before it is invited to do so, and then it must wan­der the hills in confusion until the Taker comes and leads it away to the lands of the dead.

Marwen sang the Death Song for Master Clayware. She sang it for Grondil, and for Leba and Sneda Shoemaker, and for Srill, her mother. She sang and sang until her voice would no longer make any sound. Then she slept.

When she woke, Cudgham-ip was basking in the sunlight near her face. Her tongue was swollen and dry in her mouth, and it was difficult to swallow.

“Is that really Cudgham?” Maug asked. He was sitting near­by, carving a piece of black bone and watching the creature’s every move.

Marwen sat up and moved away from him. “I need water,” she croaked.

He looked at her oddly, deliberated for a moment and then disappeared. She stood and began searching for Grondil’s lore books amidst the rubble of the hut. When Maug returned with fresh water, she had found the Songs of the One Mother. Even before she drank, she opened it and with renewed fascination touched the dragon drawings in the margins. For me, she thought, my father drew these for me.... She closed her book, eyeing Maug. Keeping him in her sight, she drank deeply, though the water tasted of cinders. Again she opened the book. At last she came upon some spells of restoration. With her hand upon Cudgham-ip she spoke them, one after another, to no effect.

Maug watched her without speaking.

Finally she stood, put the ip and the book in her apron pock­et and began walking to the hills where Opalwing was waiting.

At the top of the hill, she looked back to see her village for the last time. Maug was following her. He did not try to hide, and she waited for him.

Where his brass-colored hair touched his face there was a line of pimples, and below that his pale blue eyes were wet and red-rimmed.

“Don’t go without me,” he said.

“Why would you want to come with an ugly like me?” she asked.

Maug looked down and shrugged, and Marwen felt ashamed. To leave him here without a wingwand was to sentence him to death. He made an odd sound, and Marwen thought perhaps he was weeping.

“I have no tapestry,” he said.

She stared at him.

“When the dragon came, I was digging Grondil’s grave. It was fitting to take off my tapestry pouch,” he said.

“It was burned in the fire?”

He nodded. “You saw it once, Marwen, my cousin, not many years ago. You could stand as witness for me.”

“Yes, I remember. You were taunting me, and you dangled it in front of me.” She remembered vaguely the images of a star, a floxwillow and a spoon.

He looked at his feet and shrugged again.

“Of course, I don’t remember it,” she said, “but it is only a moderately difficult spell to bring it to mind.” She looked direct­ly into his eyes, feeling herself turn pink. “If I wanted to.”

“By the gods, Marwen ...”

“Now you know how I feel!”

His lips twisted scornfully. “It’s not the same at all. I will have neither work nor friends until my tapestry is remade, and I must be careful not to die. But you—you are soulless.”

Her throat closed around her protests. He had no reason to believe her, and it was enough for her just to know that she did have a tapestry and a soul.

“I will not tell,” Maug said, “if you promise that the first Oldwife we come to, you will witness my tapestry.”

She nodded, and with that pact they began to walk the tawny hills inland.

At nuwind they came upon Opalwing butting and pawing hungrily at the wiregras “So that’s how you got back so fast,” Maug said. “Thought you might have used magic.” He snorted, and Marwen resisted the urge to strike him. She turned to him, chin and chest thrust out.

“I’ll sit forward,” she said. “You may hold on however you wish. Just don’t touch me.”

“Gor, who’d want to,” he retorted but without conviction, as if he didn’t even care enough to fight with her.

With the roughest start Marwen could get out of Opalwing, they began their journey toward Kebblewok.

When they stopped to give Opalwing a rest, Marwen roasted some stickstem roots, which Maug devoured peel and all. They had salvaged two jars of oatbeer and some burned bread from the ruins, but they were saving them. For a long time, they did not speak, though Marwen smiled at him once or twice. Whether she was afraid of him or whether she had some childish need to have him like her, she did not know. When he finally spoke, she started a little.

“Where are we going?” he asked.

She tried to hold the food in her cheek so that she could speak with her mouth full. “Grondil told me once that if I kept the rising sun to my right and the norwind blowing into my face, that I should come to the city of Kebblewok.”

He nodded. “And then?”

Marwen let the dry nutty-tasting meat of the root slide warm and heavy down her throat. She did not know where she was going. Her future spread out before her like the endless rolling Hills on either side, without lane or landmark. Grondil was dead, and now, strangely, she longed for her father, Nimroth, who had loved her after all. She felt stripped of purpose. All that was left was her strange inheritance, the dragon’s tapestry. But before that she must have her own.

“I will go to the Oldest in Loobhan. Perhaps she can help me discover the spell to change Cudgham back so he can witness my tapestry. And after that I think I shall seek my father’s house,” she said. Nimroth—a strange name, she thought, one I have never heard before.

Maug looked at her shrewdly. “You don’t believe that stuff, do you? Master Clayware’s babblings? Surely he was delirious.” Marwen coughed as some of the root went down the wrong way. When she recovered herself, she said,”You do not believe?” Slowly, deliberately, his eyes full upon Marwen, he shook his head.

It was while they were eating that they felt a charge in the air, as though a storm were gathering. Marwen looked about her. The sky toward the sea was glowering, but in the east the sun lay like a pink egg in a nest of golden clouds. Below it the land was barren.

She ignored the feeling for a time as she ate, but when the hair on her forearms raised, she jumped up, dropping her root. She looked around for Cudgham-ip, but he was a little way off, near where Opalwing grazed. Then Marwen saw her. The Taker.

Her head was bent, her white hair like bits of cloud or cotton. Her apron glowed brilliant blue like a shred of summer sky, the stitches of patchwork like birds in flight far off. As she walked with halting deliberation toward Marwen, she muttered and mumbled and chortled incoherently.

Marwen felt bile burning in the back of her throat. “Go away, old woman!” she called. Maug jumped up.

The Taker lifted her head, though Marwen could tell she saw little. She laughed sweetly and waved with stiff spotted fingers.

“No, go away!” Marwen screamed. “Is not Grondil’s life enough? Is not a whole village enough to fill you?”

The old woman shuffled on, reaching out her arms toward Marwen as if she would embrace her. Marwen began stepping backward, then turned and ran. Maug ran beside her until they reached Opalwing. Marwen’s fingers shook as she pulled the stockings from the wingwand’s antennae. Maug had already mounted and given the signal to fly before Marwen had a chance to mount.

But the wingwand did not move. Marwen jumped on in front, too frightened to be angered or repulsed by Maug’s arms reaching around her waist.

“Fly, Opalwing, fly!” She pushed her hands cruelly into the space between the beast’s head and body shells.

Then the wingwand’s legs buckled and they had to jump from her back to avoid being pinned as the beast collapsed.

“Opalwing!” Her terror turned to disbelief and anger, for attached to Opalwing’s leg, still venting its swift venom, was the creature Cudgham-ip.

Marwen wrenched it off by the tail. “Anything, so as not to be left behind?” she hissed.

Then the sound of the old woman’s wheezing breath was behind her, and without looking back Marwen ran, still holding Cudgham by the tail. Maug, gasping for breath, ran beside her.

Marwen ran until her legs were heavy as stone, and she could not breathe without pain. She looked back. She could not see the Taker. She lay down and closed her eyes until she could no longer feel her heart beating. She still held the ip by the tail.

Maug lay down on his back. He was panting, his arms spread out. Marwen watched his chest rise and fall and noticed how large his hands were. She sat up.

“Why does the Taker follow us?” he asked, rolling his head toward her.

Marwen frowned. Her breath was coming more easily now.

“Who am I to explain the ways of the Taker?”

“Can you feel her presence still?”

“No. She is gone.” She was holding Cudgham-ip by the tail, glaring into his mobbleberry eyes. The tip of his red tongue was sticking out.

Maug stood up. “I will return for the pack,” he said.

“No, please, don’t. I am afraid,” Marwen said, dropping the ip into her apron pocket. She did not want to return to the place where Opalwing lay dead. Worse still was the thought of remaining alone.

Maug looked at her strangely and said, “I cannot see the Taker, but I can see these hills, that they grow no leaf or berry. Even ips can starve to death in a desert. Since the wingwand is dead, we must either carry the pack or the Taker herself on our backs, for we will soon starve.”

Marwen looked around at the rolling hills, bald and brown and stretching into the horizon. It was as though they walked upon the back of some vast gold-furred monster that threatened to awaken and devour them.

“I will come with you,” she said.

When they reached Opalwing lying dead, her wings spread softly on the sharp grass, Maug spat.

“By the Mother! You should chase that ip into the desert for this.”

Marwen said nothing but watched as he shouldered the pack with ease.

“Better still, throw the thing.”

“No,” she said.

“Why not? The creatures can’t run very fast. Toss it and be rid of it,” he insisted.

Marwen felt her heart’s blood drain. It was all different now, just the two of them alone in the desert, but she was still afraid of him.

“You forget that this is not an ordinary ip, Maug. It is Cud-gham.” She drew him from her pocket and watched as he batted the air with his stumpy legs but less energetically than before.

Maug snorted. “All right, then, say he’s Cudgham—so what?” He gestured with his head confidingly, as if to keep it from Cudgham-ip. “Chuck him. Good riddance, right?”

“You don’t understand, Maug. I need Cudgham-ip like you need me. He is the only witness to my tapestry, and by one wit­ness it may be remade.”

“But you don’t have—” He broke off.

A slow realization made her eyes narrow.

“You just want me to get rid of him because then you will be stronger than I am.”

Maug spat again and shook his head.

“And what should I do for a tapestry without you?” he said, but a shifting of his eyes told her she had guessed right.

“Do remember that,” she said.

She set her face toward Kebblewok, and they began to walk.

She listened for the water as the grandfather stone had advised her and often found natural wells surfacing in the hol­lows. There they would drink and dig up the roots of stickstem and sleep uneasily, and always the Taker followed in her dreams.

The only creatures they saw were ips and insects and some­times the track or spoor of a bisor beast. Wind after wind, through many cycles of winds, they walked. Their food ran out quickly, and along the way they discarded the remainder of their gear as even the slightest weight on their shoulders became a torture. Marwen left their things as gifts for the little gods of the wells, and so usually they found water. Sometimes she caught Maug looking at her, but always he would look away. He was not kind to her, but he was no longer cruel either. Their suffer­ings bound them. Spiny bloodpetal pierced their ragged shoes and filled their feet with slivers when they became tired and acci­dentally stepped on them. Their homemade shoes were soon rags, their ankles and calves were scraped and raw from brushing the thorns of ghostflower that proliferated on the dry slopes. But they kept the dawnmonth sun to their right and Marwen thought that, if she lived, she would make a song for this.

One day they saw a wingwand flying overhead. They screamed and jumped until they were sure they had been seen, and long before the rider landed, they recognized the red-legged mark­ings of Peggypin and knew that it was Buffle Spicetrader.

Relief flooded Marwen’s being like a warm bath. He must have escaped, being away on a journey to the market in Kebblewok. She ran toward him, waving and smiling, feeling terribly young, promising herself to be humble with the man. Maug, too, waved and called out.

But as she approached, Buffle’s eyes grew wide with recogni­tion. He made the sign to ward off evil and flew away. Maug did not seem surprised but said nothing.

Soon after that Marwen ceased to long for food. She found less and less water at wells along the way, certainly not enough to bathe her feet. She muttered weak little spells of healing on their bruised and bleeding feet that, although they did not close their wounds, at least prevented infection. But fatigue was her greatest burden. She did not sleep well, even when she found a bit of soft grass around a well upon which to he. The Taker con­tinued to appear in her dreams, waking her, forcing her on and on.

When they had lost all count of winds and days, and the sun had climbed noticeably higher in the east, and when they had become thin and brown, and when the songs would no longer allow themselves to be sung, then they saw the buildings of Kebblewok nestled in the lap of the hills like a child-god’s play toys.