The Village on Horseback: Prose and Verse, 2003-2008

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— Pieter Emily, said they one to another in the furrows and fields.

— Pieter Emily, whispered they the children beneath the wooden boards of the raised village.

— Pieter Emily, said Elsbeth Grinner, beneath her breath.

And she left her loom and went out into the street.

It was a clear day and dry. Marla Kranth was standing speaking to the mayor’s wife. Both wore long dresses and heavy shawls made from the cloth that was the village’s trade.

— Marla, said Elsbeth, is it true?

— True and more, said Marla. He’s breathing the same air as you or me.

The mayor’s wife interrupted. Her face was narrow like a shrew, and it was said by some that she bit the mayor in his sleep to weaken his brain.

— Jasper spoke to him, face to face. Pieter Emily. Out on the low road, and Jasper looking for a sheep that had strayed. Pieter was there, behind a tree, just watching him.

— Pieter? On the low road?

Both women nodded in a dark, disapproving way.

— What did he say? asked Elsbeth.

— Pieter reminded him of the green book. He said it was late in the year for anyone to be out on the low road.

Marla whistled a long whistle.

— But what did he look like?

— Like a boy in a wooden-coat, said Marla. Just like he always looked. Jasper said he hasn’t aged a day.

A week passed and a week. On the fourteenth day, Elsbeth closed up her shop early and sent the other weavers home. She was, it was generally agreed, the best of Forsk’s weavers, and that meant she was one of the best in the world. For there is nothing like Forsk-cloth, and there never has been.

She was born with a feel for the thread. The day she touched a loom she knew it was a beast akin to her and that if only she would speak it would give her whatever she desired. So slowly and quickly, slowly and quickly she learned to speak to the loom, and when she was fourteen, she was given a shop, and given the charge of many weavers below her, and people who came to the town would sit on chairs in the corner of the room and watch her as she worked.

Since then, her skill had only grown. She could do in an hour the work of days, and in days, work that no one could do in any quantity of time. At the age of fortythree, she was thin like a reed, with a wicker strength. She wore only the simplest clothing, made from her own cloth and sewed in the closeness of her rooms.

She lived with her sister and her sister’s husband, in a tall house set away at the edge of the raised town. It was not an outbuilding, as the farmhouses in the fields beyond. But it was thought less of, for once it had been a freestanding structure, and only during her childhood had the village grown to reach it with its tight wooden streets and walks.

She and her sister had been the same at birth. They had had the same dream every night of their common childhood, and would recount it anew each morning. But when Elsbeth was taken away to the loom, Catha took up the needle and thread. As a seamstress Catha had no match in Forsk. Her husband, Jaim was a trader, one of those who took the cloth through the mountains for sale. He was a large man, and of a wonderful quality. Catha loved him as a wife, and Elsbeth as a sister. For Jaim was sullen and ill-mannered in all save his speech with them. We should all be lucky to have such a one for a friend, and they knew his worth.

To that house, then, Elsbeth went, out her shop door and along the street. She passed shops where the people were crouched in rows before looms, or others where men and women were set to carding or spinning. The wood of the town was like a box, she often thought, with all that was needed laid out within it. Well, that and the fields beyond.

— Pieter Emily, she said beneath her breath.

They were the same age, she and Pieter, the same age to the day. His father had been a hunter, his mother, a weaver in the town. Their houses had stood side by side, looking in on each other, listening to each other’s secrets in the long winters, the brief mists of summer.

It had been Pieter who’d shown her the way up trees. She in turn had taught him to lie. For Elsbeth Grinner was an expert liar and always had been. She had, in fact, never been caught in a lie. Not once. She was most certainly the soul of truth.

In fact, she had not lied in many years. There was no reason to. Her life was all seriousness, all cloth and candles, all evening.

As she went her way, a man came out from beneath the eaves of the grocery.

— Elsbeth, he said, have you seen this?

A handbill had been printed, and he gave it her to look at.

The MATTER of PIETER EMILY

Village Meeting

Third Bell from Dusk

Elsbeth nodded to the man.

— Harfor Locke, thank you. I shall see you there.

He retired again below the roof, leaving her with the handbill, as the other shops too closed and the street began to fill. Yet no one jostled her as they passed. Many looked to her and looked away, and those who met her eyes nodded respectfully. What the town did was what she did best, and strange as she was, she was admired by all.

An hour and she stood again with the handbill in the doorway. Her sister’s shadow could be seen in the kitchens beyond, moving here and there.

Since Pieter Emily had been seen, a rash of trouble had begun. The farmers on farms closest to the low road had found animals dead, their throats cut. A house had even burned. Jerome Liddel vanished one day from his fields, and his wife was in tears in the streets asking for justice. Old Caleb More swore he saw a fox carrying a child in its mouth, but no child was missing.

Was it strange to think of a red fox in all that grayness, running with a white goose in its mouth? Many dreamed it, and wept upon waking, so lovely was the drawing in and out of breath in the goose’s heaving chest.

— The green book, said they one to another.

Elsbeth passed by the kitchens but did not look in. Her sister looked up and saw her, but said nothing. She knew the degree, the direction of her thought. For once many had thought Pieter would ask Elsbeth’s hand. But he had not, and then he had fallen out with Algren Johns and Leonard Falk, and had fought them together, with Saul Cross and Imren Jacoby, Locke Arsten and Jaim himself as witnesses, and Pieter had shot them both through the chest with a pistol. Yet Falk had been just as quick. Wounded by Falk’s pistol ball, Pieter had staggered off into the woods. That had been twenty-five years ago. There hadn’t even been a search for him. His mother had gone through the town again and again, begging for help. But something about Pieter had been dark, and no one would help. Catha’s father had forbade them to go, and they had not. Then there was the matter of Algren Johns’, of Leonard Falk’s funeral. Time had simply passed, and drawn a quiet over the whole business.

If Elsbeth was as serious as earth on earth, then this last week had seen her grow grimmer still. Catha worried and worried, and by the fence with Jaim at first light, she’d asked him what they ought to do.

His face hadn’t changed. He’d said nothing at first, and then,

— Something’s likely to be done. Things can’t go on like this.

And now there was the meeting. Anders Lew had knocked on the window at half three to announce it. What would be said? She shuddered in spite of herself and hurried on with the preparations for supper.

One bell. Two bells. Three bells in the dusk, and the people came through the streets.

Elsbeth walked with her sister. Jaim trailed behind, speaking to the smith, Canter Maynard.

So many steps in the thin darkness of the town. Lamps were at every corner, and the wood gave a comfort, a drumming as of life.

As she walked, Elsbeth thought of the pattern she’d begun that morning. She could see all the threads in her head, could watch them shaking and forming together, twining and joining. She wanted then to go to the shop and sit down at her loom, but her sister’s hand on her shoulder recalled her.

— Are you all right?

— Just thinking.

And then they were at the meeting house. And then they were taking seats near the back. Almost the whole town was there, some three hundred. Only half the farmers, of course. The flocks and fields had, after all, to be watched, most of all now.

Looking around, Elsbeth saw fear in the shapes of backs and necks, the imposition of heads on necks, the taking up of gowns and blankets, hands, white and gaunt, pressed against the benches.

How could she, of all people, find her way through this maze of confused words and thought?

The Mayor stood to speak.

He called for order, and after awhile, the rumbling ceased.

— I stand here before you as an act of free election.

It was the invocation called for at the beginning of every meeting.

— A matter has risen that needs a consensus. The murderer Pieter Emily has been discovered living not fifteen miles from this spot where I stand.

A great noise then rose up in the hall. Rumor, certainly, had had its way with the town. Everyone had heard Jaspar Mign’s tale, whether from he or another. But this was the first general confirmation of its truth.

— Order, order, shouted the Mayor.

He slammed a staff down on the raised platform and the crowd grew quiet.

— The facts of the matter, said the Mayor. Pieter Emily vanished almost 26 years ago, leaving two of the town dead. It matters not at all that it was a duel, or that they were two and he one. The rules forbade such duels then, just as they do now.

A man spoke up in the third row.

— My daughter saw a man inside our house not two days ago. From what we can tell, it was Pieter Emily!

A din rose up at this, with nearly every member of the town declaring themselves aggrieved in one way or another.

Then Jaspar Mign stood up, and all fell silent.

— He said the green book, said Jaspar. He said the green book, and now this is on us.

The meeting fell into chaos and nothing could be done for some time, with some swearing that Pieter was to blame for all the present ills, and others swearing that he was not. Someone began to draw up a vote on the matter, and the white and black painted sticks were brought out in the long, iron box, but the measure failed, and no vote was taken. Finally, the candles burned down and the meeting was closed, to be resumed on the next day, and everyone was sent home.

Elsbeth prepared herself for sleep. She laid her dress across a chair back, and stood by the window looking out across the hills. The night was clear and bright, and her sharp eyes could see far.

The village was in a hollow. It was like a great, wooden apparatus, laid out flat upon the ground. Hills and fields lay all around, and mountains as well. Mountains took up three horizons, and farther, the fourth. It was a long vale, and the road that ran down from Firsk to the far mountains was the low road. No one traveled it, or spoke of it. The town looked East, through the mountains. East was where trade was. East was the world. To the West, who knew? People had gone there once. But the green book had been written during a time of trouble in the village, and by following its rules, the village had grown and prospered. Look east, urged the green book. Do not take the low road.

Elsbeth shivered in the sudden cold and ran her hands over the thin bones of her ribs, the flatness of her stomach, her narrow legs. She ate rarely, her sister told her, but Elsbeth thought rather that she was like the threads of the loom, that she had grown only more like them with time, and that it was this oneness that allowed her her single pleasure.

For to see the shuttle in her hands was like nothing else, like air through air, like needles through needles.

The first sleep came and went. Elsbeth rose and set to her ledgers. She could do nothing with them, though, and in the midst of turning a page, she was pierced by the sudden remembrance of a dream.

A child was blowing a whistle louder and louder, and as the whistle grew in sound, the wind came through the teeth of the mountains and the town began to break.

Elsbeth was in the meetinghouse again, and the meeting continued. But all the townspeople were dressed as animals. They wore the clothes of men, but each had the head of some sheep, some cow, some dove or swan or rat. A mouse with a stick stood on the platform. A frog with a drawn dagger raised it up in a webbed hand. She felt at her own face, but there was nothing there to feel, and she was again in the snow at the day’s edge, where light was just breaking through a closing door.

I must speak to him, she thought.

— I must warn him, she said.

And the rustling of night that was listening at the window went away like salt over a shoulder.

Elsbeth dressed. She stood at the very center of the room. The tenth bell rang. She sat heavily on the floor. She stood again.

There are children among us, and in us, she thought. We are guided by what we have been just as much as what we are. If I was at his side so often in the past, should I not now go to see what has become of the present time?

And in a room below, Catha sat with Jaim talking, and Jaim said it had been declared by many that Pieter would be brought to trial.

Yet he disapproved.

— It was no fault of his, said Jaim slowly. Falk had it in for him from the first, and goaded him and goaded him.

Falk, the present mayor’s brother. The present mayor’s name was Galvin Falk and he hated no one so much as Pieter Emily.

Did we say there was no search on that day twenty-five years ago? Say then there was rather a hunt. Galvin Falk led some dozen men through the woods again and again, scouring the underbrush for some trail of blood or scent. Dogs were called, nets laid across saddles. Down they went, all down to the low road, where they stopped, gathering their horses’ necks close.

— If he’s gone further, then he’s damned.

And they rode back.

Firsk was not known to many, for the towns that had its trade were jealous of this trade, and would not share it. The truth is, the prices they paid Firsk’s traders were nothing to the prices their traders received from farther traders. This was the same as one went from town to town, farther and farther, with each place valuing the cloth, yet knowing still less about it.

Each spring, the traders of Firsk would reach the towns just beyond the mountain passes. They would come with many mules, laden down. They would set up a broad bazaar and sit cross-legged, smoking long pipes and muttering strange rhymes.

Much ill was said of these men. Jaim, for instance, knew they were disliked by those in the world. But they were honored too, for was it not their trade that meant the most?

Yet now the world had been dispelled by the drought.

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She dressed and wrapped a coat around her and, taking up a stick, went out into the night. First along the planked street, and then off into its ending, and down a stair to the fields beyond. The road was there, a slight ways off. There was hardly a moon, and the darkness was thick, but growing thinner. She stumbled to the road and set out in truth.

The mountains rose, etched as a matter of edges on the dim sky. The trees appeared in strength as she reached the edges of the farmland, the grazing meadows, and came in truth to where the town ended.

On she walked, stumbling sometimes in the muddling dark, off through the trees where the road lay. I am on the low road, she told herself, and a panic rose that fell away only when she recalled herself to what it was she had to do.

I must tell him.

And a light came then behind her eyes as she saw once again the landscape of days gone. They were digging a tunnel, she and Pieter, beginning in the hidden center of a bush, and passing away down into the cellar of Pieter’s father’s house.

Pieter was standing by the bush and calling to her. She held a spade in her hand.

— Elsbeth, he said. Come now, there’s little time.

Elsbeth shook her head. The sun was rising. Had she been asleep? The sun was rising, setting the dark aside in the eastern reaches of the sky. She thought she saw movement in the trees. Was it a man? First behind one tree, then out from behind a farther tree. She was sure of it.

Fifteen miles. Fifteen miles she’d walked and now the sun was rising. She was out beyond where anyone had business going, out beyond where anyone had gone.

The road rose. She looked over her shoulder, but could see no more motion in the woods. Just the rattling of birds, the stirring of insects.

The road rose and fell away down down down a long slope. The trees seemed to overtake the road on both sides, and the wood grew thicker and thicker as her eye passed farther into the distance. Yet there the road was again, and again, winking at turns.

And there, away on the right, a hill, and on the hill, a house.

— Pieter Emily, she said. And she set off again.

The house was simply built but strong, thick wooden beams all around, and a thatched roof of the old sort.

There were many narrow windows all around, and a door set in the ground that must lead to a cellar.

On the step at the front, a man was sitting.

— Elsbeth, he said. You’ve come.

How he could have passed so many years without changing, she couldn’t say, but it was true. She knew him immediately and completely. His eyes were narrow and gray. His face was thin and young. His hair fell wild from his head. He wore a simple coat, simple trousers and boots. He was not tall, he’d never been tall. He looked young at first, but there was something old too, something old and far that rose in him when he came to his feet.

— Pieter, she said. They are going to come for you.

He shrugged and looked away west.

— Will you come in?

Then up the steps and through the open door.

Shall I describe the fineness of Pieter’s little house? The walls were thick, with beds and cupboards, shelves and chairs, even a table all inset. The narrow windows drove the light like lace here and there patterned on each opposite wall, so that the house was strung through with a mist of sun.

Pieter lit the stove at the room’s center, and set water to boil.

— Sit now, he said. For it is no short way you’ve come.

— There’s been a meeting. They will come here, I don’t know when. They know you’re here now.

Her voice was full of concern.

— It is kind, he said, for you to worry, but let us speak of it no more.

And he set before her a basket of flat cornbread.

— We are old friends, he said, come together again. Let us speak of gladder things.

Elsbeth rose and crossed the room. Here and there were hung tools and devices. A long axe, a lantern, a drawknife, a pair of gloves that would cover the arm up to the shoulder.

And set upon a shelf, the green book.

She took it up. The cover was thick, the book was like a flat tablet, for it enclosed only three leafs within.

Pieter poured the water into a tea-pot, and brought out two thin porcelain cups.

— Where did you get all these things? You did not return to the town.

— Where did I get all these things? asked Pieter, lifting a saucer. It has been a very long time I have lived here alone, with no use for porcelain.

His eyes looked out as if through the wall.

— I will tell you a story, he said. A dog passes along the street. It sees a child. The child turns and looks in through a window, seeing a woman. The woman cuts herself with the sharp arm of a scissor, and cursing the scissor, sees her husband on a ladder at the far window, sees him and watches as a wind rises suddenly, inexplicably, and casts him off the ladder down into the street where the first person to reach him finds him dead.

Elsbeth narrowed her eyes.

— What do you mean?

— I will tell you a story, he said. A bird circles in the air, and sees with its length of sight a child crossing a stream, hopping from stone to stone. Someone is calling to the child, calling it back, but it reaches the far side, a field of tall grass. In a moment the grass is turned and grows into the shapes of some procession, a vast procession of dancing shapes that overtake the child and carries it away deeper and deeper into the field, until the procession vanishes and the grass is as it was, grass, standing grass, and the child is gone.

— I have been so long here, he said. With no one to speak to.

Elsbeth poured the tea, and tasted the cornbread. She finished the first and took another. Pieter smiled.

— What is that? Elsbeth asked.

For set in one wall there was a tiny bed, three feet long and two feet wide. It was made up with a quilt and a pillow, and even a small doll of rope and feathers lay on one side.

— There was a little boy, said Pieter, and he was born in the town. I came one day, keeping to the sides of things so no one could see me. I felt that if I brought the boy away with me, I could raise him as well as anyone. This was ten years ago.

— Cameron’s child? exclaimed Elsbeth. Mora Cameron’s child?

— I took him, I crept in the house and took him and carried him away. He was just born then, and I raised him myself. I took him everywhere with me through the wood, and carried him on my back. I taught him the songs of the morning, the long tales of night. I raised him as well as anyone could, as well as anyone. And he slept here, in the wall opposite my bed, where I could look in the night and see that all was well.

— But where is he? asked Elsbeth.

Pieter stood and a shadow passed over his face.

— He grew sick, he grew sick one day, and there was nothing could be done. He was dead by nightfall. I buried him out on the hill, with a stone for a pillow, and a name scriven on the stone and set beneath the ground.

— There was grief too in the town, when the child disappeared, said Elsbeth.

Pieter looked up and an unpleasant smile grew on his face.

— I think less of grief in the town, he said. Shall I tell you another story? A man goes walking in the woods and he meets another man, who he vaguely knows. He is guarded in his manner, perhaps even frightened. He has a weapon of some kind in his coat. He longs to have it in his hand, but there is no time for that, the strange man would see him reaching in his coat, would wonder why. And so they stand there talking and talking. I must get back to the farm, says the man. There is much work to be done. But the strange man lifts his hand. No, he says. No. No work now to be done, but you shall come walking with me. And so the men go walking further and further into the wood, and the wood changes. It changes from being of this year to being of another year, of no year. Do not leave me here, says the one. For I do not know the way back. But already the other is gone.

Elsbeth drank from her cup and the tea was hot and filled her with the far scent of oaks and trees in the deep wood.

She felt at once glad and safe, and also as if standing on a thin rope high above a flat country.

What am I doing here? she asked herself.

— I am sorry, she said, that I was no help to you when you fled the town. No one knew where you went, or even if you lived.

— Too long, he said. Too long ago to speak of.

— But they are speaking of it now in the town, said Elsbeth. They will come and take you. Don’t you understand? It’s not safe.

Pieter reached out his hand and touched her face.

— You can’t worry, not here.

And the worry fell away.

THEN MANY THINGS BETWEEN THEM WERE SAID.

Yes, in the day then there was the sitting in the house, the drinking of tea. There was the telling of stories, Elsbeth telling of her life, Pieter telling of his. There was the rising up, the out-of-doors, a walking in the woods.

— I was weaving, said Elsbeth, one day, a bolt of cloth, and there was no red in the thread, none at all, yet again and again, a red shape grew on the loom, small, here and there.

— I dreamt once, said Elsbeth, of a sea at the bottom of which our country lies. Those who live above take boats upon the sea and wonder at its depth, a depth so inconceivable that they dare not attempt it. They have myths and stories about the sea floor, but they know nothing of it. And here we think ourselves upon the highest plane, yet we stand only between things. There are seas here beyond the plains, and lands in the depths of those seas, just as we may look up through the slanting light and see the passing of ships in the heights of the sky.

— Have you, asked Pieter, seen this passing of ships?

— I have not, said Elsbeth.

— I have killed men, you know. Other than the two for which I fled. I have made the woods my own, and when others come there, I have come upon them and taken them, as I choose. I take animals in the woods, and I use their flesh for my table, their skins for clothing. I use their teeth for tools, their bones to build fences. When I have killed, I make a pile of stones, a cairn, and I set in my memory who it was, what it was that died there and how. My mind is shaped like a map of these cairns. My geography is the laying out of a great flatness peopled with cairns. One a bird, one a farmer, one a girl, one a deer. There are hundred, hundreds in the woods, for I have gone far and with great weight in my hands.

— There have been, said Elsbeth, some lost from the village, and no one knowing why.

But she did not feel any fear.

— Are you not afraid of me? asked Pieter.

— I am not afraid, said Elsbeth, not of you.

— Whether there is a name put to a place or not, still a place has a name, said Elsbeth. What do you call this place, or if you call it nothing, what does it call itself?

— I began, said Pieter, by walking around it twice. I began by discovering a place for a hidden field, a kind situation for animals. I began with winter here, and then spring, then summer, then fall, then winter again.

But I did not think to name it until my house had stood full ten years with no visitor.

Elsbeth smiled.

— That is a fine name, she said, House-Without-Visitors. But now there is a visitor.

— You are not a visitor, said Pieter. Nothing that’s mine is made without acquaintance of you.

Then they stood by the stream at the foot of the hill, where the roots of Lochen trees ran like a bridge here and there over it, and Pieter had made a bed for fish catching with the hands.

There was silver moss there.

Beneath a tree some distance into the forest, she could see a pile of stones.

— Who was it, she asked, died there?

A hare, said Pieter, the father of hares, the son of hares, an old hare, far gone through life. I caught him with a string trap and killed him with a knife.

— If I were to go first into a house of stone, and then into a house of wood, and then into a house of straw, and then into a bare roof set upon poles, and then to lie upon the empty ground beneath the sky with a blanket, and then even to cast the blanket aside and lie in the cold on the open ground, would you not think that I was making a grave for myself? For I can tell you that I have descended into what I am by throwing away the false edges of what I have been told. As I passed from house to house, the stone walls stayed with me, the wood supports, the pounded clay ground, the blankets, yet I threw them away. Everything you dismiss that is of use stays in the language of your hands. But I have seen your weaving, and I know you know the language of hands.

Elsbeth smiled and opened her hands looking down over them. They were thin hands with long fingers.

She thought of the darting shuttle that was so fine to hold, and of her shop as it stood now, empty in the town. There would have been no one to unlock it in the morning. Her workers would have come and gone. Someone would have called at her house, and found her absent. Catha would be wondering, where might she have gone. And there would be no answer. In the town there was no other place to have gone, nowhere verging into infinity, no place where one could not be found. Would eyes turn westward, to the wood, to the low road? They would not. No one thought of going on the low road. Only Catha might think she had done it, and she would tell no one.

— How is it that you live? asked Elsbeth. By hunting?

— I keep animals, and a field. I hunt in the long days, and sometimes at night. What you must understand is that when a person lives alone and sees no one, time is not like it is for others. There is so much time, so much time in the day I can’t tell you. I have lived whole seasons in a single afternoon. What can be done in a day can be years and years of work, and in thinking, the end can truly never come. I have sat staring in a pool of water for weeks, and risen, half dead, but thinking only longer on the thought I found in the depths. I have dreamt at night of lives unlived in which I lived, in which I was born and lived full fifty years, sixty years, seventy years before dying and waking back into this life. What wisdom comes from such experience? What light trails back through these thrown-open windows? I become more and more as the objects of my alone-ness grow into extensions of my living.

— And west? Have you gone west? asked Elsbeth.

— I have, said Pieter, and he would say no more.

— Stay here awhile, said Pieter, for I must fetch our supper.

But I am not staying, said Elsbeth. I must return to town.

— You can stay for supper, said Pieter. You must.

And Elsbeth nodded in spite of herself.

When he was gone, she looked furiously around herself. Why had she agreed? She would leave a note, saying she had gone, saying she had had to go.

But there was no paper to be found save in books. And Elsbeth would not write in a book.

She walked about the house. There was another room, she noticed, at the house’s back. She tried the door, but it was locked. She pushed against it, but it wouldn’t give.

I wonder, she thought, what could be in this room? For the house as it was was stocked with all that Pieter might need, and his bed was in the one room, his table, his tools. What could be in the spare room?

But the lock would not turn.

She saw that a bird was at the window. She went to the window, and opened it, and the bird did not fly away, but stood quietly, peering at her.

— What is it you want? asked Elsbeth.

She fetched a crumb of cornbread from the table and gave it to the bird. It took the crumb up in its beak and flew away.

What then could that mean? asked Elsbeth, and she sat out on the front steps in the posture she had seen Pieter assume as he waited for her.

An hour passed, and she felt her worry returning. She must get back to the town. This was no place for her. The man was mad. He must be mad. She would not be here when the town sent men for Pieter.

Up she got, and into the house. From her dress she tore a piece, and she wrote on it,

Gone back to town. I will warn you before they come. E.

She owed him that much at least.

And then she was out the door and across the field and on the road where night came to join her.

Back then by foot to wooden Firsk.

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— Elsbeth! cried Catha, as she saw her sister at the door.

— Elsbeth, she said again. I have been waiting all night.

Elsbeth came into the room. She was filthy from head to foot from walking the dirt road. She was as weary as she’d ever been.

— I know, said Catha. I know where you went. It’s plain on your face.

— It was a long walk, said Elsbeth.

— I will put water on for a bath. Change out of your clothes, and I’ll set out some supper. Poor thing.

And so Catha filled a bath, and made a supper, and when Elsbeth emerged and sat down at table, she ate a little.

— Speak, said Catha, for I’ll wait no more.

— I went to his house. He was there, alone, living alone. He has done. . terrible things. He admitted as much, though he can’t see it. He can’t see what’s wrong with the things he’s done.

The sisters looked at each other as though from far away.

— Do you understand? asked Elsbeth.

— More and worse happened today, said Catha. There was another meeting. Loren, Malin’s son, was out in a field. Malin said the field grew up around him and the boy was gone. Just like that, the boy gone. All the farmhands came, the field was searched clear from one end to the other, but the boy was gone.

— Cran’s boy Levin Mills saw himself in a mirror, turned old, and when his sister found him, she couldn’t comfort him. He’s convinced his body’s withering, and he can hardly draw a breath for fear.

— Dar Stane fell from a ladder, and his wife watching him. Fell to the street and landed on his head.

— Someone set fire to the Oulen’s place. It near burned to the ground, and the barn as well, but the fire didn’t touch the animals. They didn’t even notice it.

— Ann Severn can’t find her husband Tham. He went to gather wood, and hasn’t been seen. There’re a dozen stories, and a dozen more. People are angry. They’re setting out in the morning to take him. Galvin Falk and twenty others. My Jaim spoke against it, but he was shouted down, and there wasn’t much to say anyway, what with all that’s been happening.

— Falk was angry, angry as I’ve ever seen him. He said we could not stand to live with a murderer not fifteen miles away. He said that even if we did not judge ourselves, that our fathers and their fathers, and our children and their children, all these would judge us. There was a great argument, but when the sticks were passed around, most were for it.

— Four people dreamed it the first night, and seven the next. Everyone in town has dreamed the same dream, said Catha.

— What was it? Did you?

— No, said Catha. They dreamed of a wasteland, stretching into distance on all sides. At the center, a thin wooden ladder ascending out of sight through the clouds.

— But there’s this, said Catha. Of all in the town, only one was brave enough to climb the ladder, even in a dream.

— Who? asked Elsbeth.

— Dunough Lark. She climbed it hand over hand, and when she passed through the first cloud, she said there was a world in red, that frightened her. When she passed through the second, there was a world in blue that gave her a sadness she will never dispel. Yet when she passed through the third, she found herself in her own room, made lovelier and stranger than she ever had been.

— And was it true?

— None would have recognized her, but for her voice, which was the same, but quieted.

When Elsbeth woke it was well past noon.

— Have they left? she cried, and she knew that they had, that the mayor’s party had passed out along the road at first light.

Down the stairs she went. Jaim was there. He called out to her, but she ran on. On she went to the stable, where she hired a horse.

— Where is it you’re going, Mistress Grimmer? asked the stablehand.

But Elsbeth rode past him without a word.

Out onto the road and urging the horse on. She was a quarter of the way there, then more, when she heard a pounding of hooves ahead on the road. She drew off, dismounted, and led her horse into the woods.

In the world, there is a time when one feels a confederacy with others. That time may last a short while. It may last through all of one’s life. Elsbeth had felt that twice in this world, once with her sister, in a lasting bond, and once with Pieter. So unlike the others was she that she felt sometimes incapable even of speaking when out in public. The matter of greeting those who greet in the road was a huge complication, and she would go backways through the streets to avoid it. As a child, she had pretended there were two of her, Elsbeth, her parent’s daughter, and Elsbeth-made-of-shadows. Elsbeth-made-of-shadows could do what she liked, and did. It was she who befriended Pieter. The things they did were not good things, not always. Once, they cut off a horse’s hoof for no reason at all, and left it on the steps of the church.

Pieter was caught for that, but he did not say who had been with him, and Elsbeth had gone unpunished.

They had whipped and whipped him for that. Meyer the cart-driver, whose horse it was, was given way, and he had taken it.

The boy’d been held down by his father while Meyer laid into him. Elsbeth had watched, along with others.

How could they decide, she’d wondered, a penalty for the cutting off of a horse’s hoof? Who is smart enough in this world to know what that crime equals, to know what punishment absolves it? Something so absurd can have no correspondent.

Yet they’d whipped him and let him go, and his father had paid a price for the draft-horse.

They’d forced Pieter to put the horse down, just to show him the weight of what he’d done, but that was a lost act, for he’d killed the horse with care and even sad pleasure, stroking its face and quieting it, then firing a pistol into its head.

Who supposes any fairness is a fool, thought Elsbeth, and when Pieter went, back raw and bleeding, to his hiding place, it was she was there to clean his back and sit with him.

Off the road, then, Elsbeth drew. She pushed the horse further, and turned to look back.

Movement and dust. Along then, the mayor’s party, some twenty strong, riding slowly. Two and two carried a long pole, the mayor at the head, and from the pole hung a body, beaten and broken. On the pole a body hung. It was Pieter, stripped to his waist, slack with his mouth agog, chest blooded.

Falk’s face was triumphant. He was a large man, and he wore his happiness openly now. He did not look to left or right, or he would have felt Elsbeth’s eyes bore into him.

— You’ve killed him.

She dropped the reins and stepped forward.

Then the pole flickered. It flickered, and there was no one there, the horsemen were carrying an empty pole. She blinked and looked back. Pieter was again strung on the pole, slack in death, and then the horsemen were gone out of sight.

What was that? she wondered.

And a strange feeling made her say, I will continue to his house, to see what they have done.

The horse was waiting deeper in when she went to fetch him. He looked at her with his long horse eyes, and she felt that someone was looking through the horse’s eyes, that someone could see her there where she was. She pulled the horse’s head away from her, but it strained and turned and again it was looking at her.

— Come now, she said. Come along.

She rode on, but slower, and after a little while, came to where the road rose to overlook Pieter’s holding. The line of trees wound like bunching thread up and around, holding the hill in a green fist, and there,

there, the house was burned to the ground. Where she had sat yesterday was ashes. She rode closer, and as she rode, the house flickered, flickered and was there.

She urged her horse on. Smoke was coming from the chimney. The door was opening. Pieter was alive. She was sure.

Elsbeth climbed down from the horse and ran up to the steps.

— Pieter, she called. Pieter!

||||

— Elsbeth, said Pieter. Did I not tell you there was no worry here?

— But, I saw you, she said. I saw you on the pole.

— Some other man. Without luck. Perhaps not so clever as I.

— I saw you. It was you.

Pieter looked down at his feet.

— Those who came, said Pieter, felt they put me on the pole, felt they took me with them. They have seen my house burn. They have shown themselves to be that which they hate, that which they want to chase away out of the village. Well, there is a visiting that proceeds, that has proceeded this week in the town. Someone has been visiting, has he not?

Elsbeth was looking at her Pieter and her eyes were shining.

— I am glad, she said, that you are not on that pole. Whatever it means.

— Come and sit, said Pieter, for there was a supper laid out on the table. I will tend to your horse.

And he went out the door and down the steps. Through the window she could see his head laid against the horse’s head, though she could not hear his speaking there.

What is it you have to say to horses at evening? What understanding have you made?

She troubled him again and again with questions. How is it she had seen him on the pole. But he would say nothing about it, and would turn silent and cold, so she left off.

I will know in time all this, she thought.

And then Pieter was again with her, and serving the meat, which was a pale red meat, like venison. He had bread he’d baked, butter, cheese and fresh milk. She ate with a hunger she had never felt, ate and ate. Pieter ate too, and between them, they ate all that had been laid upon the table.

He showed her a silver glove he had made from the thinnest links.

— One wears it in the first hour of dawn, and chance goes a little ways with you on the road.

Scarcely do I believe it, thought Elsbeth, and Pieter smiled.

From a hollow place in the wall he took out a long crook. It was reddish in color, with streaks of white.

— Have you sheep? she asked.

— I have had sheep, he said, though none now.

The door to the outside was open and a cat came in.

Behind it was another cat and another.

— These go everywhere together, said Pieter. For they each know what’s best for one of the others, but never for themselves.

He gave Elsbeth a bowl and she poured milk for the cats and laid it on the ground.

— I will show you a thing now, said Pieter, as he lit the candles in the wall sconces.

He went to the door at the far end of the house and turned the handle, and beneath his hand it turned easily.

Elsbeth followed him in. He lit a candle and another and another, and the room was full of light.

What can be said of that room? There was a bed placed, as the others, in one wall. There was a broad window, widest of the house, looking out over the hill away from the road.

But most stirring, most unforeseen, most impossible of all, at the center of the room was an enormous loom, the best she had ever seen.

It was rooted to the ground upon legs like the legs of a young animal, sure in its strength. Its frame rose up, figured and etched. The wood was ebony, ebony all through.

— It can’t be, said Elsbeth. It’s made from a single piece of wood.

— It was brought here for you, said Pieter, many years ago, by a young man, building a house from his thought and wishes. He considered that perhaps Elsbeth might come one day out along the low road.

Then he brought out a bottle of warm drink, and they drank a glass together, and he left Elsbeth to her room, and left, closing the door.

And the first part of the night she spent running her hands over the loom, and taking up the thread that was at hand and stringing it.

And the next part of the night she slept in the bed that had been made for her, and it was hers then to lie in a deep place.

What can be said of waking in that house? That the dreams of the night before stood in turn to be examined, waiting with a patience unheard of?

Elsbeth remembered first:

A word learned by listening every day for years at a hole in the ground. Years and years passing and finally the word is said.

Then, all the through the town, all through the world one goes and no one can stand against one. The word is said, and houses are laid upon their sides, clouds form into veins that carry sight farther and farther than ever before. Can you see? asked the dream, the true depth of sight when one abandons the direction of one’s life and takes to a single task, takes to listening at a hole in the ground, years and years, and finally a word is said?

That was the first dream.

The second:

A room full of coats. A coat of bird feathers, a coat that is the skin of a man, a coat that is the skin of a bear, the scales of a fish, the skin of a cat, of a mouse, of a snake, of a mule.

Then out that room and into another, where three suns rise in the farther sky. Men devoid of color sit playing at chess on a hundred tables. The pieces move untouched from square to square, and smoke rises from the ground where feet touch.

— There is no dust here, says the man who stands directly behind and cannot be seen.

— Do you know what that means, for there to be a place without dust?

The third:

A grand theatre, built to hold an audience of all that were ever born and all that will ever die, but the arriving there has taken place far too soon, and no one has come. Then, the wandering up and down aisles, empty aisles, the choosing of a seat from thousands made thousands in the thousandth part. Balconies, boxes, side-seats, hiding places on the roof, stools set on the stage-side, chairs built into the machinery of the lamps and bells and curtains.

Alone there and walking and walking, sitting first in one chair and then another, whistling and singing. Speaking first softly, and afterwards with a loud voice, for it is no matter. No one has come. One is far too early for the proceeding of life, even in one’s own body.

To arrive too early even to live in one’s own body.

And then sleep again.

That was the third dream.

The fourth dream:

As though in morning, with little warning, a yellow-haired man came in through the window.

Pieter Emily rose in his small room. In his house there were but two rooms. He went into the other and lit the stove. The yellow-haired man was already there.

The yellow-haired man was standing at once in all the rooms of the house, standing at once in every field, upon every roof, sitting in the boughs of every tree, prone upon each running stream, each still lake.

You cannot escape me, said the yellow-haired man.

But all at once, there were two countries, then three, then four, then five, and Pieter Emily and his cottage were nowhere to be found, and search as the sun might, its rays were like arms without hands, and could not lift the earth to see what lay beneath.

That was the fourth dream.

Yes, Elsbeth woke and looked about her. The room was there, with the full light pouring through the windows, and the loom at the room’s center, strung like a harp, finer than ever. She sat at it, and felt the shuttle and how it sat upon her hand.

Then a knocking at the door.

— Elsbeth, will you come?

She rose and went to the door. Pieter was there.

— I must speak with you, he said.

Then they walked together the length of the house.

— Elsbeth Grimmer, said Pieter, and he looked at her but said no more.

He wants me to live here, thought Elsbeth.

And she thought of the loom, and how she had never seen a loom so fine. She thought of the feel of the place, like a house in a well to which no one can ever come. She could live here, she thought, and pass her days in weaving just as she would in town.

— Do you like the loom? he asked.

And she felt the truth of it. To leave her sister’s house, to leave her shop, to leave the town. . She could.

Elsbeth opened one of the narrow windows and leaned out so that the land beyond was all about her, the hill and the house and the room behind.

I will live here, she thought to herself.

And Pieter nodded.

— You have had many dreams this night, said Pieter. If you like I will tell you the meaning of one, but only of one.

— This was the dream, said Elsbeth. I had lost my legs in a threshing accident, and instead of legs I wore long stilts buckled to my knees. On these stilts I could make speed through the fields and so I was a carrier of messages like no other. My father was a wealthy farmer, a prince of sorts, and all those merchants who came to him would speak and wonder at the beauty of his broken child fluttering above the wheat on legs of wood. Call to me, I would say, call to me, but none would call. None called, and when my father grew old, the farm was mine, and I wore a leather coat and carried a sling and kept a watch over the fields in the long night.

— What you invent, said Pieter, is as telling as a dream.

— Do you say so? asked Elsbeth.

— The threshing accident was birth, the wooden legs the loom. Your father is the town, the messages the needs perceptible to you in thread. Those visitors are nothing, the mountains beyond. You have no hope of them, and never did. The leather coat, the sling, are a step with the left foot and the right as you come here to me to speak not in defense of myself, but to protect your childhood which seems now so far.

— And yet, said he, it is the good fortune I have awaited, so we shall call it what you like.

The day was early still, and the sun beneath its zenith. Pieter and Elsbeth went to the hill’s edge, where there was a well and a stone wall. The grass on either side of the stone wall was alike. It began and ended with no purpose.

— What is the purpose of this wall? asked Elsbeth.

— I built this wall, said Pieter, twenty years ago when I built the house, thinking of the day when we would walk out from the house and need a place to sit as I told you the necessities of your return.

Elsbeth smiled a smile of not-believing.

Then Pieter sat in a way that said, you need not believe me, but still it is true.

— You’ll go then back to the town to fetch some things. But if you are to come and live here, you must obey these few things.

He looked sharply into Elsbeth’s eyes.

— You must bring back no iron.

— You must say my name to no one, and say nothing of what you have seen.

— You must not sit in a chair or upon the ground when you are again in the town. Neither can you take food or drink.

— You must return here before the sun goes down, and you must bring back no more than you can carry in a single bag. There will be a new life for you here, with as many things as you desire. These things that you will bring will be the last of your old life.

Elsbeth nodded.

— And you must not be cut, or let a drop of blood out of you in the town. There is time still today. Go and return.

Elsbeth stood.

— I will bring no iron, she said. I will sit nowhere. I will say nothing of what I have seen. I will take no drink, no food. I will return before sunset, and I will take but a single bag. No blood will come from me while I am in the town.

Pieter wore a long coat of harsh canvas, buttoned on the side, and he had at his side a long knife.

— What will you do, asked Elsbeth, while I am gone?

— I’ll check on my field, give food to my animals, and set out in the woods.

— You must be here when I return, said Elsbeth.

— Have no fear of that, said Pieter, for I know every way in the wood, and can judge time from the limbs of trees.

Then they were parted, and Elsbeth rode away into the town, and when she looked back from a rise in the road what she saw behind her was a burned-out cottage on a ravaged hill, and she found that her clothes were dirty, as though she had slept the night on a bed of ashes.

|||||

After a short ride, Elsbeth reached the town. She saw it from a distance, its intricacy of wood and walkways, its rising of turrets and workshops. Smoke rose from dozens of chimneys, people leaned out windows. The warmth of the sun was here though it had not been with them on the hillside at the reasonless wall.

— Will I go back? asked Elsbeth. And then she thought of the loom, and her blood stirred.

I can, she thought, always return to the town one day. If I like, I can return after a month, after a week. I need not stay with Pieter forever.

But she saw in his face a hardness and she knew that what was binding to him would be binding to her.

At the stable she left the horse, and went on home.

Moll Ongar stopped her at a crossing.

— Elsbeth, she cried out. Elsbeth have you heard?

— What is it, Moll?

Moll’s face was red with the news.

— The mayor, squeaked Moll, Falk’s hand was cut off at the wrist. He reached into a cupboard and when he pulled his arm out there was blood everywhere. I mean, they brought in the body of Pieter Emily today, and hung it on the gate. I said so myself, I said it was bad luck, and now see what’s happened.

— Where is the body? asked Elsbeth.

— The main gate.

Elsbeth stood looking up at the arch. There was blood there, where the hook was, but no body.

Took him down an hour ago.

— What?

Elsbeth turned.

— What did you say?

An old man was sitting there in the shade.

— I said they took him down an hour ago. I’ve been sitting here all day. I watched them bring him, watched them hang him up, and I watched them come an hour ago, take him down and drag him off to burial.

— Where would that be? asked Elsbeth.

— Where do you suppose? asked the old man.

He spat on the ground.

— I don’t know, said Elsbeth, the graveyard?

— Would you want him there? asked the old man, with decent folk?

Elsbeth narrowed her eyes.

— Where are they burying him?

— Why do you care anyway? said the man suspiciously.

Another old man came out of the inn and sat down on the bench next to the first old man.

What’s the news? he said.

— This woman’s wanting to know where they took Jansen’s son.

— Jansen’s son?

— Yeah, where they took him.

— Doesn’t she know that?

— Seems not.

The second old man looked up at Elsbeth.

— Haven’t seen you in a time, he said. Elsbeth Grinner. My son says the shops been closed last few days.

— Clef Carr, tell me this minute, said Elsbeth. Where is Pieter Emily being buried?

— Buried him already, said Carr. In a plot by the church, face down like a suicide, from shame.

No one was at the house when she arrived. Elsbeth went up to her room and laid out a bag. She changed her dirty dress for another, and filled the bag with a few things, then a few more. She set out all she’d like to take with her, and saw that it was more than would fit in the one bag.

— I could take two, she said. Two would not be so bad. He couldn’t object to two.

But when she left the room, it was with the one bag, and having left the best of her things behind.

On the stairs, she heard the door creak. Catha came in.

— Elsbeth, she said. Elsbeth, where have you been?

And Elsbeth looked at her and said nothing.

— Elsbeth, she said, where have you been?

— I went, said Elsbeth, to the mountain pass, to see if it’s clear, to see if anyone come from the outside.

Catha shook her head.

— That’s a lie, she said. What are you doing with that sack? Where are you going now all dressed to travel?

Elsbeth looked at her feet.

— What’s going on? said Catha. Last night I dreamt the strangest dreams, so clear I could remember all when I woke. And when I did, I went to your room to tell you, for I know you had the same, but you were not there, and your bed was made.

— What did you dream? asked Elsbeth.

— I dreamed of a opera house like the ones in the great cities of the East, a grand place, as large as a city itself, and made to hold all that were ever born, or ever will be. Yet it was morning, and the opera is an evening’s word. It was morning and I came there all alone to walk among the seats as through a forest of pines, where the needles make a bed and all’s quiet. There were no hands to hold, and so I held my own and went through the arcades, the balconies, the anterooms, calling out, but no one came. The roof of the opera was painted like the sky, and changed like the sky, changing as I moved, and ceasing when I ceased. All the lights were lit, great lamps burning at every interval, in every unpeopled room. I felt that you were there, that you had been there.

Said Elsbeth,

— I was there, with you, and you with me, but we could be no comfort to each other.

— And this? asked Catha, her hand taking in the sack, the traveling clothes.

— There’s no comfort for me here, said Elsbeth, only craft and continuing.

— Do you know, said Catha, taking her sister in an embrace, that they killed him?

Catha began to cry.

— They killed him, she said, and hung him on the gate.

To this Elsbeth said nothing.

— Where have you been? asked Catha. Oh, you will not tell me. Then go, and go, and I shall watch you from behind your shoulder, as I always have.

— And I you, said Elsbeth.

On the stoop she set down her sack, for a thought had pricked her. What of iron had she taken unwittingly?

And from her sack she drew a penknife, from her sack she drew three needles, from her sack she drew a scissor, all gone there unknown.

She left these on the doorstep, and made to go. But Catha called to her from the door.

— Are you not hungry? Let me make you a meal before you go. Let us sit and have a drink.

And in Elsbeth then a hunger greater than she had ever felt. Yet she dismissed it. Then in Elsbeth a thirst as for the sea.

He said no food and drink. To have one drink alone. . It might be all right. She went into the house, and Catha poured a glass and a glass of wine.

— Sit, said Catha.

— Oh, said Elsbeth, I cannot.

And she turned away from her sister, standing there with the two glasses.

— Goodbye.

Then she fled through the door, and as she did a nail caught at her.

Her sleeve tore and the nail was against her skin. But it did not cut.

Elsbeth breathed and closed her eyes.

— Goodbye, she said again.

And then she was out in the day and the day was soon to finish. Bag over her shoulder, she made her way down to the stable. I will go another way, she thought, than the usual. I do not want to see anyone at all.

So she took the alley behind the main street, and went along behind shops and houses. As she drew near the stable and the town’s edge, a voice called out.

— Elsbeth. Elsbeth Grinner.

She turned. It was the priest.

— Father, she said.

— My daughter, what ails you?

He came up, Father Rutlin, and took her chin in his hand.

— What ails you? he said.

— I am as well as I may be, said Elsbeth.

She tried to pull away, but he would not let her.

— Elsbeth, he said, Elsbeth, there is a skin on you. Another skin, that you cannot see.

He ran his hand over her face and along her arm.

— There is another skin. It is between you and the world. I shall take it away.

— No, said Elsbeth. Do nothing!

But Rutlin held his hands at her temples and spoke beneath his breath, and when he let her go, he drew something off her that left her weak in the legs and arms.

— Come tomorrow, said Rutlin, I demand it.

And he fixed her with his eye.

The light of the sun was lying on its side and coming here and there through the houses and walls.

Elsbeth looked helplessly back and then broke away.

— Elsbeth, he called. Come tomorrow. Heed me.

||||||

On down the road on horse, on horse down the low road as the road sank and the sun sank, and a weight was upon her.

He must let me in, she thought. He must.

On she went, and evening drew near. Yet as she came down the side of the last hill, the sun was in the sky, still above the trees.

I am in time, she thought, and she urged the horse on.

The cottage appeared before her in ashes, as it had been. It lay ahead, in ashes. Up the hill she came, and down from the horse. The cottage was in ashes.

— Change, she thought. Change. Flicker and be here.

But she came on horse, and then she came on foot to the cottage, and the ground was ash. The cottage was ash. She walked about in the ashes, and moved them with her feet. The horse went off to graze where it had been the morning before. And the sun was gone from the sky, and she laid down in the ash and wept, and fell into sleep, and this is what she dreamed:

She was sitting at the loom, the black loom, strung as it had been by her the night before. She began to weave, and she wove faster and faster, and the room began to spin. She wove and she wove and a pattern grew, and she could see what it was in the pattern, rising from her hand.

A red blot growing, and then it was a fox, and a wood grew about it, and hills, and a road. A party of horsemen could be seen, and a pole they were carrying, a man hung from it. In the distance, a town of wood, a box of wood, a town like a box of wood. Three suns in the sky, each weaker than the one before. And at the edge of the town, a man with a woman’s skin in his hand. Then the loom cracked in half and broke to the floor, and Elsbeth woke.

Yes, morning bright all about her, and Elsbeth woke, lying in ash, covered in ash, holding the tapestry in her hand that was the record of all that had passed, and on the near slope her horse stood, nosing at the grass, and looking up now and then to see if she was yet awake.

THE END