The Dragon's Tapestry

Grondil began to run. She ran through the leafless trees, jumping over the whitened bones of broken tree limbs, weaving between bleached saplings that leaned toward the dim light like starving things. Fragments of fall’s left-over season still clung to the branches and crumbled as she brushed them. A scream seemed to come from the valley. She fell, and as she fell the dis­tant peaks became more distant until they were like the image woven on a tapestry, and it was Srill’s screams that filled Grondil’s ears. Her hands were again her own, though they con­tinued to work outside her will.

“A dream, a dream,” she whispered aloud to comfort herself, but before the words were spoken, she knew it was not a dream and that this deeper magic had taken her to a true place.

The tapestry before her was almost complete, as was Srill’s labor. Grondil stared at the tapestry, horrified. How could she put this mountain of shadows and half-death into the life of this new child? She looked at Srill who shuddered and was still as the pain eased for a moment. She smiled feebly at Grondil.

“My baby ... will she be great and good?”

Grondil said nothing. She turned back to the tapestry and forced her hands to weave ... weave ... weave the sign of the wingwand, which was the sign of power, of magic, the sign of the Oldwife. Perhaps with this lesser magic, Grondil’s own magic, the child would have some power against the dragon or better, power to fulfill her tapestry and avoid that land.

Far away she heard the dragon’s laughter. She knew it would not be enough. Only the wizard’s sign, the sign of the staff, was greater, and only one child could receive that sign—the wizard’s child. Grondil thought of the traveler, a Verduman she thought, from his dark coloring, and she remembered the laughter in his songs. Once she had surprised herself by allowing him to take and read her book, her Songs of the One Mother, and when he returned it, he had drawn dragons in all the margins. In that moment she knew that the poet had indeed seen a dragon, for the drawings were true. She remembered his eyes, how beneath the laughter one day, she thought she had seen a deep sadness. All these things filled Grondil’s mind, numbing her awareness of anything else while she threaded in a wingwand, a white arthro­pod with bloodred eyes. Then Srill called out: “The child is born! Help me.”

Grondil stood on weakened legs.

“Peace, Srill,” she said. Her fingers shook as she cleared the baby’s mouth of mucous, tied the cord and cut it with a white-hot knife. Wrapping the child in a warm blanket, Grondil put the baby to Srill’s breast. The child sucked lustily, and Srill fell asleep quickly and heavily with the child in bed beside her.

Grondil became more aware of her surroundings, above all the smell of sweat and blood. Intense fatigue made her legs tremble, and she sat down at her loom. She knew she should tie off the tapestry immediately after tying the umbilical cord, but her fingers were too weak, and at last she dozed with her head on the base of the loom.

While she slept she dreamed, and in her dream she saw the poet, the father of the babe. He was walking away toward a land of mists and twilight, and in his hand he held a staff, a wizard’s staff.

A soft shuffling step at the doorway woke Grondil. She did not move. She had heard this step before: a mild crippled gait that was slow and sure. It was the Taker, the old mistress of death. Twice or three times Grondil had seen her. But this time she was too tired, and she feigned sleep, still leaning uncomfort­ably against the loom. She waited for the footsteps, now belong­ing to two, to leave her house. With a great weariness, Grondil slept again.

When the baby wailed two winds later, Grondil woke with pain in her head and neck but feeling rested. She felt no sadness as she administered to Srill not the rites of new motherhood but the rites of the dead. As she spoke the Death Song, she remem­bered the depth of the magic into which she had fallen while doing the child’s tapestry, and she remembered the dragon’s laughter and the dream of the poet carrying a staff. Gently she picked up the baby. Her cry was deep and sad. Of course it could not be, but then Grondil was astonished for she saw tears on the baby’s face. Infants produced no tears. Then another tear trickled down the baby’s cheek—Grondil’s own.

The child’s mother was dead, and with no father’s house to claim the child, she would be left in the hills where surely the Taker, with her shuffling crippled feet, would find her and gath­er her up into her stiff arms and take her to the babe’s mother.