The Dragon's Tapestry

The infant turned her head to Grondil’s breast, searching for milk. “Already you have nursed on death’s milk, poor wee one,” she said touching the tiny fingers. From her midwife’s stores she drew, knowing she should not, a cloth dug. She soaked it in a pail of settling goat’s milk and offered it to the baby who suck­led noisily. Some hard place inside Grondil relented, and from that moment she loved the child and knew the child’s destiny.

“Marwen you shall be called,” she whispered.

She went back to her loom, placed the infant in her lap and began to weave once more.

Along the top like a border, she wove the sign of the staff. When it was done, she dug a hole in the dirt floor of her kitchen, and wrapping the baby’s tapestry in oilcloth, she placed it where no one would find it.

Chapter One

After mortal law there is the law of the gods. It is in some worlds referred to

as magic.

—Tenets or the Tapestry 

Marwen hefted the waterjar filled with spring water and turned to go home. This one chore she detested less than others, for she could ramble and dawdle in the hills and be alone for a time.

Marwen had always known that the hills of Marmawell were enchanted. She wondered that none of the other villagers could see it. Softly grassed, like fur, they were alive to her, pulsing with a molten heart. She knew each rise and swell, each rounded pro­file. Some hills were no more than fleshy mounds, shoulders and hips or cleft like breasts; some had faces that spoke to her of spellbound princes doomed to see without blinking the passing of the eons; some were moldering giants covered by a thin layer of dust, with rocks protruding in a row like spines; and some, strange nurseries with boulders nestled like great eggs in the grasses.

In the warm soft light of the dawnmonth, the dew burnished the slopes of grass and gleamed on yellow beegems. Even the insects flew past her swift and straight, their flight purposeful in the dawnspring morning. Marwen faced the wind, which blew straight and hard and low along the ground. She spread her arms and knew she was the first obstacle the wind had met for many furlongs, and so it would know it was wind again.

She could scarcely remember now the long months of winter-dark. It seemed to her as if her life had begun only this day, for at last Council Grondil had kept her long promise to make Marwen her apprentice when she came of age in her sixteenth sun. Grondil was the Oldwife of Marmawell, one of those women in whose order was found the last vestiges of magic and power in all Ve. Their task as Oldwives was to weave the tapestry for each child at birth, their gift to interpret the tapestry for all who asked. In each town and village, the influence they wielded was great, for their hand was over wedding feast and mourner’s fast alike.

No one in Marmawell dared murmur when Grondil announced her intentions and her adept. From the time Marwen had been a young child, she had shown a predilection for magic: a pink flower stroked into purple before the eyes of the other children, a dream come true, pictures fashioned of hearthsmoke that van­ished but not before all had seen. None dared murmur, for Grondil loved her young charge, and there would be no swaying her. Many whispered among themselves that the girl was unseemly in the use of her talent, but, if the truth be known, they feared her precocity. A few grumbled that it would be bad luck, that she was not Grondil’s true daughter and that she had no tapestry to validate her calling, the people of Ve being of long and lawful tradition. They said she had no tapestry at all and thus no soul—what could the magic be in the hands of a soulless one?

But it was done and Marwen rejoiced. Her hand went down to the beautiful tapestry pouch at her side. At one’s apprentice­ship, one was considered old enough to carry the tapestry, and Grondil had put many hours of work into Marwen’s pouch. Marwen had been so long among the villagers without a tapestry that the villagers scarcely thought it worth quarreling about when she had begun to wear the pouch with nothing to put in it, though some had glowered and gossiped.

“Someday,” Grondil whispered when she had tied it to Marwen’s waist, “someday may it be filled.”

The waterjar became heavy on her shoulders, and at the top of the next rise, she stopped to rest and breathe in the scent of the village spice gardens far below.

From here the round thatched roofs of the village looked like burrs on the smooth sinews of the valley foothills, but Marwen preferred the way the village looked in winterdark. Then the thatched roofs, glowing with firelight and light pouring from the east windows, looked like bleeding moons.