Verdandi laughed and kept weaving and asked, “What of the present, then?”
Camille looked at the golden sunlight twisting down onto the spindle and being spun into invisible thread by the golden spinning wheel. Then she glanced at the thread on the tapestry aweave. Finally she said, “In spite of the golden sunlight and the many hues I can see on that single bit of weft, I would think that the color of the present must be the same as the color of a flash, since both exist for but this moment.”
Again Verdandi laughed and then said, “Urd will enjoy your company.”
“Urd?”
“My sister, and as you have rightly surmised, she lives downstream. To you she will seem much older than I, though to me she seems much younger.”
Camille nodded and said, “And where might I find this sister? — Other than just downstream?”
“Answer me this riddle,” said Verdandi. “Caught on the cusp of ago and to be and trapped forever in the eternal now, what am I?”
Camille glanced out at the waterwheel turning in the River of Time. “You are the Present.”
“And a present you shall have,” said Verdandi, tilting her head toward the loom. “My finest golden shuttle; take good care of it, and do not yield it to anyone except perhaps near the end, for then it may do you some good.”
“But, my lady, what if you need it?”
“I have others, my child, though not fashioned of gold; hence, you must take this one, else Faery itself might fall.”
Sighing, Camille stepped to the loom and when the thread came to an end, the shuttle flew into her hand, while another did take its place.
Camille turned back to Verdandi. “Again I ask, my lady, your sister Urd, where can I find her?”
With a flick of her eyes, Verdandi glanced at the skylight, where the sun passed above. And with her right hand she gestured downstream and intoned:
“Ebon is the Oblivion Sea,
A gape of darkness where all things flee,
There binding time my sister will be.”
Again Verdandi glanced at the skylight above, and she said, “And this I will tell you as welclass="underline" when you leave the banks of time’s flow, then you will lose the stream.”
And in that very moment the trailing limb of the sun exited from the zenith, and so vanished Verdandi and loom and spinning wheel all, leaving Camille and Scruff alone in the ancient mill.
And the river flowed and the wheel turned and the great bhurstones ground on.
30
Some three and a quarter swift candlemark days after leaving the mill and continuing on downstream, at a candlemark dusk, Camille stopped and made camp, the second such stop she had made along the River of Time, and again she and Scruff rested through an ordinary night. When dawn came, she and Scruff broke fast, and then onward they pressed, swift days passing with every candlemark, blossoms fading, vanishing, splits fissuring the stave. Camille paused now and again to eat or drink and to feed her hungry and quite confused sparrow, for to the wee bird it seemed no sooner had day come than night and sleep quickly followed. Another fifteen and a half candlemarks passed, and Camille and Scruff spent another night acamp, stars slowly wheeling through the vault above, following a bright waxing moon some two days past half-full.
When morning came, once again Camille and Scruff took up the trek, and some ten candlemark days later, at a turn ahead, high stone bluffs loomed on either side of the river, a gorge through which the flow ran. Toward this ravine Camille went, the swift day growing with every step. As she drew nigh, the sun passed through the zenith, and Camille could see a dark opening in the near-most wall.
“Scruff, I believe yon is the place whither we are bound, for no doubt ’tis ‘a gape of darkness,’ and Verdandi did say:
“ ‘Ebon is the Oblivion Sea,
A gape of darkness where all things flee,
There binding time my sister will be.’ ”
Toward this gape Camille went, and she came to where the shore turned to flat stone, as if all the soil had been scrubbed down to the primal bedrock itself. Along the stone she travelled, the swift sun trailing down the sky, its candlemark pace matching her strides. Finally, as the rapid day came to late afternoon, Camille threaded through a scatter of boulders to reach the breach in the sheer stone wall. She looked inward; a cavern receded into blackness beyond, and there was no sign of a weaver or a loom or a spinning wheel.
“Well, Scruff, just as we waited at the mill for Verdandi to appear, so shall we wait here for Urd. If I am wrong, then on the morrow we will go onward and hope to find another gape.”
And so they waited at the mouth of the cave, Camille and Scruff, as the sun gradually edged down the sky. A candlemark passed and then another, and finally the sun dipped into the horizon.
And still they waited…
Time eked forward…
Scruff scrambled into the high vest pocket, preparing to bed down for the oncoming night.
And the moment the last of the sun disappeared “Oh, help me, help me. I have lost my bobbin, and woe betide the world if I find it not, for history itself will be unraveled, and all will become undone,” wailed a white-haired crone, crawling around on the bedrock beside a golden spinning wheel near a silent loom.
And the loom itself held a great tapestry, completely visible to Camille, but instead of the fabric being wound about the cloth beam, the tapestry trailed from the loom and across the smooth stone and disappeared into the darkness of the cavern.
And there beside Camille at the mouth of the cave, a cursing, hairy little man struggled to pull great lengths of the tapestry out from the gape and toward the River of Time, for he would cast it in.
“Where did you last have it?” cried Camille as she sprang forward to aid the crone.
“In my hand, here at the spinning wheel,” keened the ancient woman. “But I dropped it and it rolled away, and now I cannot find it.”
Camille searched the bedrock about the golden wheel, yet she saw no spool. Even as she searched, she frowned in concentration. “Wait a moment,” she called. “The stone here is not level, but slopes down toward-”
Quickly, Camille scrambled to the loom and below, where once again, though she could not see them, she heard the sound of one or two other looms aweave. Yet her purpose was not to locate other looms, but instead to-“I have it!” cried Camille, snatching up a bobbin partially wound with black thread, and she scrambled out from under and handed it to the crone.
“Clever girl,” cackled the old woman, smiling a toothless smile and casting Camille a sly glance; the ancient’s eyes were entirely black. The crone mounted the spool to the spinning wheel. Then from the spindle, she grasped between thumb and forefinger what seemed to be a tendril of shadow, a tendril which came from the blackness of the cavern itself. The ancient fed the tendril through the hook, then somehow tied it to the black thread on the spool. She gave the wheel a sharp spin, and then sat down at the loom, and it began frantically weaving as the woman stared with her jet-black eyes into the cavern’s ebon gape.
At that moment the hairy little man cursed and vanished.
“Another agent of Chaos, I presume, and brother of Uncertainty and Turmoil,” said Camille.
“Aye,” replied the crone. “ ’Twas Obscurity: enemy of the past.”
Camille glanced at the breastbeam. Carved thereon, as she expected, were runes spelling out the name Urd.
“Lady Urd, ’tis you I’ve come to find, sent by your sisters.”
“I know, child, yet let me weave. We will talk when I have caught up. In the meanwhile, break your duskfast.”
Of a sudden, before Camille appeared a clay bowl, and she took it up and frowned at the contents: it was filled with what at first she took to be a soup, yet it was pulpy and green, and seemed to be much like slime one would find on a pond. Even as Camille’s mouth turned down at the thought of consuming such, Urd said, “Eat up, child, for it is one of the oldest meals in the world.”