Martine Bates-Leavitt
The Dragon's Tapestry
To Larry, who was the first to believe
Faerie contains many things ... besides dwarfs, witches, trolls, giants, or dragons: it holds the seas, the sun, the moon, the sky; and the earth, and all things that are in it: tree and bird, water and stone, wine and bread, and ourselves, mortal men, when we are enchanted.”
Prologue
Grondil, the Oldwife, felt Srill’s eyes upon her, felt the young woman listening intently to every word she said. Sometimes a movement, a breath, the slightest change, and Grondil would stop and, with her hand on Srill’s belly, would measure her pain, share it. The magic felt strong.
“The child’s life thread is a long one,” Grondil said, measuring out the first of the threads to be laid beside the inkle loom in the order that she would need them. She did not see Srill smile. The warp had already been wound around the pegs in readiness, but her hands would need to be quick in order to finish the tapestry before the child was born.
For years, since the death of her mother, Grondil had been alone, but during a birthing there would often be many hands to help and her house would be full. For Srill who had no husband, however, there would be no help and no hands but Grondil’s own to deliver the child and work the tapestry. It was dangerous having no witness to the tapestry. If it were lost or destroyed, it could not be remade. But Srill had seemed almost glad when she had come to Grondil, full of pain and joy, alone.
Grondil’s fingers felt heavy and clumsy as she passed the shuttle through the sheds of the loom. Her head felt light, her neck muscles tense. She had known Srill a little, though the girl was younger. She was a quiet thoughtful lass, slow to speak like her father, dutiful and dogged like her mother, and lacking Grondil thought, the ability to laugh. But Grondil admired her, for when she spoke in her soft voice, never in gossip, everyone listened and often agreed. Srill was devout, always attending to the magic, and was kind to Grondil. One day a black-haired traveler had come through the village—what had his name been?—a lithe and lively poet with a voice like summer wind, and before he went away, he had left a child in Srill. Never mind what the villagers said, Grondil would do her best for Srill in the tapestry making. Every child received a tapestry at birth. Without it one had no soul. But for Srill’s child Grondil would do her best work.
The tapestry was everyone’s most treasured possession. Some said the symbols woven into it predicted one’s destiny, others said they guided agency. But all believed that each symbol and design was to be carefully understood and followed. The tapestry was a sacred thing, each one a poem of prophecy not to be displayed, shown perhaps only to loved ones or to the Oldwife. At one’s death the Oldwife would fold the tapestry and place it under the head of the corpse so that the spirit could carry it and with it find safe passage to the lands of the dead. Only two had Grondil seen unfulfilled. Remembering those two times made her shudder.
Grondil uttered a brief spell on her hands and searched her mind for a Song. At first the words came to her lips clumsily, whispered and toneless:
The walls seemed to fall away, and Grondil was in an abyss of magic. She felt safe here, having been here many times and knowing that in the mind of the magic her will was not her own. The abyss was deep, but this time she went deeper than she had ever been before, deep into the ancient voids where the oldest magic boiled. Grondil went white-blind with tears in the joy of it. She stopped to let the tears dry in her eyes and to look at Srill. The young woman was still, her brow knit in concentration, her breath coming in soft pants, her lips oddly twisted. Grondil gave herself up to the tapestry making, allowing the magic to use her. No sooner had she done this than a picture began to fill her mind: the seven moons of Ve, symbolizing womanliness and beauty. The child would be a girl. She thought of the verse she had learned as a child to remember them by:
She portrayed them as she had last seen them in winterdark: Epsilon, a great airy ball of celestial sapphire, Opo and Non like two pink eyes askew above the horizon, Orbica like a jade bowl in the star-sugared sky.
As the moons began to take shape, Grondil sang her soft chant. She tell capable of her calling, aware of the magic that used her in fathom the being of this new baby and to speak its destiny.
After the moons came flowers, sunrise-colored humelodia and brilliant white ice gozzys. Grondil wondered for a moment why the two appeared together, the one symbolizing life and the other death. Other symbols came: a crown, a key, a rare and beautiful tree such as she heard grew in the mountains of Verduma.
Time dissolved until she felt the warmth of the estwind on her back and arms through her spidersilk.
Hours had passed.
The Song died in her throat, and Grondil realized that she was thirsty, but there would be no food or water until the tapestry was completed upon the baby’s birth. As her own voice became still, she heard Srill’s breath come in rageful gasps. Grondil looked at her. Rivulets of sweat on the young woman’s temples ran into her hair, her eyes were unseeing and her hands were white knots of muscle. Grondil saw but only as if from a great distance. Muttering a spell of comfort, she went back to the tapestry, to the little world she was creating in color and thread.
The magic had never been so strong with her. Everywhere she looked she knew more clearly than ever before the names and beings of each object that fell into her vision. She wondered and waited for the image that would be the next part of the tapestry.
It was a mountain, a true mountain of Verduma, peaked in snow and cloud, a god’s fist of bare jagged rock. Long life the mountain often symbolized, but Grondil had only seen Venutian hills woven into the tapestries.
She began to record it in detaiclass="underline" a tract of snow, a rock, a patch of dirt ... until it almost seemed as if she were there, the pebbles and plants beneath her feet....
Somewhere, she knew, her body still sat before the inkle loom, and her fingers, aided by spells, threaded in the image of the mountain. But Grondil was here. She was looking down into a shadowy valley, a valley that had appeared only as a streak of black on the tapestry. There was no wind, only an airless cold that breathed up from the valley. It was not dark but twilight, the stars pale. A scabbing lichen stained the raw-edged rocks at the lip of the cliff, and the smell of burning filled her nostrils.
“You come by an unknown path,” she heard a voice say slowly, a voice that sounded like wind in the grass.
Grondil turned around, her back to the abyss.
“Serpent!” she whispered.
A vast scaled creature haunched before her, lean-loined and diaphanous-winged. A beautiful curl of blue fire from its mouth burned in the air a moment and was gone.
“Who are you? Why have you brought me to this place?” Grondil asked.
“It is I who should ask, ‘Who are you?’” the Serpent hissed in a voice like wind in fire. “This is my prison. You are the intruder here.” The creature blinked its eyes slowly. “But no, I think I know you now—you weave the tapestry of one who will be mine.”