Grondil shivered in the cold windless air. Beyond the dragon she could see a wasteland of black rock thinly covered with grass. To the left was a forested area that stretched to the mountains and climbed to cloud-misted peaks. Trees. She had read about them, heard about them. There were no such trees in Venutia. But even the trees she noticed only vaguely, for the wonder of the dragon filled her vision.
The dragon spoke: “In the valley live those spirits whose tapestries are unfulfilled at the time of their deaths. I gather them like jewels to my kingdom. They are my treasure. The child and her father will be my most precious gems.”
Grondil looked furtively at the creature. Her stomach felt heavy and sick, as if it were filled with a cold stone.
“The souls that come here labor on, trying to fulfill their destinies, but it must be done without hope, for I am their king, a jealous master, and I love them. This child will be the jewel in my crown and will establish my throne, for there will be no one else to withstand me. Once there were many dragons in Ve. There shall be again.”
The dragon arched its sinuous neck, and a blazing breath of fire billowed into the sky. In its cold yellow eyes, Grondil sensed the weight of its evil, and she knew that her gentle powers were nothing against it.
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.
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.
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.