The Dragon's Tapestry

“Such a sorry thing you are, Mothball,” she said. “Eat, eat.” Her words seemed muffled and her voice small on the far-stretching slopes. There was not another man or beast for as far as the eye could see, and Marwen had never felt so alone.

As Mothball grazed and Cudgham-ip harvested insects, Mar­wen rested on the hillside beside the spring. She thought of Camlach and that, if only she could believe it, he loved her. Her own love for him was emerging from her heart as a brilliantly-hued newborn wingwand emerges from its shell. She thought of Grondil and ached for her council. She rolled onto her stomach and pressed her cheek against the earth. She stretched out her arms and grasped the earth with her hands, remembering the dragon like a great winged cloud, blacker than the storm clouds, moving across the sky and speaking her father’s name.

“Oh, Mother,” she whispered into the dust, “beautiful One Mother—the Oldwife Grondil told me that I was promised to you and to your children, the gods. But what am I that you should want me? Could it be that I am...?” She stopped, unable even to say the words. “I am small, Mother, and weak, and I am lost, knowing not the way I should go, nor what I should do, having no tapestry.”

For a long time, Marwen lay very still, listening. She heard the pulse of the earth’s heart far beneath her and remembered a time when she had wondered if it beat for her. Then her life had only one course. Now the future had become shrouded. It stretched before her, vast and pathless, every direction ending in fear and failure. Then she had dreamed of finding a wizard who did not exist; now she sought in reality a wizard who was afraid to free the dragon and who might, wonder of wonders, be her father. Then she had one passion—her magic; now there was also Camlach, he a prince and she, or so Camlach thought, a soulless one. Perhaps they were right, perhaps she had been without her tapestry so long that her soul had blown away on the wind, perhaps it was her soul that piped tunelessly in the folds of the hills. She listened, her eyes dry.

After a time she lifted her head. She had heard this lilting tuneless voice before. It was the clear water of the spring. Remembering the advice of the grandfather stone, she crawled to its edge and looked into its depths, and in a moment, bright and bold, beneath a quivering layer of water, appeared a three­ dimensional world of mountains and sky and grass and flowers. Marwen cried out in wonder and reached down her hand to touch the little weedsheep that grazed on the mountainside, but her hand entering the water disturbed the picture, and it van­ished in ripples.

“No, come back,” she laughed, and when Cudgham-ip came close to the water to drink, she shooed him away. She stayed very still until the water was as clear as a mirror, and the little world was again beneath the surface of the spring.

There was a shack on the mountain slope. Flowers grew wild around the shack, in the windows and on the roof, and Marwen could see each tiny flower in exquisite detail. In a moment her eye was drawn elsewhere, for a party of wingwands came flying with great speed over the lower end of the slope. Riding the beasts were fighting men, the King’s soldiers, Marwen thought, for their shields and cloaks bore the King’s insignia. Almost all carried at least one passenger—village men, women, and chil­dren. The soldiers dismounted in a field of yellow flowers at the base of the hill and helped their riders down. Marwen saw that the people the soldiers helped were hurt and wounded. Her delight turned to horror. They had been burned. Marwen could see a mother whose hands were white as wax, the fingers mere stubs, holding and stroking and speaking softly to her child as it wailed in pain. She watched as a soldier spread a cloak over the hairless head of a girl about her own age who had died.

The tiny soldiers in the watery picture herded the group of peasants into the middle of a circle that the wingwands had formed. The soldiers drew their arrows as over the top of the mountain flew an enormous creature of august beauty. Its shape was lizardlike, its scales silver-black, reflecting the summersun into a thousand, thousand rainbows. Beneath the creature’s diaphanous taloned wings, the mountain seemed shrunken and insignificant. “Perdoneg,” Marwen whispered, and her breath ruffled the surface of the water. From the dragon’s mouth came a curl of blue fire, and its eyes glowed and faded like burning embers as it looked on the huddled group below it.

Bravely the soldiers sent their arrows heavenward, but none pierced the dragon’s thick scales, and after circling the mountain once more with two wingstrokes, the creature descended upon them and killed them all with one blast of its flaming smoking breath.

Marwen pulled back and screamed. She could not remove her eyes from the scene.

The dragon looked at her. As though the spring were a win­dow into her world, Perdoneg looked at Marwen and saw her.