The Dragon's Tapestry

“We’ll be burned alive,” he said. “The dragon can smell human flesh a furlong away.”

“There,” Marwen said pointing to the cave. “This is the gift the tree gives.”

She bent and hunched into the cave. It was cool and moist. In only a few paces, Marwen was forced to go on hands and knees through a tunnell-like aperture that opened suddenly to a large womb of blackness. Somewhere off to her right, water fell and splashed her with points of cold.

The soldier had followed behind, his huge hot breaths on her heels, but he had stopped and now was lodged in the tunnel.

“My shoulders won’t go through,” he grunted.

“Hush,” Marwen whispered. “This is a sacred place. If you can­not come in, you are not meant to be here. Stay and wait for me.”

With a grunt he pushed his way through at last, leaving shreds of shirt and skin clinging to the rock.

Marwen held out her hands, palms together, and whispered an incantation. Slowly, between her palms, a cool white flame grew until, carefully, she pulled one hand away, and the flame nestled brightly in the other. It illuminated a stone stairway before them.

“Great Mother!” exclaimed the soldier, and Marwen knew from the tone of his voice it was a prayer and not a curse. The cave was a large vault of red granite that glittered from floor to ceiling in Marwen’s bit of werelight, but more beautiful still was the waterfall shrouded in a soft mist.

Lying beside a rock basin filled with water was an old tapestry pouch.

“The house must be at the top of the stairs,” said the soldier. “Come. Once in the house, we are safe.”

“Wait,” she said. She hunched down to look at it more close­ly. Embroidered into the pouch was a dragon without eyes, writhing in the wind.

“Great Gods! What are you doing? Come!” He grabbed her arm, but she wrenched it from his grasp without looking away from the pouch.

 Her fingers jumped when she touched the pouch, alive as it was with magic. Carefully, the thin old threads grasped in her fingers, she pulled the top right corner of the tapestry out. A tree had been woven there, a tree with white fruit, and against the tree leaned a staff. Nimroth’s tapestry, not Perdoneg’s. So fragile were the threads that they began to tear beneath her gen­tle touch, and she tucked the tapestry back into the pouch.

It had been left here for her by her father. He had gone to his death without his tapestry so that she would find it, though she did not know why. Marwen felt herself growing heavier and lighter all at once. Her soul was sinking close to the earth, acquiring weight and substance, and at the same time becoming tiny as a wind-borne seed, thin as the wingscale of a wingwand.

“Come, there is no time,” Marwen said quietly. She closed her fist on the werelight, snuffing it. They climbed the stone staircase in silent haste and in darkness, going straight up as if in a long narrow chimney. At last Marwen felt a bit of wind on her face and saw a patch of light above her, round and blue as a moon.

The man below her was becoming claustrophobic and swore at himself at close intervals, finally cursing Marwen as well.

“If Perdoneg hears you, one breath of his fire down this hole will roast us both,” Marwen whispered. As if in testament, the moon of light above went out briefly, eclipsed by dragon-dark­ness.

“Can’t breathe,” he muttered, and then he was quiet.

The hole emerged into a grotto. She pulled aside a curtain of flowers and saw that they faced the east window of the little house. It was not far to the doorway of the house but far enough to die. The air of noonmonth felt thick and warm in her mouth after the cool thin air of the cave. With a brief prayer, Marwen picked up a pebble from the floor of the cave, kissed it and tossed it through the window. The soldier entered the grot­to then, sweating and bloody, filling almost the entire space with his body. It was he that Camlach saw when he peered out the window, and he to whom the Prince gestured.

“Great gods, the dragon is above us!” Torbil half-whispered, half-shrieked.

“Do as I say,” Marwen said.

The soldier nodded, gripping his sword hilt convulsively.

“Hold this tapestry pouch with me, and when I say, run.”

She pictured the blind dragon in the wind, the blind dragon of the tapestry pouch. She whispered her strongest spell of hid­ing and slipped through the curtain of flowers. “Run!”

Like phantoms they darted around the corner and into the door.

A roar like a winter wind filled their ears, and the straw-chinked bricks around the doorway glowed with flames. A figure was beating out the glowing straw with his cloak. Torbil joined him, but Marwen stood still, feeling the power in the house like a heavy quiet as her eyes adjusted to the dimness. Soon there was the smell of smoke and baked mud but no more flames. Perdoneg would not or could not destroy the house.

The two men stood panting, their faces streaked black and their hair gray with ash and soot, before Camlach finally looked at Marwen.