The Dragon's Tapestry

“You know it is no trick, Perdoneg,” Marwen cried. Her voice was trembling so that she scarcely recognized it. She swal­lowed hard. “But if you need further proof, I have it. See.” Without thinking, with shaking fingers, she took the richly woven tapestry pouch off her shoulder. Out of it she drew Nimroth’s tapestry, her father’s tapestry, and laid it, narrow and old, upon the ground before the dragon. She stared at the wondrous beautiful tapestry, the tapestry that spoke of foiling evil and defeating dragons and of walking open-eyed into death. She did not look up. In a moment the colors of the tapestry dimmed, and the threads loosened and filmed over with dust. In another moment it began to darken and shrink.

“You know this is Nimroth’s tapestry, don’t you, dragon. See, see how it blackens and shrivels and dissolves to dust before your eyes, as Crob’s body on the hill is black and shriveled and returns to dust. As Nimroth is dead, so has his tapestry passed away.”

By the time she was finished speaking, only the lifethread remained among the dust, warped and wrinkled as a worm. She stood and lifted her arm high, standing almost on tiptoe. She was elated, stunned, shaking with her own power. “Go, dragon, back to your prison,” she commanded in the language of cre­ation, not knowing she knew the words. Perdoneg’s body thrashed, and his tail thudded upon the ground again and again and again, until Marwen’s teeth seemed to loosen in her jaw, and she shrank under the protection of his tapestry. Finally his violence eased, and he brought his head close to hers, a great head full of teeth and tongue and mucous-filled eyes and nostrils crusted with carbon. Marwen choked in the burning stench and shrank back.

“Yes, I, too, am ruled by the law of the tapestry,” Perdoneg hissed, “but my magic is great and cannot wholly be ruled by either tapestry or wizard. Before I return to my prison, a spell I cast upon you unto death, one slow and sure so that you may see the Taker coming from afar, remembering that you have no tapestry. And when you come to me in my kingdom, your suf­ferings will not end.”

In one wind-filled beat, Perdoneg lifted his weight on great wings and rose into the air.

In three wingbeats he was gone. 

Chapter Sixteen

“Could it then be possible that the taker is not a taker at all but a bringer, and a guide—a guide to an existence for which this life is but a preparation and a prov­ing?”

—“Debate of the Oldwives” from Songs of the One Mother

 

Marwen immediately began to weave a spell of strengthening on the hold of Perdoneg’s prison. She had been in the dragon’s mind once, and so she knew the way by which he had escaped. When she was finished her spellworking, Camlach led her into the wiz­ard’s house.

Soldiers and citizens flocked to the hill as word spread that Perdoneg had been vanquished, but Camlach would not allow them to see her. Only Torbil did he allow to kneel silently before her, professing his service and devotion in a gruff stam­mering voice.

Marwen was weak and dizzy, so much of her powers had she expended. But it was not only fatigue that filled her. She was mortally sick.

She lay in a pool of light that poured in the east window, and Camlach sat beside her, giving her sips of water. His face was drawn and dark and his mouth grim.

“I mourn Crob,” Marwen said.

Camlach didn’t answer for a moment. Then, “He came home to die. He told me. I didn’t believe him. I have learned about belief today. I have learned from you, Marwen.”

Through the window, norwind blew cool and constant, sil­vered with floating ash. Camlach leaned down and kissed her, a sad, hard, and needful kiss that made dying impossible to under­stand. He gathered her up in his arms and crushed his face against her hair.

“I want to live,” she said, suddenly angry. “I want to live.” She felt a cold numbness in her hands and feet, and far away, above the sounds of the gathering crowds without, she could hear music. The Taker’s music.

The door of the house burst open, and Camlach leaped to his feet.

“My orders were to allow no one to enter!”

It was Torbil with the dusky figure of the Oldwife of Rute at his side.

“Forgive me, Lord, but this woman has come. She is the only believer I know, and I thought perhaps she could help.”

Vijocka did not wait for permission from the Prince but walked regally to Marwen’s side. Without speaking she ran her hands lightly over Marwen’s body, stopping briefly at her fore­head, breasts, and abdomen.

“Get me fedderweed,” she ordered, “and water, good water, from the spring in the bowels of the hill. And bring to me from the fruit of the tree.”

Torbil stumbled through the doorway in his haste to obey the Oldwife, and Camlach fell back to give her room.