Читаем The Dragon's Tapestry полностью

“Can you help me?” Marwen asked. Her throat was swelling, and the numbness had reached into her shoulders and hips.

“The only reason you are still alive is because of the power that is in you,” Vijocka said. “I have no spell that can aid you, but when magic fails, there is still skill.” All this she said while her hands worked steadily on the building of a fire. She stopped for a moment, looked at Marwen and then bent her face closer. Her voice was so soft it was heard by only Marwen.

“An Oldwife dies with dignity, a wizard with greatness of soul. Thou art both. If my art and thy magic should fail, die thou likewise.”

Marwen closed her eyes slowly and then opened them and, with every effort of her will, nodded once.

Vijocka tended the fire quietly, taming it until it was hot and even. When the cavewater boiled, she set to steeping the silver-green fedderweed. The steam of it filled the shack with an acrid earthy smell. Into the tea Vijocka sprinkled some juice from the white fruit in her hand. By the time she offered some of it to Marwen, the girl’s lips had become numb, and the liquid drib­bled down her chin as she drank. Vijocka took the rest of the bitter tea and flung it on the fire with a quick prayer. Then she began to hum and then to sing, as if remembering a lullaby from her youth.

Beneath Nimroth’s treedeep dwelling in the wildernessthere will I drink with you.there will be a thousand thousand stepsthrough the dry wastelandbut only the desert is the freeing of our soulsand the purifying of our purposes.There does the fruit bear sharp thorns, the fields bring forth sand and rock, and the rocks bring forth water.Over dust and stony shallows,the arid sky fills mind and heart and soul,and when you are perishing of thirstyou will find my fountains,wherein grows Nimroth’s tree,and I, deep dwelling in the wilderness,there to drink with you.

“I have done all I can,” Vijocka said then. “The Taker decides now.”

Camlach and Torbil seemed far away, though they only sat against the wall on the other side of the room. It was the Taker who filled Marwen’s hearing and vision, for as Vijocka washed her face caressingly, the old crone shuffled through the door. The men obviously saw nothing, but when Vijocka bowed low and moved away, Camlach stood slowly. Marwen could hear his breathing coming quick and shallow, and the whisper of his sword as it was unsheathed. The fire smoked cold.

Marwen saw the Taker more clearly now than she had ever seen her before. Her slippered feet were yellow like sunbutter against the dirt floor, but now Marwen saw that they did not quite touch the ground as she hobbled along. Around her thin shoulders her green dress hung like a garment on two pegs.

Her hands, knots of knuckle and bone, appeared as though she carried something in them, grasped together before her as they were. Her apron was the blue of the noonmonth sky, and where she had knotted the apron strings at her waist, the bow hung down like a transparent wingwand in flight. Brown and crinkled in silent laughter was her face, and Marwen could see that her eyes were the color of the mist on sunrising. Always her head nodded in mindless agreement.

Marwen could not speak, for the illness had bound her tongue, but she kept her eyes open and her thoughts serene. She could feel her spirit struggling to be free of a body that was dying.

The Taker approached with her clasped hands outstretched, in the manner of beseeching, and when she was close to Marwen, she stopped still. Her toothless gums opened and closed, but no words did she speak.

“This is strange,” Vijocka said, and Marwen saw her come forward, close to the Taker’s hands. “What message, Mother Taker?”

The Taker knelt painfully before the dying fire and put her hands into the ash. With her stiff hands she worked the gray ash and the thin threads of smoke that rose into the shadow of something familiar, the ghostly image of a woven picture, the spirit of a tapestry. Marwen’s tapestry.

She knew it immediately, that it was her own, as one would know the reflection of one’s own face in the water. She tried to cry out, but she had no voice, and her lips would not move.

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