The Dragon's Tapestry

Vijocka knelt before the Taker so that the tapestry was before her eyes, and she began to memorize each image that shifted like sunlight on water between the Taker’s outstretched hands. Marwen could see blue and white moons in a black sky and foun­tains of flowers: humelodia, ice gozzys, and stempellows. In the center of her tapestry was a mountain, a high snow-veined pin­nacle of rock like the mountains she had seen far to the north of Rune-dar. Beneath the mountain was a white wingwand in flight, a key, a tree with white fruit, and ... a crown. Running the length of the tapestry was a single thread, the lifethread, the color of a summersun sky. At the top, like a border, was the sign of the staff, the wizard’s sign.

Softly murmuring to herself and outlining with her finger, Vijocka went over each symbol once, twice, three times before the Taker slowly folded the image into nothingness and lamely doddered out the door.

Vijocka watched her leave and then, her voice breaking, said, “The Mother has decided, Marwen. You live.”

From that moment on, Marwen gained feeling and strength quickly. Now the future was not a wilderness of fear but a road with a clear direction and landmarks along the way. True, at the end of the road would still be the Taker, but Marwen had seen her eyes, that they were not the color of a blood-drained evening but the color of the mists at sunrise. She would remem­ber that. The next windcycle, Camlach called for a feast in Marwen’s honor in the dry hills near Rune-dar, and she stood before the throng briefly as they cheered her. But the songs were irrev­erent and bawdy, and Marwen thought that though they were glad to have Perdoneg conquered, still they did not believe in the magic or revere the wizard. Nevertheless, the story of the dragon and Marwen spread quickly and was put to song and embellished until it became more than it had been in reality.

Vijocka set to work immediately to weave again Marwen’s tapestry, and when Marwen saw it, narrow and stiff with new threads, and touched with her own hand the sign of the staff along the top, she wept like a child.

“No wonder Cudgham burned the tapestry—the sign of the staff as clear as day. He must have thought he was doing you a kindness,” Vijocka said.

When she was strong enough, Marwen walked to the bottom of the hill and plucked a piece of the white fruit from the tree. The peel was translucent and smooth, holding the white rays of the summersun overhead, shining as if with an inner light like a tiny moon. She tasted. It was cool like milk or snow, sweet like sugar or cream, and the meat of it was like a burst of light in her mouth. She laughed and felt the juice run down her chin. She bit into the fruit again.

It seemed for a moment as if she dreamed awake, or perhaps she had a seeing, she could not be sure. She thought she saw Nimroth, her father, plucking of the fruit of the tree for the last time before he began his journey south, south to the ends of Ve and life, plodding on and on into the fields of pain and beyond that into the fields of fear, taking himself with eyes open into the land of the dead, an intruder by his art, so that he might foil the dragon once again by denying him the opportunity to fulfill the promise of his tapestry. But before Nimroth died, he had loved and left his heir.

The fruit strengthened her, and each day thereafter she made her way to the bottom of the hill and ate of its magical fruit.

All during the lavender skies of the eveningmonths, Marwen lived in her father’s house. She tended the flowers and dusted the books and planted a tiny garden. The villagers in nearby Rune-dar cared for her well, each day bringing her meat and vegetables and grain, and when they looked in the east window of a morn­ing, they would find her deep in the study of her father’s books. For she had found that in return for obedience, the Mother gave freedom—freedom to use the magic, freedom to feel, to know, and to be. She had passed through the narrow neck of the hour­glass and found another expanding world in the next chamber.

Camlach returned often. He and his men were traveling the countryside, helping the villagers to rebuild their homes and replant their crops, and many times he flew to be with her.

Since she had become well again, he was shy with her, but one day as they walked under a sky filled with lavender clouds, he tried to kiss her once again.

She placed a finger on his lips to stop him. “This is an intima­cy I save for the father of my children and the companion of my old age,” she said.

“But that is me,” Camlach said, half-pleading, half-indignant.

“What convinces you of this?” she laughed and then, teasing, she added, “Should you not first consult your tapestry?”

Camlach heard the teasing and grinned, but his eyes were shrewd and arrogant. “Yes,” he said. “Perhaps I should.”