CHAPTER THE TWENTIETH
WHEREIN SOMETHING GIGGLES AND SOMETHING GMMMS
CLO, ONCE WALL-JUMPER, FOREST-WALKER, AND WINDOW-breaker, became now a bed-lier. She recovered slowly, drifting in and out of sleep.
She had been changed, she noticed, her short tunic and leggings replaced with a long, pale smock. Sometimes she would lie staring down at this unfamiliar vision of her body, long and pale and flat and paperlike, and wonder what had become of her own self.
Though she could now understand the old woman, she found no solace in her prattle, and she did not care enough to ask her questions. Granddaughter. The word held no comfort. The woman was a stranger.
Clo thought of the airless falling, the stars and water and quiet. She thought of the cloud that had cradled and comforted her in the darkness. She wanted only that comforting; because no comfort was coming, she wanted only to sleep. What was the purpose in waking? She had tried to escape; she had failed. She had before her only endless gray days and baskets of fish. When she thought of her father now, she felt only anger. She imagined him standing under the tallest pine as he should have done that morning long ago. How could you do this to me? she would hiss to her empty room, to the imagined image of her father waiting at the edge of the dew-soaked field. She would curl into her mattress, press her fingers against her eyes. How could you abandon me here? Why would you leave me like this? She would never find her way to him now.
She thought of the cradling cloud, the words that had echoed around her. Be brave enough to let go of always.
Let go, she thought.
She closed her eyes again.
The next time the little woman entered her room, Clo pretended to be asleep.
“Granddaughter. You must wake. You must rise.”
Clo turned away, pulling the blanket higher.
She heard the woman’s footsteps leave and then return, accompanied by a dragging sound. “Your work, granddaughter.”
Clo felt herself tugged into a sitting position. She opened her eyes. The woman had pulled in a basket of fish. Clo stared at the black-eyed silvery creatures sliding over one another and onto the floor. She felt a wave of revulsion. Endless fish. Endless fleshy tearing. Endless oily prickling. “No,” she said.
“Yes. The carding, the spinning.” The woman pushed the carding combs into Clo’s hands. She wrapped Clo’s fingers around the handles.
“No.” Clo pushed the loathsome combs away. Her voice rose, trembling. “This is not my work.” She lay down again and rolled away from the old woman.
The woman sighed a long exasperated sigh, but she did not try to make Clo rise again. “So much like your stubborn mother you are,” she murmured as she settled into the chair beside the bed. “Once she fixed on an idea, how she clung to it… no matter how misguided. Headstrong child.” She clucked her tongue lightly. “But she, at least, never shirked her tasks. And this, this is your work, granddaughter. You must see it. You will see it now.”
Closing her eyes, Clo curled into herself. Her mother was headstrong? She thought of the chalky figure her father had drawn, the woman whose gaze hovered between joy and sorrow. Had this soft-cloud woman been stubborn? She thought of the pale light that had cradled her in the darkness, warning, Be brave enough to accept what I could not.
Was she meant to accept these interminable days of gray? The never-ending fish-carding, the ceaseless fish-spinning?
Teeth clenched, Clo lay wishing the old woman would go away—Would she not leave her alone?—but the woman just sat, indefatigably carding and carding. Clo pulled the blanket over her ears to muffle the endless sh-sh-sh of the paddles pulling through the fish-wool.
Later, much later, it was the woman’s snoring that woke her.
Sitting up, Clo stared at the woman. She had never seen her sleep before. She had never even thought of the old woman sleeping before, though she realized now she must. She obviously did. Still, it was strange to see the little black hole of a mouth open in the center of her apple face and the long shuddering breaths she took.
Clo thought of how sometimes in the afternoons in the villages she would see children napping on the laps of their mothers and grandmothers, the women’s cheeks resting on their babes’ soft crowns. She and the old woman were not like this. She did not like to see the woman this way—did not like that the woman felt comfortable falling asleep, vulnerable and open, near Clo. She did not want to go back to sleep next to her.
Slowly, carefully, Clo began to make her way out of the bed. The woman had dropped the carding paddles on the mattress when she had fallen asleep, and Clo reached to move them.
The fish-wool…
She pulled a tuft from the comb and held it between her fingers.
It was not gray…
It was full of light and color, vibrant shimmering waves of light and color.
Not fish-wool…
So much light and color, so many changing hues and shades—Clo brought the wool closer to her eyes—it seemed like it was almost…
singing…
She rushed, as quickly as her weakened legs would allow, to the front room.
There the walls were still lined with the fish-cylinders she had carded. But now the towers of gray had become towers of rippling color and light, as though the walls were blooming with flowers. The colors opened and dimmed, and opened and changed—the whole room was awash in their light.
Wonderingly, Clo picked up one of a handful of bobbins that had been left on the table. The color and light were now a single bright strand, twisted and focused and wound around the spool. It, too, shimmered and pulsed and changed. Clo unraveled a bit of the thread.
Something giggled.
Clo gasped and dropped the bobbin.
Its thread unraveled and floated wide around her, a filament of light. Unspooling in the air, its bright coils drifted and settled gently about her. Mesmerized, Clo stared for a moment at the shimmering fiber before she shook herself, bent down, and rewound the thread. Again, a giggle.
Clo held the bobbin to her ear—nothing—but pulling out the thread again… a giggle. A giggle like a hiccup.
She squinted at the thread. There was nothing to see in the fibers, nothing but the shifting wash of reds and blues and lights and shades that had been twisted and shaped into a long, strong line.
She lifted another bobbin from the table, unspooled a little of its bright line. There was no giggle, but a sigh, faint and indistinct, rose from the fibers.
A third bobbin let out a pensive gmmm when she unwound it. Gmmm. Hmmm, it murmured as she spooled and unspooled it, growing ever more anxious at the noises wrapped in the threads.
She cast about for another bobbin, but there were none. The bobbins were usually kept by the woman. In her apron. Or in…
Oh.
The thought of the tapestry, that vast gray cloth hanging in the old woman’s room, woven with thousands upon thousands of these bobbins, bobbins with light, bobbins with noises that unspooled with the unspooling of the thread, filled Clo with anticipation… then uneasiness. More than uneasiness. Dread.
This is your work, granddaughter.
Thousands of gmmming threads. Thousands of giggling fibers. Thousands of sighing strands.
What had been woven?
She was not sure she wanted to look.
She stared at the closed door.
The quiet was punctuated by the rhythm of the old woman’s snores.
She felt she must look.
Nervously, Clo wound and unwound the bobbin she still held in her hands. Gmmm. Hmmmm. Gmmm. Hmmm.
This is your work, granddaughter. You must see it.
Quietly, quietly, Clo lifted the latch of the door to the woman’s room. The lock she had broken had not been fixed, and the door swung open.
This is your work, granddaughter. You must see it. You will see it now.