CLO SAW.
As before, the window was shuttered. But now the whole room was aglow with the light from the tapestry. Its colors did not shift and bloom like the unspun towers of fish-wool in the front room did; instead, the cloth held fast its thousands of bright patterns.
It depicted nothing—nothing distinct, anyway. Clo could see no scene, but as she turned her head from side to side, she had the sense of bright fields. Dark forests. Glimmering mountain heights. Sleepy hamlets and bustling cities. But each time she thought she had spotted an image in the design and tried to focus on it, it became abstract once again—a wash of light and color.
Remembering the mirror she had seen hanging behind the tapestry, she realized she was perhaps only seeing the reverse, the wrong side of the fabric without a clear image. Still, her throat tightened with the beauty of it.
As she stood marveling, the piggish cat darted through the open door into the chamber and took up a spot by the tapestry. Standing on its hind legs, it stuck its thick claws again and again into the fabric, tearing gashes into the cloth. Clo moved to shoo the creature away, to stop its destructive kneading, but just as she stepped forward, she paused. She watched mesmerized as the dark holes the beast opened in the cloth took on brighter and brighter edges. Everywhere the cat ran its claws, the ragged edges gleamed—little in the tapestry glowed as brightly as its torn patches. Even the shadowy gaps the cat made seemed part of the larger design.
“So much color… and light…,” she whispered, touching her fingers to her eyelids. After so many many days of gray, her eyes ached with the radiance of the fabric. She shook her head, overwhelmed.
She thought of the little apple-faced woman, chewing emptily, sitting alone on the low chair and drawing through the bobbins one by one, weaving thread by thread, hour after hour, to create this vast work. She was surprised to feel a sudden rush of sympathy for the woman, her quiet weaving alone in this dark room.
This is your work, granddaughter. You must see it.
Clo walked slowly toward the tapestry, fingertips buzzing with the memory of the wool sliding through her hands. This was the fiber she had spun?
She wondered if the threads would sigh or make noise as she drew close. But no, the room was silent but for the tick tick of the cat clawing at the fabric and the faint sound, now and again, of snoring in the next room.
She sat on the little stool placed before the tapestry and watched the cat pull a long thread away. Up close, the glowing tear it made looked more like a hole and less a part of the design, but Clo smiled at the beast all the same. “Good kitty.” She reached out a hand and stroked its bristly head.
Hissing, the cat moved away and took up another spot to knead and pull.
Clo turned her attention to the fabric. Parting the vertical threads, she looked into the mirror placed behind the weaving. There was no clear design as she tried to take in the whole image, but again, she had the sense of vast spaces—deserts and moors, farmland and cityscape. When she tried to focus, all was still undefined. Vast undefined beauty.
A collection of bobbins dangled in front of a stool where the old woman had last been working. Clo lifted one: the thread spooled around the bobbin still shifted, a little, in light and color, but where it had been woven into the tapestry, the color had set.
She leaned closer, peering into the mirror at the woven line of thread from the bobbin she held. She followed its path, in and out, its entanglement with other bright lines, the warp and weft, and suddenly, she saw a clear image.
There was a man. There was a man woven in the thread.
Her breath caught.
He was leading an ox to market.
In the mirror, as though he were there before her, Clo watched him walking the path to town, saw the rough rope he had swung loosely around the ox’s neck, saw the sweat damp on the beast’s white hide.
Clo traced the thread back.
Earlier, in the dark of night, the man had risen and comforted a crying babe, had rocked him by the window and shown him the moon through the branches of the trees.
Clo’s gaze raced backward along the thread, following the man’s woven story. She saw him as a young man, dancing at a village fair, with a young woman laughing at his clumsy steps. Farther back, she saw him as a boy, following his own father into the barn, leaning his cheek against the warm flank of the family goat, learning how to milk. And then as an infant, held in his own mother’s arm, rocked by the fire while snow fell in heavy drifts outside their door.
There were other threads entwined with his—the babe, the girl, the father, the mother, they each had their own strands. They twisted in and out with his, over and around his, and Clo marveled at the artistry of the old woman who had woven them. Story after story after story. Clo could follow these other threads, too—the girl he had danced with, how she later married another boy, dark and freckled and even more clumsy-footed, and how this boy—he had been apprenticed to a cooper who had once sold his barrels to a scowling merchant. And the merchant had a family. A wife. A son. A daughter. Clo saw them all around a table lit by candles; the little boy had been set upon a wooden box so he could reach his plate.
Something was familiar about this family. Clo looked at their strands with growing interest. They lived in a city, a finer city than Clo had ever seen. The little boy and little girl had a whole room of their own in a great house, and they had a servant, a tall, angular man, who placed a book before them each morning and showed them how to write the alphabet.
Clo ran her fingers along their threads. She saw how the little boy had once snuck into the kitchen at night and eaten three rounded spoonfuls of bilberry jam. How his sister had skinned her knees and torn her skirts jumping from the bench of her father’s cart on a whim. How their mother sang them the same lullaby every night—every night, every night, even when she herself was drowsy-eyed and yawning—a song her own mother had once sung to her, about a peahen and a grazing sheep. How their father kept a small coin in his pocket—the first he’d ever earned—and pinched it between his thick fingers whenever he felt uncertain of a sale. How the boy chewed on his sleeve when he was concentrating. How a tiny mole on his left earlobe looked like an earring.
Clo drew closer to the mirror, squinting. The family’s threads had become difficult to follow. Here the cat had run its claws, and the weaving had become distorted with holes.
When Clo found their lines again, she saw first the boy, then his sister fall ill. Spots. A fever. Coughing. She saw the mother tending to them, their little bodies barely visible in their vast white beds. The mother stayed with them all night, all day, and where she cared for them, the threads seemed brighter. And then the mother, too, began to cough. And then the merchant, who had not stopped his work to care for his family, became ill himself.
But then their threads disappeared.
Startled, Clo studied the place where their lines suddenly left the fabric.
Nothing. The family had gone to sleep in their beds, the rain pattering outside their windows. The little boy had woken once, coughing an empty hee, and the mother had been too feverish to rise. And then they had all slept.
Their woven story had simply ended. Their threads simply ended.
Clo looked at the little boy and his midnight cough.
No.
With rising panic and rising certainty, Clo pulled at the warp threads. She followed the other threads that linked to the family’s—the other merchants and maids and sailors and servants—their lines distorted and torn by the cat as well. One by one, the rash and fever came to each. One by one, the threads disappeared.
And here and there, the fabric, run with holes, was lit more brightly at the edges of these tears, where Clo found someone—a mother or father or minister or shopkeep or tradesman or streetsweep—tending a fever or taking in a child or preparing medicine or even slicing onions into a soup.
But the boy… She returned to the little boy asleep in his bed in the delicate nightgown. His lace-trimmed cuffs. His empty coughing hee.
The boy from the boat. The full passage.
His family. Mother. Father. Sister.
Their heavy trunk.
Hee.
Full passage.
She brushed the little boy’s thread—followed its short path, felt where it ended—with quivering fingertips.
This is your work, granddaughter.
You must see it.
She could not catch her breath.