CHAPTER THE TWENTY-FIFTH

IN WHICH THE SWINEHERD RETURNS

WHEN CLO RETURNED TO THE OLD WOMAN’S HUT, Cary’s you aren’t meant to leave flapping in her head, the old woman merely nodded as she opened the front door and waved her hand toward the spinning wheel.

“Your work, granddaughter.”

And so Clo, filled with disquiet, returned to her spinning. Under her fingers, the fish-wool slipped and twisted itself into long strands—the colors bright, sparkling, shifting—but now she fretted over the variations, the places where it grew lumpy or too dangerously thin because her foot did not keep pace or because her hands held the wool too tightly. It seemed to her, as she filled each bobbin, that the voice she would hear as she checked the finished strand depended entirely on how evenly she had spun: a particularly thick yarn might unravel with a hearty guffaw; a fine, wispy thread might whimper as it unspooled. Uneven strands that bounced between fat lumps and flyaway fiber expressed uncertain Uhhs when finished. Her finest bobbins, bobbins where the thread was perfect and even throughout, let out smug Yeses as she unwound them, but their conceited sniffs unnerved Clo as well.

As before, the old woman would collect the finished bobbins from Clo. “Good,” she would say, and return with them to her room to weave. Only now, the woman left the door open, and from her spot near the fire, Clo watched as the tapestry—strand by strand by strand—shifted with the woman’s work. And the cat’s. Whenever Clo saw the creature at the weaving, slicing its claws into the fabric, it was all she could do not to throw the beast out the front door. But to give the appearance of acceptance, she kept herself still. Later, she learned to hide a fish or two in the pocket of her smock and toss them to distract the cat. And eventually, the cat learned to sit by her feet, waiting for the smock-pocket fish.

In this way, time—whatever it was—passed. Now Clo joined the old woman at the table (and sometimes the parchment-skin man); now she ate the cold-smelling stew. Now the woman did not try to lock Clo in: Clo stayed and ran the wheel. Sometimes Cary would come—a hesitant knock on the door—but as there was nothing they could say to each other under the eye of the old woman beyond Hello, hello and How are you? Cary would more often simply peer in the front window and Clo would shake her head: No, no, she had not seen the weaving. Once, when the street was empty and quiet, Clo heard him piping his flute, and she knew he must be standing nearby, tucked in some village doorway, playing just so she could hear. Under his skipping tune, the wool slipped more easily through her fingers, and her foot bounced happily along on the treadle, following his sunny notes, until a villager intoned, “That’s not needed here, boy,” and the playing abruptly ceased. Though Clo bounded from her chair to wave through the window, to show Cary that whatever the villager had said, she had liked his music, and though his moons grew bright as he caught sight of her gesturing hand, he still put his flute away. Nevertheless, as Clo returned to the wheel, she smiled to herself, grateful that the endless, lonely spinning had seemed for a moment less endless.

Sometimes Clo slept; more often she waited, hoping the old woman would nap—but to her dismay, Clo discovered that the old woman rarely left off her weaving. She would sit on her little stool for what seemed like days—if they were days—following the same ceaseless motions: she would grasp the loops of the heddle to open a gap in the warp threads, run a bobbin of thread through the opened spaces, tap the new line of thread down with the tip of the bobbin. Weave a thread, tap it down—thread, tap, thread, tap—over and over and over. Eyes heavy, yawning, determined to stay awake, Clo would watch the old woman’s gestures from the corner of her eye as she spun, trying to learn how she shaped her fabric, trying to catch the moment she drifted into sleep.

But finally, one day (if it was a day), Clo noticed through the hushing sound of her own spinning that the woman’s tapping had fallen silent. Clo glanced up: the old woman’s head had fallen forward on her chest. Her hands, though resting on the tapestry, were still. Her back, curved into a gentle n shape, rose and fell with steady breathing.

Carefully, Clo stood. At her feet, flopped on its side, the cat tried to roll itself onto its paws, but Clo dropped a handful of fish by its bristly maw, and it lay happily down again, taking messy bites from the side of its mouth.

Approaching the tapestry as quietly as she could, Clo was again struck by the beauty of the design—the impressions of humid forests and gleaming deserts, rimy fields and green valleys. As before, the edges of holes torn by the cat glowed brightest of all, but Clo, stomach turning, kept her gaze away from these.

Where to begin?

The enormity of the design—how would she ever find her own thread? Her father’s?

They would have to be near the working edge of the fabric—the threads still being woven.

Starting at the far side, as far from the old woman as possible, Clo parted the warp and began examining the threads. Lives opened up for her. A well-to-do hunter who kept a prized pack of glossy, long-nosed hounds. The hunter’s dog-keeper, who, mortified by his own rough voice, never spoke. The dog-keeper’s mother, who had a little herb garden and offered advice to any villager who asked on any medical question. The villagers, who sought out the dog-keeper’s mother—for advice on a swollen toe or a painful tooth or a raspy cough that kept them up at night—all with their own openhearted or petty, refined or paltry, vain or modest, grand or mediocre whims, desires, dreams, loves, accomplishments, regrets. Stick-thin or plump, frail or muscle-bound, withered or new, lovely or ugly, lame or lightning-fast… Clo followed the threads of men and women and children out and over the tapestry, searching for something, anything familiar.

In some places, around some people, the fabric… Clo wasn’t sure, but it seemed to… bubble. It wasn’t a hole left by the cat. There was nothing violent or strange—no battle or plague, no suffering, no lives cut short—but there was still a change in the weaving. A distortion. The fabric gaped a little, or formed small pockets… and, around some gaps, a few bright threads spun out. Here, around a man who carved dolls for his children out of wood from an apple tree that had fallen in a storm. Here, around a king—no. Clo looked more closely. Not around a king. Around a young man who traveled with the king, announcing his exits and entrances with bright fanfares on his horn. Here, around a long-limbed girl who told stories to her young siblings while they carried pots of water on their heads on the long walk home from the river each day.

The more Clo looked, the more bubbles she saw. Some small, barely a wrinkle in the fabric. But others, others… they reshaped the fabric entirely, so it was no longer smooth and flat, but three-dimensional—with hills and hollows and ripplings… and light gossamer threads all around.

Here were a string of bubbles—some of the largest in the whole weaving—with shimmering filaments spinning out in all directions from them and crossing to other threads, other lives. But then, right beside them—Oh! The smell, the smell.

Clo drew back, holding her breath. Fish guts. Here the thread was no longer fine wool but a fat stinking line of fish guts—pink and gray, slippery, decaying. The fabric around them was wet, beginning to molder. The smell of rot hung over the weaving here.

Ugh. Pinching her nose, closing her mouth, Clo examined where the fish-gut thread first entered the fabric, where the cloth around it first began to fester. In the mirror, the line of gut was reflected cloudily—a smear on the glass. But still, Clo could see that it belonged to a young woman standing in a field. Her head was covered, her hands empty. Clo tried to trace the rotting thread back to wherever the woman had come from, but no, it did not go back. She could not find the woman’s childhood. She was not there—and then suddenly she was, a lone figure in a midsummer sweep of hay. Her thread—stinking fish gut—had simply been jabbed into the fabric, into one of its bubbling distortions.

Clo felt she ought to look away—she had to find her own thread, after all. But something about the woman, the disintegration of her line… She could not tear her gaze away.

She followed the smeary reflection of fish gut forward. The woman had walked from the field into a city. She had wandered up and down cobbled streets. She had gasped, gaping at the simplest things—the muddy river churning beneath the bridge, a cart horse flicking its tail, a woman selling strawberries. She had even stopped and, wide-eyed, tried to hold the bright red berries, tried to stroke the horse’s velvety nose, but had been shooed away by the merchant and the driver. “Are y’ mad?” the driver had shouted when she would not step away from the cart. “Buy or begone!” the strawberry lady had cried when the woman had tried to fondle the fruit.

So the woman had wandered through the lanes until she at last caught sight of a great house perched on the hill high above the town. Smiling, hurrying, she had climbed the road that snaked up the slope to the estate wall. She had touched, lightly, the blooms and vines that clambered over the wall—had leaned in, sniffing deeply, burying her nose in the sunny yellow petals. Turning then, she had knocked and knocked at the gate, until finally a young man opened it for her. “Yes?” She had held out her palms—wide, empty. A beggar.

Skin prickling, Clo stared at this moment—its milky reflection—in the mirror. Just before, the young man had been so lost in thought, strolling under the cypresses on the other side of the wall, that he had nearly failed to hear the knocking. But when he opened the gate, the woman—her empty hands, her covered head, the way her expression hovered between joy and sorrow—had captured his full attention.

The young man’s skin was plummy and rich and full of life; he moved with ease and grace. With youth and health.

He was not gray and wizened, stooped and shuffling. He did not have a leg and an arm and a foot in the grave.

But Clo recognized him all the same.

“Father,” she whispered.

She looked at the woman, head covered, hands empty, standing before a wall of flowers.

“Mother?”

And it was. They were. Mother. Father.

Her gaze tore forward along the hazy reflection. She saw the moments her father had drawn in his notebook: she saw him sketch the apple-pickers, the wedding feast, the washerwoman. She saw him painting a portrait of the young lord of the estate, the trouble he had convincing the young man to hold his pose. The fabric bubbled and rippled, but Clo paid no attention to these changes; instead, she watched the pink, stinking line of fish guts—the rotting line that she now realized belonged to her mother—become ever more entangled with her father’s thread. It crossed and crossed and crossed again. The woman brought her father a pot of herbs and honey when he was ill in bed. He showed her one of his canvases hanging in the house’s great hall. Arm in arm, they walked through sun-dappled woods and flowering gardens and bustling city streets. Finally Clo saw her father and mother standing, hands clasped together, in front of a dark-robed cleric who blessed their marriage.

And now the smeary line of fish gut was fully twined with his, and Clo saw the joy that filled her father’s days. The woman joined her father in his cottage on the estate grounds. And then her mother’s rounded dress—the anticipation of a child. She saw their happy expectancy, the way her father brought something home every day—a flower from the garden, a little cake from the kitchens. She saw her father—the fabric bubbling all around him—sketching her mother, painting her, painting small moments of their life together, canvases just for himself, and she saw the sorrow that seemed to creep into her mother’s face, sometimes, even when they laughed together.

And then her birth…“Oh!” Clo exclaimed. Clapping her hand over her mouth, she glanced over at the old woman, whose body shook with a startled snargle. But the old woman did not rise: her head drooped forward; her breaths grew slow once again. Still asleep.

Sighing in relief, Clo stared in awe at her own thread arising in the fabric. There it was. She touched a quivering fingertip to the line of her life. This thread was her own. She looked wonderingly where its shining curve entered the weaving. She saw her earliest hours, her little body bony and red and wailing; she saw her earliest days, her father and mother taking turns cradling, rocking, cooing, and she saw both the sorrow and the joy grow deeper in her mother’s eyes. And afterward, not long afterward, the death of her mother… she saw her lie down to sleep and then not rise.… She saw her father’s grief, his howling as he discovered and cradled the lifeless body.…

Clo backed away from the fabric. She could not bear it. Pressing her fingers to her eyes, she found her cheeks already wet with tears. How could you, how could you, she raged silently at the woman’s sleeping form. She wanted nothing more than to run from the room, but she forced herself to stay.

When she had calmed enough to return to the tapestry, she steeled herself to look again at the rotting line of fish gut and her mother’s death. There. The end of the rotting thread.

But the fish-gut line… it didn’t end. Confused, Clo pulled at the fabric. No, it did end. There, at her death, her mother’s rotting line ended as her life ended. But then there was more decay… another thread of sludgy guts continued on from the same place, all pink and slick and foul.

Clo’s breath caught. It was her father’s thread now, rotting and moldering. No, not entirely: Clo could still see a wisp of yarn, a single overstretched fiber, deep in the jelly of the guts. But mostly—it was her father, his decaying line twined now with Clo’s own.

Clo followed her life with her father—its smudgy reflection in the glass. He grew old, seemingly overnight. His skin grew waxy, his step unsure. He became, quickly, the man she knew—the man with a leg and an arm and a foot in the grave. He tried to paint: he could not. He tried to draw: he could not. She saw his despair. He lost his position; he was cast out of his home. She saw him rocking her infant form, despairing.

She traced their travels from town to town. Their journeys under the thick shadows of trees and at the edges of windswept moors and in the gloom of dank and terrible swamps. She saw herself as a small child, toddling, skipping, picking wildflowers and weeds along the paths, weaving crowns of blossoms and greens that her father, graciously, indulgently, wore for mile upon mile until the blooms wilted and dropped away. She saw herself listening rapt—her face shining with concentration—while her father told her tales of frogs and foxes and spiders and moths as they strode through fields or rested by fires. She saw him search out small things to make her happy—a sweet roll he snuck from the kitchens, a disused primer he found on a shelf, a pair of boy’s leather boots he bought with his last coin, for he knew they would keep her feet dry—and she saw how much he delighted at seeing her delight. She saw herself at their table ladling out the watery soup she had cooked, and her father beaming as though he sat at a feast.

She saw, too, what her father had endeavored so long to hide: the pain in each step, his exhaustion, his grief. She saw him struggling to regain his talent—his ability to paint. How at night, working by candlelight as a cleaner to remove the grease and grime from a ceiling fresco, he would practice, following brushstroke by brushstroke the work of another painter. How he would steal paintings to study the lines and work of another in the desperate hope of regaining his own craft. How—as Clo slept in the moss by a riverbank or in a hayrick under the stars—he would try again and again to copy the forms and lines of the stolen canvas… and how he’d burn every failed attempt in the fire. How finally, giving up, he would trade the stolen canvas for a few coins or a sack of flour.

She saw herself—dark hair shorn as tight as a lamb’s in spring and in a boy’s dirty tunic and leggings and boots—alone and skulking in the shadows of buildings and poking in the dirt around a miserable patch of turnips and weeds. She saw the villagers peering at her and her father, gossiping about the man with a leg and an arm and a foot in the grave and the perhaps-a-girl who poked at the weeds. But from here, she could see the concern lurking beneath their gossip: in their own rough way, they worried about her, about her ailing father, these strangers who had arrived in their village. She could feel the shyness and fear of the children who stared at her and refused to take their wayward ball off her palm. She saw how all the villagers had their own troubles and joys—warm fires and empty larders, wedding celebrations and quiet burials, winters of hunger and summers of plenty… How had she never noticed, Clo wondered, fingers hovering regretfully and helplessly now over the fabric, the neighbor whose cupboard was always bare?

She saw her own life lived in the shadows. She saw how her thread and her father’s rarely touched another’s—how they kept to themselves in forgotten corners. She saw the gaps left in the tapestry all around them.

How lonely their lives seemed from here.

Hurrying forward, she followed her own thread until she found herself at the edge of the field waiting for her father, and the swineherd arriving instead. She saw her midnight rush through the forest, saw herself arriving at the shore.

There she was at the edge of the sea. There she was uncloaking the cheese. There she was no more.

There she was. There she was no more.

But dangling right there in the tapestry, at the very moment of the uncloaking of the stinky cheese and the unwrapping of her father’s notebook and the ticket of half paffage, was a bobbin of thread.

Clo lifted it gently. Her bobbin. Her own.

It was still attached.

Still wound with thread.

Relief flooded over her—the knowledge of not dead not dead not dead—rushing through the very marrow of her bones, a terror that she had not realized she had been carrying. The wound thread shimmered with shifting light and color. Touching it, she felt a brief spark against her fingertips.

But… what of her father? What had kept him from traveling with her? Clo traced her line back to the moment when she had waited for her father under the pine.

There was the swineherd, angry skin and cauliflower nose and muck-covered boots. His lip was curling. An unsure smile… not a sneer, Clo could see that now. She shook her head. He was nervous. He was looking at her pityingly.

She followed his thread as he left her by the woods, carrying the woad and madder she had given him back toward the town.

He clambered over the wall, dropped to the other side.

In twilight, he made his way through the streets, past Clo’s own crumbling house with its freshly swept stoop. He nodded a greeting to a man raising a bucket from the village well. He climbed the path that led to the manor house; he looped around the gardens to the stables, entered, and walked down a dim corridor to the very end—the pigsty.

He opened the door. In the half-dark, grunting softly, the pigs moved as oblong shadows through the straw.

“Shh-shhh, girls. ’S all right, then,” he murmured to the shadows. Then more loudly, “Are ye here?”

…

“Are ye here? I’ve seen yer lass.”

…

“And I’ve delivered yer parcel. And yer letter. She gave me th’ wood’n matter.” He waved the wilted plants. “And y’ promised another coin if I brought it.”

…

“And I didna tell yer daughter y’are still here in th’ stalls.”

…

“She’s on her way to the harbor… like ye wanted.”

…

“Y’ might come out now. No one’s in th’ stalls but me.”

The boy tripped over something in the straw and knelt to look for what had caused him to stumble. There, half buried beneath the straw and muck, was Clo’s father.

“Wake yerself up, old man. Time t’ wake.” The boy shook him, but Clo’s father could not be roused.

In the weaving, Clo watched with horror as the boy looked about, then tenderly lifted her father’s bony, aged body into a barrow and covered him with straw. He trundled him through the dark streets until he reached his own crumbling home. He carried her father through his own doorway, placed him on his own floor. He called out, “This ’un’s in a bad way, Ma,” and a woman, wiping her hands on an apron, knelt to help the stranger her son had carried in. Their threads shimmered with light.

For a long while, Clo could not tear her eyes from the image of her father in the barn. Over and over, she watched him struggling to lead an ass from a stall, struggling to hold a wheel of cheese, struggling to fill a skin of water. He had wanted to leave with her. He had not had the strength. The breath. Finally, in the dark, in the muck with the pigs, he had wrapped up the cheese, the stolen painting, the notebook. He had waited in the shadows. He had grabbed the swineherd. Voice cracking, he had begged for the boy’s help. Had handed him the cloak. Bring this to my daughter. A coin now, a coin when you return. Bring the woad and madder so I know she’s received my words. He had scribbled his message to her, the ink dripping and smudging under his hand in the dark. In the mirror, backward and smeary, Clo could just make out the letter now:

My dearest Clo,

Forgive me. Forgive me—this time you must travel alone. I wish it were not so. You must be brave. The ticket is a promise I made long ago to your mother. It will give you safe passage, and will, I hope, bring you to her, wherever she has gone. Follow the path through the woods to the harbor to Haros; I believe he will find you. We will, I am certain, be voyaging together on his craft.

The canvas is for you. It is the last I painted. How much your mother loved you. You will see, and perhaps even Fate will forgive me and save me.

I hope you will come to understand.

Clo, know I love you. So much my daughter.

You are the beauty of all the stars.

Always, always, always,

your loving father