Dragonfield (9 page)

She got up without disturbing him and went to the cupboard where she found a white linen towel. She washed the wound with water. The cut was long, but it was not deep. Some scratch he had got in the woods perhaps. She knew it would heal before morning. So she lay down beside him and fitted her body to the curve of his back. Brother Hart stirred slightly but did not waken. Then Hinda, too, fell asleep.

In the morning Brother Hart rose, but his movements were slow. “I wish I could stay,” he said to his sister. “I wish this enchantment were at an end.”

But the rising sun summoned him outside. He donned the deerskin and leaped away.

Hinda stood at the door and raised her hand to shade her eyes. The last she saw of him was the flash of white tail as he sped off into the woods.

She did not go back into the cottage to clean. She stood waiting for the hunter to come. Her eyes and ears strained for the signs of his approach. There were none.

She waited through the whole of the long morning, until the sky was high overhead. Not until then did she go indoors, where she threw herself down on the straw bedding and wept.

At dusk the sun began to fade and the cottage darkened. Hinda got up. She went to the clearing’s edge and called:

But she got no further. A loud sound in the woods stayed her. It was too heavy for a deer. And when the hunter stepped out of the woods on the very path that Brother Hart usually took, Hinda gave a gasp, part delight, part fear.

“You have come,” she said, and her voice trembled.

The hunter searched her face with his eyes but could not find what he was seeking. He walked past her to the cottage door. Hinda followed behind him, uncertain.

“I have come,” he said. His back was to her. “I wish to God I had not.”

“What do you mean?”

“I sought the deer today,” he said.

Hinda’s hand went to her mouth.

“I sought the deer today. And what I seek, I find.” He did not turn. “We ran him long, my dogs and I. When he was at bay, he fought hard. I gave the beast’s liver and heart to my dogs. But this I saved for you.”

He held up his hands then, and a deerskin unrolled from it. With a swift, savage movement, he tacked it to the door with his knife. The hooves did not quite touch the ground.

Hinda could see two slashes in the hide, one on each side, under the heart. The slash on the left was an old wound, crusted but clean. The slash on the right was new, and from it blood still dripped.

She leaned forward and touched the wound with her hand, tears in her eyes. “Oh, my dear Brother Hart,” she cried. “It was because of me you died. Now your enchantment
is
at an end.”

The hunter whirled around to face her then. “He was your, brother?” he asked.

She nodded. “He was my heart.” Looking straight at him, she added, “We were one at birth. What was his is mine by right.” Her chin was up, and her head held high. She reached past the hunter and pulled the knife from the door with an ease that surprised him. Gently she took down the skin. She shook it out once, and smoothed the nap with her hand. Then, as if putting on a cloak, she wrapped the skin around her shoulders and pulled the head over her own.

As the hunter watched, she began to change. It was as if he saw a rippled reflection in a pool coming slowly into focus: slim brown legs, brown haunch, brown body and head. The horns shriveled and fell to the ground. Only her eyes remained the same.

The doe looked at the hunter for a moment more. A single tear started in her eye, but before it had time to fall, she turned, sprang away into the fading light, and was gone.

The dream was finished. The Weaver’s hand stopped.

“I would have kept them both,” said the girl. “No need to lose one man for another.”

“You will never lose me,” the boy said quickly, with such yearning in his voice that the Dream Weaver knew he would never have this girl.

“Never,” said the girl. “It was a foolish dream. Not even worth the penny.”

“I thought it moving,” said the boy in a whisper to the Dream Weaver as the girl moved off. “I felt the slash under my heart.” His voice broke on the last word. Then he turned and followed the girl.

The Dream Weaver listened to them go, the girl’s steps always a bit faster, always anticipating the boy’s.

She ripped the skein from the loom and finished it off, putting the fabric in a bag by her side. She sent out a sigh into the air. “People never want to keep their dreams,” she said to herself, patting the bag. “I wonder why?”

She heard a carriage come around the corner, the horses blowing gustily through their noses. A heavy carriage by the sound, and rich, for there were four horses. The carriage stopped near the Dream Weaver’s place. Her hand went up at once, and her cry began again: “A penny, a penny, a penny for a dream.”

An old couple stepped out of the landau. They were richly dressed in the brightest of colors, as if reds and golds could deny their years. Though the woman put her hand on the man’s arm to be steadied, there was no warmth for either of them in the touch. And when they talked, as they did for a moment in sharp angry bursts, they did not look into one another’s eyes but always stared an inch or two away, concentrating on the collarbone, on a lock of hair, on the lines etched in the forehead.

They would have passed by the Dream Weaver, but the old woman stumbled. The Dream Weaver heard the faulty step and put her raised hand up to help.

In a swift, practiced movement, the man reached into his pocket and paid off the Dream Weaver, as if she were a beggar in the street.

“Please, sir,” said the Dream Weaver, for the touch of his hand told her that he was a man; the size of the coin, his peerage. “Please, sir, for the coin, let me weave you a dream.”

“We have no time for such mystic nonsense,” the man began. Impatiently he looked up at the Great Temple and shook his head.

“It takes but a moment in the weaving, a moment in the telling, but it is beyond time for it will last forever,” said the Dream Weaver.

The old man glanced at the sky, judging the time once more, and clicked his tongue. “Forever?” he said, and hesitated.

“A moment,” said the Dream Weaver, counting his hesitation as consent. Her fingers scuttled over the warp, and this was the dream that she wove.

There was once a quarrier named Craig, who worked stone down in a pit. Stone before him and stone behind, he labored each day from dark to dark. He was a tall man and broad, a mountain working a mountain. The years of his pit work were printed in dust upon his face and grained in the backs of his hands.

He worked alone and spoke not even to himself, except to curse the sun when it shone full upon him or when it did not. And the habit of silence and curses was as engrained in him as the dust.

At home he was like the rocks of his quarry: silent, unmoving, stolid before anyone who would weather him. He was a man of stone.

He had married a woman who was soft where he was hard, and moved by every tenderness he had forgotten. She never gave up trying to water him with her tears as if he were a plant capable of growth. But he was not. He was a man of stone.

Only in the quarry, under the hot eye of the sun, did he take on a semblance of life. There, his hammer above him, he would suck in a breath of dust, then ram the hammer down, expelling dust from his lungs. He took great pride in the sweat that ran down the solid line of his back and stained his clothes, proof of the life within him.

But when the sun went down, life ended for him. He would pack his hammer and chisels into a grayed and cracked satchel and go home.

“Wife,” he would call at the door as if he had forgotten her name or thought it too soft for his lips, “I’d eat.”

His wife had a name, as soft and pliant as the memory of her youth that still hovered about her lips: Cybele. But if she thought of herself at all now, it was as Wife. The rest was gone.

She had been given to the quarrier by her father, one stone gifting another. She was to keep Craig’s house, to feed him, and to warm his bed, no more. Her tears at the time had moved neither of them. That was the way of it. And if late at night, lying by the unmoving mound of her husband, she dreamed of green meadows and a child touched by the wind, it was a fancy spun into an unheeding night. There were no meadows, no green, no child.

Her life was bounded by her husband and her house. There was a hardscrabble garden she tended with little success. Only occasionally would brown plants push through the slate, their roots digging shallow graves in the pumice. And Cybele clung, like tender moss, to the outer edge of the man of stone.

All she had ever wanted was a child, but she had dared ask only twice before his silence and his anger overwhelmed her wish.

The first time she asked was the night they were married. Her hand had been transferred from father to husband before the cold eye of the celibate priest. Craig’s hand was hard in hers, the knuckles on it rose like hills of flint. She had put her mouth on those hills to quicken them. She looked up at him, her eyes brimming over. “Will we make a child tonight?” she had wondered aloud, a bridal wish.

“No child,” he growled. “I’ll have no child.” It was a statement, not a guess.

Months later, when she knew him and had only started to fade into hopelessness, she had tried again.

“With a child between us,” she began.

But he gnawed at the words. “No child.”

So the years were all that they shared between them; and sorrow was all she bore.

There might never have been a third time if a false spring had not brought a gentle wind to their house. Cybele startled a brown bird off its nest. There were two small graying eggs. The bird did not return, and so finally, fearfully, she brought the eggs inside and tried to hatch them near the fire. But the eggs turned cold before the day’s end. She cracked the eggs open and found the unborn chicks inside, their dead bodies only partially formed. Blind membraned eyes seemed to stare up at her. She buried them under a stone in the garden, afraid she might otherwise have to feed them to Craig.

But she dreamed of the birds in her sleep and cried out: “The children.”

It woke Craig, and he in turn woke her.

They sat up in the bed, staring at one another in the half-light of dawn. “Children?” he asked. “What children?”

“It was a dream,” she replied.

“I said there would be no children,” Craig said, his voice rising to a shout.

She shrugged and turned from him. “A stone cannot make a child.”

“You scorn the stone? The stone that gives me a living? The stone that gives us a life?”

Her back to him, she lay down again and said, “I do not scorn the stone that is your work, but
you
who are stone instead of man. And a man of stone cannot make a child.”

“You think I am incapable of making a child? I
shall
make one,” he said, leaping out of the bed. “But not with you. No, I shall make a child of stone.” He dressed himself in silence, picked up his tools, and went from the house.

The silence after his leaving struck Cybele like a blow. She had never heard so many words from him at one time. She had never spoken so many in return. She feared her words had damaged him beyond healing, had shattered something inside him that would not come right again. She dressed in the darkness of the house and went outside into the dawn.

She had never been to the quarry before. Indeed she was not even sure of the way. Craig had made it clear that the quarry was his and the house hers. But she followed a path she had often seen him take and came within minutes to the place where he worked.

The quarry was lit by both the setting moon and the rising sun. No shadows yet marked its face. It stood waiting for the touch of Craig’s hammer, waiting to submit to each blow.

Craig had set to work at once. His first angry strokes had been so quick, they seemed random, unplanned, a cleaving of rock and rock. But as his anger drained from him and his body took up the rhythm of his work again, a rough shape began to emerge from the quarry wall.

He had thought to make a child of stone, but the hammer had chosen differently. In all his life he had never really looked at a child, so the form that came from the stone was as tall as a man and as broad.

Once the form was wrested from the rock, Craig took out his finer chisels. Using his own body as a model, he shaped each nail, each muscle, each hair in the rock. Only the face he left blank.

The sun traveled overhead. His wife watched silently, unheeded, by a tree at the quarry’s edge.

Craig worked without stopping, shaping the rock to his will. He breathed heavily, and the rock dust swirled about him, rising and falling with each breath.

The sun struck its zenith and went down. Craig wiped the sweat from his eyes, felt the sweat running down his arms and legs, collecting in his body’s cracks, and pooling in his hair.

Before him the man of rock stood faceless but otherwise complete. Only one cord of rock attached the figure to the quarry’s side.

Craig stood tall, the hammer in his hand. He drew in a deep breath and threw out his chest. His lungs ached with the effort. He felt a wild exaltation. With a cry, he brought the hammer full force on the fragile link between rock and rock.

“Aiee,”
he called, “my son!”

The faceless man of rock shuddered with the releasing blow. It seemed as if the figure itself might shatter.

Craig shook his head free of the sweat which clouded his eyes. Drops spattered the rock form. It stumbled forward, caught itself, stood upright, then turned its blank face towards Craig. It raised its arms in supplication.

The movement frightened Craig. He was not prepared for it. He raised the hammer once again, this time to shatter the man of rock.

“Oh, no,” cried Cybele from the quarry’s edge. “He is your son.”