Cat in Glass

by Nancy Etchemendy

  Jacinth nodded, suddenly afraid to speak for fear the tears would start again. If he had seen her before, that explained why her face hadn’t frightened him.

  “My name is Joth,” he said. “I … I’m the cobbler’s apprentice.” Color rose suddenly in his cheeks, and he looked away from her, giving more attention to her elbow than it required.

  She watched him silently, wondering at his strange behavior.

  Joth dipped the cloth in the water and looked up again. “You didn’t laugh,” he said.

  “Why should I laugh?”

  Joth shrugged. “Most people think it’s funny that a boy with only one foot makes shoes.”

  Something about Joth’s words gave Jacinth a soft, warm feeling, as if a meadow full of buttercups had bloomed inside her. She looked at him, wondering if she could find some hint of a lie or a trick meant to make her trust him when she shouldn’t. But his clear eyes seemed kind and honest.

  At last she said, “I know. People think it’s funny that a girl with only one eye should weave tapestries or go to see the lily hunt begin, too.” She looked off toward the center of Aranho, where she knew the handsome young men must still be striding through the street on their way to the lilies that grew in the faraway forests. When she looked at Joth again, he was resting his chin in his hands and staring sadly away in the same direction.

  Jacinth felt the tide of tears rising in her once more. “My sister says that no one will ever bring me a lily. She says I’m too ugly.”

  Joth sat up straight and smiled at her as softly as the last light of dusk. “I don’t think you’re ugly,” he said. “I would bring you a lily if I had two good legs.”

  The strongest dike ever built could not have held back Jacinth’s tears then. The hot, salty stream of them poured down her cheek as she stumbled up from the doorstep. She didn’t know whether to hug Joth or run. She wanted to believe him. But no one had ever said such a thing to her before. What if he were lying? What if this were his way of making fun of her?

  “Don’t cry, Jacinth. Please don’t,” said Joth.

  But she couldn’t stop and, not knowing what else to do, she fled down the steps and into the street.

  “It’s true, Jacinth. You’re not ugly,” Joth called after her.

  “I don’t believe you!” she cried, without looking back.

  Barely a week had passed when the first of the young men returned to Aranho, scruffy and mud-smeared but triumphant, bearing orange and yellow lilies like torches in their hands. That very evening, there was a proud, firm knock at the miller’s door. Jacinth ran after Wynna as she hurried to answer it. There stood Sten, tall as clouds, the first stars strung like diamonds in the violet sky behind him. He smiled as he held out a flower on a leafy stem. Even the twilight could not rob the lily of its amber brilliance.

  “Yes. Oh yes,” whispered Wynna as she took it from him.

  Jacinth watched as they walked arm in arm down the stone path to the gate, their bodies swaying together like stalks of wheat in the wind, and their faces aglow with mysterious joy. She thought of the scene in her tapestry—her father at his mill, the streets and the white cottages, the tall men with their knives and bows. She thought of Joth, and of what he had said to her. And for the first time, the deep winter coldness that would someday become old and familiar settled over her heart. For the first time, it occurred to her that perhaps there was no place at all in the tapestry for a boy with one leg, no place for a girl with one eye.

  Soon enough, autumn came, and the citizens of Aranho prepared for the Great Wedding. The men stalked the fields in search of tender young deer, and the fattest pigs in the village were slaughtered. The women gossiped amiably among themselves as they sewed wedding costumes and cooked spicy dishes of squash, grain, and apples. Even the children ran errands and gathered branches laden with bright leaves for the marriage beds. Many of the men who had returned from the hunt with lilies that year were to be married. Sten and Wynna were among, the new couples who danced in the wedding circle and drank from the high elder’s cup of secret wine.

  After the wedding, Sten took Wynna away to the cottage he had built for them. The miller waved good-bye, his shoulders square and a smile of pride on his face. His wife wept, though she could not say why. And Noa ran at the newlyweds’ heels like a puppy, begging them to invite her often to the new house.

  But Jacinth went off by herself and climbed quietly to her loft in the rafters above the millstones. She cut the unfinished tapestry from her loom, rolled it up, tied it carefully with strong twine, and carried it to a dark corner, where it stood untouched for many years thereafter.

  Summer followed summer, and Jacinth watched the passage of many lily hunts, many triumphant returns, and many weddings. Three years after Wynna’s marriage, there was another knock at the door one midsummer’s dusk, and then Noa was gone, too, off into the world with a lily in her hand and a man beside her. With each year, Jacinth felt herself changing into a woman, cherishing a woman’s hopes and desires. But each year the chill in her heart grew a little deeper, and the anger and energy with which she faced the world grew a little stronger.

  At last, the time for her own lily went by, as she had feared it would, without event. After the Great Wedding that year, she trudged back toward her father’s mill alone, tearing the garlands from her long hair and wishing she could tear away the maiden’s gown she wore as well. As it happened, she passed the cobbler’s shop on her way, and there stood Joth on the doorstep. He had grown taller in the time that had passed, and his kind hazel eyes were set in a leaner face, with a jaw more firm and knowing than she remembered. His crutches were propped beneath his arms, and he held a jar of dark ale in his hands. He was smiling.

  “Hello, Jacinth. It was a fine day for the wedding, wasn’t it?” he said.

  “If you like that sort of thing,” she replied.

  Joth held out his jar. “Will you have a drink of ale with me, to wish the newlyweds well?”

  But Jacinth’s frustrations swept over her head like angry water, and she shouted, “How can you be so gay about it? Don’t you see that there’s no place for us here? Half the roads in the world are closed to us for no good reason at all!”

  She started to run, her head awhirl with her own cares. But the crash of breaking crockery in the road behind her made her stop. She turned.

  There lay the ale jar, a heap of shattered fragments in a dark brown pool. Joth’s eyes were wet and bright, and his body as taut as a bowstring. “Then what are we to do?” he cried. “Lie down and die? I would rather make my own roads!”

  He spun on his one leg and disappeared into the cobbler’s shop.

  All through the smoky autumn and the winter, Jacinth spent her days alone in the meads and thickets, foraging for bark and stones and roots with which to dye her yarns. At night, she lit candles in the chilly loft and sat at her loom while the wind rushed across the meadows and through the brittle trees outside. She worked as if a demon lived inside her. Her fingers grew stiff and raw, and thin lines creased her forehead from the effort of peering at close work with her single eye. Only when the sun rose and the candles had turned to stubs did she ever give in to sleep, for she hated the dreams that came to her, and awoke from them weeping.

  The tapestries she wove in that long, dark season became her only respite. When her heart thrashed like a desperate bird, when she could not face her lonely bed, she wove tapestries, and they were like no others. They were filled with all the power, beauty, and pain that had no other way of escaping from her. She spun fabulous worlds, told impossible tales, and the people she wove danced and wept as if they were alive.

  When the weather began to soften and the air to grow rich with the smells of green buds, a merchant came to the miller’s door. He said that in his village, which lay two days’ ride to the west, he had heard rumors of the one-eyed weaver of Aranho. He asked to see the tapestries, and when Jacinth showed them to him, he bought several, paying her well for them.
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br />   The next afternoon, Jacinth sat in the dappled sunlight beneath a willow tree and bounced Wynna’s children on her knee. They were used to her and thought nothing of the fact that their aunt had an eyeless cheek. They spoke to her and laughed as if she were anyone else. Jacinth felt the fragrant spring breeze touch her. She thought of her good fortune with the merchant, and of the places and futures she had woven into the tapestries. It came to her that perhaps Joth was right. Perhaps even a woman with one eye, if she was strong enough, could make her own roads.

  That summer, Jacinth watched a man build a new cottage. As she observed him, she took careful stock of the money she had made from the sale of her tapestries. When the man was finished and she had learned all she could from watching him, she set about making a cottage for herself. She chose a small piece of land near a creek on the outskirts of Aranho and she bought a few tools. From a glazier who lived nearby, she purchased six round pats of thick, bubbly glass with which to make a window.

  The work of building a house was not easy. The sun reddened her skin, and the tools slipped sometimes and bit into her weary hands. She made mistakes, for she had to learn as she went along. At first, the villagers laughed and jeered at her because it was unheard of for a woman to build her own house. They said that Jacinth must wish she were a man. Noa ordered her to stop, for her actions were unseemly and embarrassing. But Jacinth only smiled and went on.

  When it became clear that her project would succeed, the villagers stopped laughing and grew sullen. Still she worked, and before the summer ended, she moved her loom from the loft above the millstones to her own snug cottage with its thick window, straw roof, and warm hearth. In a corner by the fire, she propped the unfinished tapestry she had cut from the loom so many years before. There it stood mutely, where she could always see it.

  By the time the leaves changed color, the world seemed a different place to Jacinth. Her senses, which had for so long been deadened by her sorrow, began to awaken again. When she wandered in the groves and fields in search of dyestuffs, the songs of hidden birds swept over her like wind, and the autumn sun made her body tingle with pleasure. The smells of soil and ripe fruit and leaf mold no longer made her think of wintry death. Instead, they seemed a part of something wonderful and vast, a ritual of the earth much larger and more lasting than that of men. She gathered berries and insects and flowers that she had never noticed before, and the dyes they yielded gave her a palette like that of no other weaver in the land. When winter came, all the corners and nooks of her house were stuffed with skeins of yarn in every color, ready to be threaded into warp and weft and woven into the images of Jacinth’s heart.

  While the snow fell and the sharp wind blew it into drifts, Jacinth sat at her loom. She worked long hours every day, stopping only when she needed firewood or food, or when her eye grew too tired to decipher the threads before her. In the cheerful warmth of the cottage, her fingers stayed supple much longer than they had in the drafty mill loft. From dawn till dusk, the well-made window let in winter’s pale light, which served her much better than the flames of tallow candles had. Jacinth finished tapestry after tapestry, each one alive and powerful in its own right, each one an improvement on the last.

  When the ice and snow began to melt and the first green shoots of grass pushed up from the muddy fields, three men came to Aranho asking for the one-eyed weaver. Two of the men were ordinary merchants who had driven donkey carts from villages in the nearby countryside. But the third man wore rich clothes and rode a glossy black horse.

  “I am here in the service of a wealthy nobleman,” he said. “My master asked me to pay you for some tapestries to warm the stone walls of his house.”

  Jacinth shrugged and spread her winter’s work in the sun for the men to see. Then she watched with her arms crossed and her lips pressed tight together as they argued and compromised with one another over who was to get which of the pieces. A part of her felt elated and triumphant at this evidence of her success. But the old bitterness still lay inside her like a small, sharp jewel. And the part of her that cherished it could not forget that although men might desire her tapestries, they had never desired the woman who wove them.

  The next week, Jacinth took her dye pot to a sunny glade near the creek. She filled the pot with water and set it to boil over an open fire, then went about gathering enough meadow flowers to make a good yellow dye. As she stooped to pick a handful of wild mustard, she heard someone whistling in a tuneless and preoccupied way among the linden trees that grew by the water. She stood up to see who it could be, and the whistling stopped.

  “Jacinth, is that you?” someone called.

  She recognized Joth hobbling toward her over the muddy spring soil. She sighed, for in a small, mean way, she resented the fact that no one except another cripple ever took the trouble to greet her with such kindness. Nevertheless, the air was so sweet and warm and the songs of the robins so bright that she made up her mind to be friendly in return.

  “Hello,” she said. “What brings you to the creek today?”

  “Cobbler’s reeds,” he said, standing still before her with the sun in his hair. “Old Bot sent me to see if there will be enough cobbler’s reeds this year to make shoes for those who can’t afford leather.”

  Jacinth dropped the mustard flowers into her basket, and she and Joth wandered toward the waiting dye pot. “And what will you tell him? Will there be enough reeds?”

  Joth nodded. “A sizable crop. And what brings you to the creek?”

  “Yellow dye.” Jacinth motioned toward the flowers that lay in her basket like a mound of captured sunlight, bees whirring above them in a single-minded search for pollen.

  When they reached the dye pot, Jacinth shooed the bees away and tipped the basket up. Joth, with his crutches tucked under his arms, scooped the fragrant harvest into the boiling water for her. He lay down in the grass and, chewing on a single leafy blade, watched her stir the dye with a stick and carefully add unspun flax to it. The water hissed and bubbled.

  In the drowsy afternoon, Joth began to talk, slowly and idly, laughing now and then, about leather and lasts and awls, and about his childhood in the house of Bot the cobbler. Much to her astonishment, Jacinth found herself speaking in return. She told him about the little round beetles from which she made her best blue dye, and about the long winter of weaving and the light that came through her window.

  Shadows were thin and the air had grown chilly when Joth looked down at his hands and said, “I’m sorry. You must think I’m a silly fool to lie in the grass all day and bother you when you are busy with your work.”

  Jacinth glanced at him and smiled, for his solemn frown looked out of place beside the foxtails that rode here and there among the strands of his shining hair.

  “Not at all,” she said. “No one has ever spoken to me that way before. And I’ve never spoken to anyone as I have to you just now, except perhaps in dreams.” She felt her cheeks redden and she brushed her face with the full sleeve of her blouse, as if to wipe away steam from the dye pot.

  Joth reached for his crutches and began the slow process of standing up. Jacinth offered him her arm, and he leaned against her as he rose. She felt the warmth of his strong hands on her shoulder and remembered how gently he had cleaned the gravel from her elbows when they were children.

  “I’ll be back a week from today,” he said, “to check the reeds again. Perhaps I’ll see you.”

  “Perhaps,” said Jacinth, and she waved to him as he started across the field toward Aranho. When he had dwindled to a small, limping figure in the distance, she sat down by the fire and picked up a stick. Staring after him, she stirred the ruddy embers beneath the dye pot into a confusion of hungry flames.

  They met many times in the field beside the creek that spring. Joth came more and more often to check the reeds, and Jacinth found reasons, no matter how small, to gather whatever flowers were blooming in the meadow. In the long afternoons, only the birds and the buzzing insects hea
rd the murmur of two human voices in the glens and linden groves. As spring turned into summer, Joth and Jacinth spoke to each other first like gregarious children, then like old friends. By and by, they spoke almost without words.

  The first month of summer was nearly through when Jacinth recognized the longing that welled up in them both. They lay beside the creek, propped on their elbows, facing each other. Joth tickled her lips with a long blade of timothy. Then softly, with his fingertips, he stroked her hair and her cheek and the smooth hollow above it, which no one but Jacinth had ever touched before. She closed her eye and felt the large wetness of tears forming there and did not know whether joy brought them, or confusion, or knowledge that the time was not yet right.

  Jacinth caught his hand and wove her fingers through his. “Though I wish it were otherwise,” she said, “we must be patient awhile longer.”

  A shadow fell across Joth’s face, and his eyes grew dark for a moment. “Have I overstepped myself?” he asked. The question seemed simple, but in the sound of his voice and the way he held his head, Jacinth saw that he had left much unasked. She held his hand tighter.

  “No, dear Joth,” she said. “You are like the sun to me. No day seems whole without you anymore. No task seems meaningful. But there is something I must do first.” She gazed at him, thinking of the tapestry, of the lily she had never received, and of the bitterness that lingered in spite of her love for Joth. From a thicket across the stream came the hollow cry of a short-eared owl.

  So it came to pass that in the early summer Jacinth prepared to join the lily hunt. She told no one the exact nature of her plan, not even Joth, though she was sometimes certain he had guessed it. She made herself a pair of stout, coarse trousers and a sturdy jerkin the color of thick forests. The smith of Aranho gazed at her quizzically when she bought a tempered dirk from him; the fletcher frowned at her request for a bow and a quiver of ashwood arrows. But in the end, her gold was as good as anyone else’s, and they accepted her money though she offered no explanations. Last of all, she straightened her back and strode into the shop of Bot the cobbler, as if she were any other customer.