The Shifu Cloth (The Chronicles of Eirie 4)

by Prue Batten

  COPYRIGHT

  Copyright © 2012 by Prue Batten

  The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  All rights reserved.

  Published December 2012 by Darlington Press

  ISBN: 978-0987330529

  Author’s note:

  The art of shifu is an ancient Japanese skill. Sheets of mulberry paper are marked and cut into strips as narrow as 2mm. They are shaken to separate the strands, then dampened between wet cloths whereupon the strips are rolled as if one is making pasta flipped and rolled and flipped and rolled again, separating and softening the fibres. The ends of each strip are joined to make a long filament that is then spindle spun. The resulting ‘yarn’ is woven on the weft with silk yarn on the warp to make the fine, very strong and unique fabric that is shifu.

  ***

  It should be noted that the word Færan (pronounced Far-An) was referenced from an internet site: (http://www.etymonline.com). The word was derived from the Old English færan meaning to "terrify, frighten." I first used it in The Stumpwork Robe (2008) where the meanings of panic and grief fitted the theme of the story, and have chosen to continue its use through each of my novels.

  It should also be noted that the word Faeran, as opposed to Færan, was used by Cecilia Dart-Thornton in The Bitterbynde Saga (2002) and The Crowthistle Chronicles (2006) and no distinction of any sort should be drawn between the two.

  ***

  The story of Chih Nü is a Chinese legend and is related at the end of the novel.

  Chapter One

  Isabella

  The ink burned into the paper, the message darkening as the air settled on the ink-gall. Isabella had slit the bamboo pen into a needle-fine sliver in order to write as secretly as possible. In the silence of deep night the scratching of pen over paper reverberated around the room, so loud she thought the Master or his wife would wake. But the young woman persisted thin angular letters, short words, with no sign of the begging desperation that drove her to do something that could end in her death if she were discovered. Simple words: Nico, farthest north by northwest.

  She lay the pen down on a bamboo tray and removed the tiny saucer of ink, pouring it through the smallest gap in the floorboards in a corner of the room.

  Then she began, for the stripping at least must be finished by the time the Master woke. Her work-roughened hands itched and burned as she grasped the bone-handled knife, wincing as blisters burst. Bringing pressure to bear, she slid the blade through the paper, slicing friable, infinitely narrow strips. She took a handful of water from the bowl that had been left outside her door during the night, battered fingers cracking the hoar across the surface as she began to sprinkle scoop after scoop.

  Each droplet sparkled, flashing as it fell to sink into the paper fibre and she wanted to slow the motion so she could examine the reflection held in the tiny liquid sphere. Her heart wished for some scrying power so she could see family, her home. But her head knew all that would be reflected would be a bare paper-screened room, mats on the floor, her quilt rolled on top of her sleeping mat and a lantern flickering as the last of the oil burned away.

  She took up the strips, rolling and massaging. Anyone looking into the room would think they had chanced upon a noodle-maker except that the room lacked the comfort of a kitchen fire or the smell of star-anise, or ginger and garlic. Reddened fingers lifted the fibrous bundle and she stood shaking and gyrating so the strips separated and fell apart, hanging like an oyster-coloured veil.

  She could see little of the writing, maybe faintly with the acuity of an informed eye, but she relied on the fact that paper had a memory. Her mother had heard it from a gifted papermaker long ago. Paper could be cut, even shredded and if the pieces were ever re-joined, innate bonding occurred – a harmony, a gathering together of like with like, the need to be side by side with familiars.

  As well for paper, but for others like me, no togetherness with familiars at all.

  *

  The pliant strips had dried in the persistent beams of dawn. She drew up one and then another, joining them by pinching the ends and rolling the strips until she had a thin fibre, as thin as thread and as long as forever.

  On the other side of the winter-cold compound in the family’s sleeping wing, she could hear Madame Koi, the Master’s wife, rattling off complaints in a dialect she could barely understand. Then the slap-slap of the woman’s slippers along the verandah, a door sliding open and then shut and then more rattling as the kitchen staff received the back of her tongue.

  The Master’s steps followed, heavier, the paper in the screens vibrating. The door to Isabella’s room slid apart and he filled the space, face in shadow. His quilted black robes smelt of sandalwood, his voice sonorous and not unkind.

  ‘You have begun. Good. You have understood my instructions, it seems. The old scroll was nothing if not pedantic in how it must be done. Shifu cloth is treasured, Ibo.’ He touched the pile of paper strips and her heart nearly stopped, but then he moved on to the coils of silk thread. ‘The fabric must be ready in two days, the loom shall be delivered shortly.’

  He spoke in the language of Trevallyn and Pymm, each syllable masticated but she knew he tried hard so she could understand. She bowed her head over hands that she slipped into the wide sleeves of her padded, indigo robe.

  ‘Yes Master Koi. It will be ready.’

  ‘It is cold. I shall send a brazier,’ and he withdrew, the dark of his robes stirring the embers of memory.

  She saw them then, the men and the boats.

  *

  They came at midnight, gliding over the silvered waters like black swans. The moon had hidden behind a curtain of cloud and the boats blended with the shadowy chiaroscuro.

  She and her cousin had just pulled in the nets and were bending to fill baskets with wriggling whitebait, the incoming tide brushing over their toes. They chatted to each other, Nicholas deftly flicking crabs and smaller fish back into the phosphorescent wash. She watched him – his broad shoulders as he flicked a net out, his height as he bent to haul it back in. She smiled a secret smile as she thought how much the lovesick maids would have changed places with her in an instant. It was no surprise that he was the centre of their attention. She grinned. No surprise at all. As the lamp flame agitated in the breeze, she turned.

  A hand slid over Nico’s mouth and she had no time to scream because a strong force grabbed her – a muffle tied over her mouth as she struggled against arms that lifted and hefted her over a shoulder. Still she kicked as she was carried through the water. The strange language chilled her and a whack with a closed fist smashed on the back of her thighs. It was only later she felt the ache from the bruise that followed because at that minute she was thrown with no attempt at care into one of the boats.

  She hit the planks on the floor and screamed and screamed, a stifled sound as weak as a babe’s. They began to pull a bag over her head and she shook herself from side to side until they hit her hard on the temple, a harsh pain and dizziness following as vomit swelled into her mouth. As the bag slid down, she glimpsed Nicholas kicking and punching on the shore.

  Then he folded into the unkind shallows of the night.

  *

  She lay still in the moving boat, her heart pounding, knowing each beat took her further and further from all she held dear, and for the first time in her life she knew fear like she had never felt before.

  Her life had been built on a simple foundation – she knew who she was, everyone else knew who she was and there had never been any need for confusion or effort.

  Nico had told her again and again that such thinking
led to arrogance.

  As the boat moved away, her heart beat in time to his words: ‘Pride goes before a fall.’

  The seasons had passed and with them her pride had fallen like leaves from the trees in autumn. She had entered the compound when the elm was a spider-web of barren twigs, snow settling like a white shroud. Spring brought forth acid green bud and unfurling leaf. Summer elicited shifting shade and then autumn arrived dipped in topaz and toffee. And now winter again and she had cried so much, she thought she would wither from the dryness that crackled inside her.

  Isabella, whom they called Ibo, was their slave.

  She had skills.

  In Trevallyn and Pymm she had been fêted for many things – for her embroidery, for sewing, delicate writing, skill on the lute and for a lovely face. Here, wherever here was, farthest north by northwest, she was valued in a different way for those same things. The House of Koi paid the slave-master handsomely for her hands, even though the Master’s wife punished her for her face.

  She moved to the bamboo basket filled with copper hanks of silk. It was she who had suggested stripping some of the bark from the elm in the gardens and boiling it to see what colour emerged. The shade had been a little of sunset and sunrise but needed more depth, so she split apart an old wasp’s nest from the garden. Inside, some creature the Han called vermilac had spread, bred and died by the hundreds and their dried husks were boiled to release a colour as richly red as the lacquer of Master Koi’s chests.

  She added it, drop by drop, as if she were some scheming alchemist of old. Then one dropof oak gall and there it had been her mother’s hair colour glinting like new-minted gelt. She prepared a simple woven square and hadn’t shown the Master until she observed it in all the lights of day and night and was content that it glistened and glowed as if it had been sliced from a dusk sky. The Master immediately desired a bolt, for he saw his family’s fortunes rising like the sunlight of Isabella’s dye, the fabric to be sold at the prestigious Stitching Fair in Trevallyn.

  Now here she was, grasping the fibre of the paper and threading it through the loom on the weft, with the copper silk on the warp. Without stopping for breakfast or a midday meal and then only briefly for a bowl of savoury dumplings in the night, she continued on.

  *

  The tsk-tsk-swoosh, tsk-tsk-swoosh of the loom counted off the minutes of her life and the shifu cloth fell onto her feet. At one point she pulled up the yardage she had woven and examined it for signs of her words. Her finger slipped over the faintest slub and she knew it was a letter and her heart sang. She spoke to the fabric as she replaced it carefully at her feet.

  ‘You have a memory, let Fate put you in the right hands and you will spill your memory forth, so help me!’

  Chapter Two

  Nicholas

  Nicholas pressed the heel of his hand against his forehead as the pain of grief cut through his skull. His sister-cousin Isabella, the other of half of the pair of them, had gone and he was hurt. Worse, he was diminished. The girl who had been his kindred spirit from the crib was gone. Ebba, his adoptive grandmother complained once of the child before she was a woman, ‘Isabella, you’re too sure of yourself. Think before you do, child, think before you speak. You’ll get into trouble one day. You need to be a little more like Nicholas and you Nicholas, you need to be more like Isabella.’

  He’d never understood till now, relying on Isabella’s nature for impetus through life. Now he was in stasis, bereft and wishing she were back in the fold didn’t change a thing.

  She’d never tried to be less than confident; always gregarious and he loved her for it. It had been a good life until that midnight witching hour a year ago. Nicholas shifted in his seat. He remembered from this silent and lonely point, a year after Isabella had gone and Ebba had died, how he had crept into Ebba’s home on the old woman’s death, hoping the house would sustain him, give him answers, hoping Ebba would give him a sign.

  Where should I seek her, Ebba?

  The house had creaked and the curtains flew away from the opened window in response. Swiping at his short black hair, he had sat down and tried again to pull valuable information from his memory, from that dreadful midnight experience on the beach.

  *

  He could remember what they talked about as they pulled in nets filled with whitebait and tiny flounder, with bullies and baby catfish, with crabs and shrimp. He had been remonstrating with her she had such a way. She was a beauty to be sure and none on the island could play the lute as well, nor write with such a delicate hand nor embroider with such perfect skill. She was lauded as a paragon and the most perfect catch.

  He remembered one day at a fair. She was dressed in a shirt with a wide neck that shrouded bare shoulders, her hair looped up high, and her head bent as she examined some passimenterie on a stall. A coterie of young suitors behind her had sucked in their breath, their eyes fixed on the fragile neck, the chain of her spine disappearing downwards beneath the shirt so that the men’s eyes followed it. She turned her head slightly and looked out of the corner of her eye, her lashes sweeping her cheekbones and she smiled a secret smile, knowing her power, enjoying the pain of unrequited love she inflicted. She grabbed Nico’s arm and swept through the pile of stunned admirers, leaving them thirsting like men lost in the Amritsands.

  Nicholas called her a veela and she looked at him with a chill freeze filling her eyes. Of course the two had gotten over it and he had learned to keep his thoughts to himself but he sometimes felt she was more Færan than he, so much did she toy with people’s feelings. She would manipulate and tease and yet even through the hurt, everyone would still love her because she had a way of smiling and touching the arm that begged forgiveness and slavish devotion.

  It was her attitude to a most recent devotee that had been the subject of their conversation as they pulled in the whitebait.

  ‘He’s a nice man, Isabella. You could do worse.’

  ‘James of Merricks is, I shall grant you, nice. But his looks are as lacking as his intelligence and nice will not see me into a marriage.’

  ‘Aine, Isabella, that’s the fifth man you’ve refused. What are you waiting for?’

  ‘Someone good enough for me! You and I have such fine times together Nicholas, and I want exactly that with the man I marry. No man I have met is even likely.’

  ‘Then perhaps you need to find an Other since patently no mortal will do.’

  He splashed her and grinned.

  ‘Perhaps I should,’ she tossed her long skein of hair and threw a crab at him.

  ‘Ebba used to say,’ he admonished as he picked the shellfish off his jacket, ‘that pride goes before a fall.’

  She had laughed and a hand slid over her mouth, a band locking around his own chest and he never saw her again.

  And almost as terrible, it was the last time he ever spoke.

  *

  He heaved a sigh as he wondered for the millionth time if Isabella was dead. The thought of death and the hereafter reared above him as black and malevolent as the Cabyll Ushtey. He had dredged at his senses, casting lines out, trying to hook thoughts from Isabella coming the other way.

  But there had been nothing, nothing for a year and he feared the inevitability.

  He had searched in many directions, the better to seek for news, even as far as one could sail without falling off the edge of the world. Phelim, his stepfather, searched for even longer periods and returned with lines etched down the side of his tired face. Gallivant the Hob, stalwart to Isabella's mother, would chivvy Nicholas and they would take a pointless turn about but the results were always the same and each time there was more of nothing, another little piece of Isabella’s mother would fade away.

  Nicholas and Gallivant returned from the west coast of Trevallyn, having spoken to the families of three other missing girls who were taken at the same time as Isabella. But the families could report nothing more. Indeed as time moved on, it appeared Nicholas was the only one to have seen any
thing at all and that most fleeting.

  From Zennor it was reported the missing girl was neither comely nor plain but a skilled weaver and of childbearing age. From Porthcawl, the girl was reported to be of passing good appearance, a tomboy and troublemaker but an excellent cook nevertheless, and also of childbearing age. From Polcarrow, the daughter was said to be quite pretty and good with children – and of course of childbearing age. In each instance the girls had dark brown or black hair and dark eyes. The common history was that nubile girls, one from each village, had been abducted over a number of years. Enough for a legend to spring up that Others were snatching mortal children of their choice.

  It was not news that Nicholas or Gallivant wished to hear. Both being Other, they had spoken to many of the eldritch of Trevallyn and always with the same answer. Others had heard of the abductions but they believed the style of it smacked of something unfamiliar, perhaps more mortal.

  How so, asked Gallivant?

  Well, was the opinion, since when were Others in need of childbearing women in particular? And to be frank, Others always preferred better looking women, not passing ordinary ones. Had Nicholas and Gallivant tried the Raj? Perhaps it was the magic of djinns, foliots and afrits.

  But the Raj had offered up nothing better when Phelim went there, except to find that a small series of abductions of male infants took place every few years leaving a trail of tears shed by mothers as bereft as the afflicted parents of Trevallyn and Pymm.

  Nicholas remained mute.

  To all who knew him, it seemed as though his voice and Isabella’s disappearance were intrinsically tied. The islanders of his home believed it was shock.

  ‘Aine, it’s most like. Don’t shock turn yer hair white overnight and cause hearts ter stop beatin’?’ This ain’t no different!’