“How did you learn to weave?” My head was pounding. I could not rid myself of the image of that hand before me, that foreign hand, touching my breast.
Mother tutted and stood up. “You know what your grandmother is like. She couldn’t teach the craft as a master to her apprentice, oh no. She had me discover everything myself. Learn the hard way. I lost years through her method. You won’t have to. If your time comes I will train you myself, you won’t have to make all the same mistakes I did.”
She looked at me properly for the first time since I came in. “Have you seen something?”
I nodded. She stiffened and tilted her head to one side.
“So young… Did it frighten you?”
I nodded again. Dared not meet her gaze. Afraid that she could read from my eyes what I had seen, the shameful thing. I had been taught from a young age that the worst thing a dreamweaver could do was enter the dream of another unbidden.
She smiled. “That is understandable.” She came to me and drew me close. “I haven’t had time to prepare you. I couldn’t have guessed that the dreams would come to you so soon. But it does make me happy that you have the gift, I must say. I have always hoped that one of you girls would carry it. Now I can pass on the lore.” She gave me a quick stroke on the cheek. “We begin tonight. I have no work to do, so meet me on the roof when the little ones are asleep.”
I was relieved. Now Mother would teach me. She would show me how to distinguish between dreams and reality. I did not want to jump out of the window again. Or suddenly see myself from the outside. It had been a terrifying experience.
But Mother and I spoke different languages when we spoke of dreams. I did not understand her, and she did not understand me. She sat me down by Father’s pillow while he was sleeping, and showed me how to tune into his dream, and weave in a new element. But I found it difficult to do what she showed me. It felt all wrong—unnatural. When I did it my own way she became furious, smacked my fingers and hissed, “Respect!” so loudly that Father woke up. Then she flung out her hands. “If you don’t do as I say, what is the point of me teaching you anything?” she snapped and disappeared out through the door. The hanging bridge creaked under her weight as she paced away from the hometree. But I wanted her to teach me. I wanted her to show me how to hold reality close and keep foreign dreams at bay, but when I asked her about it she did not understand what I meant. I always did as she said, and followed her movements, and watched with a sigh as the dreams slowly faded away. But Mother was pleased with me, nodded and corrected some tiny detail. It was as if she could not see what I saw. As if the colours and energy of a dream were hidden from her. For me a dream starts as an overwhelming sensation, then come the images, and I see what the person is dreaming about as if I were really there. The feeling is often so intense that I carry it with me for several days. If it is a bad dream, filled with terrors, then I go around in horror and fear and cannot shake it off. Yet even when the dreams are not unpleasant, the burden is heavy. It was heaviest when I was a child, and defenceless against all the anxiety, longing and pain of the dreamers.
We were bickering more and more often. She wanted an obedient student and daughter. And I wanted to be obedient, but was too desperate for knowledge that she could not give me. I loved her with ireful fervour and, though I did what she asked of me, it became harder and harder. I had difficulty sleeping, afraid of what dreams might force themselves upon me. I began to sneak out at night, and climb to solitary trees on the outskirts of the city to get as far away from the dreamers as I possibly could. I became hollow-eyed and weak from lack of sleep, I lost my appetite. I no longer played with Aurelo. I missed his companionship; the hole he left behind was as though someone had scooped out my core with a spoon. But I could not rid myself of his dream. His version of me. Though I knew that nobody can control their dreams.
One night, Mother and I were sitting in the dark by Father’s pillow, she on her dreamweaving stool and I on my cushion, and I failed at the simplest of tasks: to introduce a fish into Father’s dream. Or some rain. Or climbing. I had done it before, and more difficult things besides: escaping from a storm; preparing a meal; an encounter that ends in tears. But this time I was so tired, and so frightened, that nothing would work for me. My hands were shaking and I was fighting to hold back the tears.
Eventually Mother lowered her hands and leant back. She looked at me and sighed. I let the last fragments of Father’s dream slip out of my reach, whittle away and disperse.
“It’s time I took you to my mother,” she said shortly and stood up.
We set sail the following day.
* * *
Mother packed for the journey: clothes, dried fish and drinking water. More than was required for a one-day journey. But on the ocean one must always be prepared for storms. Gifts for Grandmother: dreamsnares made by my aunts out of horsehair and human hair, pearls and dried berries.
We rarely visited Grandmother, and the few times we did it was with the whole family. Mother and Grandmother did not get on. I did not know why. I knew only that Mother sometimes got the notion that she needed to visit her mother, and then she took all us children with her. To show us off, or as a shield? This time Mother and I sailed alone. The boat felt empty. Mother barely spoke to me. She sighed as she loaded the boat, and again when she untied its mooring from the boat tree and poled us out of the delta.
As soon as we emerged onto open water the light was sharp. My eyes were accustomed to only seeing the sun filtered through leaves and branches. I sat at the fore and squinted. Even the air was different. Light. Salty. There are several islands outside Goveli, and when you first catch sight of them in the haze of the sun they appear to be no more than shadows, spectres in the blue. Then they begin to loom increasingly clearly, high and rocky. So unlike our leafy delta. On the larger islands are small villages, on the smaller ones just houses scattered like driftwood on the shore. The people live not in trees but in houses built of stone. I wondered how they could sleep without the wind’s lullaby in the treetops. The island people were different. They saw the world differently from us.
Grandmother lived alone on the farthermost island. Her little house was halfway up a steep slope above a beach of smooth pebbles. We reached the island in the evening when the sun was at its lowest western point. Grandmother’s island is called Aspris. It means the white island. It has no trees, only some low bushes and grass where Grandmother grazes her small herd of goats. When we came to land the goats were standing on the highest ridge of the rocks and staring down at us. White and black and brown-horned heads against a pale-blue sky. I was a little afraid of them. They were nothing like our Bark. They were wild and dangerous and nameless.
Grandmother was standing high on the sloped shore and waiting while we dragged the boat in. She was even smaller than I remembered her, hunched and white-haired, dressed in some shapeless black garment. It was difficult to believe that this woman, no larger than a child, had given birth to four daughters and a son. Mother respectfully knelt to kiss her bare foot, revealing no expression. Grandmother held out a bowl of water from the island’s spring and Mother drank before passing the bowl to me. The water was delicious and completely different from what we had at home. Then we were each given a piece of hard goat’s cheese. Nobody had said a single word. Grandmother barely looked at her daughter. But she inspected me carefully. The sun disappeared and, with it, the shadows. The cheese was salty and delicious, while Grandmother’s gaze felt harsh on my skin.
“Are you teaching her?”
Grandmother spoke to her daughter without taking her eyes off me. Mother nodded.
“She is clever. Only her handling is a little clumsy, but she sees clearly.”
“Sees clearly.” Grandmother scoffed. “Why have you brought her here?” Her words were short and hard. Mother shifted her weight from one foot to the other.
“May we come in, sit down?” I have brought gifts from Laela and Imjanda. We…”
G
randmother ignored her. “Do they enter you? The dreams?”
It took a heartbeat before I realized she was talking to me.
“Yes.”
“Can you distinguish between dreams and reality?”
Mother gave me a sharp look. I had never dared speak to her about any of this. I had hoped she would guess, understand. I quickly shook my head.
“Of course you can, Orseola.” Mother was impatient. “You see the dreams very clearly. It is only that you don’t do as I say.”
Grandmother sighed. “Come. Let us eat.”
Grandmother made up a bed on the floor for me. Mother got the sleeping mat and Grandmother took a blanket and a mat for herself and lay on the beach beneath the stars. I lay for a long time and listened to the sound of Mother’s steady breathing. Grandmother’s house was very small. Hundreds of dreamsnares hung from the ceiling, made of bulrush and horsehair, feathers and pearls, bone fragments and nuts. Some were slowly spinning and jingling. I could not sleep. I missed the swaying of the trees. The stillness was making my skin crawl.
I carefully slid out from under my blanket. The door did not creak when I opened it. Outside was a starry night and a new moon. I could see the dark lump of Grandmother on the beach. I walked over the rattling pebbles towards her and sat on the corner of her mat.
“What do you do with the dreams you capture?”
Grandmother stayed silent. The ocean whispered to itself out in the night. I was not sure whether she was awake. Then a shoulder moved under the blanket.
“You understand why I live out here?”
I thought for a moment. Nobody had ever spoken of it. Grandmother was of the delta folk, like us. I did not know how long she had lived on the island. What could make someone leave the trees and fruits and the city? What could make me choose solitude?
“The dreams. You are escaping the dreams.”
Grandmother sat up. She withdrew a pipe from the folds in her robe and stuffed it carefully. The leaves were fresh and sweet-smelling; Mother had brought a whole bag with her. Once the smoke was billowing in abundance, Grandmother took a long and pensive puff.
“They wouldn’t leave me in peace. Even after I stopped dreamweaving and passed the craft down to your mother, the dreams came to me in droves. I had to go as far away from other people as possible.” She absent-mindedly offered me the pipe and I shook my head. “I have the dreamsnares to capture any dreams that have lost their way.”
“But then what do you do with them?”
Grandmother looked at me. Her eyes shone in the starlight.
“I drown them,” she said shortly.
“Your own too?”
“I stopped dreaming a long time ago.”
“How do you do it?”
“That you must learn for yourself. This is what your mother found so hard to understand: the lore of dreams cannot be learnt. We see them in our own ways. They affect us all differently. Your mother, she is clever. Well regarded. But her way is precise. Practical. You and I…” She picked a leaf off her tongue. “The dreams come to us, whether we like it or not. Isn’t that right?” I nodded and she took a long puff on her pipe. “Tell me. What has happened?”
I told her about the flying dream and the others. In the darkness I was not afraid. I knew that Grandmother would not judge me. That she had experienced similar, or worse. I explained my fear, and how difficult it had become to know for sure what was reality and what was dream. She nodded, her face expressing neither surprise nor alarm.
“You and I, we feel the dreams inside us. You must be careful not to let them in too much. They can begin to take possession of your being. Erase your boundaries. Do not worry, there are ways to protect yourself. But it takes time and work. You have been struck early, much younger than I was. It is inexcusable to enter the dream of another unbidden. You know that?”
I nodded. It was one of the first things Mother taught me.
“What happens to us is not unlike that. It is involuntary, but still not permissible. Do not speak of it to anybody.”
She sat quietly awhile. It was chilly at the sea’s edge and I was shivering. She snapped out of her musings and covered me with her blanket. It was rough and smelt of goat.
“Sleep, Orseola. Lie down here with me and dream, and I will weave you an explanation. Most of it you will only understand later, when you are older. But it will stay within you, to arise as needed.” She smiled, and the smile transformed her face so that she no longer looked like my grandmother. “Nobody forgets a dream I weave for them.”
“But Grandmother, you do not weave any more, Grandmother,” I said, repeating the word so as to anchor her here with me and make this wild and dangerous persona disappear. She chuckled and became my grandmother once more.
“For my own blood I can break my abstinence. Come, lay your head here on my lap. Tomorrow I will teach you to plait dreamsnares. They can afford you some relief while you are in training.”
I lay down with my head on Grandmother’s bony thigh and the blanket over me. My ears were filled with the sound of the ocean’s swell, almost like the whisper of wind through leaves. The smoke from Grandmother’s pipe filled my nostrils. And I dreamt.
It was a dream woven with artistry. It was nothing like the dreams my mother wove for me. It was much more vivid and powerful, starker than anything Mother made. During this one night I learnt more about dreams and dreamweaving than from all of Mother’s instructions put together. It spoke directly to that place inside me where I saw and touched dreams. Some of it I did not understand until later, when I had learnt more about dreamweaving and my abilities had developed.
Some of it I do not understand to this day.
* * *
The day I left Terasu was one of the first clear days after the rains. The air in Goveli was filled with the sound of birds exulting in the warm sun and their drying feathers. For several moons we had been mainly shut up inside, with the rain as constant company, drumming against the roof and leaves. The little ones squabbled and fought. Father escaped often to his workshop to work on instruments, whether commissioned or not, late into the night. Mother and I had stopped arguing. We stayed silent instead. Silent through daily life and its chores, silent through her continuing instruction in dreamweaving. Not that I was learning anything from her any more. We both knew it but refused to acknowledge it. So we wove dreams for Father or the few clients who braved the rain and the slippery hanging bridges to come and request Mother’s services. And though I did as she asked, it was unthinking and lifeless. Mother had hoped that dreamweaving would bring us closer together. But instead it was driving us apart.
I had hung dreamsnares above my bed. Mother looked at them with dagger eyes and tight lips, but said nothing. The snares held some dreams at bay, but could not hold back the strongest ones. So I practised. Many nights I lay awake in my bed and struggled to stand my ground. To cling tight to who I was, to the boundaries that defined me, and to strengthen them against the unrelenting barrage of dreams trying to make their way in. I was growing stronger. Grandmother had given me a talisman, a necklace of seeds that I wore around my neck day and night. When I did not know what was real and what was someone else’s dream, my fingers sought the necklace. I recognized the shape of each seed. If the necklace was not there, or the seeds were the wrong shape or size, I knew that I was in a dream. I had learnt how to creep out of dreams as well. It worked best with the simple ones, the minor ones. Nightmares were worse.
That night I had stayed awake listening to the wind in the trees and the absence of rain. Finally the rains were over. Finally I could leave this house, venture out among the trees again.
I packed a bundle of belongings. Bound my stool to my back. Looked at my sleeping family. My husband. My children. I crept out without waking them. Ran barefoot over the bridges. My heart was hammering in my chest—would they discover my flight? The sound of steps behind me. I turned around. There stood my eldest daughter with her angry eyes. I could not let he
r suspect anything.
“I have a client,” I said. “Go home to bed.”
She did not obey. She never obeyed. She opened her mouth to scream, to expose me. I became furiously angry. I lashed out before she could make a sound. Lifted her over the rail of the bridge. She was heavy and struggled in my arms, her breath warm on my neck. She was writhing soundlessly, the unholy necklace she wore scratching at my cheeks. I prised her loose from me and sent her sailing downward. The water enveloped her. She left no trace.
I groped around my own neck—nothing there, no seeds. I had to get away, get out, this was not true. I had to continue my escape before anyone else woke up. The trees grasped at me with branches like fingers. I stumbled and fell down into the water,
my feet touched the surface,
I used all my might, more than ever before, grappled for a stronghold,
got a grip,
clawed my way out of the dream before the water enveloped me.
I sat up and staggered outside. Vomited over the veranda rail. Stood outside and breathed. The morning birds had already awoken. Soon the others would be awake too.
I crept into my parents’ room. Mother was sleeping, motionless but with a wrinkle between her eyebrows. Her ribcage was lifting up and down with steady breaths. One of her hands twitched slightly in her sleep.
She had thrown me in the water. She had wanted to run away from us all. I could still feel her turmoil inside me.
A dream is not the same as a wish, I tried to remind myself. People cannot control their dreams.
I could still feel the disgust she had felt, seeing myself through her eyes, standing there on the bridge. She must truly despise me. I was a disappointment to her. I could not even manage the simplest of tasks.
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