by John Plotz
“Do you know what, you old fish-breath?” Morris had roused himself a bit and poked Eiríkr awake. “I was dreaming of my love nest at home. Should I read you the poem I wrote?” Without waiting for an answer he pulled out a little fragment and began:
“Dead and gone is all desire
Gone and left me cold and bare
Gone as the kings that few remember
And their battle cry …”
Something friends of Morris learned: the gift of silence. Eiríkr held his breath a few minutes, waiting to see if there was any more. Then he unwrapped a book neatly wrapped in oilcloth and held it up to Morris with a questioning look.
Morris slid down next to him, and opened the book so it lay between them. “Yes, yes, a saga!” he exclaimed immediately. “Sigurd the Volsung, why not? That’s my translation there, is it?”
Soon I heard them crooning softly, Eiríkr reciting in what must be Icelandic, then Morris after him in English.
At first it was hard to pick up the lilting syllables, but after a while I heard Morris say clearly, “What shall we do next? How about the dragon’s bane, when Sigurd hides in a pit to slay the worm-tongue Fafnir?” Eiríkr turned some pages and resumed the moist burble of Icelandic (Ed: “He sounds like a drunk loon humming to himself underwater”). When Morris chimed in, however, it grew louder and fiercer:
Now crept the worm down to his place of watering, and the earth shook all about him, and he snorted forth venom on all the way before him as he went; but Sigurd neither trembled nor was adrad at the roaring of him.
“Adrad?” I heard Eiríkr ask. “Why not just terrified?” Morris only held up a warning hand and went right on:
So whenas the worm crept over the pits, Sigurd thrust his sword under his left shoulder, so that it sank in up to the hilts; then up leapt Sigurd from the pit and drew the sword back again unto him, and therewith was his arm all bloody, up to the very shoulder.
“And that,” shouted Morris triumphantly, jumping up so the book would have tumbled to the ground if Eiríkr hadn’t snagged it in midair, “is one dead dragon, by Wotan!” Ed laughed under his breath, but I couldn’t join in. As Morris had been reciting the story, the queasiest feeling had come over me, as if my own arm were covered with dragon gore.
I punched my leg in bewilderment. First I thought I was Morris; now I was starting to feel like a character in one of his stories. Mead seemed to have some idea what was happening to me, but I sure didn’t.
Suddenly I heard Ed’s laughter stop. He pointed a shaky hand at the ground below us. There was a kind of vibration in the air, the kind you can sometimes see above a fire—and I caught a whiff of that same sweet smell from the moment we hit the Tapestry. As we sat there watching, only feet from where Morris and Eiríkr sat chanting from the sagas, a dragon shimmered into being. It was like watching a dream come alive—except that this dragon had the gruesome chest wound the saga described.
“Fresh and fell,” I whispered; and once I started shivering I didn’t stop. This was obviously a job for Mead. I looked down at him, head not quite hidden under his wing; the feathers that should have concealed him completely now formed only an imperfect veil. He was still the biggest and the most experienced of us all. Clearly if anyone was going to tackle this dragon, the job was his. Ed started to tug at his wing. “See it, Mead?” he was whispering.
For some reason, though, I found myself standing up. Before I even heard Mead’s bemused “What? What do you see, Ed?” I was moving out from the cover of the boulder, trying to silence the voice screaming at me to run back and bury my head under Mead’s wing. Rather than walking right at a dragon so huge, and so hot, that I could even feel my arm hairs starting to curl.
Thick black smoke was still pouring from the nostrils that lay just above its terrifying razor teeth, but strangely enough I found myself wondering exactly how much bigger it was than the elephant I’d once patted at Roger Williams Zoo. My pulse was steady, and my mind was busy with logistics. Will it fold up when I touch it? Or will I have to use my pocketknife to hack out the forked tongue? One way or another, I had no doubt that there was going to be room in our bag for whatever the Tapestry needed. There just had to be. I squared my shoulders, and set to work.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The People Marching On
“Can we check on Mouse first when we get back?” Ed was saying to Mead as we plunged back over England, its tidy green fields and low rolling hills unfolding comfortingly under us. I knew he was doing his best to pretend nothing was wrong, trying to get Mead’s mind off his lost feathers and increasingly labored breathing.
But I could also tell that what we’d just gone through had meant less to Ed than it did to me. He’d shaken off Iceland quicker than I had, probably hadn’t even heard my vow to come back. I wondered if he would be with me when I went back there one day. Could I herd sheep, I found myself wondering. Or find a way to make a living fishing, pushing a small boat out every day into that steely gray surf? Images from those little villages we’d flown over stuck with me like a slide show, floating in front of my face even as the ground beneath us grew dense with people, crowded with traffic.
“We got it!” Ed chirped up suddenly. “We’re really almost there.” I nodded and smiled. But as I did the same mental arithmetic that Ed had been doing (four to go?), it struck me that in Iceland something had changed. I had stopped caring what we found. Or at least stopped caring in the same way.
Oh great! What else was I going to find out about myself? Not only was I a selfish hoarder, I also didn’t care about art, and what made a real work of art. But that was it, I realized. No matter how much Granny knew about Morris and Company, there was a basic fact about the Tapestry she’d completely missed.
It wasn’t Morris’s signature that made it an artwork, and it never had been. A collectible, maybe, or a valuable way to pay for our house. But what made it art was something else again. If the life came into it when I looked, what did it matter if it was an original or a copy, or just something that some other weaver had put together a hundred or fifty years ago? Or yesterday, for that matter. The professors might care, and the curators, but I didn’t—and I had a sneaking suspicion that Morris wouldn’t have cared, either.
So what were we doing here? It occurred to me that I had an answer for that, too. I didn’t care about getting the trustees to believe the Tapestry was genuine. Whether it made us money or not, whether it made the museum happy or not, I wanted to see those Lost Spots filled. “Come back!” I found myself whispering ferociously, “Oh, come back!”
Ed poked me. He’d scribbled something on the pad he was shoving at me: Maybe it’s only the Jumps that take feathers! Out loud, what he said was “Don’t worry, Jen, when we land we can take as much time as we want to find the singing birds in the town of the tree.”
I nodded. It made sense to focus on the quest one step at a time; what else could we do at this point? Maybe Mead had only three flights left in him, or even two. But maybe there was some power we didn’t know about, some way to heal him.
Suddenly, without thinking about it, as if it just had to come out, I opened my mouth and said, “Mead, is there any medicine for you?”
Though Mead kept his head turned away, I could tell just from the set of his neck that he understood the question right away. He didn’t pretend not to know, didn’t make me show him Ed’s notebook calculations. After a long pause, he said, “Well, there may be. There is a place, a spot enclosed by willows beside the Thames. But there’s no reaching it until this quest is done; no way at all.”
I felt the blood pounding under my skin; we had to find that spot, and right away. The quest could wait, and …
But Mead was going on. “Children, I’m old but not yet blind. Could I have snatched what Ed has snatched? Woken myself to face that dragon? None of what I thought I lived for could have been done without you.”
“But Mead …” I couldn’t help the desperate whining note I heard in my voice,
like a girl about to cry. But that girl absolutely could not be me.
“Have you considered,” he went on, his cranky whisper a faint echo of his voice only a few jumps back, “how many times I have tried to enter that Tapestry to accomplish what I thought was my duty? Considered that nobody ever told me I had a geas; that even the strongest roc only matters to the story because of where he takes Sinbad?”
Ed and I looked at each other in dismay, and Mead finally said, heavily, “Have you considered, in fact, that you two are the heroes of this adventure? And that at best I can be nothing more than a minor character?”
Had I considered it? It was worse even than that. I’d never stopped thinking about myself as a hero—no, as the hero of this adventure. I didn’t need Mead to explain to me what that meant. Whether I was thinking I was Morris or thinking I knew what it felt like to slay the dragon, I was in the heart of things—maybe for the first time in my life. Even saving Mead seemed to be part of my mission. There seemed to be nothing to say. We trundled on in silence: companionable or uneasy, I wasn’t quite sure which.
After an hour or so, Mead finally threw a glance back over his shoulder. “So,” he said with a pleased croak, “I suppose you two philosophers are too busy to notice that I just performed a perfect one-claw landing on top of a London omnibus?”
The bus, drawn by a pair of silent chestnut workhorses, slowly traveled west through central London at sunset. Ed and I peeked down though an open window to see a beaming William Morris, grayer and definitely fatter but otherwise unmistakably himself. He was energetically haranguing the person at his side. For a minute I thought it was Jane. Then she gave a familiar jerk of the arm, William Morris style: it could only be May. Dressed like a young lady, yet barely up to his shoulder. A child still, but rushing to become … well, somebody. I could almost count the lines between her eyes as she peered intently across the aisle, following her father’s gaze.
May was staring at a tall, mild-looking man with light hair and a droopy mustache. You’d have bet he was a librarian, or maybe a veterinarian—even from here I could see the tufts of cat hair clinging to his shabby tweed jacket. Oblivious to the sway of the car, he clung to his little brown clothbound book with white knuckles, lips moving slightly.
Morris, all jumps and twitches and triumphant glances, couldn’t stand it any longer. Leaning across the aisle, he put his stubby finger on the book’s open page and started reciting loudly.
“Folk say, a wizard to a northern king
At Christmas-tide such wondrous things did show,
That through one window men beheld the spring,
And through another saw the summer glow,
And through a third the fruited vines a-row.”
The man twitched violently and jumped as if waking up from a dream. He looked at his book, looked at Morris, then looked down at his book again and in a shaky voice continued:
“While still, unheard, but in its wonted way,
Piped the drear wind of that December day.”
Morris chimed in now and they went on together, Morris waving his arms as if he were conducting an orchestra.
“So with this Earthly Paradise it is,
If ye will read aright, and pardon me,
Who strive to build a shadowy isle of bliss
Midmost the beating of the steely sea.”
May was blushing furiously by now and looking frantically around, probably for a pit to crawl into. The people nearby, though, behaved as if the evening ride was incomplete without at least one tag-team recitation of epic poetry. Somebody yawned, two or three gentlemen refolded their newspapers. One small boy started laughing, got shushed instantly by a bossy older sister, and subsided.
The man reached up to remove his hat, discovered he wasn’t actually wearing one, and blushed. “Sir,” he started, got embarrassed, cleared his throat. Tried again. “Sir, I recognize your face from this evening’s Socialist Guild meeting. May I introduce myself? Emery Walker, by trade a printer.”
Ed jiggled next to me deliriously. “It’s Photogravure Walker!” he whispered ecstatically.
“Shut up, techno-freak!” I whispered furiously back. Walker was still speaking.
“I take it,” he went on, “that like me you are an ardent admirer of The Earthly Paradise by the great poet William Morris?”
“None greater!” bellowed Morris with an exuberant laugh. Grabbing Walker’s arm, he propelled him down the steps, counting on the driver to lurch to a stop (he did).
“Well, Mr. Emery Walker, printer, shall we walk and talk? Tonight I feel not only an ardent revolutionary but also, thanks to you, a very happy man. Let’s build our own socialist isle of bliss.”
May grabbed the bulky box he’d left behind: “I’ll just tuck these magic lantern slides away at home and check on Jenny.” As the bus turned out of sight, we heard the occasional word float back down the street: “Father … issue … Commonweal… proofreading … !” And a final despairing wail, “Remember!” It had the sound of something she yelled at him a lot.
As they strolled along bustling Oxford Street in the gathering shades of evening, Morris and Walker were soon deep in talk. So deep we were able to glide cautiously along behind them, tree to tree, never falling out of earshot. Morris was bouncing on the balls of his feet, sawing the air so vigorously that Walker kept having to swerve to avoid a punch in the nose.
He was talking about his trip to Iceland; suppers he’d shared in the poorest little fishing villages. “The most grinding poverty is a trifling evil, Walker, compared with the inequality of classes.” Waving an arm so wildly that Walker had no choice but to duck into a butcher’s doorway. As Morris strolled obliviously down the street, Emery struggled to disentangle himself from dangling coils of sausage under the butcher’s baleful glare.
“Listening to those fishermen talk to me about saga heroes like Njall and Sigurd as if they’d performed their heroic deeds last week, I got a glimpse of what we stand to gain if, if …” Finally noticing Walker far behind, Morris reluctantly spluttered to a halt for as long as it took him to pull within earshot.
Morris had put on what I was beginning to think of as his stare into the future: a thousand-yard stare. He wasn’t talking to Walker now, but to some imaginary audience. “In Iceland,” he began with a little wave of the hand that made Walker look behind him nervously (I giggled; he was checking to see if Morris might be talking to a quick-gathering crowd of listeners), “I began to see socialism through the eyes of an artist. We are practitioners of the lesser arts—our weaving, wallpapers, our tiles, even these illuminated manuscripts. Though we sell to the wealthy, our art can have no real growth but life under commercialism and profit-mongering. If it doesn’t belong to everybody, it’s nothing, and nobody’s.”
Walker’s voice was so low I missed it, but he must have been asking Morris something about how he’d written The Earthly Paradise. “It was all done at the loom, Walker!” In nearby trees, birds flew up at the sound of his voice, thought better of it, settled back to roost. “If a chap can’t compose an epic poem while he’s weaving tapestry, he had better shut up; he’ll never do any good at all.”
Suddenly I recognized the open space they were heading toward: “Trafalgar Square!” I whispered to Ed, “That must be Nelson’s Column.” I saw Ed’s blank stare—naval history is one of his few weaknesses. “They built it when Lord Nelson smashed Napoleon’s navy off Spain.”
I’d always wanted to see Nelson up on his column. But when Morris looked angrily up at Nelson, I suddenly saw him differently. True happiness lay in sinking the enemy, the admiral’s blank stare proclaimed; what other joy could there be? In Morris’s eyes, Nelson wasn’t so much a hero as another expert killer, someone who trained his men to blast French sailors with the finest cannons British factories could build him. It struck me: How many statues were there to Morris and people like him—people whose victories didn’t involve gunpowder and corpses?
I could hear Morris describing
a recent protest. “Only three dead after the police came in, the papers reported. Only three! How many would they have liked?”
“Bloody Sunday, I heard it called,” said Walker meditatively, rubbing the toe of his sturdy leather boot along a rusty stain on the pavement.
Rather than answering, Morris started to hum. “There’s an American song that’s been running through my head, Walker, perhaps you know it?” The tune he hummed was incredibly familiar to me. Ed tugged my sleeve, leaned forward, and whispered, “It’s ‘John Brown’s Body Lies a-Mouldering in the Grave’! You know, the anti-slavery version of ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic.’” He started to sing: “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord …”
I hushed him: Morris was going on. “I don’t quite have it right yet, Walker, but something like this.
“What is this, the sound and rumour? What is this that all men hear,
Like the wind in hollow valleys when the storm is drawing near,
Like the rolling on of ocean in the eventide of fear?
’Tis the people marching on.”
Walker smiled encouragingly; an I’ll just nip down and give the cat a treat kind of smile. In response, Morris gave a pleased grunt (if Morris were a big tabby cat, he’d have purred). “I tell you, Walker, all the lectures in the world, all the lantern slides, are not going to rouse the people to change their government.”
“Yes,” piped up Walker unexpectedly, “I sometimes think the government is more likely to change the people than the other way around.”
Morris plowed ahead. “So we’ll have to try something else, won’t we?” Walker nodded tentatively, not quite sure where this was heading—a look I’d come to recognize in the faces of Ned, Janey, Webb, even Rossetti.
