Once Upon a Winter's Night fs-1

by Dennis L McKiernan

  “Child, you are already making such an effort, and I do hope you succeed, else the world will be the worse off.”

  At this pronouncement Camille’s heart hammered wildly, for if the fate of the world were added to her quest for Alain, it would seem too much for a simple farm girl to bear.

  To still her racing heart, Camille concentrated on the clack and slap and thud of the loom, its rhythm somehow soothing, the loom where, but for a single weft thread, an invisible tapestry grew. Finally, Camille said, “Would that I could see my love at this moment, even if he is the Bear. Do you weave such?”

  “Mayhap, child. Mayhap.”

  “Then let me ask what I came to ask: where lies a place east of the sun and west of the moon? Lady Skuld said you would know.”

  “I believe, Camille, she sent you to me to ask, but she did not say I would know.”

  “Well, Lady Verdandi, do you know where such a place is?”

  Her golden gaze yet focused on the opening, Verdandi said, “You will have to ask my sister.”

  Camille groaned. “The third sister?”

  “Aye.”

  “Downstream, I assume.”

  “Indeed.”

  Again, Camille groaned. “And here I was hoping to leave this flow. Just where downstream?”

  “Let me ask you this,” said Verdandi, “what is the color of time?”

  Camille sighed in exasperation, yet, just as she had humored Lady Skuld, so would she humor Verdandi. She took two breaths and exhaled slowly, then said, “Well, the Mists of Time whence the future comes were silvery, though the future itself seems to be an invisible color, at least to most of mankind, for most of us see it not. I suspect, though, that to you three who weave the tapestry of time, the color of the future must be quite plain to all your eyes.”

  Verdandi smiled. “And what of the past? Has it a color?”

  Camille turned up a hand. “If it does have a color, then to mankind it is perhaps the hue of shadows and moonlight, or mayhap the color of death, for it is buried beyond recall.”

  Verdandi laughed and kept weaving and asked, “What of the present, then?”

  Camille looked at the golden sunlight twisting down onto the spindle and being spun into invisible thread by the golden spinning wheel. Then she glanced at the thread on the tapestry aweave. Finally she said, “In spite of the golden sunlight and the many hues I can see on that single bit of weft, I would think that the color of the present must be the same as the color of a flash, since both exist for but this moment.”

  Again Verdandi laughed and then said, “Urd will enjoy your company.”

  “Urd?”

  “My sister, and as you have rightly surmised, she lives downstream. To you she will seem much older than I, though to me she seems much younger.”

  Camille nodded and said, “And where might I find this sister? — Other than just downstream?”

  “Answer me this riddle,” said Verdandi. “Caught on the cusp of ago and to be and trapped forever in the eternal now, what am I?”

  Camille glanced out at the waterwheel turning in the River of Time. “You are the Present.”

  “And a present you shall have,” said Verdandi, tilting her head toward the loom. “My finest golden shuttle; take good care of it, and do not yield it to anyone except perhaps near the end, for then it may do you some good.”

  “But, my lady, what if you need it?”

  “I have others, my child, though not fashioned of gold; hence, you must take this one, else Faery itself might fall.”

  Sighing, Camille stepped to the loom and when the thread came to an end, the shuttle flew into her hand, while another did take its place.

  Camille turned back to Verdandi. “Again I ask, my lady, your sister Urd, where can I find her?”

  With a flick of her eyes, Verdandi glanced at the skylight, where the sun passed above. And with her right hand she gestured downstream and intoned:

  “Ebon is the Oblivion Sea,

  A gape of darkness where all things flee,

  There binding time my sister will be.”

  Again Verdandi glanced at the skylight above, and she said, “And this I will tell you as well: when you leave the banks of time’s flow, then you will lose the stream.”

  And in that very moment the trailing limb of the sun exited from the zenith, and so vanished Verdandi and loom and spinning wheel all, leaving Camille and Scruff alone in the ancient mill.

  And the river flowed and the wheel turned and the great bhurstones ground on.

  30

  Past

  Some three and a quarter swift candlemark days after leaving the mill and continuing on downstream, at a candlemark dusk, Camille stopped and made camp, the second such stop she had made along the River of Time, and again she and Scruff rested through an ordinary night. When dawn came, she and Scruff broke fast, and then onward they pressed, swift days passing with every candlemark, blossoms fading, vanishing, splits fissuring the stave. Camille paused now and again to eat or drink and to feed her hungry and quite confused sparrow, for to the wee bird it seemed no sooner had day come than night and sleep quickly followed. Another fifteen and a half candlemarks passed, and Camille and Scruff spent another night acamp, stars slowly wheeling through the vault above, following a bright waxing moon some two days past half-full.

  When morning came, once again Camille and Scruff took up the trek, and some ten candlemark days later, at a turn ahead, high stone bluffs loomed on either side of the river, a gorge through which the flow ran. Toward this ravine Camille went, the swift day growing with every step. As she drew nigh, the sun passed through the zenith, and Camille could see a dark opening in the near-most wall.

  “Scruff, I believe yon is the place whither we are bound, for no doubt ’tis ‘a gape of darkness,’ and Verdandi did say:

  “ ‘Ebon is the Oblivion Sea,

  A gape of darkness where all things flee,

  There binding time my sister will be.’ ”

  Toward this gape Camille went, and she came to where the shore turned to flat stone, as if all the soil had been scrubbed down to the primal bedrock itself. Along the stone she travelled, the swift sun trailing down the sky, its candlemark pace matching her strides. Finally, as the rapid day came to late afternoon, Camille threaded through a scatter of boulders to reach the breach in the sheer stone wall. She looked inward; a cavern receded into blackness beyond, and there was no sign of a weaver or a loom or a spinning wheel.

  “Well, Scruff, just as we waited at the mill for Verdandi to appear, so shall we wait here for Urd. If I am wrong, then on the morrow we will go onward and hope to find another gape.”

  And so they waited at the mouth of the cave, Camille and Scruff, as the sun gradually edged down the sky. A candlemark passed and then another, and finally the sun dipped into the horizon.

  And still they waited…

  Time eked forward…

  Scruff scrambled into the high vest pocket, preparing to bed down for the oncoming night.

  And the moment the last of the sun disappeared “Oh, help me, help me. I have lost my bobbin, and woe betide the world if I find it not, for history itself will be unraveled, and all will become undone,” wailed a white-haired crone, crawling around on the bedrock beside a golden spinning wheel near a silent loom.

  And the loom itself held a great tapestry, completely visible to Camille, but instead of the fabric being wound about the cloth beam, the tapestry trailed from the loom and across the smooth stone and disappeared into the darkness of the cavern.

  And there beside Camille at the mouth of the cave, a cursing, hairy little man struggled to pull great lengths of the tapestry out from the gape and toward the River of Time, for he would cast it in.

  “Where did you last have it?” cried Camille as she sprang forward to aid the crone.

  “In my hand, here at the spinning wheel,” keened the ancient woman. “But I dropped it and it rolled away, and now I cannot find it.”

 
; Camille searched the bedrock about the golden wheel, yet she saw no spool. Even as she searched, she frowned in concentration. “Wait a moment,” she called. “The stone here is not level, but slopes down toward-”

  Quickly, Camille scrambled to the loom and below, where once again, though she could not see them, she heard the sound of one or two other looms aweave. Yet her purpose was not to locate other looms, but instead to-“I have it!” cried Camille, snatching up a bobbin partially wound with black thread, and she scrambled out from under and handed it to the crone.

  “Clever girl,” cackled the old woman, smiling a toothless smile and casting Camille a sly glance; the ancient’s eyes were entirely black. The crone mounted the spool to the spinning wheel. Then from the spindle, she grasped between thumb and forefinger what seemed to be a tendril of shadow, a tendril which came from the blackness of the cavern itself. The ancient fed the tendril through the hook, then somehow tied it to the black thread on the spool. She gave the wheel a sharp spin, and then sat down at the loom, and it began frantically weaving as the woman stared with her jet-black eyes into the cavern’s ebon gape.

  At that moment the hairy little man cursed and vanished.

  “Another agent of Chaos, I presume, and brother of Uncertainty and Turmoil,” said Camille.

  “Aye,” replied the crone. “ ’Twas Obscurity: enemy of the past.”

  Camille glanced at the breastbeam. Carved thereon, as she expected, were runes spelling out the name Urd.

  “Lady Urd, ’tis you I’ve come to find, sent by your sisters.”

  “I know, child, yet let me weave. We will talk when I have caught up. In the meanwhile, break your duskfast.”

  Of a sudden, before Camille appeared a clay bowl, and she took it up and frowned at the contents: it was filled with what at first she took to be a soup, yet it was pulpy and green, and seemed to be much like slime one would find on a pond. Even as Camille’s mouth turned down at the thought of consuming such, Urd said, “Eat up, child, for it is one of the oldest meals in the world.”

  Camille sighed and resigned herself to at least try. No utensils were provided, and so she used her first two fingers, dipping in and bearing the wet, scumlike coating to her mouth. She managed to choke down the first lick, its taste somewhat like that of the stalks she had chewed on when crossing the grasslands. She dipped in her fingers again and dragged more slime to her mouth.

  As she ate, Camille realized she could see the pattern upon the tapestry, yet parts of it were quite blurred, as of dyes that were not fixed, as of colors that ran. In some places, though, the depiction was quite clear, while at others the fabric seemed entirely blank. Yet even as she scrutinized the tapestry, the patterns at a given spot seemed to shift about, to change slightly, or to change altogether, or to vanish entirely.

  By studying the tapestry and distracting her mind, Camille managed to eat all of the slime and to do so without gagging overmuch. And just as she finished, the pace of the weaving slowed.

  Camille set the clay vessel down to the stone, and, as with the wooden trencher and fine porcelain provided by sisters past, so did this bowl vanish, too.

  “It gums quite good, eh?” said Urd, smiling her toothless smile. “Tastes good, too.”

  Camille sighed. “Mayhap a better term to describe it would be, um, ‘nourishing.’ ”

  The crone cackled. “Quite right, Camille. Quite right.”

  Camille frowned at the fabric. “Why do you weave such a tapestry? One where the colors run and patterns change and great blank spots exist.”

  Without taking her gaze from the ebon gape, Urd said, “Oh, child, the pattern set thereon is quite well-defined, precise and clear to all who can truly see; without error, I bind all that has gone before as it did in fact occur. ’Tis simply because you have mortal eyes that the past seems quite unclear. Even to most immortals much of it seems unclear as well, but to mortal eyes the pattern is yet worse.”

  “Why so?”

  “Much of mankind tries to ignore the weaving, often trying to change what the pattern shows, rewriting history to suit their own needs, though the events they would alter are quite plain to eyes which behold the truth.”

  “Mankind rewrites history?”

  “Aye, child, at least the victors do, though in the end it is the survivors who will have the final say, can they winnow out the truth, or if not, make up that which is either fanciful or as they would have it be. Even so, most of what they tell will shift from era to era.”

  “And because I am of mankind, you say I cannot see the truth?”

  “Nay, child, that I did not say. Some see the truth for what it is when it comes upon them. Still, there is much you do not know, for you have not the lore. But even if you had much wisdom, some things yet would be obscure to you, for they are beyond your understanding as well as beyond the knowledge you have. But despair not, for I think you will never twist the truth simply for your own ends, though you may not see it when others do so.”

  “Be that as it may, Lady Urd, I did not come to discuss the truth or relevance of history, but instead I came to ask if you know where I might find a place east of the sun and west of the moon.”

  “You are welcome to look at the tapestry to see if it is there,” replied Urd, gesturing at the long train leading into the dark cavern.

  In the growing dusk, Camille lit her small lantern, and then slowly walked alongside the tapestry, searching for… she knew not what. Still the pattern seemed begotten with runny dye in places, some places obscure, some murky, and some places blank, other places shifting even as Camille looked on, yet in still other places the scenes were quite clear: folks in loincloths hunting with spears, other folk digging in fields and dressed in sandals and with cloth bound ’round their waists and buttocks and up through their legs, others on rafts poling along rivers, still others making passionate love, and here Camille did flush. She saw all manner of endeavors, the depictions so lifelike that one might think of them as actually being real living people, though many were very old, and some seemed to be on the verge of death, while others were in caskets; and there were graves and ruins and great monoliths and other curious things of antiquity, things that might once have been but might no longer be. Strangely, every time Camille looked at the tapestry, it seemed to have altered, as if the figures and scenes themselves were moving, changing, shifting about.

  Into the cave by lanternlight Camille followed the tapestry, the cloth wending away into the dim recesses within, where it finally disappeared under ever-increasing layers of dust, though the cavern itself went on and on.

  Camille sighed and turned about, for she had not spied aught in the pattern which would aid.

  Returning to Urd, Camille said, “I found nothing of that which I seek, and so again I ask, know you where such a place might be.”

  “Answer me this riddle, child: running on the rim of now to oblivion, what am I?”

  Camille looked through the growing dusk at the River of Time and then replied, “You are the Past.”

  Without glancing away from the ebon gape, the old woman crowed with pleasure and said, “And it’s past time I should give you a gift.” She nodded toward the spinning wheel. “Take my best bobbin, the one of gold, and keep good care of it. Do not yield it to anyone except perhaps near the end, for then it might do you some good.”

  “But what if another calamity occu-?”

  “Take it, child, for other spools I have, though none as fine or of gold.”

  Sighing, Camille took up the golden bobbin, a bobbin in a queue of spools, as if awaiting its turn at the spinning wheel. And then she said, “Please, Lady Urd, do you know where is a place east of the sun and west of the moon?”

  With a flick of her eyes, Urd glanced at the horizon, dusk nearly gone. “I know of someone who might, for he has travelled far and wide.”

  Hope sprang into Camille’s heart. “Where can I find this traveller?”

  Again Urd glanced at the horizon, and then she in
toned:

  “There are winds that do not blow,

  But flow across the sea;

  A master of one might know

  Where such a place doth be.”

  Once more Urd glanced at the fading dusk and said, “And this I will tell you for nought, for I have seen it in my weaving:

  “Nearly dual,

  It is the key;

  That which two fear

  Shall set four free.”

  Just then, the fullness of night fell, and Urd and loom and spinning wheel and tapestry vanished all.

  Camille cried out, “Wait! The riddles, what do they-?” But in the ravine only her echoes responded to her cry, and she realized she would get no answer at all… and neither of the two riddles meant a thing to her.

  Camille made camp there at the cave-placing Scruff on a boulder high-and ere she went to sleep, she counted the blossoms on the split and cracked and splintered stave: forty remained.

  As tears brimmed in her eyes, she pondered her encounters with the three sisters and wondered if she had chosen the right course, for it had cost her dearly to travel along this way, especially upon these shores, where many blossoms had vanished, and all she had to show for it were two conundrums for which she had no answer, as well as a carding comb, a shuttle, and a golden spool, and these in response to her three straightforward answers to three very simple riddles.

  But wait! Lady Skuld said: “My sisters and I are bound by a rule: no answers of significance or gifts of worth can we give to anyone without first a service of value being rendered to us-which, in my case, you have certainly done- but even then we must ask a riddle and have it correctly answered.”

  Now the service I performed was the finding of lost-Oh, my! Ladies Skuld and Verdandi could easily have found their own missing threads, for although they were invisible to me, they were certainly not invisible to them. And as for Lady Urd, a lost bobbin would mean little, for she had many more. Why would they do so? — Test me with trivial tasks, that is. Perhaps it was to aid me on my way. But what aid have I been given? Two riddles I know not how to answer. Three quite commonplace gifts, but for the value of gold they bear. Yet those are the gifts they gave me, gifts supposedly of worth. Yet even though gold is precious, perhaps their value is- Camille’s eyes widened in speculation. Mayhap they are magical in some manner!