Weaving Man: Book One of The Prophecy Series

by Tove Foss Ford

  He made a horrible face, pulling down his eyelids and turning up his nose so she could see the inside.

  “When you do that you look like a boar,” she said, holding the cookie out. He stopped pushing his face around and took it while she got a good look at his eyes. They weren’t shaped like hers.

  “No girls!” he said again, turning his back on her.

  “Old toad! Boys are toads!” she responded, closing his door hard.

  Katrin skipped out into the hallway again, stopping at the big mirror to study her eyes some more. If she pulled down on the sides of her nose a little, they looked even more like the Thrun’s eyes. She didn’t understand it, but she knew who would.

  Katrin poked her head around the door of Menders’ office. He was bent over something he was writing and didn’t look up while he spoke in a funny voice.

  “My wonderful magical powers tell me that a little girl is looking at me.” Katrin giggled and went over to him.

  “How did you know it was me?”

  “Short light footsteps, a distinct smell of lemon soap and Cook’s spice cookies,” he said, looking up and grinning at her.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Writing in my notebook about things I’m going to change here.”

  “Like what?”

  “A bathroom with a huge tub and a boiler to have water hot all the time. No more heating bathwater on the stove. Things like that.”

  Katrin was trying to look around his dark tinted glasses.

  “What do you want, Little Princess?” he asked.

  “Can I pull down the shades? I want to look at your eyes.”

  “Give me two more seconds to finish this and then you may,” he said. She liked that. He didn’t always ask why she wanted to do things. When he finished writing she pulled the shades down, making the room dark enough for him to take off his glasses.

  “Here, sit up close,” he said, setting her on his lap. She looked at his eyes.

  Most people didn’t like them but she did. They were silvery white. Nobody but Menders had eyes like that.

  “What do you see?” he asked.

  “They’re like mine. The same shape. More the same shape. They aren’t like Lucen’s or Hemmett’s but they’re like Cook’s and Doctor’s – but more. And they’re like the Thrun’s eyes, but not so much.”

  He smiled at her attempt at quantification.

  “Should I explain it to you?”

  She nodded.

  “Hemmett, Lucen and Zelia are Southern Mordanians. You, I, Doctor and Cook are Old Mordanians. We’re related to the Thrun. That’s why we have eyes shaped similarly to theirs, like an almond. Southern Mordanians have rounder eyes.”

  “Really? We’re Thrun?”

  “We’re definitely Thrun. But from a long way back.”

  “But the Thrun’s eyes are brown or black. And your eyes look more like the Thrun’s eyes than mine. The shape, not the color.”

  “That’s because my grandfather was Thrun. Your Thrun ancestors are farther back. And remember Tharan-Tul? His eyes are blue. It happens sometimes among the Thrun.”

  “Why are your eyes white? Or almost white, they’re not really white.”

  “That’s something that runs in my family. Some of us don’t have the color in our eyes that most people have,” he explained.

  “Do you mind?”

  He shrugged. “If you’ve never known anything different you don’t miss what you don’t have. Now, if you’ll put the shades back up, I’ll show you something.”

  When she climbed back up on his lap, he had a map on the desk.

  “This is a map of the world we live on,” he said. “Do you remember the name?”

  “Eirdon.”

  “That’s right. This is as if you took the planet’s skin off, and flattened it out, like peeling an orange.”

  “Mordania,” she said, pointing to the word.

  “Yes – this is like a picture of the world from up in the sky, as if you were a bird flying over it. The blue is water, all the oceans. The colored parts are land. This is Mordania, and this,” he explained, taking a pencil and making a cross on the map, “is where we live at The Shadows.”

  “Then what’s all the rest of this?” she asked in astonishment, looking at all the colored parts of the map.

  “The rest of the world. We live in only a part of it.”

  “It’s a big part.”

  “Indeed it is,” Menders smiled. Mordania was the one of the largest free standing land masses.

  “These are other countries. And this island,” Menders said, pointing to a white shape near the top of the map, “is where most of the Thrun live.”

  “It isn’t very far,” Katrin said, looking at the paper, walking her fingers across to the Thrun island.

  Menders laughed a little.

  “It doesn’t look like it, but it’s very far. More than five hundred miles.”

  Katrin wrinkled her forehead. She couldn’t even think of five hundred miles.

  “Long ago,” Menders continued, “the Thrun traveled from this island over the ice bridge into Mordania, where many Thrun still live. This part of Mordania we live in is called Old Mordania, because it’s the first part of Mordania that people lived in. Down here is the part called Southern Mordania. The people who live there look different from people who come from Old Mordania, because Old Mordanians look more like the Thrun, who are their ancestors.”

  Katrin nodded.

  “The Queens of Mordania are descended – are part of the same family that the Thrun are part of,” Menders went on. “They have always been tall women with red hair. Once, long ago, there was a woman chieftain of the Thrun and her daughter was the first Queen of Mordania.”

  “I don’t have red hair,” Katrin said. She knew what red hair looked like. Eiren had red hair.

  “No, you have golden hair because your father had golden hair, like I have eyes like the Thrun because my grandmother was Thrun,” Menders answered. Katrin looked at the map again.

  “Where was I born?”

  “In Erdahn, here.” Menders pointed to another place on the map. “Then you were given to me and I brought you on the train from there, all the way around this water, to The Shadows.”

  “Is it a long way?”

  “Very. It took two nights and a day and the train never stopped. It couldn’t go fast because of the snow.”

  “Where is my mother?”

  “She lives here in Erdahn, at the Palace, because she’s the Queen,” Menders answered. Katrin knew that, but she didn’t realize how far away it was. It was as far away as the Thrun’s island.

  “Why doesn’t she come to see me?”

  Menders sighed a little. “Queens of Mordania don’t see their children much.”

  “I think that’s bad,” Katrin said.

  “I don’t think much of the custom either,” Menders smiled. “But we have a nice family. I’m your second cousin, so I’m part of your family and then everyone here has become a family as well.”

  “What’s a cousin?” Katrin looked at him in surprise. She hadn’t known this.

  “We have the same ancestor, the same great-grandmother. We’re relatives called cousins.”

  “Do I have other cousins?” Katrin asked excitedly. Menders laughed.

  “You do indeed, quite a few of them. Maybe when you’re older you’ll meet some of them,” he replied. “For now you’ll have to make do with a cousin who gets to be your father.”

  She put her arms around his neck and hugged hard. Let her mother just stay where she was. She had Menders and everyone else and they loved her even if her mother didn’t. Although she couldn’t understand why her mother didn’t.

  “Tell me about these other places,” she said, looking back at the map. She liked all the different colors.

  “This is Surelia. It’s warm there and they make wine. You’re learning their language. This part here is Samorsa, where the food is hot and spicy, and this part h
ere, that’s Fambre, famous for its linen and music.”

  Katrin frowned. It was all one big lump, right in the centre of the map but different parts had different names, unlike Mordania.

  “But… isn’t that all just one?” she asked.

  “Try telling them that, Snowflower,” Menders laughed. Samorsa and Surelia had been arguing over their border by force of arms for decades.

  “This is Artreya, which is a very large country far across the sea. It reaches all the way from the top of the planet to the bottom. It’s where boorish upstarts come from.” Menders picked up a round, carved marble paperweight and traced his finger from the top to the bottom of it.

  “It stretches from pole to pole, like this. The people there look different from Mordanians. They usually have dark hair and eyes that are round like Southern Mordanian eyes.”

  Katrin looked at the map.

  “It’s so big,” she sighed. “I can’t keep all of it in my head.”

  “Well no, not all at once,” Menders laughed. “We’ll look at it many more times but now I think a good way to learn about how maps work is to make our own map of The Shadows. Maybe Hemmett would like to watch while we start it.”

  Katrin shook her head.

  “He won’t let me play with him. He keeps saying ‘no girls!’ So I called him an old toad,” she explained.

  Menders laughed. “Boys are known to do this and they can be old toads at times,” he said. “We’ll start on our own then and let him join in later.” He put the map to one side and pulled over a big sheet of paper, the kind he used for drawing, uncorked an ink bottle and picked up his fine point pen, the one Katrin wasn’t allowed to draw with.

  “Now, the top of the map is north, so we’ll draw the north wind blowing from there, so you remember it,” he said, quickly making a drawing of a cloud with big eyes and fat cheeks blowing snowflakes out of its mouth. Katrin laughed.

  “This is east, where the sun rises, so here’s the sun waking up.” Menders drew a bed with a sun peeking out over the covers. “In the west is where the sun sets, so here he is, ready for bed.” Another sun in a nightshirt with sleepy eyes. “The south is where the south wind blows warm, so here she is.” This time, a lady cloud with big curls, blowing flowers out of her mouth.

  “Here’s The Shadows,” Menders went on, his pen flying, drawing a picture of the house – then a moment later, a little girl who looked like Katrin standing in front of it. She clapped and watched excitedly while Menders drew the drive and then the road, and then drew himself holding her hand when she asked him to.

  “Now, Snowflower, if that is where the house, drive and road are, where would the stables go?” he asked.

  Suddenly she understood perfectly, and pointed.

  “Smart girl! That’s exactly right, by the bend of the road where the drive meets it. So here’s the stable – and here’s Snowflake.” Suddenly there was a drawing of the stable with her white pony standing by it.

  “Put Demon in,” she smiled. He did, making Demon look skinnier than he was and with a wicked face.

  They went on, with Menders drawing in the road that led to Spaltz’s farm and then a drawing of the farmhouse and the Spaltz family standing outside, from the old granny down to the littlest Spaltz. Toward the south he drew The Giants, the huge stone hands and noses that poked up out of the earth. Katrin could just remember Menders walking over to them with her one day when she was really little. He’d drawn a picture of her sitting in the palm of one of the hands. It was in a frame on his desk.

  “We’ll do more tomorrow and soon you’ll have a map of the entire estate,” Menders said. “It sounds like it’s getting to be dinnertime, so you need to run and do your chores.” He kissed her and set her on the floor. She was about to run out of the room but then she turned around and looked right at him.

  “You say you get to be my father,” she said. “Do I have a father?”

  “Yes, little one but he died before you were born,” Menders answered gently, stroking her hair.

  “I think that’s sad,” Katrin said, feeling her eyes prickle. “I didn’t get to know him. Maybe he would have come to see me.”

  “Yes, it is sad, but I knew him. He was my tutor when I was in military school and we were good friends, Bernhard and I. You look very much like him.”

  “Was he a good man?” Katrin asked. “Would he have loved me?”

  “Yes, Little Princess, he was good and he would have loved you,” Menders smiled.

  “Not as much as you do,” Katrin said, suddenly feeling very certain.

  Menders looked like he was going to say something very serious for a moment, but then he just smiled.

  “You might be right there,” he said. “I love you very much indeed. But Bernhard would have as well, if he’d had a chance to know you. Now, time for you to get to work or we won’t have any dinner tonight with no forks out to eat it with.”

  Katrin laughed, bent over and kissed his hand where it rested on the arm of his chair, then ran off to the kitchen.

  ***

  Borsen could hear the heavy raindrops drumming on his mother’s cloak. She held it over his head like a roof, so he would stay dry. He was a little boy, very small for his age. He stood beside her on the seat of the bench they’d picked out, his face pressed close to the pictures carved into the shimmery, white stone base of the big statue that blocked some of the rain. Borsen had weak eyes and he could see things well only if they were very close.

  “She was a great Queen, The Great Glorantha,” his Mama said softly, her words rocking along from tone to tone in a soothing singsong, the inflection characteristic of the Thrun language. “The Surelian invaders killed her husband and children and burned her village, as they had killed many other Mordanians and Thrun. Glorantha rode out against the conquerors, a woman all alone. It inspired the people of Mordania and they rallied behind her in a great army. They drove the wicked Surelians out of Mordania and then joined in a great, strong tribe, all together.”

  Borsen ran his thin little hand across the wet, slippery stone, over the carved figure of the great Queen in her chariot. Pale sunlight slanted through the clouds for a moment and lit the stone. It sparkled inside, glinting under the smooth white surface. Borsen traced a fine dark green line that ran across the carvings.

  “Mama, what is this stone?” he asked softly.

  “I don’t know, my Little Man,” she smiled. “It is not familiar to me. The Thrun do not use this stone. It is the old bones of the world. Pretty, isn’t it?”

  Borsen nodded, unable to take his eyes off the tiny lights glinting inside the stone. He watched until the sun went behind the clouds again. Then he looked up at Mama, who was smiling down at him.

  “Where I grew up, on the Sea of Grass where you were born, my Little Man, there were great stone statues different from this,” she said. “They are parts of people, great hands or feet, thrusting up from the ground. They are called The Giants. When you were very small, I took you to see them, before we moved from there.”

  “Who made them?” Borsen asked, moving closer to her so he could see her face clearly.

  “Nobody knows. The Thrun believe they are the life of Eirdon. Old bones, coming out of the ground. There is a poem about them. It goes like this:

  There are Giants in the ground,

  There are Giants in the sky.

  When clouds are thick and rolling,

  You see them striding by.

  When the snow drifts deeply,

  There are giants far below.

  Sleeping in the places,

  Where all men’s bones shall go.”

  “Where are The Giants now?” Borsen asked, looking around, squinting into the rain.

  “They are everywhere. They are what make everything live,” Mama smiled. “You can’t see them but they are there. They come from The Light At The Top Of The World, where everything on Eirdon came from and where everything goes when it dies.”

  Borsen turned back
to the carved pictures, bringing his eyes close to them, running his fingers over the wheels of the Queen’s chariot. Was she one of The Giants, he wondered. He leaned against Mama and rested his hand against the cool, wet, glistening stone.

  “Here, get away from there! Bloody City Thrun! Get off, you trash!” A man’s voice boomed from nowhere, making them both start.

  Mama cried out softly and bent over her shin. Borsen nearly fell and clung to her as she rubbed the place where the man had kicked her.

  “Please, sir…” she gasped, speaking awkwardly in Mordanian.

  “Move along or you’ll get worse!”

  “Come, Little Man,” Mama whispered, gathering Borsen to her and rising with him. He wrapped his legs around her waist and held on tight, turning his face from the man who was driving them away. It was better not to look at them, although all he could see was a human-shaped blur. It was better to walk away.

  Mama limped into an alleyway. Borsen could tell that the leg that the man had kicked pained her badly. They had to stay near the statue because they were waiting there for Borsen’s father, who was looking for places he could steal from. Borsen tried not to cry.

  “Do not let that trouble you,” Mama said gently, cuddling him close. “He is just an unkind man, not worthy of notice. You are more than he will ever be, my Little Man. Always remember, you do not have to follow the way of those who do wrong, like your father, like that man. Always follow The Way Of Light, the way of the Thrun.”

  The rain began to drum down harder and Mama drew her cloak up over her head and Borsen’s, making a warm, snug cave for them both.

  “Always remember that you are Thrun, my son,” she whispered. “Remember you are from the first people of Eirdon.”

  (21)

  Menders’ Men

  “Wondered where she’d got to,” Menders said as he came level with the door of the room that now belonged to Ifor Trantz. He could see that Katrin was sound asleep beside the big man – she must have made a late night visit to The Shadows’ newest inhabitant.

  “She was very concerned about you earlier,” Menders continued, settling in the bedside chair. “Gets on pins and needles if anyone is ailing in the house.”