Henry Szabranski

by Witch of the Weave (html)

  Witch of the Weave

  — by Henry Szabranski —

  Skink changed direction toward a knot of weave that loomed ahead. She sailed easily between the withies dangling from the tunnel ceiling, moving with a speed and agility I could never hope to match.

  “Go around,” I protested as I stumbled along the fern-choked floor after her. “It’s easier!”

  As usual, she ignored me.

  It had been days since we abandoned the Motherman. Days since his vast body had collapsed into the sea of flesh-eating mist surrounding the plateau. Days spent getting used to the wide-open spaces around us and the strangely solid ground beneath our feet. Fortunately there was still weave scattered upon this new landscape; giant tubes that served both as shelter and passages through which Skink could swing.

  She paused before the huge knot, a dense tangle of withies easily twice my height that hung suspended in the middle of the tunnel. It reminded me of the Motherman’s heart, though it was tiny in comparison to that great organ, and motionless. As Skink delved through its outer folds, I called up to her, “What you looking for?”

  She didn’t answer, face crinkled in concentration, but it wasn’t long before she gave a cry of triumph and her hand reappeared out of the tangled weave, clutching what looked like a huge black spider. It was a weaver. Similar to the ones in the Motherman, and just the same as those, it appeared dead, or so deeply comatose it might as well have been. I frowned up at her. “You know we can’t eat those, right?”

  “Not eating, Percher. Testing.”

  “Testing what?”

  “Idea.”

  “What idea?”

  But she was done communicating with me. She slid down a ropelike withy to the floor and leaned over her prize, pushing and pulling and squeezing until there was a loud crack. A circular plate split from the weaver’s knobbly carapace to reveal a shiny compartment within. I edged closer to get a better view.

  “What is it? What’s inside?”

  But Skink was not looking at the opened weaver, but at her hand. She hissed. The weaver tumbled from her grasp like some hairy-legged, poisoned fruit. I saw a bright splash of blood. A sharp edge on the weaver’s body had caught her palm and forefinger.

  “Are you all right?”

  Despite the blood, the cut seemed slight to me, but Skink cradled her hand, all earlier cheer erased. “Can’t swing. Not until this heals. It’ll keep splitting open, get infected.”

  I eyed her skeptically, but the more I thought about it the more I realized she was right. She needed her hands to be able travel, as well as for everyday tasks. Her weak and twisted feet were useless over any distance.

  “I’ll carry you.”

  Skink’s face hardened. “No more carrying, Percher.”

  I glanced through the tube’s woven wall. It was late. Outside, night was gathering. It wouldn’t be long before it was dark, sooner within the weave than without. “Time to stop and rest, then. Hand will be better in the morning.”

  “Not enough.”

  I ignored her injured tone. I knew she was more upset with herself than anything else, and not usually one to dwell on hardships. I concentrated on collecting fronds of weave and fern suitable for tonight’s bedding.

  When I came back with the last armful, Skink was already crouched in a makeshift nest. She nodded toward the tunnel snaking beyond the knot. “There is something out there. Waiting. I can sense it in the weave.”

  “More dead weavers. More dead everything.” I could no longer hold back my own growing sense of despair. I had been trying to ignore it for days, for Skink’s sake, but the deepening gloom, her injury, the constant hunger and discomfort we endured—it was taking its toll. Yes, we had survived the Motherman’s collapse. Yes, this strange new land allowed us a meager existence. But what were we heading toward, and why? As far as I knew, Skink and I were the only living people left in the world. How long could we expect to survive? Sometimes it felt like we were traveling for no other purpose than to distract ourselves from the grim reality of our situation.

  “No. Something out there. The weave . . . it has a direction.”

  “Direction?”

  “There is . . . intention. Grown stronger the more we have come this way.”

  I frowned at her serious expression, no clue what she what was talking about.

  She picked up the dropped weaver with her uninjured hand and began to inspect it again.

  “Why break it?” I asked. “There’s no good meat in those things.”

  She didn’t answer, but carefully placed the tips of her fingers inside the weaver’s exposed, iridescent cavity. She closed her eyes and stayed like that, silent and still, for many moments.

  “Well?”

  “No good, Percher.” She cast aside the broken weaver, her expression unreadable in the growing dark. “Test failed.”

  * * *

  I woke, bewildered, to screams. I had been dreaming of long hair dangling over my face, lithe arms around the back of my neck. But reality was quite different.

  Skink was clutching her head, her fingers frantically combing her mop of hair.

  “Get it out! Get it away!”

  By the faint glow of the predawn gray light penetrating the weave around us, I could tell it was past the darkest part of the night, but I could still barely see in the gloom. “What? What is it?”

  The discarded weaver, miraculously reanimated, was scuttling over Skink’s head. Its exposed interior cast an odd, silvery light on her distraught face. Before I could reach her, Skink managed to scoop the creature away. It flopped and jerked where it landed, trying to right itself in a bed of weave.

  I snatched it up, ignoring the prickle of revulsion as its spiky limbs clenched tight around my fist. Too late to worry about whether it could sting or bite. For something the size of a child’s plaything, the little weaver was surprisingly strong. It twisted and bucked in my grip, struggling to pull itself away. I searched for something to smash it with; a rock, or a stick—but there was nothing. Only my hands. I lifted it up, ready to throw it as far into the tunnel as I could, but Skink grabbed my arm. “Percher, wait!”

  She thrust out her hand, the one with the cut, palm upright. “Look! Look what it did.”

  It was a moment before my eyes could refocus in the gloom, and at first I didn’t understand what I was meant to see. The wound on her hand was still there, a dark gash extending from the base of her thumb to her forefinger . . . but something about it was different.

  I peered closer, the weaver still struggling in my own hand.

  Skink’s wound was neater.

  Sewn up.

  A caterpillar trail of stitches left in the flesh.

  * * *

  We slept fitfully for the remainder of the night. When the light from the sky became too bright to ignore, Skink rolled her back to it and declared she had a headache. She held the weaver protectively in her hand—it had crawled back to her earlier and she had let it—where it lay motionless apart from an occasional spasm of its long legs.

  I resigned myself to a day or three anchored around Skink’s curled up body. She had always had headaches, even back in the Motherman; it’s just that I could ignore them whilst she holed up with Ma or Da. They had always protected her from the worst criticisms of our tribe. If Skink had one of her debilitating headaches, Da would order out foraging parties or give some other excuse to hold up climbing for a day or two. We hardly noticed, glad enough to stay in one place for a time. But now it was just Skink and me, and her condition was impossible to ignore.

  The first time I had woken, ready to go, and Skink had instead rolled over and covered her eyes, groaning, I had thought she was just tired. I had felt momentary triumph,
that at last I wasn’t the one lagging behind for a change, the one complaining about sore feet after hours of stumbling over rolling hurdles of weave, Skink gaily sailing above me. But my feeling of superiority quickly turned to guilt and worry. She tried to speak but instead only vomited. It was obvious she wasn’t feigning or being lazy; she was truly ill. I worried she might have eaten something she shouldn’t, something that had infected her with dark rot, poisoned her, but she was hoarsely dismissive of my concern. “It’s the same as always, Percher, all my life. Just leave me be. In darkness. Silence.”

  So on those days she was ill I would forage for mushrooms and snails and water amongst the tunnel’s dank floor, groping through its undulating landscape of weave and mud and broad-leafed undergrowth. Sometimes I would find a gap in the tunnel wall and look out into the unobstructed sky and open spaces beyond, feel the wind and sunlight on my skin. Until it became too much and I would feel sick myself. Retreating, shuddering, back into the welcome confines of the weave. I couldn’t understand my fear. I used to sit on the Motherman’s skin, it seemed miles above the mist and within the sky itself, the hazy horizon arching before me. How could it be that openness filled me with such terror now? It made no sense, but knowing that didn’t help my queasy stomach settle or my thumping heart race any less.

  It was on those days, absent of Skink’s company, with the weave feeling at once like a cage as much as a protection, that I especially missed the others in the tribe: Ma, Da; Wren, Feather, and Dart, all of them. Even, sometimes, my brutish eldest brother Broc, who had almost killed us when we tried to escape the burning Motherman. Sometimes, even more than the people, I missed the silent, hard-edged company of the library; Da’s book collection that I used to carry in a great sack upon my back, and in whose moldering pages I used to immerse myself, transported to a world long lost to the mist and the weave. But the books were all gone now, as were all the people of the tribe. Victims of the fire, of the swarming razorbugs, of the rot and the mist. I told myself I would have to get used to it. Adapt. Survive.

  Such days were bad.

  Today was worse. Every natural rustle and crunch around me sounded suspicious, jarred my nerves. What had Skink meant, that something was out there? Were we unintentionally trespassing on some other tribe’s territory, like we had with the clevers in the head of the Motherman? Was some strange, hostile face about to break out from the bracken and scream at me? Eventually I shook off the feeling, and after spending most of that morning foraging in the tunnel bottom around the knot, I returned with a handful of mushrooms, slugs, and fleshy tubers rooted out from the dark wet soil. It was tough trying to find enough to eat, especially as we had no means of starting a fire or any way to store what little we managed to find. We had fled the Motherman with no time to grab any equipment—only the clothes we wore, and even those were ragged now, and torn.

  Skink had stirred by the time I returned. I hoped it was a good sign; perhaps we’d only lose that day instead of the next couple too. She was sitting up, inspecting her cracked-open weaver. It lay on its back on her injured palm, and its legs were, one by one, gently curving in to touch her other hand, as if in obeisance. I shook my head, unable to fathom her interest in the thing.

  “Stop playing with it,” I said. “Get rid of little creeper.”

  She glanced across at me with a glint in her eyes. “Pet.” She upturned the weaver and placed it on top of her head. Creeper used its legs to hold itself in place atop her hair. She laughed. “Hat!”

  “You mad.” I turned away, shuddering.

  Something landed on my back. Sharp-tipped legs scuttled toward my skull. I seized the thrown weaver and hurled it away.

  Skink’s laughter followed me as I marched away in disgust. “What you afraid of?”

  She was still laughing when I stopped, heart leaping in my chest, at the sight of a line of people standing on the tunnel floor only yards away. The sharpened sticks in their hands pointed toward us.

  * * *

  “You.” An old man at the front jabbed his spear at Skink. “Like Meghra. Patternmaker. Witch!” His words were heavily accented, but unmistakable.

  The others murmured in agreement and shuffled back warily. I made a quick count: three men, two woman, three I could not tell. Was it the whole tribe, or were others hiding in the weave? They looked strong and well fed, dressed in tanned and stitched fur. Elaborately painted marks swirled over their faces and shoulders, skillfully executed bright patterns of blue and green and yellow.

  Skink slowly stood, unsteady on her legs. Creeper had clambered back onto her body and now balanced on her shoulder. “Who’s Meghra?”

  “Witch! Witch!” The old man waved his hands, fingers spread like claws. His rheumy gaze could not decide between settling on Skink, or me, or scanning the undergrowth around us.

  He seemed terrified.

  I made a step forward, my hands raised and open. “We don’t mean to trespass on your land. We are lost. Hungry.”

  The man raised his spear and I took a step back again. He was too far away for me to rush and grapple, but too close for him to miss if he had any strength or skill at throwing.

  “Where you from?” He jabbed—but did not hurl—the spear toward me.

  “From the Motherman. Of the heart tribe.”

  Skink elaborated when the old man showed nothing but further confusion, “From the mist. We used to live out . . . ” she waved vaguely in the direction we had come from, the edge of the plateau, so many days ago “ . . . there. Beyond the land. In a giant made of weave.”

  “No one survives the mist. No one. Only the patternmakers.”

  I backed further away. I did not know how to ease the man’s bewilderment and fear. “We will leave.”

  “No.” A hurried, whispered discussion between the man and the others. He advanced. “Are there others? Like you?”

  I shook my head. Images of Ma and others falling into the mist. “Only us.”

  “Then you stay. You and witch. Food for news.”

  I hesitated, exchanged a glance with Skink. “Food?”

  The man nodded, lowered his spear. “Yes, come. Tell us about mist, how you survived. Please, you stay. Food for news.”

  The old man replied to me, his hand outstretched. But his eyes kept shifting—with barely hidden fear or desire, I could not tell which—always back toward Skink.

  * * *

  The man said his name was Idran, and his village was not far outside the tunnel. Skink managed to stagger the short distance, though she leaned heavily on me for support. I knew it pained her, knew that she was still suffering from her headache, but her face was set in its familiar determined way. I doubted if Idran or the others realized how difficult it was for her.

  The village was nestled in a small valley between the weave tunnel sprawled across its western border and a saddleback ridge dividing a line of high hills to the east. It bustled with more people than I had ever seen before, more than the most populous tribe in the Motherman; possibly over a hundred villagers or more. They had stripped weave from the tunnel and braided the torn withies into globular, nest-like dwellings with circular entrances and windows. These pods clustered in circles and rows and stacks around a communal space into which we were led. We were quickly surrounded by children and yipping little fur-covered creatures I was unfamiliar with. At the center of the space, a pond and a series of firepits, at least one of which was in use.

  I was immediately attracted by the warmth of the flames and the smell of meat roasting. The skinned and gutted carcass of some large, four-legged animal was being roasted on a spit near the piled embers.

  “For us?” I asked, meaning it to be a joke, as it was obvious the meat had been cooking for hours. But Idran nodded and motioned with his painted hands. “Yes, yes. Come. Eat.”

  A slice was cut from the creature’s haunch with a sharp stone knife and the steaming hot meat was passed to me by a wary looking boy. I tore the hunk easily in half and shared it with
Skink. Rich yet lean meat, of a kind I had never tasted—not as tasteful and as textured as heart meat, but delicious all the same after so many days of only raw river meat, bugs, and tooth-achingly tough roots.

  “Please.” Idran squatted on a richly-patterned woolen blanket on the ground near the firepit, indicating we should do the same. The other villagers kept their distance, fearful or disdainful, I could not be sure. “Tell us about yourselves.”

  Skink did most of the talking as I greedily ate. It was odd, hearing her like that, the villagers and their children gathering around. She had a clear, beguiling voice, I hadn’t really noticed before. Perhaps the children in the audience brought it out in her, their greasy faces rapt. She spoke of the Motherman, how the lightning had set him on fire, how we had nowhere to escape but to keep climbing toward his clever-haunted head, how there she had made the giant walk, and how we had found this land rising from the all-encompassing ocean of mist. Her hands were in constant motion, adding emphasis or effects or occasionally becoming transformed wholesale into characters. I was as fascinated as the children.

  Eventually she came to us escaping the Motherman, and the current point in our journey. “I tell you about us,” she said, leaning back and straightening her arms, cracking her knuckles. “Now you tell us about you. About Meghra the witch.”

  The villagers glanced amongst themselves and shifted uncomfortably. The children were ushered away. Idran stood. “Is late. You rest. Tomorrow we will talk again.”

  Skink bristled. “Not fair!”

  The old man hesitated, then sat again. The other villagers, however, quickly drifted away, with many a wary backward glance.

  “Meghra used to be like us.” Idran jabbed a grease-slicked thumb at his chest. “But different. Even when young.” He pointed at Creeper, still mounted on Skink’s shoulder. “She was always interested in weave and stories of the patternmakers. For days she would be lost in the tunnel there, exploring and playing with the withies, bending, shaping, making shapes. Then one day she was gone and did not come back. Perhaps she had gone to the old city.” He waved beyond the pass that loomed above the village to the east. “We thought her lost, and that was that.”