In the Night Garden

CONTINUED

THERE WAS A PLACE IN THE PARISH IN THOSE days which you might have thought was a church, if you were not careful. It had a carved door and a frescoed ceiling, and in the pews were parishioners, after a fashion. Where the nave should have been was a spinning wheel, and a loom, and a raised dais not unlike an altar. The windows were cast in fabulous colors, but this was not a church, and the woman who stood between the wheel and the loom was not a priest.

This was Xide’s house, and even to a spider with eight legs to her name, Xide was extraordinary and grotesque. Her arms wheeled around her, one for each of mine, and there were rings of petrified wood and plain gray stone on each of forty knuckles, and each of forty fingers was occupied with needles and thimbles and cords, spindles and pedals, bolts of fabric and strips of lace, bustles and whalebone, tassels and cuff links. She was a wheel and a whirl, and I was frightened of her. In the pews were cedar boxes and in each of the cedar boxes was a silkworm busily spinning away, the thread draped over the benches, flowing up to the altar, through copper bowls brimming with dye of every shade, and to her. They looked up at their mistress from time to time in the mute adoration of which blind worms are capable, and, satisfied that their goddess remained yet among them, exuded another tiny length of precious, wet thread.

I passed through all of these fragrant boxes unseen and unmarked, up toward Xide whose face shone among her arms, whose web-white hair was bound severely back. I watched her weave and my legs twitched in unison with her—they longed to touch such cloth, to make such miracles of cotton and silk. I was rapt; I was held.

On the dais at that moment was a woman whose nose was very long and highborn, and Xide was spinning a red dress around her even as I watched, culling silk from the rows of cedar boxes and spinning it into fabric faster than my vision could catch. The woman was naked beneath the growing dress, holding up long strands of black beads in tented fingers so that they would not be caught in the rushing skirt.

Everywhere I had asked where I might learn to weave properly, I heard Xide’s name, whispered, murmured in reverence. I called her name out then, and two of her hands ceased their motion, shading her eyes as she gazed into the distance, trying to find the sound.

“Xide, it is I, I am here, on the floor,” I cried.

“Hello, Spider. I am afraid I do not know any patterns for your body, but if you wait, I will try.”

The woman in her half-built dress laughed. A pearl fell out of her mouth. One of Xide’s hands caught it deftly, and tossed it into a bowl already half full of white gems.

“No, I do not need clothes. I wish to be like you, to learn to weave. I have been told it is the proper profession for a spider. I wish to be proper.”

“My silkworms might be jealous,” she mused. “And I suspect, not being yet a proper spider, you know nothing of weaving beyond base instinct.”

I hung my head. “I am sure that is true.”

“Come closer, Spider.”

I crawled up to her knee, which seemed so great and hard beneath me. Her face loomed huge above, young as a bride’s, her eyes full of laughter and light—but they had no pupil and no iris, being all white, smooth as a statue’s.

“Fate,” she said, putting her head to one shoulder as her arms wove on, “is a blind weaver, they say. Did you know that? Have you lived long enough in the world to hear how she cuts and spins and stitches, how she never ceases, even for a moment?”

“No, Lady.”

“It is a very silly story. For one thing, I have never cut a thread in my life…”

THE

WEAVER’S

TALE

I SPIN EACH THREAD TO ITS NATURAL LENGTH, and when it is ended it is ended, and I exhort it to wind no farther. I do not sever it before its time, simply because it would make a neater sleeve. Everything I weave is neither more or less than what it longed to become.

I was the last to step down out of the Sky. They went down like a rain of light, and they changed in their going, and I did

not wish to change. I saw nothing there I liked so well as the hole the Sky had made for me, its cool edges and its darkness. I wandered in the dark after they had gone, an orphan in an empty house. It had once been so full of light, and now the Stars that stayed hung like lanterns, far from each other and silent.

Far off in the reaches of the black there is a field of grass. I could tell you that it goes on forever, but only a child believes that anything goes on forever. But there is a place where the dark becomes speckled with light, thicker and thicker until there is nothing but light, on and on and on. These are Stars, too, these speckles, Grass-Stars who lie over the dark like blades and wait for the part of the Sky that bellied out the world to wander through and nose them, just once, just a bit, just the slightest brush of her skin. There are so many of them who chose this. I suppose you cannot blame them; they are not the only orphans who have told themselves that if they make up the house very nicely, Mother will come home.

I went walking there once, long after the bright ones left. I was lonely—can I be blamed if in the dark I went toward the thing which was brightest? I went walking, through the first swirls of Grass-Stars, their tiny faces beaming with anticipation that never wanes, never for a moment. I walked through the fields, into the marshes and the rivulets of pooled light, where the Stars were nearly to my waist, waving in nameless winds, waving in the dark. And I tried to step carefully, I tried, but they are so thick and so wide, sometimes I did step onto the grass. For that I can say I am sorry. It crumbled beneath me, falling in brilliant shards out of the Sky, sharp and screaming, falling out of the Sky like glass.

And when the shards broke—shall I say I should not have gone? Shall I say I was punished, a little lost girl who has been told not to walk in the gardens, not to ruin the flowers with her muddy feet?—when they broke their light splashed out and into my eyes, and my eyes were washed away in it, and I saw nothing but light.

I have seen nothing since but light.

But in that light I could see a kind of shape, a shape which seemed to me something like the world, and a world which seemed something like me. There were things which wove, and I could not see them, but I could see their weaving, how tiny and diamond-strung, how intricate and perfect. And I wanted to weave that way, I wanted to weave bigger things and greater things, and as this wish formed in me like a spindle gathering flax, my arms opened up into eight, and silk pooled in my belly—but I did not want to become a spider. I only wanted to weave. I stopped before I could grow small and black and many-eyed. What use are many eyes to the blind?

And so at last, I too came down from the heavens, blind and wet and small, cut through with the grass-rain, and in the place where I lay I began to weave with all my fingers, with anything I could find, with grass and leaves and branches and my own hair and mud and silk and cotton and wet wool and flax and rose thorns, stones and river water and stripped bark and tall trunks and evergreen needles: Everything I could touch I could weave.

And as I wove I could see. I could see what I wove, and no more; with all that light boiling in my eye, I could see what I wove, I could see where every stitch began, in rose-seed and flax-flower, and where it would end, rotting to dust on the dead body of a witch laid out on her bier or cut into strips for a child’s swaddling clothes in a city which did not yet even have a name. I could see the threads, I could see the warp and the weft, I could see every day a thing I wove would live. It was so big I wept, and with my weeping and my weaving my light went out into these webs, these webs which became stones and streets and cornices and bridges and alleys, towers and bells and doors and churches, cutting into each other at all the sharp, cruel angles of a web, turning and twisting around me, who sat at the center. And after a while there was no light left, and my blood went out into the weaving instead, and all the stones and streets and cornices and bridges and alleys, all the towers and bells and doors and churches ran red as they wound out of me. How it hurt! But how it sang as it came!