The Spellcoats (31 page)

All this time Duck and Tanamil had everyone below pulling rushes from the lake. While they worked, he and Duck took a heap of pebbles and splashed a sign on each, so: #. This is to stand for a net to hold a man's soul in, Duck says. They made the back of the pebbles sticky and shared them out. We all wear one, stuck to the front of our clothes. They are in colors according to clans. Our people, having no clans, have adopted whichever clan they feel like. Jay has taken red and blue for the Sons of Rath, the clan of Kars Adon. I wanted the same, but Duck says we must have gold, he and I and Robin and Hern, because we are royalty now. This annoys me, but everyone else says Duck is quite right. You cannot believe how much happier Tanamil's pebbles have made them.

When I think, I believe Hern regards my weaving as a consolation, like these pebbles. He is welcome to his opinion. Sometimes I think I would be happier if he were right.

When the pebbles were done, Duck and Tanamil were weaving the rushes into nets until midafternoon. I did not know, until I came to be weaving of the Riverbed. Then Tanamil, like my mother, dragged himself over the edge of the falls in strong spray and fell in the warm pool. My loom was showered. Duck followed, gray with weariness. He might have rolled back to his death if Jay had not pounced on him and caught his coat. That was when I wove wrong. Duck and Tanamil were both soaked; I have never seen Tanamil wet before. Jay dragged them out onto the turf, where Duck lay whimpering and Tanamil rolled on his back with his chest heaving and seemed barely alive.

“What's wrong with them?” I said.

“It's those nets they've been making,” Jay said. “They've put all their virtue into them, by the looks of it.”

I have conquered my fear of heights and looked at the nets. They are frail and narrow as ladders, except for the great net spread at the bottom, which is hidden in spray from here. I hear there is another, larger one, farther along the gorge of blue pools, too. The nets I have seen stretch across the falls from side to side, wherever there is a ledge or foothold. Hern has posted his fighters on the ledges at both sides, two groups for every net. Those who go down as reinforcements wait on the broad grass below the turf where I weave. We have made quite a path between there and Kars Adon's camp in the valley.

There is always someone coming or going over this turf, though I have little leisure to look. Someone saw Tanamil lying and fetched Robin. Robin came running.

“What have you done?” she said, on her knees in the warm water.

“Used up my strength for the moment,” Tanamil panted. “Made something to put Kankredin in a form we can fight him in. Can't fight water.”

“You'd no right to use Duck's strength, too,” I said. I was angry about Duck, and about having to unpick my weaving, and sick at heart over Mother.

“Had to,” gasped Tanamil. “Not enough of mine.”

“Oh,” I said. “And you call yourself a god!”

Tanamil fetched himself up onto one elbow and said, very earnestly, a very strange thing. “I never called myself that,” he said. “Neither I nor any of the Undying ever made that claim. It is a claim men made for us, and that is how we came to be bound.”

I told Tanamil I was sorry. I think this he said is one of the strongest threads of my weaving.

Robin made them both rest in my tent. When she came out, I thought of asking her about my bobbin of thread. I should have asked her before. Robin unrolled a length of the thread, rubbed it between her fingers, and then smelled it. “This seems to be the same stuff that the One used to be made of,” she said. “Before he went into the fire that turned him gold. How it comes to be spun, I can't think—but then you can spin gold. Tanaqui, I think the One will tell you how to weave it in. Don't use it till you're sure.” So I have waited. So far I am not sure.

Kankredin came that evening. When Jay told me, I left my loom and went with him to a ledge a long way below, so that I could see it and weave it in.

It is the most terrifying sight, though I am in a way used to it by now. He came in a mountain of water, standing a hundred feet tall or more. This mountain burst roaring from the valley and spread across the lake from shore to shore. I saw the trees and the stone barn go flat, like things of paper, as the skirts of the great wave took them. The wave is not transparent, or yet quite solid. It is green-black, stinking of River rottenness, with trees and beams and the greater part of a bridge, and many other things, carried along in it and glimpsed from time to time. But inside it, gleaming out through the dark water, we could see terrible shapes, staring eyes, and glances of bared teeth. I screamed as the monstrous thing came grinding through the lake. It sucked the substance of the lake into itself as it came, and left bare trickling mud behind. Many people on the ledges screamed besides me.

Hern sent messages up and down that it was only water.

Water. Oh Hern! It is the whole River, turned to evil. And only see what the River did when it flooded. But people have come to trust Hern. “Only water,” we all said, trembling.

The huge water came on. At the top it curved, and the trees and stones carried in there danced, as if it was about to bend over and break, as I saw the waves do in the sea. But it never broke. I could feel the power that held it upright. No wonder Tanamil ran away from it. The power was confident; I could feel that, too. They were almost at their journey's end, and the One would be theirs before nightfall. They raced toward the chasm of blue pools.

This was where Tanamil and Duck had spread their first net. The great wave ran in, piling behind itself to come into that narrow space, and came on the net unawares. Never have I heard a sound like that great wave breaking. It left our ears numb and our bodies weak. For the top curled before the mages could stop it, and the mass of water crashed down on the chasm. I was drenched by it, far up as I was. Logs, timbers, stones, and trees crashed down there with it. Some people were injured on the lower ledges, but none seriously.

The remaining pile of water faltered, hung, and finally withdrew into the lake with a grating and grinding of rock, where it paused, and its surface seethed with fury. It left the chasm broken wide, into a bay, and Tanamil's net broken with it. Tanamil had known that net would be broken.

“More of a trip wire, really,” Jay called it.

But word came that two of the lower nets, including the great net at the bottom, had been broken, too. Tanamil, tired as he was, dragged himself out of the tent and climbed down to mend them. As he passed me coming back with Jay, he told me he had forbidden Duck to go down, for which I was thankful.

The great wave stood seething in the lake, drawing itself higher as water ran into it from the falls. Behind it was all mud and little puddles. But before night fell, people on the lower ledges sent up word that the bodies of two mages were lying behind there among the puddles.

“They are only mortal men as we are,” Hern sent word, up and down. Then he made a great pother, from ledge to ledge, to find out if there were, as he remembered, no more than forty or fifty mages. By this time even the most doubting of Heathens had realized that Kankredin cared as little for them as he did for our people. Their lords sent very humbly to say that the college of mages was always fifty. I think Hern knew this. He did it to cheer people.

It did not cheer me. I looked at that hill of water and wondered who could live in it. And then it came to me. People who dealt in men's souls were as dangerous dead as alive. I remembered how Kankredin had suddenly appeared to us, sitting in that chair, and I began to fear that Kankredin was not alive. I whispered to Tanamil about it, when he climbed wearily up from his nets.

“Yes, he is dead,” said Tanamil. “No one can work with souls who is alive. All the mages pass through death. Then they clothe themselves in their spellgowns, which are their acts of magery and their new bodies both together.”

I had wondered why
hidden death
had worn his gown trailing beneath his horrible rugcoat. I sat at my loom, shaking, in the cold half dark. Two good thoughts came out of my terror. The first is that I, too, have passed through death, and I am more their equal accordingly. The other thought caused me to catch one of Robin's girls and send her down to Hern, to tell him that the way to disable a mage was to cut him out of his gown. Hern sent back to thank me. He sounded almost respectful.

If Kankredin had sent the wave on again at once, he would have destroyed us. Tanamil was climbing down to mend the nets, and I had then woven only as far as my talk with Kars Adon in his camp. I had to stop for the night then. But I could feel that Kankredin was—not uncertain; he still thinks he will win—made cautious. Something had opposed him when he least expected it. I think the nets stopped him from seeing who it was. Duck says they are meant to. So he decided to wait until we puny living creatures were exposed in our folly by day. He can work by dark, but he knows, by the same token, that we also appear mysterious and large in the night. See the way I am beginning to think like a witch! So the wave stood in the lake until dawn, and our army slept by relays on the ledges.

Robin hardly sleeps at all. She has the girls, women, and small children all organized. Some run messages. Some carry away the wounded, and others nurse them. Others again are made into an army for a last defense.

“No,” Jay wants me to say. “Not the last defense. The last but one. I'm your last defense.”

It rather pleases me that the Heathen girls do not make the best soldiers. You would expect them to. The Heathen men show a toughness and courage that Jay often admires. But none of the Heathen girls is strong, and they are scared of being mannish. It is our own tough village ladies who are the army. Robin has sent Aunt Zara down to the next ledge today, armed with a spindle and a gutting knife. Aunt Zara is a match for any mage. She was always half a witch. That is why she hates me so.

And now I come at last to the battle, which has raged below me as I weave for two days now—as I weave and weave and weave. I dream of weaving when I sleep. But no one has slept much since the dawn when Kankredin moved the wave in against us.

Jay tells me that it came on slowly, observing. Kankredin may not have seen the great net hung in the boiling spray at the foot of the falls. Or perhaps he despised it, not knowing it was the work of the Undying. I could hear from here the repeated
boom, boom, boom
, as the wave reared and smashed and reared again. Duck came panting over the turf to tell me Kankredin had realized the net's purpose too late. The net broke under the wave, and the wave shattered with it. I could hear the cheering as the mages were swept floundering back into the lake. From there a good half of their captured water escaped, they say, and the River is running again as a trickle. They cannot now come against us as water. But they have amassed the rest of the wave and they use it now as a ladder to rear their onslaught up the falls.

Since midday yesterday they have been coming—as fire, as wolves, as scaly creatures with snapping mouths, and all manner of horrible things. Each mage can make himself seem several of these shapes at once, so men often strike at the false shape and leave the mage unharmed. The worst of their power is that they can come straight up the middle of the falls, where it is hard to reach them. Hern has hung ropes across to help his fighters come at them. And as each fresh batch of nightmare creatures scrambles up, men shout, “Only mortal men!” and they hack at them without fear for their souls. We have lost many men drowned.

When the mages come to the nets, they are forced to appear in their own shapes. They fear this and slash at the nets to break them. Duck and Tanamil sit, with their minds dwelling on every knot in the rushes, holding them together as long as they can. And while the mages attack the nets, Hern's army attacks them, yelling, “Cut his coat off!”

The first day we lost, besides the great net, four small ones. Hern and his people were driven to the fifth ledge. Today is worse. They are up on the ledge but one below me now. The women have gone into battle. The yelling is deadly. Uncle Kestrel is hovering on the edge of the turf, trying to watch. He is fond of Aunt Zara, the old fool. Poor Uncle Kestrel was brought up here, shaking all over, yesterday evening.

“Those mages are too many for me,” he said. “I had enough of them last winter. I'll stay here and be your last guard, Sweetrush, with Jay here.” I have made him stay in front of me, with the sun at his back. I do not want to confuse his shadow with my grandfather's again.

Robin has just gone down into the fight, taking her nurses with her. Tanamil is waiting by the smoking spring to pipe me to the One. We have agreed I must sew the coat by the Riverbed. Tanamil says there will be time. Time is slow there. I have put needles and thread in my rugcoat and gone on weaving. I have not finished. I have not used my bobbin of strange thread yet. I look out, and all I can see is giddy blue landscape far below. But the sound of the fighting is terrible, and so near.

Aunt Zara has been led back up here, laughing like a madwoman. She has cut the coat off a mage. I knew she would be a match for them. She is so excited and horrified and pleased that she has spoken to me for the first time for six months.

“Right in the midst of him with the gutting knife!” she shouts. “I waited and I aimed, and I got him, right in his midst! Cut the coat off him like apple peel! And, do you know, he was rotten inside. Black and rotten! Think of that, Tanaqui!”