Gift of the Unmage (7 page)

Thea did not demand more answers, and for that received a small nod of acknowledgment and respect. She went away instead, with the weaving spool and the handful of different-colored threads that had accompanied it, and tried to puzzle out the way things were supposed to fit together. The operation was reasonably complex in the sense that she had never seen anything like
this before, and details of its operation had to be fully thought out before the thing would work properly—but once she had the basic idea of it the rest came easily and quickly. It was a question of looping the threads over the four pegs and then lifting the previous loop over the new one, creating a “stitch” in the ribbon. It took her longer to figure out how to change the colors in the skein, because simple knots didn’t appear to work that well. If tied too loosely they would break when she was some way into her ribbon, and unravel everything above it as soon as the loose thread end was pulled. If tied too tight they would play havoc with the tension of the ribbon, making it come out stiff as a piece of wood, or twisted to one side, or part of the pattern would vanish into the background because the thread would be stretched too thin to leave a color mark or it would snap somewhere in the middle and then the whole thing would unravel. But Thea stubbornly worked at the spool until the tips of her fingers were red and tender and her eyes watered with concentration.

The first ribbon that she completed with which she was remotely pleased she kept to herself, tucked underneath the pallet she slept on.
The second one, more practiced, she handed to Cheveyo with quiet triumph when she emerged for breakfast one day. He accepted it gravely, inspected it, and then lifted his eyes in a speculative glance up at the heavens through the low stone roof of his pueblo room.

“Tuani’ta is waning,” he said, nodding to himself. “The things that were obstacles are resolving, perhaps. Maybe in the next day or two, when the Crow Moon is almost gone, you and I will try and seek the Barefoot Road again, Catori.”

As he spoke, he tucked the completed ribbon into a waist pouch that he wore, and Thea could not help a small smile. “You can have that one if you like,” she said.

But her heart had leaped at the mention of the Road. They had not gone in search of it for more than a week, not since Cheveyo had caught her trying and failing to weave the sunset, not since the day he had put the weaving spool into her hands. It was as if he had been waiting for her to achieve something with that—with the thing that was rooted in the real world—before he would try again with the big things that shaped lives, the tasks the achievement of which would matter.

She had taken the weaving spool with her on impulse, when they had set out on the Road search the very next morning. She had got used to scrambling up and down the hills of Cheveyo’s country by now and did not need both arms stuck out for balance—she now recalled her early treks and was amused by the image of herself as a dizzy long-legged heron who couldn’t walk upright except if both wings were stuck out in ludicrous poses to lean on the wind. But now her feet were sure, even in the sandals that she had found so strange and unsteady in the early days. Her hands were busy with the spool as she walked that morning, her fingers now happy with their task, nimble on the pegs, evolving shortcuts to tasks even as she wove, a long and perfect ribbon emerging from the bottom of the spool as she walked in Cheveyo’s wake as usual.

She had not been paying much attention to her surroundings this time, other than her immediate environment, instinctively feeling where to seek solid footing and keep up the steady pace Cheveyo set. Somehow the pattern of this walk had found its way into her mind, into the pattern of her ribbon, and she was not even aware of it when things changed very subtly, and she began
to hum her mysterious tune as she walked—the first time she had ever done so in Cheveyo’s presence. Thea hummed and walked and wove, and it was a moment of pure startled awakening when she suddenly became aware of Cheveyo’s gentle hand on her shoulder, bringing her to a stop.

Her eyes flew up to his face in a startled, questioning glance, but his fingers merely tightened a little as he urged her, with a small motion of his head that required no words, to look down again to her hands.

She did, and gasped in pure astonishment.

Her left hand held the weaving spool very loosely—and her right, frozen in the instant of Cheveyo’s intervention, had been in the process of lifting a loop of color over the stitch already on the peg. Except that the loop in Thea’s fingers was not cotton thread but a ribbon of pale air, the same color as the washed-out blue sky above them. Beneath the spool, the ribbon she had been weaving shimmered with that color, and also with the white of a cloud, with the gold of a ray of pale sunlight, with the charcoal-gray darkness plucked from a shadow underneath a mesa.

Even as she watched, the thing shredded and disappeared, and the solid, more physical part
of her ribbon—the one she had started weaving as they had set out—fell to the ground at her feet, its edges rough and unraveling, not attached anymore to the pegs, which had held nothing but light for some time. Thea stared at the thing that she had made, so imperfect in itself now that half of it was gone, so perfect in its memory of the promise it had held.

In the hills—and she honestly did not know in that moment whether it was real or just echoing in her mind—she could hear the spill of the flute music that had wrought this miracle in her hands.

And, looking down at her feet, she suddenly realized one more thing.

She and Cheveyo no longer stood in the tumbled wilderness of the thorn-covered hills. Her feet were bare, as were his own; they stood on a flat firm surface, on a road—on the Road—on which now her incomplete ribbon lay like an offering.

“You brought us here, Catori,” Cheveyo said.

Thea lifted her eyes to his face. She had not known just how full of tears they were, but her vision was blurred and Cheveyo’s features were hard to determine until she blinked sharply sev
eral times and a tear spilled from the corner of her eye and ran unheeded down her cheek.

“What did I do…?” Thea whispered.

For a moment the haggling Alphiri of her dream appeared in her mind—
We can show you the road…. We have directions…. We have a price
. What had the price been? Had she paid it?

Was it over? Was she no longer the One Who Couldn’t?

“Take a step,” Cheveyo said. “And do not be disappointed, whatever happens. What you have done today is a great thing, and anything further is a gift; there is more waiting for you, but you do not have to, you cannot, claim it all today. Take a step.”

Thea lifted one foot, narrow and pale, blue veins snaking around the ankle; she seemed to have difficulty doing so, as though the Road was covered in glue and the glue was holding her toes attached to it, unwilling to let go. But then the resistance ended, quite suddenly, and the foot came off the ground quickly, released.

Before Thea could bring it down again, the Road had vanished, and her foot returned to the earth in the tumbled hills she had come to know so well. She thought she could see the Road still,
for a long moment—there and yet not there, shimmering underneath everything as if glimpsed through a window into another reality. And then it was all gone, and only the unfinished ribbon remained, still there at her feet.

That, and the music, echo in the hills.
I am the beginning, I am the first step, I am what created your first and your favorite world. I am the first vision. I am what you remember from the dawn of time. I am. I am….

“Where did it go?” Thea whispered, staring at her feet, planted firmly in the usual scrub and scree, with the Road as though it had never been. She was suddenly tired, bone tired, shivering with exhaustion. Cheveyo’s hand, still on her shoulder, tightened its grip, and then it vanished momentarily just as Thea’s eyes closed and she felt herself perfectly ready to fall into a deep and—this time—utterly dreamless sleep. But then she felt herself being picked up, one of Cheveyo’s arms around her shoulder and the other underneath her knees as he lifted her up and began walking.

Thea’s eyelids flickered open momentarily, and she caught a glimpse over his shoulder of a staff planted in the ground amongst the rocks—
a familiar staff with two feathers fluttering from the tip of it, the staff that Cheveyo was never parted from.

“You left…,” she murmured incoherently into the curve where the muscles of his shoulder knitted into the base of his neck. She struggled to put what she wanted to say into words, but it wouldn’t come. “You left…your…”

“How else would we find this place again, if I had not?” Cheveyo said softly in response. “This is the place, this is the Road, and here we will return.”

1.

U
TTERLY SPENT
, T
HEA
slept deeply the night she returned from the Barefoot Road. When Cheveyo finally woke her up on the following day, it was to the bright almost shadowless light of high noon.

“Are we going back to the Road?” Thea asked sleepily, rubbing her eyes, still lying on her pallet.

“You have stood on it,” Cheveyo said, “and therefore you will do it again. Once you have stepped onto the Road, you always find your way back—it accepted you once, and now your feet know how to return there. But not yet. Not yet. Before you do…perhaps it is time.”

“Time for what?” Thea had said. She propped herself half upright on her elbow, her chin in the palm of her hand. Her mouth curled into a little
grimace when Cheveyo’s own lips twisted into a slight smile. She knew that smile of his; she knew what it meant. She could almost hear him say it.
Questions, again. With you, Catori, it is always questions.

“Well, but who knew you’d be a true weaver,” Cheveyo murmured, apparently in response to her words, giving her nothing, as usual, until she proved willing to unwrap the kernel of information that she wanted from the layers of words in which it was veiled. “Perhaps this is as good a time as any for you to meet her. Perhaps I should let you rest up for a day or so; there will be another moon in the sky tonight, it might be worth waiting for the Grass Moon to come into its own to begin this. But no, I think you already feel its gifts in your blood. This is the moon of belonging, and I think you are starting to sense what that might mean.”

“Who must I meet?” Thea persisted.

But he had said no more than that before they had taken to the desert trails, giving Thea barely enough time to eat a hurried meal and make sure her sandals were securely fastened around her ankles.

They walked for hours. Although her body
had ostensibly spent almost twelve hours recuperating in deep slumber, Thea started out tired, stumbling frequently and stifling several large yawns, but then she got her second wind and fell into the rhythm of Cheveyo’s walking, so lulled by it that she almost walked straight into him when he abruptly stopped right in front of her.

Ignoring her stumble, he merely pointed to what looked like a vertical cliff rearing squarely in their path and said, “Climb.”

“Climb? That? How?” Thea gasped after a moment of stunned silence, craning her neck to where the edge of the towering mesa seemed to split the sky. “I can’t crawl up sheer rock walls like a spider!”

Cheveyo seemed to find something about that remark amusing, because there was a flash of a smile in his dark eyes. But he chose not to respond directly. Instead, he merely pointed to what seemed to be no more than a small indentation in the rock. Taking a closer look, Thea suddenly saw something she had failed to notice before. What she had thought of as a tiny hole in the rock had another just like it a little way above it. And then another.

It was a toehold. This was a ladder.

Thea looked up at the cliff face again. “Oh, my stars,” she said in a small voice.

She glanced at Cheveyo, but he, other than folding his arms across his chest in a manner that suggested that he’d wait as long as necessary, merely inclined his head at her.

“Did your people make this?” she asked.

“And climbed it,” he said tranquilly, “with water gourds on their heads when it was the dry season. You carry nothing except yourself. Climb.”

Thea drew a deep breath and tucked her sandaled toe into the first indentation, feeling for the matching handhold above her. It was lower than she thought it would be; she knew a moment of panic as her fingernails scrabbled on bare rock, but then they slipped into their niche. Thea hung her weight from her fingers, lifted her other foot, found a toehold, and inched upward with exquisite care. She was so focused on this that she was almost twice her own height up the cliff before she felt an emptiness at her back and below her. Clinging to the rock face with all four limbs, she risked throwing a precarious glance down to the solid earth she had just left.

Cheveyo was still standing at the foot of the
cliff, his face turned up to her, watching.

Thea blew a strand of irritating hair from where it had worked loose from the braid she usually wore and hung over her mouth and nose. “Aren’t you coming with me?” she said, and her voice sounded loud in the silence of the wilderness.

“No,” he said economically.

It made sense—anytime he wished to accompany Thea somewhere he was generally striding in the lead. She should have known, she told herself, that he wasn’t coming when he told
her
to climb and made no movement to perform that action himself.

All the same, she felt oddly abandoned.

“But…,” she began, her fingers tightening in the handholds.

“I will be waiting,” Cheveyo said, “when you come down.”

“But what am I…?”

“There is a tree at the top of the mesa,” he said. “Wait there until you are summoned.”

Thea shifted her grip a little. “But how will I know who…? When is…?”

Cheveyo heaved a deep sigh. “Catori,” he said, “if there is one thing you should have
learned by now, it’s that your questions almost always answer themselves. Go up, find your tree, sit. Wait.” And then added cryptically, “Kill nothing up there.”

She had little choice. She squared her jaw, straightened her body, lifted her eyes, sought the next handhold. She did not look down again until she was pulling herself up, breathing hard, over the edge of the mesa.

Cheveyo had gone.

Alone, she took stock of her perch. The mesa was smaller than she had thought it would be, and far from flat—it had a rugged, uneven surface that had a definite downward slant in the direction facing away from the ladder. There had been a ruin halfway up the cliff—something that might have once been a dwelling, now just a single wall jutting out from living rock with a narrow window still picked out in a kind of ancient, crumbling adobe brickwork—but up here, there was nothing except a few scraggly juniper bushes and a solitary gnarled pine tree that crouched squarely in the middle of the mesa.

The sun had set. It was the instant before moonrise, and there would be a full moon. And it was no longer Crow Moon, Tuani’ta, the
moon of hardship and trouble. When the pale round disk broke into the sky, it would mean the rising of the Grass Moon. Cheveyo had called it Mura’ta, the moon of belonging, of peace of mind, of heart’s ease. And in the days after achieving the Barefoot Road, Thea had started at last to understand what that might mean to her.

Clifftop junipers blazed white gold with the reflected light from the disk that had not yet broken Thea’s horizon. She waited where Cheveyo had bid her, sitting cross-legged with her back against the twisted mesa-top pine, for whatever it was that she was here for. A moment before she had been uneasy and shivery and full of an odd sort of dark dread, but the distant promise of moonlight distracted her, pulling her mind away from dark thoughts and into the white glow.

Thea amused herself by weaving a tiny ribbon of the reds and golds of the fading sunset, a feat that until only a few weeks ago would have seemed nothing short of miraculous to her but that was now something oddly familiar, something that brought comfort and peace to her. But then it began to grow dark with unsettling speed, shadows spreading like a cloak across the land.
Thea was left with nothing but a ribbon of woven sunlight to warm her. She usually allowed her handiwork to dissipate as the light that gave it birth faded from around her, but this time she held on to it, cupping it in her hands, willing it to stay together. As the sky brightened with moonrise, she even reached out for a strand of distant silver and began working it into the edges of the evanescent thread of light that she held.

Who knew you’d be a true weaver.

Cheveyo’s cryptic words echoed in her mind. She tried to weave the words into her ribbon, puzzling out their meaning, and then felt a sudden tickle as something scampered across her bare shin. She loosened one hand from her light-weaving, raised it to swat at whatever had climbed up onto her, and then froze mid-motion as Cheveyo’s voice echoed in her mind:

Kill nothing up there
.

Her skin crawling at the touch of insect legs, Thea clenched her teeth and allowed her hand to fall gently back into her lap.

“Look at the ground at your feet,” a tiny but imperious voice instructed Thea.

She did and realized that there was a darker shadow there, a hole in the ground, something
she could have sworn had not been there moments before.

“Welcome,” the tiny voice said. “Please, come into my house.”

Thea involuntarily glanced upward, but the mesa was just as empty as it had been a moment ago—except for that disembodied voice, and the small hole by the toe of her sandal.

“Where are you?” she asked.

“In the palm of your hand,” the small voice said.

In the midst of Thea’s sunset weave that had been edged with moonrise sat a spider, its legs sunken into the light.

“Come into my house,” the spider said.

“But how can I?” Thea said helplessly.

“Follow me,” the spider said. It disengaged itself from the weave, and almost instantly disappeared into the gathering shadows. But the light clung to its feet like droplets of water, and it left a delicate trail of splintered light where it walked—off Thea’s hand, over her knee, onto the ground, into the hole.

“But I cannot come through this entrance,” Thea whispered, watching the spider track vanish into the darkness.

“Stand,” she was told, the spider’s voice coming from within the hole.

She obeyed, and as she did so the darkness swirled inside the hole, and the hole somehow grew bigger, but without apparently taking up any more of the space of the mesa-top than it had done before. Or the mesa-top had grown larger with it, to accommodate it. Or else Thea had shrunk down to the size of a spider….

Her mind spinning, she fell forward into the hole…

…and found herself standing upright, on her own two feet, in a cavern lit by a pair of torches and a large fire on a central hearth. Beside the hearth, on a comfortable nest made from animal skins, sat an old woman.

Or maybe a young woman with an old woman’s white hair bobbed just at the jawline, swinging forward as she reached out to prod the fire. It was hard to tell—as she looked up at Thea with a smile hovering around her eyes, her face was a young woman’s face with smooth unlined bronze skin.

“As old as time, as young as eternity,” the woman said, apparently in response to Thea’s unspoken thoughts.

“Cheveyo sent me,” Thea said, and then felt like an utter idiot. It was as though she were offering a password to someone who had not asked for one. Instead, she had been invited into this woman’s house. In Thea’s world, visitors brought offerings—flowers, chocolates, sometimes a contribution of food, depending on the occasion. Here, she was the visitor, someone who had barged in without a gift, without a thought for simple courtesy.

She had nothing to give, nothing except…

She glanced down into her hand. The light weaving still shimmered there, dulled now in the brightness of the cavern, but still holding on to its own glow. It was the longest Thea had ever had a light weaving hang together; a part of her wanted to know
how
,
why
—what had she done that this should be so? In that sense the thing was precious, the only remnant of a magic she had somehow worked, and without it she had no way of knowing how she had worked it.

But it was hers. Hers to give.

She stepped forward, extending her hand with the light patch resting in the middle of her palm.

“This is for you,” she said.

The woman inclined her head, nodded gra
ciously, and took the weaving in both hands, examining it.

“A true weaver,” she said at length, after a few moments of silence. “This is a precious guest gift, more than you know. Will you sit at my fire?”

Thea folded herself with as much grace as she could muster onto a separate pile of furs apparently laid aside for a visitor, without taking her eyes off her hostess’s face. It was an odd face, a young face under hair glowing white with old age—but it was more than that. It seemed to shift and flow; even the skin changed hue subtly as Thea watched, shading from a pale blue-white to a warm glow of something resembling polished mahogany, and back to a creamy ivory. Her eyes reflected the flames of the hearth as though tiny little fires burned behind each bright surface.

For a moment, Thea thought she caught the features shaping themselves fleetingly into a more feminine version of Cheveyo’s own chiseled face.

And she had used his words. His exact words.

“Who are you?” Thea said at last, very quietly.

The woman chuckled to herself. “Many
names are mine,” she said. “You may call me Grandmother Spider.”

In a world of strange things, that almost failed to seem odd to Thea. She could have queried the name and what it meant, but under the circumstances there were other questions that seemed more urgent. “Has he sent me here to test me?” she asked. Her voice trembled, just a little, despite her best efforts to control it.

“Perhaps,” Grandmother Spider said. “That entirely depends on what you mean by being tested. My guess is that he saw a true weaver and sent her to the center of the web. You are a seeker, I think—you ask questions, and Cheveyo my son is not one to give answers freely….”

“He is your
son
?” Thea said, unable to stop herself.

“As all men are my sons,” the woman said, “and as you are my granddaughter, and as life sprang from my music and my thought and my flesh and my bone.”

“I think I have read about you,” Thea said, choosing her words carefully. “Are you one of the old gods?”

“There are no old gods,” Grandmother Spider said serenely. “They are, or they are not. The
things people believe in are born anew every morning in their souls, like the sun rises new at every dawn. I go everywhere and I know all things. I know whence you came and where you are going. If such things make one a god, then perhaps I am one. But I am what I am—I was a beginning. One of many. Or maybe there is only one beginning and some of us are merely echoes of that first primeval light of being.”