The next day, Nell found Mistress Meva and reminded her how much she’d like to see the weavers at work. The Shepherdess, delighted, gave her leave to go. If Max was spending all his time in the third band, Nell decided, she’d have to get closer to it.
She did not expect to be much interested in the weavers or the embroiderers or any of the other artisans, all women, who sat in the second garden, working their looms or bent over embroidery hoops in the sun. But on her way past them, she glanced at the half-made tapestries and stopped.
The image on the nearest loom standing upright in the garden was of a boat cresting the waves. It stood half revealed, the bottom of the picture vivid and alive. Keel up, the boat hung suspended over a stormy sea of blue and gray, waves that tossed ivory foam into an iron sky. The icy water and the ship’s hull poised above it and the red, chafed hands of people clinging to the rails were richly colored; they stood out, bright and alive, disappearing halfway up into lines of unwoven thread, shoulders and faces and mast and sail as yet unmade. But what stopped Nell was the color of the yarn that hung from the side of the loom, waiting to be drawn into the tapestry. It was all gray.
She watched as the weaver lifted a thread and pulled it through. Her fingers ran over it, tugged, and fitted it into place. As she did so, it colored, twinkling a little as the gray blushed orange and the thread settled over the others, part of a streak of sun breaking through clouds.
“How did you do that?”
The woman looked up, and the thread she was about to weave, which had begun to brighten, dulled again in her hand. Nell watched it in dismay, but the woman was untroubled.
“Weave, you mean? Are you the girl Meva sent?”
Nell nodded, and the weaver, who introduced herself as Iana, offered her a chair.
“I’m sorry to ruin your thread,” Nell said, pointing.
Iana smiled and shrugged. “Oh, that? That’s nothing. It’ll come back. Come, and I’ll show you weaving.”
She was a talkative woman tilting toward old age, with a hawkish nose and a wrinkled chin, though around her eyes a little youth remained. And in her hands there was speed and strength and nimbleness. Nell watched her work, pulling the weft back and forth over the pattern she had laid. Each time, as she consulted her paper and drew a new thread into the weave, Nell saw it bloom color.
“How do you do that?” she asked again.
The woman shrugged. Amid all her talk of the weaving, she seemed to see the colorless thread coming to life as an afterthought, a happy convenience.
“We weavers have little songs of color in our heads,” she said, tapping hers for effect. “That’s one of the first things you learn, weaving.”
“And it tells the thread what color to be?”
“Oh, no. I see that. It just gives you a little rhythm to see it by: Life is ours, and color and light, the child we form, the yarn make bright. It’s like the growing-garden song, or haven’t you learned that one yet?”
“You mean the chant of seeds?” Nell asked. She hadn’t thought of the poem as a song.
“Yes, that. Just a little help, an aid to the mind, to make the work light.”
Nell watched her a while longer, fascinated. Nearby, an embroiderer named Neetri worked pearls into a glossy cloth stretched over a large hoop. These, too, shifted and deepened in color as she worked. Nell wanted to know how it was done, but Neetri told her what Iana had, quoting an old saying that woman’s work was in her belly and hands, and remarking that the great dyers of old, all men, were known to make colors more vibrant than any others.
“But that art was lost, you know, with the flight across the sea. Perhaps in the third band they’ll discover it again, and we’ll have all the lost shades. There were colors among the ancients, that would dazzle the eyes. Not like today.”
Nell looked around the garden, freshly washed from yesterday’s rain. Drops clung to the blush-colored petals of some flowers Iana called open-palms, glinting like crystal. Shallow pools of white rain winked in the folds of the rainbow canvases the artisans used to keep the sun off. Nell looked again at the tapestry of the ship, and the embroidery that Neetri called “the birth of twins to Priya, mother of all,” a radiant scene built of beads of polished brass and gems and brilliant silks, and wondered what colors could have outshone these. But she didn’t say anything. She went back to the first band, trying to remember the words to the chant about growing, and for the moment forgetting all about Max, and even Susan.
Summer on the mountain was unlike summer in the valley, with its bright sunlight and brighter crops, the women bending to toil together in the mornings, the girls in their lines gathering the harvest in their canvas bags, skirts catching on the tall stalks to make them rustle and swing and wave beneath the cloudless sky. At the mountain cottage, the garden grew in its small glade, untouched by any but one set of hands, one patient farmer collecting the day’s harvest alone.
The exile dug carrots and turnips and a hard-skinned yam from the soil and thought that perhaps silence would have been the better way, long ago. Perhaps obedience and acceptance and dampened hopes were not such a price to pay for the vivid life of the valley, full of the company of others.
Silence had been the choice then, and the exile had refused it.
Now there was neither company nor silence. The roiling mist had washed all away, and even in the empty garden on the
