by Andy Giesler
I gave up ’til that morning. The morning when the World That Is sang me awake, and I laughed, and laughed, and laughed. Because I’d been thinking so much about where the chimeras happened, I hadn’t paid no attention to when they happened. And do you know what?
Chimeras followed the weaver’s pilgrimage calendar, too.
The calendar is a weaver secret that not even a shepherd could know. What’s more, it’s an awful puzzler. There’s lunar cycles, and patterns of thirteen, and skipping every third of this or that…goodness. Took me years to learn it, and even then, Ma was surprised I’d learned it so young.
Now, when I say chimeras followed the calendar, that’s not quite right. You see, chimeras happened at a holy place when weavers would not be visiting it. In fact, they happened at a time as long as possible from when weavers would be visiting. It was like they happened on the opposite side of the weaver calendar. There were skips and misses in the pattern, but I could see it fit for true. As if somebody was going from one holy place to another. Somebody with a purpose.
Eulee couldn’t see the pattern, for he wasn’t a weaver. Weavers couldn’t see the pattern, for they didn’t have Eulee’s list. Shepherds couldn’t see the pattern, for they had little interest in weaver rituals. But I saw the pattern. And because I saw it, I knew this:
Somebody besides the shepherds had a shepherd’s tool.
Somebody was taking the shepherd’s tool to weaver holy places and making chimeras.
Somebody was careful to visit those places at times when no weaver would be there.
And if the pattern held, in a few days’ time I could find that Somebody. I’d find them at a weaver holy place not so far from where I was. The holy place that seemed to have more chimeras than any other. Near where I was born, or so Ma had told me.
That’s why a sightless, wounded young woman of twenty-three was going off on her own. Why she was hunting chimeras and whatever made them. Why she was headed into the Divide.
6
The Holy Place
As caves go, it wasn’t such a bad one.
Some caves are wet and sticky, where this one was tolerably dry. A dry cave is always welcome at the high heat of summer, and that summer was a warm one. And while the ceiling was low for my comfort, the place seemed wide and deep, though I hadn’t yet explored to its ends.
So it had all that in its favor.
The mouth where they shoved me into the cave, though, that was narrow for my liking. Not so narrow that it was hard to fit me through. It just left me feeling a nudge cramped is all.
The heavy wood beams they set in place outside it, slotted through somehow with long metal poles, leaving just a small space where my face might press into the fresh air? That didn’t help the cramped feeling, neither. I could just begin to touch the metal poles when I reached as far as I could between the beams, but only ’til my guard rapped my hand with a club, hard enough to make me yelp.
So I’d say, taking the whole situation edge to edge, this cave was about in the middle of all caves. Roomy and not too damp, which was good. Holding me against my wishes, and likely to keep doing that ’til I died, which was bad.
Right up ’til that burly fellow who smelled of onions grabbed me and chucked me in there, I daresay I felt a touch proud of how I’d done since leaving the Alters. I made it from the Old Crossing up along the west edge of the Highcrest to a spot well north of Ashland Lake, where I knew a bridge waited. A swaying, narrow bridge from noplace to noplace, yet one much used by weavers. From there I went along a branch off the Highcrest whose place ain’t yours to know, then along a path marked by things that ain’t yours to know neither, ’til somewhere just past dusk of the second day I came near enough that holy place to hear folks there who oughtn’t be. Folks chanting things like what weavers chant, but not really quite.
From there, I did everything just as I ought. Moved only soft, and only when other sounds might hide me. Kept to the sides of trees much as I could, staying low to the ground and swinging my staff ahead of me so slow it was hardly moving, so it wouldn’t make the least noise when it touched something.
But the thing I’d learned so many times, and which was a constant vexation to me, was that even if I did everything just as I ought, soft as a shepherd, deep as night, creeping along in my very most sneaking way, there was a fair-to-good chance that somebody was standing there watching me do it, wondering what I imagined myself to be about.
This particular fellow—the oniony one—was puzzled because even though I seemed to be sneaking, I was sneaking right to him. He told me so just after he took two quick steps and collected me, kicking and thrashing, my arms pinned to my sides before I could make much Willim-what about it.
Once he’d tossed away my staff and shoved me in that hole, blocking it with his legs while he heaved those beams back in place, he went off for a time. After a bit, I heard two folks walking back toward me and speaking low, as though not to bother the ritual. One of them was that oniony fellow, and the other was some fellow a great deal older. When they arrived, the older one crouched down to the cave’s mouth and said soft, “Come here, girl. Show yourself.”
I was at least as curious about him as he was about me, so I came up, hoping to learn more of who he was and what would happen to me. Yet soon as I brought my face to the gap between the beams, the older fellow cried out and sounded as if he fell on the ground. “Grandmother protect us!” he gasped, and he skittered away through the brush a moment before regaining his feet.
“Elder Willim,” said the burly one, “what’s amiss?”
But Elder Willim didn’t say what was amiss. He just rushed off the way he’d come, leaving my burly guard and me to puzzle it out and wait.
A few moments later, the ceremony off toward the holy place stumbled to a stop. A few moments after that, there was the sound of more folks coming. And I am not embarrassed to say it: I didn’t truly expect to meet Gebohra Muerta, but my belly did some uncomfortable squeezing at the fear I might.
I was still at the mouth when they arrived. Somebody else leaned down toward me, and hers was the voice of a woman of middling age when she said, “It’s not her. She hasn’t the smoothness of the eldest ones. But looking past that, the likeness is a touch troubling.”
That’s when another voice spoke—a voice I knew. A withered husk of a voice. A moth’s wing voice hardly louder than rubbing wool.
And the Humble Weaver said, “Set me down, then, and leave us.”
7
How We Spoke
“There is little sight left in these rheumy, filmy, sunken things of mine,” the Humble Weaver said, “so others must do the seeing for me. They tell me you look something like a shepherd we knew a lifetime ago. Like a shepherd we’ve lost, though you are not worn and smooth as the eldest shepherds are. This old shell of a weaver is not fool enough to think you the Shepherd Lee, as old Willim thought. But I do think on things, and I guess, and I wonder—Grandmother, do I. Nothing else is left to me but wondering. And just now, I have wondered out who you might be.” She paused. “So, Root of Surecreek, who left the weaver’s path. What brings you to us?”
That’s how our conversation began.
We spoke a good while into the night.
I puzzled her. My likeness to Shepherd Lee. My escape from the Pit. My conversation with Shepherd Gabriel. Even the slurred, teetering ramblings of poor, hateful, dead Eulee the Outcast.
And she puzzled me, too. I didn’t know whether I would live past this meeting, but it would be a comfort to die understanding more. So I gave her what I knew in bits and nibbles in trade for the bits and nibbles she would share.
We didn’t bargain it. We just did it. Understood we both wished it. Because she was hungry to know all she could of the World That Is, whether she was meant to know it or not. And maybe especially if she was not.
Guess we had that in common.
It’s strange to say, but for the first time in my lonely life I spoke with somebody like m
e. Somebody who wanted to know so many things, sometimes for good and practical reasons, but sometimes just to know them, and without caring whether they were proper things to know.
I didn’t like her. I don’t suppose she liked me. But gracious, it felt good to speak on and on of outlandish things with somebody who wasn’t scared to.
8
The First Shepherd
We spoke of many things.
Late in our time together, I asked how she knew so much that was meant to be hid. Almost like she hadn’t heard, she said, “Do you know chicken-scratch?”
I had no idea what she meant, and I said so.
“No,” she said, “I guess you would not. Folks mostly speak it in the west of the World That Is. I learned it in Holyhock. When folks have something they wish to keep from their children, it is a game to hide their words. Here now. Witchee witchill hitchave sitchome hitchoney witchith ditchinner. Can you make much of that?”
“No,” I said.
“No. ‘Til you see the game. You just put ‘itch’ after the first sound in a word. So ‘we’ is ‘witchee,’ and ‘have’ is ‘hitchave.’ I said, ‘We will have some honey with dinner.’”
I couldn’t begin to think why she told me this, but she did prickle my wondering.
“Now then. Can you understand the Shepherds’ Speech?” she asked.
I couldn’t. Nobody could. I’d heard shepherds speak it of course, as had we all, and I’d wondered what they spoke of, but I could make no sense of it.
“You do not understand them, girl, because they do not wish you to. The shepherds speak as they do for the same reason a mother in Holyhock speaks chicken-scratch. They speak this way so that we simple children might not understand. That they might hold back treats from us and hide coming miseries.
“Yet off in the west of the World That Is, once in a very great while a most especially clever child will worry at the knot of chicken-scratch, and she will work it out. And oh, such power that child will have! She will know things the other children do not. Things her ma and pa would just as soon she did not know at all.
“To the shepherds and their secret speech, I was just such a child.
“Nearly five and sixty years agone I became a worthy weaver, and I found myself in the company of shepherds far more often than most. In those days, ten shepherds walked the World That Is. With the passing of Shepherd Lee, it was nine. And now perhaps we’ve come to eight. I wonder.
“Fifty years agone, the weavers chose me as their Humble Weaver, and I found myself in the company of shepherds far more often still. Not just in ones and twos, but often among several, and sometimes among them all. Most weavers, I am sure, would not listen in on their betters. But I wanted to know. I wanted it so very badly.
“After many years of worrying at that knot, I was startled to find the Shepherds’ Speech is cousin to our own. A far, far distant cousin to be sure, and an ugly one, but a cousin even so. It is a speech like our speech, but shifted and twisted, as suits a wicked thing. Though I do not understand near the fullness of it, I know bits and snatches. And oh, I have learned so many things we simple children are not meant to know.”
I just want to say here: I always thought the Shepherds’ Speech was real pretty. It was like somebody with an Alter lilt pretending to say words that meant nothing at all. I guess ugly is about how we hear things, not about how they truly are.
Anyhow.
“Sometimes,” the Humble Weaver said, “they spoke of Gebohra Muerta. And when they spoke of Her, they laughed. They spoke with ridicule, and that was a mighty puzzle to me, as we have been taught to see even Her love as a terrifying thing. In time I learned that She was not what we have been told. Gebohra Muerta was the first shepherd, and a friend to Grandmother Root. She gave us a great Gift, the gift of health and strength and life unending, and She was punished for it. I learned this from the shepherds’ own lips, when they did not know I listened.
“And so we Hidden Folk follow Her, seeking what the shepherds have hid from us all. We seek the Shepherd’s Gift of life that Gebohra Muerta meant us all to have, and not the shepherds only.
“But often…often the shepherds spoke of a thing that took me long years to puzzle. A particular word they said time and again, which in the end I came to know meant ‘nothing.’ So it was that I began to understand the Nothing within us.
“We use that phrase too lightly. I daresay that in your brief, uncommon life, folks have used that phrase on you more than on most. Yet it is not at all what folks think. The Nothing within us is not an attitude. It’s not some regrettable failure of judgment, a wickedness that we might teach folks out of. No. The Nothing is as real as the ground we walk on. It sleeps in every one of us, not only in a wicked few. It sleeps in our blood, and in our flesh, and there it waits and yearns to wake. And you will not guess, Apprentice Woodsmith Root, what comes to pass when the Nothing within us wakes.”
I didn’t think she was really asking me, and she was about to go on, but I felt the terrible, prideful need to impress this old weaver, to show her I knew hidden things, too. “The Nothing makes some folks shepherds, and some folks chimeras,” I said. And I’m shamed to say that, just to tweak her, I said it real light, as though anybody ought to know this, as though it was no more surprising than rocks getting wet in rain.
She was quiet for a bit, sitting outside my cave-y cage, me with my face pressed at the gaps between the beams. She stayed quiet long enough for me to notice crickets again, and the smell of eldergreen on a gentle breeze, and some good ways off, the sound of hushed voices.
Finally she said—and her voice had an unfamiliar edge to it—“Well. Well well. How does a little Outcast woodsmith, and a half-trained one at that, come to know such things?”
I saw no reason to fuss or stretch about it. “Shepherd Gabriel told me.”
“Did he?” she said, sounding surprised. “Did he. Not the sort of thing his shepherd friends would approve of. Well then, Wise Root, tell me this.” And now her voice was hungry. “Did he say why the Nothing gives some folks the Shepherd’s Gift, yet it gives other folks the Chimera’s Curse?”
“No. Why?”
She took a long, wheezing breath, then she let it out slow, her disappointment plain. “I do not know. I need to know.” She sat still a moment. “I will know. It is the only question that matters now. I wonder on it, and I study, and I learn. For so many years I have studied and learned. I have learned how to awaken the Nothing within us. Somebody wounded by a chimera will become a chimera, as we weavers know too well. And perhaps you think that is an awakening. But you are wrong, for that is not a true awakening. I have heard the shepherds speak of this as a sickness, as borrowing the chimera’s Nothing, just as you might borrow your neighbor’s head cold. That is not awakening, but poisoning. No. For a true awakening we need…”
“A tool,” I said, stepping between her words. “Something from so very long ago. An ancient tool that, even if you only so much as stand beside it, it’ll wake the Nothing within you.” What I did not say was: And I’ve come here to find the ancient tool you surely have, and to take it from you.
“Hunh,” she said. And I’ll confess, it pleased me some little bit to take her wind away just as she gusted up to impress me. “Just so. Just so. Well, when I learned that, I set my mind to finding one. And find one, I did. A tool to awaken the Nothing. We call our tool the Holy. And we have learned so very much from it.
“Using the Holy, we seek after the First Shepherd’s Gift. We sit someone near the Holy to awaken the Nothing within them. Then we see what they become. We study their form, that one day I may understand how to wake the Shepherd’s Gift rather than the Chimera’s Curse. Sometimes their final form is more like a person than a beast, and from this we learn.
“So far, all have received the Chimera’s Curse. No one has yet remained a person in full. But someone will. Before my life runs out, I know someone will. And once I have puzzled that out? I will use the Nothing just as the
First Shepherd intended when She gave it to us. I will share it with all the People of the World That Is, whether the shepherds wish it or no.”
Up to then, no matter how I pressed her, I’d not understood what her plan was for me. But now that I’d grasped the shape of it, it was all I could do to pretend fear when I asked, “So that’s what you plan for me? To see what the Holy makes of me? Please Humble Weaver, don’t turn me into nothing unnatural.”
“Goodness, nothing like that,” she said. “Even if I cared to, the Holy is not where I can quickly have it. And as things lie, I do not care to anyhow. We are not cruel, girl. We do not use the Holy for our entertainment. We use it to learn, for the benefit of everyone. Yet we would learn nothing from you.”
“But…” I faltered, stumbling on my disappointment. “But you’ve a mind to learn how folks receive the Shepherd’s Gift,” I said. “You heard me say I had the Gift ’til Shepherd Gabriel took it. So you know that I can receive it, where others have not. If you use the Holy on me, you might learn a thing to two.”
She rattled out a laugh like a winter leaf scraping bark.
“You disappoint me, girl. I imagined you thought more clearly. While I am mightily puzzled by how you lost the Shepherd’s Gift, the answer lies with the shepherds, not with you. I have no doubt the Holy would restore your Gift. Yet that would help me not one whittle, for you have had the Gift before.
“Some months before she vanished, the Shepherd Lee visited me. The signs were subtle, but as clear to my dim old eyes as light itself. She was with child. So even in this hateful haze that I now call light, I see clearly whose child you are. There is no question whether Shepherd Lee could receive the Gift, nor would it surprise me if her daughter could. What I care to know is how other folks might receive it who were not shepherds born. So waking your Gift would give us nothing we need. But you being a most remarkably ornery young woman? I imagine waking your Gift would give us a good deal of trouble. Or do I guess wrong?”