Spindlefish and Stars

by Christiane M. Andrews

  She saw her own life lived in the shadows. She saw how her thread and her father’s rarely touched another’s—how they kept to themselves in forgotten corners. She saw the gaps left in the tapestry all around them.

  How lonely their lives seemed from here.

  Hurrying forward, she followed her own thread until she found herself at the edge of the field waiting for her father, and the swineherd arriving instead. She saw her midnight rush through the forest, saw herself arriving at the shore.

  There she was at the edge of the sea. There she was uncloaking the cheese. There she was no more.

  There she was. There she was no more.

  But dangling right there in the tapestry, at the very moment of the uncloaking of the stinky cheese and the unwrapping of her father’s notebook and the ticket of half paffage, was a bobbin of thread.

  Clo lifted it gently. Her bobbin. Her own.

  It was still attached.

  Still wound with thread.

  Relief flooded over her—the knowledge of not dead not dead not dead—rushing through the very marrow of her bones, a terror that she had not realized she had been carrying. The wound thread shimmered with shifting light and color. Touching it, she felt a brief spark against her fingertips.

  But… what of her father? What had kept him from traveling with her? Clo traced her line back to the moment when she had waited for her father under the pine.

  There was the swineherd, angry skin and cauliflower nose and muck-covered boots. His lip was curling. An unsure smile… not a sneer, Clo could see that now. She shook her head. He was nervous. He was looking at her pityingly.

  She followed his thread as he left her by the woods, carrying the woad and madder she had given him back toward the town.

  He clambered over the wall, dropped to the other side.

  In twilight, he made his way through the streets, past Clo’s own crumbling house with its freshly swept stoop. He nodded a greeting to a man raising a bucket from the village well. He climbed the path that led to the manor house; he looped around the gardens to the stables, entered, and walked down a dim corridor to the very end—the pigsty.

  He opened the door. In the half-dark, grunting softly, the pigs moved as oblong shadows through the straw.

  “Shh-shhh, girls. ’S all right, then,” he murmured to the shadows. Then more loudly, “Are ye here?”

  …

  “Are ye here? I’ve seen yer lass.”

  …

  “And I’ve delivered yer parcel. And yer letter. She gave me th’ wood’n matter.” He waved the wilted plants. “And y’ promised another coin if I brought it.”

  …

  “And I didna tell yer daughter y’are still here in th’ stalls.”

  …

  “She’s on her way to the harbor… like ye wanted.”

  …

  “Y’ might come out now. No one’s in th’ stalls but me.”

  The boy tripped over something in the straw and knelt to look for what had caused him to stumble. There, half buried beneath the straw and muck, was Clo’s father.

  “Wake yerself up, old man. Time t’ wake.” The boy shook him, but Clo’s father could not be roused.

  In the weaving, Clo watched with horror as the boy looked about, then tenderly lifted her father’s bony, aged body into a barrow and covered him with straw. He trundled him through the dark streets until he reached his own crumbling home. He carried her father through his own doorway, placed him on his own floor. He called out, “This ’un’s in a bad way, Ma,” and a woman, wiping her hands on an apron, knelt to help the stranger her son had carried in. Their threads shimmered with light.

  For a long while, Clo could not tear her eyes from the image of her father in the barn. Over and over, she watched him struggling to lead an ass from a stall, struggling to hold a wheel of cheese, struggling to fill a skin of water. He had wanted to leave with her. He had not had the strength. The breath. Finally, in the dark, in the muck with the pigs, he had wrapped up the cheese, the stolen painting, the notebook. He had waited in the shadows. He had grabbed the swineherd. Voice cracking, he had begged for the boy’s help. Had handed him the cloak. Bring this to my daughter. A coin now, a coin when you return. Bring the woad and madder so I know she’s received my words. He had scribbled his message to her, the ink dripping and smudging under his hand in the dark. In the mirror, backward and smeary, Clo could just make out the letter now:

  My dearest Clo,

  Forgive me. Forgive me—this time you must travel alone. I wish it were not so. You must be brave. The ticket is a promise I made long ago to your mother. It will give you safe passage, and will, I hope, bring you to her, wherever she has gone. Follow the path through the woods to the harbor to Haros; I believe he will find you. We will, I am certain, be voyaging together on his craft.

  The canvas is for you. It is the last I painted. How much your mother loved you. You will see, and perhaps even Fate will forgive me and save me.

  I hope you will come to understand.

  Clo, know I love you. So much my daughter.

  You are the beauty of all the stars.

  Always, always, always,

  your loving father

  CHAPTER THE TWENTY-SIXTH

  IN WHICH A BOY EXAMINES THE SILVER ON A PLUM

  CLO READ AND REREAD THE BITTER WORD. ALWAYS. Always. Always.

  She read and reread the bitter line. Perhaps even Fate will forgive me and save me.

  She stared at the tapestry, at the line of rotting thread, at the bobbins dangling at the working edge. She stared at the old woman’s hands resting in her lap. At her head nodding with each deep breath.

  At last, eyes hot with tears, Clo put her finger on the old woman’s shoulder.

  She poked her.

  Again.

  Again.

  Caught midbreath, surprised awake by the sharpness of the poke, the woman gargled, coughed, blinked.

  She blinked several times before her eyes focused on Clo.

  “Granddaughter,” she said slowly.

  “How could you?” Clo’s voice shook.

  “How could I?” The woman’s gaze followed the length of Clo’s arm to her fingertips, still resting on the line of fish-gut thread. “Ah.” Her jaw worked furiously, an empty chewing, chewing, chewing.

  “How could you do this to my father? Did you want to punish him? For what? What did he ever do to deserve this? In his letter, he said Fate could forgive him. Save him. Is that you? Did he mean you? He must mean you. But you do nothing. Look how he has suffered!” Clo tried to pull her father’s section of the tapestry closer. “How could you be so cruel?”

  The woman’s apple face crumpled. “You should not have looked at this,” she said quietly.

  Clo started: she had expected anger, not gentleness, or perhaps even remorse, but still she continued. “You’ve taken my father’s life. You’ve made him ill and old and… and alone. You gave him a rotting thread, and gave the same to my mother! And she is supposed to be your daughter? I never had the chance to know her. Why did you want to punish them… punish me?”

  “Granddaughter.” The old woman shook her head. “I did not want this. I did not do this.” She slumped mushroom-like into her stool. “And you should not have seen it. It is too painful.”

  Clo watched the old woman, surprised but unmoved by her apparent regret. “I’ve seen you weaving. I’ve seen you place the threads, tamp them down. I’ve seen you creating this… this thing!” Clo slapped the cloth again, and it billowed under her hand. “Who did this if not you?”

  “Granddaughter…” The woman put her face in her hands. She was silent for a long moment. At last she raised her head. “How much… how much of your father’s thread did you see?”

  “I saw where he met my mother. I saw where I was born and my mother died. I see where he is now.”

  “Look at the rest.” The woman jutted her chin. “Maybe then you will understand.”

  Hesitating, Clo gla
nced at the old woman, who nodded and led Clo to a spot in front of the tapestry. She poked a finger at the fabric. “Look, granddaughter.”

  Parting the warp threads, Clo looked into the mirror at the design. For a moment, she thought she was looking at herself.

  There was a boy—a boy with hair shorn tight as a lamb’s in spring. Gangly in his dirty leggings and boots, he was standing on a pickle barrel outside a building on a crowded street. Behind, street vendors were hawking their wares in shrill, cracking tones, but the boy was rapt—his eyes wide and dark as walnuts—staring in the window at a man painting a bowl of fruit. He watched with a kind of reverence and wonder, not even noticing when the painter became aware of him and his shadow falling across the fruit.

  “Father?” Clo was not really asking a question; she knew this dark-eyed, wonder-struck boy was her father, but she sensed the woman nodding beside her.

  “Look,” the woman repeated, though Clo could not now look away.

  Hauled off the pickle barrel and dragged by his collar inside the house by a servant, the boy was confronted by the painter. Clo watched the boy standing, knees shaking, in the middle of the studio as the man wiped his brushes.

  “You like my painting?” the man asked the boy.

  The boy, terrified, nodded.

  “I’ve seen you at the window before.”

  The boy nodded again. Swallowing, he found his voice. “It’s like magic,” he said, pointing at the man’s canvas.

  The man’s eyebrows rose in surprise. “It is,” he said. “But see here—it’s like magic if I can capture the light. But when there’s an… urchin in the window blocking the light, I cannot paint the object as it is.”

  The boy’s gaze shifted between the window and the bowl of fruit. Comprehension settled over his features. “I understand,” he said sorrowfully. “I won’t stand on the barrel again.”

  “Ah. Good.” The painter motioned to his servant to take the boy out of the room and turned his attention to his palette.

  “If I was standing there,” the boy went on, “then the apple wouldn’t be quite that shade of red now, would it? It would lose all its white, glossy bits, and it’d be more purple-like.”

  The painter looked up in surprise and held up his hand to stop the servant.

  “What’s that, then?”

  “The colors—they’d all change, wouldn’t they, if I was standing in the window? So you’d need…” Tentatively, the boy crossed to the painter’s side and leaned over his palette. “Well, you’d need almost that color”—he pointed to a mustardy blob—“but with a bit more gray in it to get the pear just right.”

  The painter’s eyes traveled over the boy. He looked at the pear and the mustardy blob and pursed his lips.

  “Would you like to watch, then? The painting?”

  “But… the light…”

  “No, no,” the painter said. “Not from out there. In here. I need an assistant. My man, here”—he gestured at the servant—“is excellent with affairs of the house. But not with paint. And you seem… inexplicably… to have a good eye. So if you’ll return at this time tomorrow, and you prove yourself dependable, you might be my assistant. And you might watch me paint. Quietly.”

  The boy’s whoop of joy, the painter’s startled jump made Clo laugh out loud.

  The old woman tapped the tapestry again. “Keep looking, granddaughter.”

  Following the thread, Clo saw how the boy served the painter faithfully, and how, as he did so, he became more and more skilled himself. The painter first trusted the boy to set up his easel, then to buy his paints, then to mix his paints, and then later, much later, to paint parts of the work himself—small details here and there—and then at last to fulfill whole commissions.

  Clo saw how as he grew more and more skilled, the boy’s work began to diverge from the painter’s, until finally, sadly, the painter asked him to depart—the two could no longer work together, as the boy was clearly no longer an assistant but a master himself. And how the boy—now a young man, a young man she definitively recognized as her father—at once secured a position as a court painter in the city.

  Clo watched the young man take up his position, be given his cottage on the grounds, and receive the first orders of his employer. In the beginning, only decorative objects occupied his time: floral vines and patterns on the edges of mirrors, mantels, trays, doors. But soon he was asked to paint his first portraits—a new baby, her mother. The young chancellor and his son. The aged treasurer and his wife. Various court ladies and gentlemen in luminous court dress. He painted all with the same rapt attention, the same wonder he had shown as a boy standing on the pickle barrel. He worked for hours to make a stroke, a line, a shade just right. And his paintings… when finished…

  Clo leaned closer to the mirror. She could see his paintings almost as if she were there in front of them. The silver thread of drool where the baby had been sucking on its own plump arm. The crease in the leather of the chancellor’s shoe. The bloom on the plums beside the treasurer’s wife. The shred of yellow light that edged the clouds scudding past the open window. Clo felt she was there—not just beside the artworks, but there—with the drooling babe and the vain chancellor and the plums beside the treasurer’s wife.

  Around each of her father’s paintings, Clo saw, the fabric was full of distortions: waves and pockets and hollows. It nearly bubbled. And fine golden threads spread like cobwebs. What were these threads? They were not like the fish-wool, not like the thread she herself had learned to spin.

  Clo lifted one with a fingernail. So light, thin… She narrowed her eyes to see the reflection of the golden filament in the mirror. It was there, but sheer… gauzy…

  She followed the gossamer strand across a section of tapestry to its end. Here, it wrapped with a thicker thread belonging to a pillowy nursemaid who was standing, arms crossed, in a great chamber in front of her father’s painting of the mother and child. “So that’s the young master when he was just a wee bit of a babe, then?” she was saying. “An’ how young his mother does look, too!”

  Clo returned to the bubbles around her father’s thread. Again she lifted a golden filament and followed it across the tapestry to where it wound with a fatter yarn: here was a little boy standing on a chair, holding up a plum beside the painting of the treasurer and his wife.

  “Look, Mama,” he was saying as his mother lifted him off the chair and scolded him. “Look how this plum is like the ones in the painting! Even this silvery bit here—do you see? This silver? On the skin?”

  Clo took a step back from the tapestry. She looked at the old woman whose jaw was moving up and down, up and down emptily.

  “Do you see, granddaughter?”

  “No.” Clo’s cheeks were hot. She tried to keep her voice steady. “I see my father was a talented painter. Once. You… you stopped him from being so. You took this away from him. I think this must cause him even more suffering—even more than his… infirmity. There”—Clo thumped the weaving—“where he was watching the painter, when he began to study… how happy he was! And his paintings—well, they almost live themselves, don’t they? They’re so… so beautiful. And others see them, and for a moment, they see what my father saw. Just at that moment. They see the baby. Or the bowl of fruit. Or the sky—just at that moment, how it seemed to him. And maybe they see their own lives, the things in their own lives, a little differently, too; they see them again, know them in a different way, when they look at the painting. But I don’t see”—Clo could not stop her voice from shaking now—“I don’t see how the rot—the rot that has surrounded his thread and is torturing him—is not your doing. Part of your own weaving.”

  “You do.” The old woman’s apple face had settled into a firm, satisfied expression. “You see your father’s work—you understand.”

  “No, I do not!” Clo exploded. “And I don’t see how what has happened to him is not your punishment!”

  The old woman pushed Clo in front of a patch of
tapestry distorted with bubbles.

  “See what your father did here,” she said. “See how his painting transformed the fabric.”

  “So you are puni—”

  “Shh. Listen, child. There is no punishment.” Her hand traced the bubbles and hollows that rose around Clo’s father’s paintings, the ripples in the weaving and the gossamer threads that spun out all around them. “You saw your mother, yes? In the tapestry? At the gate?”

  Clo nodded.

  “Imagine your mother, here. In this room. Imagine her weaving. Here. Beside me.” The woman’s voice wavered, just slightly, as she spoke. “Imagine her weaving here, and seeing her weaving reshape itself. Seeing it ripple, seeing these golden filaments rise out of the fabric. Imagine her watching your father’s paintings come to life—seeing them, as you saw them, and feeling the fabric change under her hands.” The woman’s arm, sweeping over the tapestry, lingered over other waves and hollows. “There are others, of course. Always others like your father, whose work re-forms this fabric. Who reshape time with their paintings or stories or sculptures or dances or songs. Whose work gives their subjects a kind of life beyond their own. But your mother…”

  Lapsing into silence, the woman pinched the line of fish gut where it first entered the fabric. Gently, she twisted it into shimmering wool, let it spring back into rotting innards. Twist, relax. Twist, relax.

  Clo sat quietly waiting for the woman to continue. For the first time, she saw—she had a sense of—her mother, her never-known mother, here, in this room, in this house… on this island. And for the first time, Clo began to feel her own self as a part of this place. She touched one of the tapestry’s rippling patches and tried to imagine her mother doing the same. “These bubbles are my father’s paintings… reshaping time?” she asked, trying to understand. “They’re my father’s paintings capturing… moments so they last longer than they were meant to?” She glanced at the old woman, who was nodding.