Time and the Tapestry

by John Plotz

  First, Ed and I both leapt toward Mead, who was fluttering just beyond our grasp, right up against the Tapestry (but our leap was too strong, we were going to smash into the wall!). Second, there was a low booming sound, like faraway thunder. Third, I smelled something like a hot summer rain: damp, and a little whiff of sulfur like lightning had just struck. Before I had time to think about that smell, or what it meant that Ed and I had been falling toward the tapestry for quite a while but hadn’t yet smacked our skulls on the wall behind it, I stopped noticing anything at all.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Betwixt the Blossom and the Bough

  Okay, fine, I was thinking in the slowed-down way they say comes with crashes, okay I’m falling, falling but not landing. I opened my eyes, and shut them again immediately, because what I saw made no sense.

  In that quick glimpse I saw a riverside meadow, and a hill, and not far off a man in a leather vest driving an old-fashioned wagon over a bridge. Near him, galloping on a fat little pony, was a kid wearing armor and waving a sword over his head. Though I couldn’t place it exactly, I knew this place, knew it very well.

  What made me squeeze my eyes shut and scream “Ed!” in a squeaky voice was how I was seeing all this. From above. Way, way above, like the blimp’s-eye view of Fenway Park they sometimes show on TV.

  “Yeah, Jen?” came an eager voice right behind me. “Have you checked out the view? So awesome! I knew that poem was a code! The Tapestry must have been the machine; that’s what May must have been doing with the poem, somehow setting up this program so that we could …”

  “Oh great, thanks for the briefing, Einstein!” I said as ferociously as I could muster between panicky gasps. Any minute now, I was definitely going to open my eyes. “Do you have any idea where we are, Ed?”

  “Well,” he said immediately, “we might be in England to judge by the meadows, and that wagon, and the rain, and the costume that boy down there is—”

  I cut him off. “No, I mean where? Where! Are we inside a helicopter, or a plane that’s going down, or …”

  My voice trailed off; Ed had reached forward to grab my waist. “Relax, sis,” he said soothingly as if he had the best news you’ve heard all day, “I know exactly where we are. We’re just riding around on Mead’s back.”

  “Oh good,” I said automatically.

  Then my eyes snapped open. Nope, not good at all. I shut them again. After a moment, I reached out a hand gingerly to feel around in front of me: It definitely felt like feathers, each one as long as my forearm. I took a deep breath and opened my eyes to find myself staring at the back of Mead’s head. He clicked his beak in what might have been a friendly hello.

  Five minutes ago Mead had been the ordinary kind of blackbird who could land on your wrist if he felt like it. How could we possibly be gliding through the air with nothing but him between us and a gruesome, extremely messy death?

  Looking around, I saw that Ed was balancing behind me by leaning against Mead’s upturned tail, which was a little bit bigger than the back of a comfy armchair. That wasn’t going to work for me, but while my mind was still freaking out my body had figured out the trick. My knees were gripping tight right above Mead’s wings. Sitting on Mead was kind of like riding a feather-covered horse, except that where you’d want to slide your legs down and feel for stirrups, there was nothing but wing.

  I was trying to get up my courage to have a good look at the new Mead (just super-sized, nothing but super-sized, I told myself). When I did look forward, I caught him looking back at me at exactly the same time: I’d never noticed how bright and yellow a blackbird’s eyes could be.

  Ed had apparently adjusted quicker than I had to life in the air. “Hey, Jen,” he called, pointing down into the far end of the field, where shadows were falling long and velvety gray. “Who’s that fat little boy on the pony?”

  I looked down hard at the kid; focusing on something on the ground made me feel a lot less scared, I noticed. I’ve always had a good eye for faces, so without thinking I called out, “William Morris!”

  Then I stopped, confused. “Well, I mean if the kid were a grownup with a red beard, and we were in nineteenth-century England—which we’re obviously not!”

  Ed just snorted. “Yeah, and we’re not flying on Mead’s back.”

  And without taking the time to think about it, or consult his notebook for directions, Ed all of sudden started yelling, “William, yoo-hoo, O Willy! I have this Tapestry to ask you about!”

  At which point Mead, who’d been flapping us steadily closer to the meadow, cleared his throat and looked back over his shoulder, exactly as if he were going to speak to us. We both shot him a quick glance, then went back to staring at William Morris. So he cleared his throat again.

  I looked back at him, with the friendly face I always use for puppies, or cats that I think might let me pet them. “Good boy, Mead!” I said chirpily, or at least what I think of as chirpily. And Ed chimed in, “Want a cracker, Mead?”

  Mead opened his beak and closed it. Glared at us. Then opened it again and said in one of those “propah” English accents from old movies, clear as day, “Thank you, Ed, no. I don’t very much want a cracker.”

  Someday scientists will discover that among human instincts, the strongest of all is the desire to humiliate your sister. Before we had time to scream, or get air sickness, or even think about what all this might mean, Ed turned to me and muttered, “Oh yeah, Jen, we’re not in nineteenth-century England—and Mead did not just talk to us in a Mary Poppins voice.”

  And with that, he turned back and started yelling down again. “Yoo-hoo, excuse me, William; the Tapestry I need to ask you about is mostly blue and gold, with designs of … Huh! Hey, Mead”—Ed leaned forward indignantly, as if he’d been complaining to blackbirds his whole life—“why is William Morris ignoring us?”

  By this time Morris, or at least the fat little kid on the pony, was already almost in the forest. At the last minute, though, he glanced briefly overhead, and suddenly pulled his pony up short, making it rear in a very cowboy-movie kind of way. Seeing a giant bird, he drew his sword, waved it ferociously, and shouted at the top of his lungs, “Yoicks!”

  Then he galloped out of sight. I heard a sound like two dry old boulders rubbing together, and realized that Mead was chuckling. Chuckling at us. “Dear me!” he said gravely. “Dear me! I do believe you’ve been challenged to a duel by a schoolboy!”

  We were left staring after him in dismay. About ten thousand questions ran through my head: Where was our house? What had happened when we crashed into the tapestry? Why were we on Mead’s back? How were we going to get home? I opened my mouth to begin and instead found myself saying, in a humble voice I barely recognized as my own, “Mead, do you suppose we could find a nice place to land? A place where we could talk for a minute?”

  Rather than answer, Mead turned his face back toward us again. Blackbird or no, I recognized his expression from basketball. I’d seen it on the face of a point guard who got the ball ten points behind with only three minutes to play. I can still do this, that look says, I can do it, but only if absolutely everything goes right.

  Something about Mead’s face made me spin my head around to see if something was chasing us. Nothing there; but I did see one of Mead’s tail-feathers tumbling slowly down to the meadow below. That wasn’t normal, was it?

  Then it hit me; that meadow! “It’s on the Tapestry,” I shouted triumphantly. “This is the meadow on the Tapestry! I recognize that oak forest, and the river down there, and …” Ed was just opening his mouth to interrupt me when Mead suddenly dropped, absolutely dropped out of the sky. He fell like a rock or a meteorite (a feathery meteorite) and both of us screamed. As we plunged toward the edge of the forest Morris had just entered, Mead said—now sounding more like an excited game-show contestant—“Ooo, what a nice-looking apple, down there betwixt the blossom and the bough!”

  With that, Mead entered the forest at top speed and neatl
y clawed an apple off the tree. Just like that, we were back up the sky, heading straight for a huge gray cloud bank. I squeezed as tight as I could with my knees. Sliding off those slippery black feathers, Ed had no choice but to grab at my bag awkwardly—I heard the seams groaning. Far away as it was, the whirling ground below still managed to look awfully hard and stony.

  Ed was screaming, “Hey, Mead, where are you taking us? Mead? Mead?!” But as we plunged into the heavy storm cloud that loomed above us I was trying to think where I’d heard “betwixt the blossom and the bough” before.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Facts, Facts, Facts

  We came out of the cloud above a glowing white spire. Not that far above: Mead’s claw immediately banged into the very tip, and both of us jolted upright, holding on extremely tight. I heard him mutter something that sounded like “Obese grandchildren” (I must have heard wrong …).

  “Land, please!” Ed snapped; he was frantically trying to hold on to a notebook that was about to get away from him. I heard Mead mutter again, more faintly. But after a minute he did spin in a tight circle (“Ooo, rats; I mean Yoicks!” Ed yelped, as two pens tumbled out of his pocket) and bring us to a neat landing atop the spire. I took a breath and began to look around.

  We were no longer in the countryside; now we were in the middle of a town, maybe even a little city. All around us were tight coils of streets, with apartment buildings and row houses interspersed with little cottages and stand-alone houses blended in. Down below us the traffic (on the left side of the road, I noticed) was a mixture of country carts, fancy horse-drawn carriages, and the occasional mounted man or woman. The building we were on was by far the tallest in sight, and as far as I could make sense of it from above, it was a medieval-looking cathedral.

  I thought about other people I knew who’d ridden birds: the only one who came to mind was Sinbad riding the roc in the Arabian Nights, and I couldn’t remember how that had ended up. Not well, probably.

  Ed yelped suddenly and pointed down to the entrance of the cathedral. There, accompanied by a pair of very parental-looking people (her silk umbrella, his walking stick and fussy top hat), I caught sight of the kid William Morris, still in Ivanhoe-style armor, complete with wooden sword—although he’d apparently left the pony at home. Ed immediately started yelling again. “Yoo-hoo, William Morris, about that tapestry …”

  Mead sounded more like Mary Poppins than ever. “Erhemmmmmm, Edward, a bit of brain power, please. He’s still only nine. As a matter of fact today is the day that he’s first been brought to see Canterbury Cathedral and its beautiful illuminated books.”

  “Wait, you mean Canterbury as in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales?” said Ed in a genuinely impressed voice. Mead nodded smugly, as if he’d built it himself.

  All of a sudden, I was incredibly exasperated with them both. “Ed, until we know what exactly is going on, do me a favor and stop screaming at Morris! Would you really like all those people down there to look up and notice us riding on the back of a giant bird?” Ed turned toward me belligerently and opened his mouth to say something; then paused, thought better of it, looked down at the ground without speaking.

  “Okay,” I said. I tapped on Mead’s head (and felt another feather slide off his shoulder). “Listen, can you please stop proving you’re the smartest bird in the room and tell us what exactly is going on? I think you know a lot more than us”—Mead gave a triumphant nod when I said this. “But” I went on, “I also imagine you need us as much as we need you. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be here, would we?”

  At this, Mead clicked his beak indignantly then, almost exactly like Ed, looked down at the ground in thought. I waited a second to make sure he had nothing more to say.

  “Here’s what I can figure.” I let them hear my anger, and my fear as well. “Something happened when Granny was reciting the Tapestry poem, right?”

  Ed bounced up and down approvingly and smiled—he was on the same page with me. But I was studying Mead, whose face was now turned away in profile. Like a dog that knows you’re keeping an eye on him, he was pretending to ignore me, but I knew he was listening. After a second he nodded.

  “So when the poem ended, the Tapestry …” I paused, not sure I had the right word for what had happened. “It …”

  “It opened for me,” said Mead. “As I’ve always known it would.”

  “For us!” said Ed immediately. “It opened for us!”

  “Only because you were touching me!” Mead snapped at him, a little shiver of indignation running through his body and making us both squeeze our knees tighter.

  I took a deep breath; this was all starting to come together. “Mead?” I asked cautiously, keeping my voice polite and light. “Have you ever tried to enter the Tapestry before?”

  He looked at me guardedly for a minute and then nodded. “As long as I’ve been with your grandmother, I’ve known that I was meant to. But it never opened up before today.”

  “Because it was only today she said the poem?” I suggested.

  Mead started to nod, then stopped. “No,” he said in a voice that sounded less cranky, more puzzled. “She’s said it before: The night your grandfather died, she said it with her hand on the meadow, said it over and over. The day of the crash, too, she stood there reciting and crying, crying and reciting, until night fell.”

  He looked me straight in the eye. “Nothing. Nothing ever happened until today.”

  The wind was fairly high on the tower—I could tell we couldn’t stay there forever without losing our grip. But I had to ask Mead one more thing. “Do you suppose,” I said carefully, “that we belong to your quest, too, whatever it is? That our touching you wasn’t an accident, that it was the point?”

  He stared at me a long time, as if he were trying to read my mind. Rather than say anything, he very slowly brought up from underneath him his right claw. The move made us slide off the spire suddenly, and just like that we were aloft.

  I realized with a start, though, that the claw wasn’t empty: he was holding out to me the thing he’d snatched from “betwixt the blossom and the bough”: a single glowing apple that fell into my open palm. I can’t imagine my expression at that moment. For some reason, though, my mind shot back to the face of the girl on the Tapestry, the one grasping for that empty space where an apple should be. I wondered for just an instant what her face looked like now.

  For the first time since we’d gotten the letter from the museum that morning I allowed a small feeling of triumph to spread through my chest and warm me. I tucked the apple carefully in the basketball bag and turned to Ed with a smile.

  “What’s the poem say after bough?” I asked him. And without even glancing down at his notebook, as if he was expecting me to ask that very question, Ed recited:

  A gourd and a pilgrim shell, roses dun,

  A ship with shields before the sun.

  As Ed finished speaking, Mead was already diving toward a line of people in very old-fashioned getup filing slowly out of the cathedral. We barreled closer, the distance to the ground telescoping minute by minute, details snapping into focus. One of those pilgrims had around her neck a water-gourd, with a scallop shell tied to its neck.

  I was dazzled by how deftly Mead managed to grab the little gourd and shell just before we pulled out of our dive and headed for the clouds again. It was too bad the pilgrim stayed firmly attached.

  As Mead brought us through another cloud bank, and out over a town dotted with pointed spires and steep tile roofs, a regular cloud of feathers fell loose from his tail. I counted nine as they spiraled lazily down below us. Looking up from my counting I caught Mead, too, watching them go.

  “What’s his rush?” I whispered. Ed looked up in surprise when I said that. Then after a long pause he nodded and made a note. It was something Granny had taught him to do when I asked him anything about feelings. “Your sister reads faces the way you read math books,” I remember her telling Ed, “and she can find a whole opera’s worth o
f drama in a single expression she glimpses in passing. Until you can look someone in the eye long enough to figure out what he really wants, Ed, you listen to her when she tells you about a face.”

  I don’t think I would have known that about me and faces if Granny hadn’t said it. But she was right. I usually knew who was going to yell at the teacher before the teacher—sometimes it even seemed like I knew before the yeller did. And I could pretty much walk into a room and sense who was mad at the kid in the next desk, and who was about to go to sleep. “You smell it!” Ed said once accusingly. You would have thought that kind of face reading might help me with Eva, and her friends—but somehow it didn’t work that way.

  When Mead looked me full in the face, though, all he said was, “Tuck this away somewhere, there’s a good girl.” He passed me the shell and gourd, now minus their pilgrim (I caught a glimpse of her in a lake below, indignantly dog-paddling toward shore). I found room for them in my gym bag while Mead floated us down to a flat-roofed old building. We landed disturbingly near an edge, perched just above a pair of open windows.

  Still, it was better than nothing. For the first time I felt comfortable sliding off Mead’s back and stretching my legs. While Ed headed off to see what he could spy over the edge, I dug out the water bottle and a big box of granola bars I always kept stashed in the bottom of my gym bag. Below that I glimpsed only a couple of withered apples. But we’d definitely be home before we needed those.

  “Here,” I said, diffidently offering the box. “I think that top one may have some sunflower seeds.” As he dug eagerly into the bar I felt my back shake all over: Mead had thumped me with his wing, a real thank-you thump. I felt another warm glow; not exactly triumph but something a little deeper, and harder to classify.

  I lay down for a minute, closed my eyes, and took three deep breaths. Opened them again and there I still was, on a rooftop that was definitely dirty enough to be in England, and 160 years old. There really was no way I could find to make it add up. Ed was happily scribbling in his notebook, I noticed, probably calculating years traveled per minute, or the ratio of Mead’s body weight to our velocity, or some other set of numbers that would make a nice chart. But it was the big picture I kept stumbling over. When Ed and I read The Hobbit together as kids, he had a whole series of questions: How could something as big as a dragon fly? When you’re invisible can you see yourself? Are wizards originally humans or are they another race? What about their mothers? And so on. Me, I only had one question: Where is this place? When Granny asked me if I wanted to go there, I always shook my head stubbornly. It wasn’t that. I just needed to know if Middle Earth was a place I might end up sometime, if it could happen.