The warrior did as he was told, and the priest let him into the church and gave him a blanket. He slept the night on the thick aisle rug, and in the morning he went back to the rugmaker’s house. She gave him bread and bacon to break his fast and bid him to remember, when he went to war, the kindness of women and to deal gently with them when he could.
“I will do as you ask,” he said. But he went on, seeming troubled, “I slept on the rug you wove for the church, and I had dreams which I cannot remember, except that their strangeness surpassed anything I have seen.”
‘And little wonder,’ the rugmaker thought, ‘when a man of the sword sleeps in the house of God.’ But she kept her own counsel.
“When I awoke I felt rested and well in body, but I wept for the life I had set out to live, without that strangeness in it. If I return from this war in honor, would you...will you be my wife? My father is old, and I am his only son. I will have land and cattle, and you can ride a lady’s horse and rest your hands from all labor but your weaving. Or if you think it better I will give up my inheritance and live here with you, and work for some man born below me, and never think it hard.”
The warrior felt pleased with himself, for he had never given such a fine speech before, but he watched the rugmaker carefully, because he had never meant anything so surely.
Now the rugmaker was used to listening and serving, but she was not used to being expected to reply to a man except when the question concerned the price of her handiwork. So she cut more food for the warrior and imagined what her friend the wise woman would say. She sat down again at her loom before she replied, “I am a humble woman, and you have paid me a higher compliment than I deserve. Surely it was not the work of my hands but the presence of God in his church that disturbed your dreams. If you are afraid to lose that, do not go to this war, but go home and confess to your priest and ask him to take you into the brotherhood. That way you will follow God in whatever strange paths He may choose for you, and you will never be without what you have felt.”
The warrior told her not to be too modest. He had gone to church since he was a child. He had been baptized. Surely he would have felt the presence of God before now, if it was God’s presence he lacked.
But the rugmaker refused to await his return or give him any promise, so at last, discontented, he went on his way.
The rugmaker worked all day.
She finished a rug commissioned by an old lord for the room of his young bride. Into it she put the comfort she had learned from her mother, the strength that the warrior had made her discover to refuse his worship, and a little of the outlaw’s dreaming.
She worked in her garden, pulling up the weeds that would stifle her vegetables and keep them from the sun. Some of the weeds were ugly and some were beautiful, bright and beflowered, but none of them could feed an honest Christian and help her live.
Then she fed her hens and herself and swept out her small woven house with its neat dirt floor and went to see the wise woman.
She brought a fresh tomato and two eggs, because the wise woman was her friend. But she was one of the few who would pay what was right for good counsel, so she brought money as well.
The wise woman listened to the rugmaker’s story, working all the time to mend a broken rocking chair. She was always taking in the maimed items of the village; the work seemed to help her to think, and if she could fix them she earned extra food or firewood.
The rugmaker thought of how lucky she was to have such an understanding and helpful friend, and repented of her dismay the first time she had seen the cluttered mess of a house the wise woman kept. ‘There are many different ways of living well,’ she said to herself, ‘whether as a timid priest or a disorganized adviser. Perhaps I should have been slower to judge. Perhaps I should not have turned the warrior away so quickly. After all, he would not have been a warrior any longer when he returned to me.’
But the wise woman said, “You did rightly. A woman must not stand between a man and his God, even if it puts her in the sky. If once you stand between a man and God, you can never look at them both together. How can you choose on whom you will turn your back?”
The rugmaker went home comforted, for at least she could think of God and the warrior at once, and if ever he returned she could be both happy and at peace.
On Sunday she prayed for his soul. She did not pray that he would come back to her. Nor did she ask God to send her a man of peace but like the warrior in other ways. She wished she could ask the wise woman if it were permissible to pray for such things, but she felt too ashamed of her silly requests, so she kept quiet about them.
Seasons passed, and the world grew and shrank and gained and lost. The rugmaker watched the changes in her garden, among her chickens, and in the faces of her neighbors. But her life stayed much the same.
Then one day a man with a mandolin came to the village. He had traveled many miles and many days, playing for his supper and for the right to sit beside other men’s fires and to sleep, when he was lucky, beneath other people’s blankets. He loved the life of the road, because it meant that he could spend so many hours with his music. He loved his mandolin as he had not had the time or patience to love any human person.
And yet, as time passed, the musician had begun to feel himself grow old. On unlucky nights, when he slept outdoors, he lay awake longer than he would like and woke too often, and in the morning the stiffness hung about him too long. He began to wish to sit beside a fire he had the mastery of, to keep his own stock of blankets and be ever as warm as he desired.
He began to watch, also, the couples who listened to his music, and although before he had bedded women in a wandering man’s lying way, he began to think on constancy. How nice it might be if someone cared to hear his songs more than once, if someone else knew his own-made tunes. How nice it would feel, after all this time, not to play always what others asked of him, not always to curry favor in hope of a drink or a coin.
Thinking so, he came to the rugmaker’s village and played in their new tavern his songs along with other men’s songs, which were always more popular than his own. He had a fine fair voice and a quick and accurate hand, and love besides, which could change both those talents into something mystical. But this night, discontented even after earning dinner and bed (to which he promised to return), he went out into the streets to sing his own songs only under the moon, walking slowly where his feet led him.
Perhaps the rugmaker’s prayers for peace drew his weary soul, or perhaps it was only the sight of the pretty cloth house that stopped him there.
The rugmaker heard him singing and playing, and her weaving changed to follow the rhythm of his song. When he stopped, she stopped, and when he came to her door she stood and went to him.
They stood in her doorway, looking at each other. The rugmaker was not beautiful, but it could be that the musician favored her more because of it, for she had the peace of plain living in every feature, and everything about herself and her home spoke of simple work and a stable life. The musician, in his turn, had long hands and a wide mouth and the gentlest touch of any man walking. He took her hand. “I have been roaming for years,” he said. “I am a wanderer and a fool, and I have no true love and no place to call mine.”
She said, “If you will play for me you’ll never want for a roof over your head, though it be a cloth roof only. If you’ll play always for me, I will weave for you and we will have food and warmth aplenty, and never be alone. I am a good rugmaker. Many wealthy people have bought my wares.”
“I am a layabout and a song-maker,” he warned her. “I cannot promise to work hard for you, or to support you as a husband should.”
“No. I believe you. But if you will play for me always, if you will play me all your songs, I will be content.”
So the musician never returned to the bed he had been promised but slept the night in the rugmaker’s house. In the morning the priest agreed to marry them that very day, lest they fall into sin.
> They lived happily, according to the agreement they had made. The rugmaker’s weaving grew even more beautiful, with her husband’s music in it.
The wise woman visited them once. “Life is full of surprises,” she said, which was rather inane, given her profession. “Now aren’t you glad you never let that warrior settle with you?” But her smile held craftiness and a true question.
The rugmaker thought of the music that filled her home every day, the work her husband’s presence had enabled her to make. “I am content,” she said, pushing aside the memories that threatened her certainty.
The musician continued to play, softly, as they talked. He looked at neither of the women, as if he did not hear.
“Well, it’s enough,” the wise woman replied. “Contentment is a rare and enviable state.”
The rugmaker’s lips twitched of their own accord, itched to speak her mind, to ask the wise woman what right she had to come and make the rugmaker doubt herself now, while when it mattered no one had been surer that the rugmaker had done well to send the warrior away.
While the two women sat watching each other over their tea, the musician stood and left them to go and play in the tavern. Drinking men always liked him, for he knew all the old songs.
“You’ve grown unpleasant in your old age,” said the rugmaker when he had gone.
“You’ve grown foolish in yours. I remain the same.”
“I’ve a right to a little company, and it’s time I had someone to take care of. It’s not good for a person to be alone.”
“If you wanted a stray, you could have taken in a dog.” She stood. “I won’t say trouble will come of it. But it’s for you now to see that it doesn’t.”
And for a while no trouble came, no real trouble, though an unease lay in the house for days after the wise woman’s visit, until the music drove it out.
The wise woman did not return, and the rugmaker began to avoid visiting her either, although she didn’t bring the subject up again.
Something sat in the rugmaker’s belly, small and solid and chill, and within a little time her husband’s songs ceased to warm it.
For his own part, the musician spent more and more evenings at the tavern, and made friends of unreserved people who never stared past him, as his wife did, with that placid, unreadable look that he knew shouldn’t break his heart.
And one autumn evening, when the rugmaker stood alone in her doorway to watch leaves dancing in the twilight, a man came walking up the path to her.
His strut had changed to a limp and his face had seen hard weather, but she knew him.
“No,” she said into his warm smile. “It isn’t.”
“I’ve come back,” he said. He put his hand on her arm and guided her indoors. She stood in the middle of the floor, not moving to sit, to offer him food or drink. “I have changed my ways. I spoke to a priest. But I am not taking up holy orders. I had to come back to you.”
She put a hand over her mouth and another over her heart and quieted her breathing against the anguish she felt.
He stared around the little house, like a man sent home from the gallows. “It’s just as I remember it. And you are just the same.”
“I’ve changed. So has the house.” And she tilted her head toward the second chair by the fire, her husband’s seat.
The warrior smiled at her still, uncomprehending. “Not so much.”
“I told you not to come back. You might have died in the war. You might have...”
His lips faltered. “That’s true. But I didn’t.”
The rugmaker turned away, beginning to crumple, and he came and lifted her in his arms and rested her head on his shoulder as she sobbed out the whole story. The wedding, the marriage, the wise woman, and the fear she had learned too late and kept deep and unspoken, the fear of his return.
When she quieted he led her to sit on the edge of her bed. “It’s all right, my love,” he said. And she wept again. “You saved me from a wretched life,” he told her. “It’s more than I could have asked for. I will live in the village and be a neighbor to you, if I cannot be the man of your house.”
And so it was.
Night after night he came to her, as soon as her husband left for the tavern. They would sit, fireside, and tell stories of all the years they had not shared. Now and then he would lay his fingertips against her forearm or the back of her hand, and when they said goodnight he’d kiss her palm. And with each touch she felt the chill knot in her belly begin to unravel.
As time went on they left the tales of his conversion and her marriage far behind them, and spoke instead of childhood, and referred no loner to her husband or to God.
And his good-bye kiss moved from her palm to her cheek, and thence to her lips, and all her righteousness and worry melted away together, and he shed his weapons and his boots, and they abandoned the slatted rocking chairs for her soft, high-piled bed.
Until at last, one spring night even the warrior forgot his wariness, and they slept.
The musician strolled home humming a new melody, abuzz with the praises of strangers and friends. He took two steps into the house before he knew what was wrong. For three breaths he listened to the other man’s snore.
Then a fire roared in his head, his heart, his belly. Shaking, he came to the broadsword discarded beside his own hearth. He lifted it, given strength by his rage, and with a strangled cry he swung.
The rugmaker woke to the cry, and the warrior by instinct rolled to the floor as the blade descended and bit into her side. She shrieked.
She sat up, in blood and pain, to see her husband backing away, already retching. He put up his hands in defense or surrender as the warrior sprang toward him. She heard the crunch of bones, and then the screaming. The warrior twisted the musician’s hands in his own and broke one by one the delicate fingers.
With a wail, the rugmaker threw herself, bleeding, between them. Her husband collapsed onto the floor. “How could you? How could you?” she cried. The warrior met her gaze and fled into the night.
Willing herself not to faint from the pain, the rugmaker crawled to stanch her wound with her own woven wall.
She felt a fire in her side and saw the wound beginning to mend. Then she remembered the priest’s blessing, and she curled against the wall and wept with shame.
Before long her own weeping abated enough for her to hear the musician moaning over his hands. She stood, gritting her teeth, bound up her fragile belly, dressed gingerly, and went out to seek the village physician.
When she had found him, she sent him ahead toward her home and shuffled on behind.
The warrior stepped from shadows into her path, but she only moved around him. “I had to protect you,” he said.
And she said, “That wasn’t protection. You know what that was.”
He let her go.
The musician’s hands healed, slowly, in the usual way. The rugmaker put his rocking chair out in the dooryard, and he sat in the sun for weeks, cradling his hands in his lap like two broken birds too beloved to bury.
Her side healed into a puckered red weal.
Neither of them spoke apology or accusation, and neither ever saw the warrior again.
When the wind grew winter-cold, she brought her husband’s chair in by the fire and put the mandolin into his hands. “Play for me. You said you would play for me always.”
And she wove their fortunes through the dark of the year, and through the years afterward, to his slow and lonely melodies.
Copyright © 2014 Brynn MacNab
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Brynn MacNab has been reading speculative fiction since before she knew there was any other kind, and writing it for almost as long. You can find links to more of her published work at brynnmacnab.blogspot.com.
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COVER ART
“Golden Age,” by Juan Carlos Barquet
Juan Carlos Barquet is an artist from Mexico City. He has
done illustrations for books, album covers and tabletop games for clients such as Fantasy Flight Games; concept art and matte paintings for short films supervised by DreamWorks Animation and ILM, and exhibitions at Art Takes Times Square (New York, 2013), Parallax Art Fair (London, 2012), Euskal Exhibition Center (Bilbao, 2012) and more. View more of his work at jcbarquet.com.
Beneath Ceaseless Skies
ISSN: 1946-1076
Published by Firkin Press,
a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization
Compilation Copyright © 2014 Firkin Press
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