With a Tangled Skein

by Piers Anthony

  “Is that coincidence?” Niobe asked worriedly.

  “Here? I doubt it,” he puffed. “I don’t think we can outrun it.” She was alarmed. Pacian ceased rowing. His face was red from his effort. “Another challenge?” he gasped. “I’m—afraid so. And this time we can’t retreat. It would catch us in a moment.”

  He hefted a paddle, pondering. “I suppose I could try to fend it off,” he said. “If it’s big enough to take a bite of us, it’s big enough to get a paddle or a pole wedged edgewise in its mouth. But I don’t like molesting wildlife. After all, we are intruders on its preserve.”

  “You’re a soft-hearted fool!” she chided him.

  “It runs in the family,” he agreed without rancor.

  She was stricken. He was right. Once Cedric had taken to the wilderness, he had refused to harm any of it. And Junior’s long association with the hamadryad of the water oak had left him with a profound appreciation of the magic of the wetlands. She herself felt the same. Pacian was very much in that mold.

  The leviathan drew near. Its huge snout broke the surface of the grass. The thing was big enough to swallow them whole, raft and all!

  “They say that music has charms to soothe the savage breast,” Pacian said. “That is most often misquoted as ‘savage beast.’ It just may be worth a try, rather than futile force.”

  Niobe liked the way his mind worked, but the leviathan terrified her. Already its ponderous jaws were cranking open. “You mean—sing it a song?”

  “Sounds silly, I know—but it’s harmless, at least. I have sung to the animals on the farm with some success. We can always try to fight, as a last resort. Have you any idea what it might like?”

  Doing requests, for a monster? Niobe found her mind largely blank. “I—maybe a round—”

  He nodded agreement. He faced the leviathan as if about to deliver a speech. He sang, crudely but adequately:

  “Have you seen the ghost of Tom?

  Round white bones with the flesh all gone!

  O - O - O - O - O - O - O!

  Wouldn’t it be chilly with no skin on!”

  Niobe started to laugh, hysterically. To sing a Halloween song to a monster!

  The leviathan paused in place. The jaws stopped opening. It was listening, and like some animals, it could not focus its attention on two things at once.

  “Have you seen the ghost of Tom?” Pacian sang, with greater volume and confidence. This time Niobe picked up on it, repeating the first line as Pacian continued with the second line, for it was indeed a round. It worked out rather prettily, despite the macabre and foolish words.

  They went through it three times, and the leviathan did not move. Whether it liked the song was uncertain; perhaps mere curiosity held it. But that was certainly preferable to an attack.

  When they stopped, the jaws slowly resumed motion. Quickly Pacian started another song, one long beloved in his culture:

  “O Danny-Boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling,

  From glen to glen and down the mountainside...”

  Niobe joined in, making the harmony. She had not sung like this since her mortal days, and had almost forgotten how grand it was.

  “The summer’s gone, and all the leaves are falling...”

  Pacian turned while singing, and reached to take her hand.

  “‘Tis you, ‘tis you must go and I must bide.”

  And Niobe was transfixed as the song abruptly expanded to magnificent sound. He had the magic! The same phantom orchestra that Cedric had had when he sang. The same phenomenal magnification of the music!

  Of course! This, too, ran in the family! Not in every member, for her son did not have it. But here and there. She had never guessed! No wonder Pace could pacify animals!

  The leviathan was aware of it too. Slowly, now, its jaws subsided, no longer menacing the raft. They had indeed found a way to soothe the beast.

  But Niobe’s attention was only partly on that. She had thought she would never love again, after Cedric. Now, suddenly, amazingly, she knew it was possible. The prophecy had not been based on what she knew, but on what she would discover.

  They finished the song, and the internal music faded. The leviathan did not resume its aggression, but Niobe now had need of more music. She clung to Pacian’s hand, and started a song.

  “In the gloaming, O my darling, when the lights are dim and low...”

  He joined the song and the music rose in them and surrounded them.

  “Will you think of me, and love me, as you did once long ago?”

  Even as she sang, Niobe felt the love expanding from her long-isolated heart, encompassing her being. The beginning of her love for Cedric had come with the magic music. She had not seized upon it, then, and so had wasted much of the scant time they had had together. She was much older, and perhaps wiser now—and she found herself entering into it as into a primeval sea, gladly giving herself to its tide. O my darling...

  When the song ended and the music faded again, the leviathan was satisfied. It backed off slowly and turned about, and swam away.

  “It seems we have navigated the crisis,” Pacian said. “Now we can go to meet Mother Nature.” He reached for the oars.

  Niobe put her hand on his arm again. “Pace—do we need to?”

  He considered, then laughed. Then he drew her in to him, and they kissed. The grand music encompassed them.

  They reversed course and returned to her Abode, and then to the realm of the mortals. As they landed back in his house, he said: “I don’t think I’m going to be lonely anymore. But let’s not act precipitously.”

  “This is very sudden,” she agreed. “We can afford time to be sure it’s real.” But she already knew it was.

  He nodded. “And if it is—”

  “Then I will retire on schedule, to become mortal— and be your wife.”

  “Fulfilling the prophecy,” he agreed.

  She left him without further comment. The moment she was alone, a babble broke out among her Aspects. Did you feel that music? He’s a rare one! If that’s what your first love was like, no wonder you waited for his like! We’ll have to locate your successor, whatshername. Lisa. When’s the wedding?

  “Enough, you hens!” Niobe exploded. “It’s tentative!”

  Lachesis snorted. As tentative as a pregnancy, girl! Indeed, all that developed over the course of the following months was certainty. Niobe visited Pacian several times, and each time it was as if another layer of love was added. “I do love you. Pace,” she said. “I must marry you.”

  “I thought I would never be whole again, after I lost Blanche,” he said. “But it is no denigration of her to confess that now I love you as I did her. When I was a child I adored you hopelessly; now I am a man I have reason to live again. It is as if you were saved for the time in my life when I would most need you.” He paused. “Is that coincidence?”

  She shook her head. “I am an Aspect of Fate—but my power is limited. Lachesis handles the disposition of the threads of life I spin—but her power too is limited. It was Satan’s interference that caused me to lose my spouse, and you yours. Fate never planned those horrors, and now the Tapestry is healing.”

  “Yet the prophecy—”

  She sighed. “Yes, there must be a deeper current of Fate, beyond our awareness, that the seers drew from. Maybe our manipulations of the Threads of Life are only to restore the pattern Satan sought to disrupt. It has made for a tangled skein!”

  “Which our daughter—and granddaughter—will stand athwart,” he agreed. “But for the moment, there is only our love.”

  They kissed, and there was music. He was right; their offspring might be destined for horrendous adventures, but at the moment love made all that beside the point.

  In due course, as the time of her departure from office neared, Niobe made it a point to bid adieu to her friends, the other Incarnations. First she went to the Green Mother. This time she had no trouble reaching the domicile of Nature. “You knew, didn’t y
ou?” she charged the woman. “You arranged that challenge course!”

  “Love is one of my Aspects,” Gaea admitted. “I knew your heart and his. I only facilitated what was inevitable.”

  “So we never even consulted you!”

  “Not overtly.”

  “You are devious, Ge.”

  “Coming from Fate, that is indeed a compliment.”

  They embraced, and Niobe cried a little, and they parted. Gaea’s face was serene—but when Niobe stepped outside the domicile, she discovered a gentle rain falling, and knew that Ge was crying too.

  A few days later, in the course of routine business, she visited Thanatos. Fate worked most intimately with Chronos, but she also had considerable interaction with Thanatos, for the threads had to be terminated as well as started. “I am soon to return to mortality,” she said. “I pray you do not come too soon for me or the man I love.”

  The death’s-head smiled. “I will postpone it as long as your successor permits. Who is she to be?”

  “I don’t know. We are conducting a search, but no suitable prospect named Lisa has shown up.”

  “Will Lisa be as pretty as you?”

  “Not quite. But you are sure to like her.”

  “I envy you, Clotho. You are able to step down voluntarily, returning to life. I will be assassinated by my successor, even as I assassinated my predecessor.”

  “Yet it was to Heaven you sent your predecessor, and to Heaven you will go.”

  “That is a comfort,” he agreed.

  She embraced him, not repulsed by his skeletal hands, and she kissed his grinning skull-face. His business was grim, but he was a decent person. He was not the same one she had first met, but the office had made him similar.

  Her supply of yarn ran low, and she made her monthly trip to the Void for more. She wondered, as she often did, whether this monthly cycle stood in lieu of the feminine cycle that had abated when she became immortal. There were, indeed, patterns she did not understand.

  “So you are quitting, cutie,” Satan said, appearing before her.

  “Go to Hell,” she told him shortly.

  “You have been a delectable thorn in My side for too long,” he continued blithely. “It will be an excellent riddance.”

  “Go damn yourself.”

  “I really will enjoy working over your successor, scrumptious.”

  She paused. “Why so positive. Lord of Flies? Can it be that you don’t want me to go?”

  He puffed smoke. “Of course I want you to go!” he said.

  She nodded. “Because I am fated to produce a mortal child who will be a real pain in the tail for you.”

  He did not respond with the derogatory or cynical exclamation she expected. Instead he was oddly pensive. “There are currents of destiny that perhaps only God comprehends,” he said. “Our glimpses of the future are fleeting and imperfect. I have taken a reading on your daughter and I see only a terrible storm perhaps forty years hence, and she is caught up in it—and so am I. I do not know the outcome.”

  Niobe suffered a chill. “And one may marry Death, the other Evil,” she said, again recalling the prophecy.

  “I am the Incarnation of Evil!” he said. “Why should I ever bind Myself to a mortal woman?”

  “She is to be an Incarnation.”

  Satan turned and paced in air, his gaze downcast. He was almost handsome in that moment of reflection. “And what woman, whether mortal or Incarnation, would ever bind herself to Me?”

  It was a serious question. “Only an evil one,” Niobe said.

  “Are you about to birth and raise an evil woman?”

  “Of course not!”

  “Of course not,” he agreed. “For you are indeed a good woman, as well as a lovely one. She can only oppose Me. Yet the prophecy—”

  He was genuinely disturbed! “Satan, what are you getting at?”

  He faced her without any sign of cruelty or mockery. “Simply this: there is a tangle coming in your skein that neither of us understands. Never would I bind Myself to a good woman, nor would she to Me. Something very strange is brewing. Let us avoid the whole issue, and oppose each other on conventional grounds. Keep your present office, O lovely woman! Do not generate that child.”

  Niobe was astonished. “You are pleading with me to do you a favor—by abrogating the fulfillment of my love?”

  “I suppose I am, Clotho. I can proffer inducement if you prefer. I could assume the likeness and manner of your—”

  “You’re crazy!”

  Satan sighed. “No, I am evil, not crazy. I have merely confirmed that no decent woman would accept Me if she knew My nature, however I might clothe Myself. You know Me, therefore you will not do for Me what you did for Chronos.”

  Niobe stared at him. “You—desire my favor?”

  “I do desire it.”

  Almost, she felt sorry for him. Then the memory of Cedric surged back, and the emotion became anger. “Well, you will never have it!”

  “That I know. Still I would have you remain in office.”

  “You should know better!”

  “You will not do it?”

  “I will not do it!”

  Now he flared brightly with his abrupt fury. “I tried to be reasonable! To be honest, though it pains Me! I’m not good at it, I know, but I did try. Now you will feel the brunt of My wrath!”

  “Go to Hell, Satan,” she repeated mildly.

  “And your child will suffer too!” he cried as he faded out. “You and yours will rue this hour!”

  He was gone—and Niobe found herself shivering with reaction. Had she made a mistake by refusing to deal with Satan? He had seemed oddly pensive, and his expression of desire for her had seemed honest. Satan, of course, had all the women he wanted, in all the forms he wanted, in Hell—yet none of them were good, by definition. Did he have a hankering for the opposite type? Was there some good even in the Prince of Evil?

  Surely not! Satan’s designs were always evil, also by definition. If she opposed him, she was probably correct. If he was angry, she should be pleased. She was fulfilling the vengeance she had so long sought against him.

  Yet Satan was also devious. The Father of Lies knew how to deceive by indirection as well as by direction. Why had he come to her to make his plea and why had he shown such obvious anger when she declined it? That suggested that it was an act, and that she was in fact doing exactly what he wanted.

  She shook her head. Her safest course was to pursue her course as she intended, not allowing herself to be influenced in any way by Satan. Still, it bothered her. She brooded on it throughout her business in the Void. Would she—and her daughter—be vulnerable to Satan’s wrath, as mortals?

  She visited Chronos next. Mindful of his reversed timeline, she phrased her farewell carefully. “Hello, Chronos. I thought I would introduce myself, as we shall be working together for the next two or three years. I am Clotho, an Aspect of Fate.”

  “Oh, go on!” the child snapped. “You aren’t Lisa!”

  “Of course I’m not. Lisa has gone mortal. I am Niobe.” She smiled.

  Chronos was eight years old, physically and emotionally. He melted like ice cream in the radiance of that smile. “Gee, you sure are pretty, Obe! I guess you’re okay!”

  “I guess I am,” she agreed. “I know you and I will get along well.” She tousled his hair.

  “Hey, wait a minute!” he protested. “You live forward, not backward like me! You’ve already been through it!”

  She smiled again, daunting him. “Smart lad! Yes, I know you a good deal better than you know me, though that will change as you advance into my past. But when your tenure comes to a close, and you are afraid, I will come to you and hold your hand. So don’t annoy me, okay?”

  “Geez, it’s weird having you come in like this, knowing so much! Lisa was sorta timid and sweet, specially at the end when she forgot my language. I’ll sure miss her.”

  Forgot his language? How could that be? But Niobe pre
ferred not to discuss it with him. “Just remember, sport—I chose her.”

  “Yeah, I know. Yesterday. Funny thing, you coming up with her.”

  “What’s so funny about bringing in a woman who can do the job?”

  He stared at her a moment, then laughed teasingly. “That’s right! You don’t know her yet. You’ll find out, Obe!”

  “I’ll find out,” she agreed, kissed him on the forehead, shifted to spider form, and climbed out of his sight. He always enjoyed that trick.

  This was getting stranger. First Satan’s pointless offer and threat, then Chronos’ reaction. Chronos knew something she didn’t, of course. They had been searching diligently for Lisa, and still had not found her, one day before the event.

  What would happen if they failed to find her? Would there be another snarl in the threads, pinching the Tapestry, and could Niobe find herself stranded in office, unable to turn mortal and marry Pacian? Was that the mischief Satan contemplated?

  No, it couldn’t be, for the change to Lisa had occurred tomorrow; Chronos remembered it, and Chronos was no tool of Satan’s. She really didn’t need to worry about it; what would be would be—and she would be mortal, tomorrow.

  But tomorrow came with no further illumination. There was no sign of Lisa even as the hour approached. Niobe’s better two-thirds were as mystified as she was. “The thread has to be here in the Tapestry,” Lachesis said. “But nothing distinguishes it. So it is lost until we find it. There simply is no signal that Lisa is to step out of life and into Fate.”

  “I’ll bid farewell to Mars,” Niobe decided. “Then it will be time, and we’ll see.”

  She sailed down a thread to the spot on Earth where Mars was working. This was the great double city of Budapest, at the moment torn by strife. Huge Soviet tanks were moving in the streets, and buildings were burning.

  She landed on a street beside him. Mars, too, was different from the one who had been in office when she first came to Purgatory. She wasn’t certain what the mechanism for his changing was, but it seemed to occur irregularly and without warning. But this one had been in office for several years, and she liked him well enough, considering the differences in their philosophies. “Mars, I came to say good-bye.”