THE OLD WOMAN'S STORY

by Marilyn

"The Raiders! They're coming! Awake! Awake!"

The old woman bolted up from her narrow bed. She reached for her tunic and stuffed her feet into her clogs. Someone pounded on her door. Her son burst into her room, half dressed, his hair unbraided. "They're coming! We must flee. Yessia says there are scores of them."

"My loom--" she cried.

"I'll build you another." Her son tossed her clothes and blankets haphazard into a large basket.

"The children? Your father's tools?" She snatched her herbal and her mother's recipe book from the shelf and wrapped them in her best shawl.

"All in the wagon. You know I'd never forget them. Now hurry." He ran outside with his burden, calling, again, "Hurry!"

The old woman looked around her snug home for the last time. Gently, she closed her empty blanket-chest, her carpenter-husband's first gift to her. Too heavy to carry. So was their long table, its silk-smooth top made from one wide board. And her loom. Her precious loom, strung with red and gold threads still unwoven. She was glad her husband was not there to see what became of his creations--left for the horsemen to burn. "I thought to die here," she murmured.

"Mama! Come on!"

Startled, she snatched up a heavy clay pot, swept the coals from her hearth into it and ran into the dark to join her neighbors in flight.

All that night, jolting along in the back of her son's cart, she crouched over her pot, feeding the fire with bits of straw, scraps of wood. The heat of it scorched her thighs, dried her eyes, reddened her cheeks. She dared not sleep lest it go out for lack of care.

Morning came, dull and grey. "Do they follow us?" asked the miller, looking back to where the smoke from the burning village stained the horizon. "Dare we stop to rest?"

"They have our cattle," answered a herdswoman sourly. "They won't bother about us."

"I want to go home," wailed the blacksmith's child.

"Hush, dear, we can't go home," sighed her mother. "Our homes are no more. We're going to find new ones."

Some of the people unpacked pots and measured out cereal to cook. Others fetched water from the stream or gathered fuel. It was then that the old woman produced her glowing treasure.

"Fire!" cried her daughter-in-law. "No one else thought to save fire. Bless you, Mother."

Many days passed. Deep in the mountains the wanderers followed a deer's track through a narrow pass into a wide sunlit valley. "This is a good place, Mother," the old woman's son said. "The ground may be stony, but it looks fertile. We have time to build homes and plant a crop for winter. How Father would have loved to live among so many trees."

The old woman was not strong enough to work in the fields. She knew her son could not spare the time to build her a new loom. The mountain's plants were strange to her. "I have left my work behind," she thought. She gazed up at the icy peaks that surrounded the valley and thought, "I am of no use any more and food will be scarce until the harvest. Already the children complain of hunger."

Wearing her oldest tunic she walked into the mountains as if to forage. She took nothing with her and she did not mark her trail. All day she wandered higher and higher, losing herself in the piney woods. When night fell, chill and clear, she bowed to her body's distress and ate a handful of berries from a low-growing bush, sipped icy water from a silvery stream. Shivering, she curled up under the thick-needled branches of a fir tree. She did not expect to survive the night.

But as she slept something large and warm lay down beside her, rousing her. She touched thick fur, felt moist breath on her neck. "I should be afraid," she thought, "but I'm too tired." She sank back into sleep.

In the morning she thought it must have been a dream.

Next day she gathered berries and nuts, for she had decided to walk as far as she could towards the glowing white peak of the tallest mountain. By nightfall she crossed the snowline. The bulk of the mountain lay below her, green and grey and mysterious. Above was silver, glittering, forbidding. She found no more berries, and she could not bring herself to eat the crystal snow. So she found a place where two boulders formed a shelter from the wind and lay down. "I shall not rise from this bed," she thought. But as she closed her eyes, she felt again the shaggy warmth of a beast enfolding her in its long arms. "A dream," she said, and slept.

In the morning she woke, surprised to be alive for another day. Her stomach twisted with hunger, and she called out, "Do you keep me from freezing only to watch me starve to death? If you would have me live, feed me!" Then she laughed aloud. "Foolish old woman," she said. "Talking to a dream."

She stood up. On top of the rock that had sheltered her she found a chunk of honeycomb oozing with golden honey. Hesitantly, she touched it. She licked the sticky honey from her fingers. "Thank you," she called, but to whom she did not know.

That night, before she slept, she cried to the empty winds, "My protector, give me a sign to strengthen me, for the way is hard." When she woke she found a slender, curved claw from no animal that she had ever seen caught in her skirt. As long as her hand, it glowed golden in the sun. She gazed at it in bewilderment, then tucked it into the empty pouch on her belt.

At sunset of that day she came upon a weathered stone cottage with two round windows and a green wooden door. The door opened as she approached; she peeked in and saw a fire and a table set for one. A pot hanging in the fireplace sent out a rich, enticing smell.

She called. No one answered. Hunger overcame her shyness. She went inside and filled a bowl from the bubbling pot and ate until she was full.

Only then did she look around the room. The walls were lined with shelves full of books bound in all colors of the rainbow, with gold and silver designs that gleamed in the firelight! The old woman had never seen so many books in her life. She scrubbed her hands twice before she dared touch them.

A book bound in rich blue leather with silver sea-anemones embossed deep into it caught her eye. "Kallia Verrossa," she read. She had heard that name long ago from a travelling trader. She opened the book and read, "I was born in the summer, in my mother's palace by the sea, and the music of the tides has haunted me all my life." She followed the life of the woman Kallia Verrossa, queen and beggar, through the pages until her eyelids grew so heavy she could no longer keep them open. Then she lay down on the narrow bed, so like the one in her dear, lost home, and slept.

Next morning, the pot gave her porridge with nuts and honey to eat. Afterwards she returned to her book. When she finished it, she reached for another. Each new book told the story of a different life. Some related the deeds of kings and queens. Others told of explorers and merchants adventuring in lands far from their homes. Still others detailed the lives of philosophers and scholars and their journeys of the mind. The days passed quickly. She did not count them.

One evening before she slept she said aloud, "Thank you, my host, for your many gifts. How can I repay you?"

One morning she found a leaf-green book upon the table. A thick wooden pen and an inkwell sat beside it. Her name was embossed in gold upon the spine. Its pages were blank.

"I do not understand," she said. "I am no queen, or explorer with an important tale to tell." But slowly it came to her that in all the books she had read she had found no one who spoke of the lives of people like her, farmers, herdsfolk, lovers of the land and guardians of its fruits.

She picked up the pen. It felt at once strange, and as familiar as her lost shuttle. She began to write, weaving a tapestry of her village's life from the slender thread of ink.

She told first of the undulating sweep of the green and fertile plain, of the sun that warmed and the winds that brought rain from the mountains. She told of the thatched sod homes in which she was born, snug in winter, cool in the dry heat of summer.

She paused, then wrote all she knew of how her uncle the blacksmith crafted plows and tools. She drew pictures of the herbs and wild plants her grandnimother, the village healer used to make medicines. She drew a picture of the loom her husband had built for her and showed how she strung threads of many colors to make patterns in her cloth. She told how she spun her thread, thick or thin and drew pictures of the plants she used to make her dyes.

Smiling, she wrote of the games her children played and the tales she heard in the village school in the short, idle days of winter.

Humming softly, she wrote down the songs she sang to her babies, lovers to lovers, husbands to wives, children to parents, all to the gracious land. She wrote down the prayers the farmers hummed as they sowed their seeds in spring, and the joyful anthem they sang when they gathered the crops. She wrote, too, of the harvest feasts, of braided breads, thick soups, sharp cheeses and the nutty, honey-glazed cakes the children baked especially for the Day of Praise.

She wrote down the songs her people sang over the graves of their dead and wept, thinking of the fat-handled gouge she had buried with her husband, his favorite, and not a waste, her son agreed, for no one could ever use it as skillfully as his father had.

At the last, she wrote of the coming of the raiders, and the escape into the mountains. Then, though she had not filled all of the pages, she laid down her pen.

It was late, but she was not tired. She walked out into the darkness and gazed up at a sky full of stars. It struck her, how much she now knew about the earth and its ways, and how little she knew about the heavens.

All at once, she felt another presence. Beside her stood a great beast, tall and bulky and bearlike, its fur golden in the light from the stars.

"My protector," she murmured, unafraid. It turned its almost human face to her. Tenderly, it gazed at her, a question in its luminious eyes. Her heart leapt. Her adventure was not over. She reached out and put her hand on its soft-furred limb. She glanced back. The little house was gone. It did not surprise her. She did not need it any more.

Together, the old woman and the golden beast walked higher and higher up the silver mountain until their feet no longer touched the earth and they trod among the stars.