The Seekers of Shar-Nuhn. Ardath Mayhar

and the near at hand, that which has been and that which is to be. Often has she wept bitterly that the things she has woven must prove to be true, yet she is wise and strong and always has she conquered her grief. Over the past years the trance loomings had waned until she had begun to hope that the burden had been lifted from her. Happy was she as I have seldom seen her, and the house rang with her song and laughter, and the children bloomed in the blessed light of her cheer. Our life was joyful as never before, and all seemed clear as a summer sky.

      “The ending of the spring brought a change. Through the early summer she remained in good cheer, yet she seemed to be ever listening to something far away, some­thing that she could not quite hear. At midsummer, suddenly in the night she rose from our couch and went to her loom. Though her eyes were open, yet I could see that she neither heard nor saw that which was before her. She did not change the colors but set at once to weaving, looking with dread at the strange patterns that emerged in the cloth.

      “Long did I watch, studying the runes, but none save she can decipher them. I returned to our couch, but did not sleep, and through the long night I could hear the thumping of the loom. I lay in dread, for I had seen that in her eyes which never had been there before. Not until the next night did she fall at the loom, and I carried her to bed and forced milk between her lips. And thus have I done for all the weeks since, though I know not how she walks to the loom of a morning, when she has eaten noth­ing except that which we can coax her to swallow in sleep. She sleeps now, for the hours when she can sit and weave grow fewer each day, and she falls into slumber before the sun sets.”

      Kla-Noh leaned forward and laid his hand upon the man’s knee. “Be comforted, old friend. What we can do will be done. Long have I lived amid strange secrets and unearthly matters. Mayhap there will be among my recol­lections one that will work the cure for your beloved Shallah.”

      Si-Lun also leaned forward. “Not so wise or so old as Kla-Noh am I, yet I, too, have traveled far and seen much of the ways of other places than this. Surely we may man­age, between us, relief for your helpmate.”

      “Let me, then, take you to her, that you may look upon her in sleep. She will not awaken until dawn, whatever the disturbance within her chamber. Perhaps you may see some sign that my anxiety has caused my eyes to miss.

      The red light of sunset lay across the couch where Shallah lay, and the color gave her slender face the flush of health. Yet Kla-Noh, touching her forehead and her wrist, felt a chill in her flesh, and the pulsing of blood through her wrist was light and rapid. There were blue shadows about her eyes, and her small frame was worn away to the light bones. The Seeker felt a chill in his own frame as he summed up her state.

      He turned to Lo-Shel and said, “In my pack there is a box that contains a powder. We shall add that to her milk and soup. It will strengthen her body, though it will not aid her spirit. Yet we must keep that spirit burning in this frail flesh, if we are to give it help. We shall think long this night, Lo-Shel, on this matter.”

      Then the two Seekers went to their chamber and talked long as night drew in. Yet no similar sickness had either seen, in all their varied experiences.

      Morning found the house of Lo-Shel a hive of activity as the four sons and three daughters of the family accomplished their forenoon tasks. After breakfast all went into the fields, for the hay was ripe for harvest. Only Lo-Shel remained behind with the Seekers.

      “We have propped her in our arms and spooned milk between her lips,” he said to Kla-Noh. “Soon now she will awaken and, if I am not by to wrap her in her house gown and place slippers upon her feet, she will go in her night­robe to the loom and begin to weave. Come with me and watch.”

      So Si-Lun and Kla-Noh watched outside the chamber door while Lo-Shel dressed Shallah. Then the door opened and she stepped swiftly, surely, yet blindly down the passageway to the loom chamber, where she sat at once and began weaving.

      Pressing treadle, throwing shuttle, swinging batten with hypnotic rhythm, she seemed weaving the cycles of time and of life into the growing web before her. Her eyes were set upon the pattern, her mind far away—or in­ward. No touch reached her consciousness, no word pene­trated her ear. All her being was focused upon the warp, the weft upon the loom. When Si-Lun stepped forward and grasped her hands, preventing their motion, she writhed as if in agony, her eyes still fixed, past his shoul­der, upon the cloth.

      The men retreated into the passageway, their faces grave and their hearts filled with foreboding.

      “Let us go into the fields,” said Kla-Noh, “and work in the hay with the others, clearing our minds and relieving our hearts with good labor. Too much thought stifles it­self, and to stretch the muscles oftentimes stretches the ability to think.”

      Good was the clean air, fragrant the cut hay as they walked in the fields, forking the layers over to dry in the sun. A spatter of insects shot up before their feet with a crackle of wings, and the sweat ran down their arms and their backs, cooling them in the breezes.

      In the next field the children were scything the stand­ing grasses, shouting and laughing as they disturbed nest­ing birds and sunning serpents. The air rang with birdsong from the surrounding forest, and the stream added its clear note among the stones of its bed. The lit­tle valley among the mountains seemed brimful with all the good things of living, and the spirits of the Seekers rose, even in the midst of their worry.

      “The gods will not spoil this paradise with tragedy,” said Si-Lun, pausing to wipe the sweat from his face upon his sleeve. “They have placed here all that is good and given it to those who know it and prize it and nurture it as best they may. Surely they have also sent us for a purpose and with an answer to the darkness that threatens.”

      “The answer will come,” said Kla-Noh, leaning upon his fork and gazing up into the ridges that shone with fir-dark and gold in the morning sunlight. “A sureness grows within me. We bear the answer in our hearts and our hands. It but remains to seek it out. In this place nothing is impossible, nothing insoluble. We were sent, and we are here. For the present, this is enough.”

      At midday all returned to the house, where the thump­ing of the loom continued, regular as the pounding of waves upon a shore. The food was sweet in their mouths, and they worked the afternoon away with zest, feeling their muscles rejoicing in their strength and their lungs expanding in the fir-sharp air.

      As they went, washed and cleanly clothed, to their sup­per, Si-Lun said quietly to his foster father, “It may be that a solution is knocking at the door of my conscious­ness. In some cranny of my memory there is a stored fact that is now tapping away, seeking to be re-found and brought into the light.”

      Kla-Noh squeezed his arm and smiled. “When we have eaten and the younglings are about their evening sports, then we will talk of this.”

      Thus, when the children went out into the twilight to play upon the lawns and in the edges of the forest, they sought out Lo-Shel and sat with him in quietude, lending their presence as Si-Lun thought long.

      “What, Lo-Shel, is the use to which Shallah puts the cloth that is spun in her trances?” he asked at last.

      “It is folded away and put into a chest, which she never opens save to add more,” he answered. “She seems to fear to look upon it, yet she lifts it with caution and tenderly packs it away. I have never touched it, though never has she said me nay. It seems to me such a mystery that I am wary of it.”

      Si-Lun nodded. A wrinkle formed between his green eyes. “Has she never ripped out the weave?”

      Lo-Shel almost blanched. “Nay, never. Such would seem almost...blasphemy. It is sent of the gods.”

      “True,” the Seeker answered. “Yet this sending will end by slaying Shallah, as surely as sunrise. So we must act in unorthodox ways to break it and to bring her back into the world of life. It is in my thought that such has been done before, in another time and place, with another kind of sending altogether. Yet the principle is the same. If we destroy the thing whole, it might rebound against Shal­lah. But if we simply...unmake it, there is a hope that she may return unscathed. Will you give your leave for us to try this?”