The Fires of Morda
Redwatch, seat of Clan Morda, stands in a red-stone gorge where the east passes give out, and it is not Crag’s End and it is not the sea.
It is older, narrower, harder: a hold built by a people who expected to be besieged and usually were.
They hung no garlands for me. I respected that.
Garlands would have been cloth over a hole.
Ulmar met me at the hall’s heart, before the great hearth they call the peace-fire, and here I must set down the terms, because the terms are where he began to come apart from the word enemy entirely, a thread at a time — and there goes my second, I am rationing them.
“Your rooms are your own, and bar from the inside.” Formal, carrying, for the whole hall to hear.
“Your loom has a hall of its own; it arrived before you and I am told my folk have already quarreled over who carries your wool. You sit at my fire as honored guest; you owe no one here a smile, a touch, or a bride’s duty of any kind.
The wedding, if it comes, comes at midsummer, and only—” and this he said slower, and the hall heard the slowness “—if the weaver, knowing us by then, still finds the warp will bear. Until that day you are free to leave at any hour, escorted, with gifts, and no shame on your villages. Those are the terms. Redwatch has heard them. Redwatch will keep them.”
“And if Redwatch doesn’t?” I asked it straight out. The hall drew breath. But I had not come north to weave with my eyes shut.
The chief of Clan Morda looked at me, and then at his own divided fires, and answered in the same carrying voice, cost-counted, exact: “Then I will have proven my own hard-hearted right about me, and you will go home to Deepford, and the feud will wait for a better chief. I am betting Redwatch that we are finished burying sons. Sit anywhere, Widow Holt. Watch us. Weave when you’re ready. ”
He was formal like that for weeks. I want it in the cloth as it was: the man was a treaty in boots.
Every sentence balanced, every cost counted, every word weighed out like dye by the half-measure — and I, who had braced all the way north for cruelty or coldness or courtship, had braced for everything except precision, and precision, in my trade, is the first thing I ever loved.
You can read a man’s whole hand in how he states his terms. I read his nightly at that divided hall, and the reading said: here is a chief who has taught himself to want nothing, because everything he ever wanted got counted against his clan’s survival and came up too dear.
The ember turned over in its ash and I let it lie. There was watching enough for both of us.
Because we were watched — I will say it now and let it stand over everything that follows: at Redwatch, that first season, we were always watched.
The glad fires watched hoping. The hard fires watched for the mistake.
Old Ghera watched from her corner with her three sons’ worn-thin banners on the wall behind her, and her eyes on me were two banked fires of their own; she had given more to the feud than anyone in that hall and she did not want it woven over.
And a young war-leader named Draz, who had ridden with the hunters and thought the hunting too gentle, watched me the way you watch a rat in the store-room: with patience, and a plan.
Under all that watching, the chief of Clan Morda and I conducted what I can only, now, call a courtship, though neither of us would have dared name it — conducted it entirely in public, entirely in terms, at a fire with half a clan’s eyes on our hands.
He came to the weaving hall each evening at the same hour, escorted, doors open, and asked after the work.
That was the whole liturgy. But the questions were real questions: what the wool wanted, why the red dye-lot ran uneven, what a selvage is for and why mine were coming out so hard and straight.
And the man listened the way no one has ever listened to me on the subject of cloth, and it was three weeks before I understood what he was doing, because he was doing it so quietly: he was learning my language.
Not smiling at it. Learning it. And when he had enough of it, he began, gravely, precisely, to say things in it.
“The hall is quieter since the loom started,” he said one evening, watching the shuttle.
“The sound reaches the hard fires too. Ghera sat an hour yesterday where she could hear it. My folk say a working loom means nobody is leaving.” A pause, weighed.
“They are learning to count on the sound. I find I have learned it also.”
That is a love letter. I defy any woman of any trade to hear it otherwise. It was also, strictly, a report on clan morale, and he took his leave after it with a chief’s correct bow, and the doors stood open the whole time, and the escort saw nothing but a man asking after weaving.
The ember was not lying quiet anymore. I would like it written that I fought grandly against it, out of loyalty to my dead; the truth is smaller and harder.
The dead don’t ask for that. What I fought was the watching — the certainty that anything I let show would be read at forty fires before morning, half of them hoping, half of them sharpening.
So I showed nothing. I sent everything down my arms into the work, the way weavers have done since wool was first spun, and the cloth of those weeks came off the loom so charged that the wool-women said it crackled when they folded it.
And once — once, in the whole of that formal season — the terms slipped.
A feast night, early winter. The hall loud, the ale horns going round the fires, and I at the chief’s fire in the guest’s seat, close enough that his sleeve brushed mine when he set down his horn — untouched, I had noticed, feast after feast; a chief of a divided hall drinks nothing, watches everything.
Some toast roared up at the glad fires and under its cover, below the table’s edge, entirely out of every sight in that hall, his smallest finger moved half its width and lay against mine.
Warp-weight. That little. That much.
Neither of us looked down. He carried on his talk with the fire-elders; I carried on failing to hear one word of it.
Two grown leaders of two burnt peoples, hands hidden in plain sight, touching along one finger’s edge like the first pick of a pattern neither had dared state aloud — and when the toast ended and the hall settled, the finger withdrew, correct as a treaty, and the chief of Clan Morda said, to the fire at large, in that weighed-out voice:
“Winter is early this year. We should bring the wool in.”
I finished my ale like a woman with nothing in her chest but lungs. The ember had stopped being an ember. Banked is a lie you can tell about a fire for only so long: past a certain heat, ash is just the shape the burning wears in public.