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In the first-year apprentices’ dormitory everyone is awake by now. A flood of whispers and half-spoken words washes over me. At the far end of the room, where the youngest apprentices sleep, a group of girls is gathered around a bed, but not too close. Their ring leaves an empty space full of fear around the source of the sound, and they are all fiddling coral amulets between their fingers. A faint, anxious moan carries from the bed, circling the room like a starved ghost seeking a way out.
I hope to be wrong. I walk across the dormitory towards the bed.
When I see the girl from whose mouth the moan is rising, I know there is nothing I can do for her.
She is lying on her back, her body completely still and her lips slightly parted. I remember her name: Mirea. She cannot be older than ten. Her breathing is strained, as if her throat is trying to close around it. But it is her eyes that really give her away. They are open, black holes. Her pupils have widened like dark water, washed away all colour, and there is nothing between their edges and the frightened whites. Because frightened she is, her whole face brimming with terror as she stares into the space above her that seems empty to everyone else. Yet I know what she sees. And I know the strange song of her low, bare moan: the kind people always sing when a night-maere is riding them. The sound marks the sleeper as soon as someone else hears it.
I seize my own coral amulet and speak her name softly.
‘Mirea.’
A violent shudder runs through her, and then she grasps my arm. The grip is tight enough to bruise.
‘Help me,’ she says.
‘Everything’s fine, Mirea,’ I tell her, although it is not.
‘There was a shadow,’ she says. ‘It tried to strangle me.’
Her first time, then. She does not know yet what happened. Does not know how to keep the secret. Not that it would help now. The others stare at us. I see some girls whisper to each other. There is no easy way to do this.
‘Have you heard of night-maere possession?’ I ask.
Alarm stains Mirea’s face. Of course she has. Everyone on the island has.
‘It wasn’t like that,’ she says, but without certainty.
‘I’m so sorry, Mirea,’ I say. The rims of her eyes are turning red and her cheeks quiver once, twice. ‘Everyone saw you. Your eyes were night-maere black. You carry the dream-plague.’
‘My mother says night-maeres are invisible,’ Mirea tries. Her voice cracks and fails. ‘It was here. Someone else must have seen it.’ A single tear rolls down her face.
The girls around us shift uncomfortably. Someone sniggers. Anger burns in my throat like white-hot glass.
‘Only those who carry a night-maere can see them.’ Weaver’s tall figure has appeared in the doorway. Her words cross the room before she does.
I look at Mirea, who has begun to shake with sobs.
‘I don’t want to sleep in the same room with a Dreamer.’ It is a blonde girl. Her face is smooth as polished white stone, and equally hard.
Weaver looks at her with an expression that betrays the slightest crack of impatience, and behind it, something buried far deeper. For a moment I think her words are going to be something else entirely, but then she just says, ‘We will want to avoid contamination, of course.’ She pulls a small notebook from her pocket, tears out a page and draws three symbols on it. ‘Eliana, go and send this message immediately.’ She hands the piece of paper to me.
Mirea is still crying. Her nose is dripping large, wet drops to the sheets, and the softness of her child-face is distorted with fear. The coral amulet hangs around her neck purposeless, incapable of keeping the night-maere away, a piece of dead seafloor. I see the blonde girl look at her in disgust. I nod and turn slowly to go. I have to stop myself from giving Mirea’s hand a quick, encouraging squeeze. It would be a lie. She has nothing to feel encouraged about.
The door to Weaver’s study opens without a sound. It is never locked. The glow-glasses shine faintly. Through the window in the corner I can see the ever-burning fires of the Tower at a distance, like sharp eyes blinking in the face of darkness.
I missed my night-watch.
Perhaps there is nothing I could have done for Mirea. But if I had been walking the corridors and listening to the sounds of night-rest in the rooms, I might have heard her before anyone else. Quietly, without anyone knowing, I could have woken her up, and she could have hidden her illness – if not forever, at least until the next time. She might have lived through the dormitory years and even through sharing a cell without another visit from a night-maere, and no one would ever have known.
The watergraph stands tall and robust in the corner. The glass tank embedded in its stone body reflects my face dark and distorted when I step close. I select the lever that bears the emblem of the House of the Tainted. The metal creaks. The message-pipe leading there opens. In the faint light I can just barely see the index and the scale plate with its engraved symbols inside the tank. I do not need the paper Weaver gave me, because I recognized the symbols when she wrote them down. Fetch a Dreamer from the House of Webs. I turn the wheel on the side of the machine until the index points at the first symbol. The surface of the water rises in the tank as the index moves along the scale. In the tank of the watergraph in the House of the Tainted, the water level will change accordingly, showing the same engraved symbol.
When I have inserted all three symbols, I wait until a small bell chimes to signal that the message has been received at the other end of the pipe. Then I turn to go. I am nearly out of the door, when I stop. I listen. The corridors are night-silent and all I hear are the movements of my own body. There is no one else in the building.
I move behind Weaver’s table. Slowly I coax the drawer open and stop to listen again. No light flickers to life and no footsteps brush the floors. The message-book is pushed to the back of the drawer, but like the door, the drawer is never locked. I pull the thick book out and place it in my lap. The pages are yellowed and brittle on the edges, and full of water message code, which no one in the house knows apart from Weaver – as far as she is aware.
She is not in the habit of writing down the dates, but she records moon phases with precision: how Our Lady of Weaving hides a silver coin in her palm behind the sky, reveals it little by little and hides it again. The last full moon was two days ago. I only need to find the circle marking it and count from there backwards towards the day the girl arrived at the house.
There are no entries for that day. Then I remember: the flood. The watergraph could not be used. I find three entries from two days later. The first one is a request to the trading harbours to buy more yarn. The second seems equally casual. Herbs, it reads. The third and final one is in the column for incoming messages. To be certain, I check the symbol against the translation sheet Weaver keeps placed between the final pages of the book.
Intrusion at the museum, the message says. The sender is the City Guard.
I remember the scar-handed man I saw at the Museum of Pure Sleep.
A stone-cold draught blows across my skin, too sudden and sharp to ignore. It is possible that I hear a soft creak of weary metal. I turn to look, and take a moment to see what I am looking at. In the corner of the room, a tapestry billows like a sail in wind. Behind it a dense and deep darkness cuts the wall.
There is a modest wooden door in the wall. I have always imagined it to be some kind of storage room, if I have ever even taken notice of it. Now I do.
The door was closed when I came to the room. I am certain of it.
I push Weaver’s watergraph logbook back into the drawer.
This time I hear the creak of the hinges clearly. The door is swinging slowly in the draught. I walk closer. I listen closely, and for a moment I think I hear a rustling sound, as if someone is breathing in the darkness. But when I try to catch the sound again, it is gone.
Another breeze blows through the chink and across my skin, making every hair stand on end. The door slams shut, as if pushed by an invisible hand from the other side. I take a step back, then another, and as I walk towards the tall door of Weaver’s study, I hear the quick beating of my heart against the bones of my chest, like an animal struggling to break free.
I do not slow down until the long, shadow-soaked corridor is halfway behind me
and another landscape opens ahead, a world that is ready to crumble or change.
She dreams dark dreams of a place where longing settles in limbs and thickens into fog on window panes, where a hunger to run free and feel the salt of the sea on one’s face makes the air bitter to breathe and fear crawls dense along the floors. The walls fall quiet into deep water, every door is held by a lock and branch-stiff lattices cover the windows. If you go close enough, you may hear words swishing, and behind the walls you may sense many solitudes interlaced with one another. Even closer you may sometimes catch screams, but perhaps they are of seagulls.
Those who carry marks on their faces and are confined within walls scratch the doors until their claws break, and under the weight of their dreams the city subsides and cracks, poles and foundation stones under houses shift out of joint and crumble, the edges of shores and canals corrode into the sea. But ink chains others also, flows under skins and in the veins of the island. It grows slow wounds at the core of all life, hiding from sight what is meant to be seen.
Hands reach for the threads of sleep and fall towards them, and they do not thwart the touch. Their stirring started long ago, elusive, adaptive, impossible to stop. The door into darkness is closed, the door into darkness is open, air flows and through it
CHAPTER FOUR
A gondola arrives for Mirea at dawn. We all hear the squeaking of the metal cables as the vessel approaches, hovers above the drop and climbs slowly to the port on top of the hill. I am not outside to see it, but the walls of the Halls of Weaving make every sound swell in my ears: the heavy footsteps, rarely heard in the house; the indistinct words of Weaver’s voice; and, eventually, Mirea’s weeping. I imagine two silent and dark figures taking her into the black gondola bearing the emblems of the City Guard, which will return down to the city across the void. Once its bottom touches water, the large hooks holding it to the airway will be detached. The vessel will float down the canal, turn to a waterway running towards the House of the Tainted and finally stop before the locked iron gate. I imagine Mirea: struggling and fighting, her body wriggling like a slippery fish at the bottom of the boat. Or quiet, submissive, her face closed.
None of us flinches, or slows down the work, or stops it.
Later, when the weather turns warmer, the folding doors of the Halls of Weaving are opened towards the square. Many weavers carry their looms outside, under the canopy woven of web-yarn. If interior and exterior spaces can be separated from each other in the House of Webs, that is: here, rooms move often. The dormitories and cells remain. They are built in stone, because sleep must be confined within solid walls, it cannot be released to wander free. But around the stone buildings the rooms, walls and streets wax and vanish, nor are they supposed to stay. That is the will of Our Lady of Weaving.
Days are seldom warm this late in autumn. The sun draws soft shadows on the walls and casts them across the floors, falls through the half-woven wall-webs. Clouds break the edge of the light. The long rows of weavers reach from the room all the way to the square. Their hands pass the weft through the warps, building within the frames fabrics that are all alike. No exceptions are allowed. The only sounds in the hall are the rustling of clothes, the swishing of yarn and the breathing of dozens of women. The coarse sea-wool stings my fingers until their skin cracks, and my weave is not as smooth as I would like.
I pat the weft with a wooden weaving fork to make it a tighter fit with the rest of the web. The warp rises tall and bare ahead of me. On my left side Silvi, who came to the house three years after me, has already woven twice as much as I this morning. My weft twists into a tangle and leaves a large, protruding loop in the wall-web. I am so focused on tugging the knot free that it takes me a while to notice the low chatter that has grown in the hall, and the stopped movements. Silvi stares away from the square and folding doors, towards the arched stone doorway between the hall and the corridor.
The girl tattooed with invisible ink stands at the door of the hall. She has changed her white patient gown for a long, grey wool dress and tied her hair low in the nape of her neck. The skin around her mouth still looks slightly swollen and bruised, but she stands straight and without hesitation. Her gaze circles the hall and stops on me.
I place the shuttle down. The girl begins to walk towards me. I catch uncertain looks and tense postures from the corner of my eye. Outsiders are not allowed in the Halls of Weaving. Yet no one rises to stop her; neither do I. Outside clouds part, and the sky casts sudden light across the hall. A shining forest of halfway webs reaches in all directions. She walks to me, tilts her head and the corners of her mouth lift, just a little. I do not know what moves on my face, but something must do. She sits down on the narrow seat next to me, so close I smell the soap on her skin. For a few moments, neither of us moves. I breathe her in.
She places a hand on top of the shuttle resting in my lap. Her fingers brush it briefly before settling on the polished wooden surface. Its shape is a familiar fit against her touch. She looks at me, face close to mine, and tilts her head again. Her expression poses a question.
It is quiet enough to hear a hundred simultaneous breaths drawn in the hall. Only those chosen as apprentices are allowed to weave in the house. Anything else is forbidden. Everyone stares at us.
I nod.
The girl nods back. I feel her breath brush my neck. She picks up the shuttle and begins to pass it through the warp. Her movements are swift and sure. The yarn slides without clumping, and I see immediately that the resulting weave will be smooth and dense. When the wall-web is ready in its frame, it will show the place where the shuttle passed from my hands to hers: the lumpy, sometimes too tight and occasionally too loose texture turns even and made with skill.
I remain seated, although the seat is too narrow for both of us, and she is tightly pressed against me. There are footsteps at the door. Alva steps into the hall, her face red and her breathing heavy.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘She disappeared while I was outside drawing water from the well. I will take her back immediately.’
I look at the girl’s hands again, the endlessly intertwining strands sliding through her fingers.
‘I don’t think she wants to go back,’ I say.
The gondola from the Hospital Quarters arrives that evening and takes away six rash-covered, violently coughing weavers. The girl is not among them. On the second day after I have handed my shuttle to the girl, she steps into the halls with Weaver. Together they set up a new loom in the corner and stretch the warp between the upper and lower beams. The girl carries a seat in front of the frame and sits down, places the shuttle, a skein of yarn and a weaving fork next to her, and begins to work. Weaver keeps an eye on the girl for a while, and when she leaves, no one says anything. We all take secret glances at the girl. Once she glances back at me. I can only see her face diagonally from the back, but the cheek turned towards me lifts as if she is smiling.
After supper I sit in my cell, detach the coin pouch from my waist and pour the coins in front of me on the bed. The House of Webs pays a small monthly salary and clothes its residents, because the servants of Our Lady of Weaving are expected to look tidy. But my socks have worn thin, and there will not be new ones on offer until spring. I begin to count the coins to see if I can afford to buy a pair of warm socks at the market for winter. My fingers brush something oblong. For a moment I am confused, but then I remember the metal object the dark-clad woman dropped at my feet on the day of the Ink-marking. I pick it up. It is a small key. I turn it in my fingers. Its teeth are simple, but one end is unusually shaped: it is tapering, like an eye, and in place of a pupil an eight-pointed sun shines at the centre, the emblem of the island and the Council.
There is a knock on the door. I drop the key back into the coin pouch, collect the coins from the bed in a hurry and tighten the mouth of the pouch. I get up to open the door. Weaver stands behind it with the girl who is carrying a pile of clean bed linen in her arms.
‘Eliana,’ Weaver says and places her hand on the girl’s shoulder. ‘She will stay in the house for the time being. At least until we find out where her home is.’
I glance at the bed linen and understand.
‘Can we come in?’ Weaver says. ‘I have no doubt she would like to prepare her bed.’
‘Can’t she live in the sick bay?’ I ask, and my voice sounds harsher than I had intended. The girl shifts her weight from one foot to the other. ‘Or in one of the dormitories?’
‘The sick bay has five new cases of rash, and we do not want more infections. After what she has been through, I trust you understand that she would prefer more privacy than a dormitory can offer.’
‘I cannot sleep when there is someone else in the room,’ I try.
Weaver looks at me from her heights, eyes black in the dark face.
‘I thought you did not sleep anyway,’ she says. ‘She is your roommate for the time being. I will leave you to make closer acquaintance.’
I know the conversation is over. I move to the side and let the girl in. She places the bed linen on the night table next to the empty bed. The table is too small, and the sheets fall to the floor. She picks them up with hasty hands and begins to make the bed without looking at me. Weaver simply nods and leaves.
I do not know where to look. There is little to do in the cell in the evenings after work. My former roommate usually wanted to chat about seamen and jewellery sold in the market, or how many children each of us would have when we found husbands and left the house. I mostly responded with a few syllables, if at all. That never seemed to bother her.
The girl gets the linen in place and begins to take off her dress, which seems slightly too big for her. I look away and hear her slip under the blanket in her thin undergarment.
‘It would be good for you to know that I sleep less than most others,’ I say. ‘I’m often on night-watch.’ It seems like a sufficient explanation.
Her eyes are wide in the dusk, their colour metal-sharp.
‘I didn’t mean to be rude,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry. I just haven’t shared a room with anyone for a long time.’
I close the curtains. The glow-glass globe on the night table dims slowly. I take off my jacket, change into my nightgown and lower myself to bed. I turn towards the wall.
I hear the sheets rustling and the bunk creaking under the girl. Apparently she too has turned her back on me. It feels as if I can sense the warmth of her body across the room. I close my eyes and fear falling asleep. From her breathing I can tell she is not sleeping, either.
As weeks pass, the girl and I try to get used to each other’s presence in the small space that is now new to both of us: to her because she does not yet know it, and to me because the strange, shifting element of her limbs and hair and shape has been added to my former privacy. I begin to understand I am also responsible for introducing her to the ways of the house. She follows me into the washrooms in the morning and to the supper table, although she cannot eat normally yet. She bends her head down to the floor of the Halls of Weaving after me and goes to sleep when I do. I stay awake and watch her, but some nights exhaustion eventually drops me to sleep. When images begin to form behind my closed lids, she seems to chase them, too. The walls of sleep fall quiet into deep water, and she climbs on them before me. I follow her through low and tall doors to dream-rooms where branch-stiff lattices cover the windows. I seek her in dream-halls where black water rushes in the rifts of cracked floors and walls are fraying webs, because the threads run from their meshes and everything unravels. I want the floors to be unbroken and they close their cracks in front of my footsteps. I want the walls to be whole again and the yarn interweaves back into meshes, but it escapes my grasp and I cannot reach it, and each new wanting is without strength.
When I wake with a start in the light of night or dawn, I hear the girl’s breathing on the other side of the cell.
I should perhaps know how to read these signs:
That morning, when I arrive at the Halls of Weaving with the girl at my heels, I see two City Guards enter Weaver’s study.
My shadow has moved two palm-widths on the wall, when a weaver who is on messenger duty steps into the hall, bows her forehead to the floor, walks to the girl and says something to her in a low voice. They leave the hall together.
The air gondola cables screech under the weight of a vessel.
At lunch I keep a vacant seat next to mine, but she does not come.
No one touches her wall-web for the rest of the day.
I am on my way to the cell after supper, when Weaver stops me in the corridor.
‘Come to my study,’ she says. ‘I must tell you something.’
The tapestries on the walls are dark and their patterns seem to move while you look away. I sit on the chair Weaver has offered me. This is not the Scolding Chair, but one of the better ones, with a high back and a smoother shape.
‘Two City Guards came to the house today,’ Weaver says. ‘They were trying to track down someone who missed her Ink-marking recently.’
For some reason I think of the key, of the woman on the square. Of the guard who saw me. On the wall Our Lady of Weaving raises all her hands, inviting the sea to storm.
‘I did not miss my visit,’ I say.
‘I know,’ Weaver replies. ‘But someone named Valeria Petros did.’
She pauses and watches me. I search my memory for the name and do not find it.
‘Who’s that?’ I ask.
‘Your roommate,’ Weaver says. ‘She confirmed it today when the City Guard spoke to her.’
I reach for the girl’s thoughts, try to imagine what I would have done. She must have been too badly injured and heavily medicated to even know what day it was. She could have gone later, but how would she have explained what had happened without words? And whoever attacked her probably still walks the streets of the city, eyes perhaps ready to see, hands ready to capture and kill this time.
‘Will Valeria Petros leave the house now?’ I ask. The thought hits me deeper than I expect.
‘She will stay,’ Weaver says.
‘Doesn’t she want to return to her family?’
‘I am certain she would like to,’ Weaver says. ‘Unfortunately it is not possible.’ She pauses. ‘You will remember that air gondola accident the night she arrived.’
I nod.
‘Her parents were in the gondola that crashed. There were no survivors.’
A cold weight settles into my chest. I think of the cables in the sky, of their distance from the ground below, or water. When you fall from that high, it matters little what is underneath. An image from the week before arises in my mind: Valeria’s darkening face when Alva mentioned the air route crash. She must have known her parents were travelling by gondola the night she was attacked. She must have wondered.
‘Doesn’t she have anyone else?’ My voice is evened by years of practice, as if it belongs to another.