There was the cave and there the dropped pot; and last the bed where, with the sun shining full on her face, the old woman would breathe no more.
“It has come,” the old woman said to Vera, smoothing her black skirts over her knees. “The loom is yours.” She stood up fresher and younger than Vera had ever seen her, and moved with a springy joy to the bed. Then she straightened the covers and lay down, her face turned toward the entrance of the cave. A shaft of light fell on her feet and began to move, as the sun moved, slowly toward her head.
“No,” cried Vera at the smiling woman. “I want the loom. But not this way.”
Gently, with folded hands, the old Weaver said, “Dear child, there is no other way.”
“Then,” said Vera slowly, knowing she lied, but lying nonetheless, “I do not want it.”
“The time for choosing is past,” said the old Weaver. “You chose and your hands have been chosen. It is woven. It is so.”
“And in a hundred years?” asked Vera.
“You will be the Weaver, and some young girl will come, bright and eager, and you will know your time is near.”
“No,” said Vera.
“It is birth,” said the old Weaver.
“No,” said Vera.
“It is death,” said the old weaver.
A single golden thread snapped suddenly on the loom.
Then the sun moved onto the Weaver’s face and she died.
Vera sat staring at the old woman but did not stir. And though she sat for hour upon hour, and the day grew cold, the sun did not go down. Battles raged on and on, but no one won and no one lost, for nothing more had been woven.
At last, shivering with the cold, though the sun was still high, Vera went to the loom. She saw the old woman buried and herself at work, and so she hastened to the tasks.
And when the old woman lay under an unmarked stone in a forest full of unmarked stones, with only Vera to weep for her, Vera returned to the cave.
Inside, the loom gleamed black, like a giant ebony cage with golden bars as thin and fine as thread. And as Vera sat down to finish the weaving, her bones felt old and she welcomed the shaft of sun as it crept across her back. She welcomed each trip of the shuttle through the warp as it ticked off the hundred years to come. And at last Vera knew all she wanted to know about the future.
The White Seal Maid
ON THE NORTH SEA SHORE there was a fisherman named Merdock who lived all alone. He had neither wife nor child nor wanted either one. At least that was what he told the other men with whom he fished the haaf banks.
But truth was, Merdock was a lonely man, at ease only with the wind and waves. And each evening, when he left his companions, calling out “Fair wind!”—the ‘sailor’s leave’—he knew they were going back to a warm hearth and a full bed while he went home to none. Secretly he longed for the same comfort.
One day it came to Merdock as if in a dream that he should leave off fishing that day and go down to the sea-ledge and hunt the seal. He had never done such a thing before, thinking it close to murder, for the seal had human eyes and cried with a baby’s voice.
Yet though he had never done such a thing, there was such a longing within him that Merdock could not say no to it. And that longing was like a high, sweet singing, a calling. He could not rid his mind of it. So he went.
Down by a gray rock he sat, a long sharpened stick by his side. He kept his eyes fixed out on the sea, where the white birds sat on the waves like foam.
He waited through sunrise and sunset and through the long, cold night, the singing in his head. Then, when the wind went down a bit, he saw a white seal far out in the sea, coming toward him, the moon riding on its shoulder. Merdock could scarcely breathe as he watched the seal, so shining and white was its head. It swam swiftly to the sea-ledge, and then with one quick push it was on land.
Merdock rose then in silence, the stick in his hand. He would have thrown it, too. But the white seal gave a sudden shudder and its skin sloughed off. It was a maiden cast in moonlight, with the tide about her feet.
She stepped high out of her skin, and her hair fell sleek and white about her shoulders and hid her breasts.
Merdock fell to his knees behind the rock and would have hidden his eyes, but her cold white beauty was too much for him. He could only stare. And if he made a noise then, she took no notice but turned her face to the sea and opened her arms up to the moon. Then she began to sway and call.
At first Merdock could not hear the words. Then he realized it was the very song he had heard in his head all that day:
Come to the edge,
Come down to the ledge
Where the water laps the shore.
Come to the strand,
Seals to the sand,
The watery time is o’er.
When the song was done, she began it again. It was as if the whole beach, the whole cove, the whole world were nothing but that one song.
And as she sang, the water began to fill up with seals. Black seals and gray seals and seals of every kind. They swam to the shore at her call and sloughed off their skins. They were as young as the white seal maid, but none so beautiful in Merdock’s eyes: They swayed and turned at her singing, and joined their voices to hers. Faster and faster the seal maidens danced, in circles of twos and threes and fours. Only the white sea maid danced alone, in the center, surrounded by the castoff skins of her twirling sisters.
The moon remained high almost all the night, but at last it went down. At its setting, the sea maids stopped their singing, put on their skins again, one by one, went back into the sea again, one by one, and swam away. But the white seal maid did not go. She waited on the shore until the last of them was out of sight.
Then she turned to the watching man, as if she had always known he was there, hidden behind the gray rock. There was something strange, a kind of pleading, in her eyes.
Merdock read that pleading and thought he understood it. He ran over to where she stood, grabbed up her sealskin, and held it high overhead.
“Now you be mine,” he said.
And she had to go with him, that was the way of it. For she was a selchie, one of the seal folk. And the old tales said it: the selchie maid without her skin was no more than a lass.
They were wed within the week, Merdock and the white seal maid, because he wanted it. So she nodded her head at the priest’s bidding, though she said not a word.
And Merdock had no complaint of her, his “Sel” as he called her. No complaint except this: she would not go down to the sea. She would not go down by the shore where he had found her or down to the sand to see him in his boat, though often enough she would stare from the cottage door out past the cove’s end where the inlet poured out into the great wide sea.
“Will you not walk down by the water’s edge with me, Sel?” Merdock would ask each morning. “Or will you not come down to greet me when I return?”
She never answered him, either “Yea” or “Nay.” Indeed, if he had not heard her singing that night on the ledge, he would have thought her mute. But she was a good wife, for all that, and did what he required. If she did not smile, she did not weep. She seemed, to Merdock, strangely content.
So Merdock hung the white sealskin up over the door where Sel could see it. He kept it there in case she should want to leave him, to don the skin and go. He could have hidden it or burned it, but he did not. He hoped the sight of it, so near and easy, would keep her with him, would tell her, as he could not, how much he loved her. For he found he did love her, his seal wife. It was that simple. He loved her and did not want her to go, but he would not keep her past her willing it, so he hung the skin up over the door.