Page 54 of Katabasis
She fought to keep her voice level. “It’s not the Cooke.”
“Then what is it? Have I done something?”
“It’s not you, honestly—”
“Was it about that one morning? Is it my—”
“God, Murdoch, no!”
“If you’re angry with me, justtellme.”
“It’s just—” She broke off. She could not shake the sudden conviction that someone was laughing at her. She was sure she’d heard a woman giggle. She glanced about but saw no one. Peter’s face set in familiar concern, and she felt the panic again that she was going mad. “I’m just—”
There it was again, a definite tinkling laugh.
Alice spun around. “Stop that!”
“Stop what?”
“Can’t you hear it?” She marched around the embankment. Someone was hiding, lurking, she knew it—only everywhere she turned she saw only rock. The nearest Shade was Bill Cadeaux, and he was well up the slope by now. Still the laughter intensified. It was so clear now; she couldn’t have imagined it. Archimedes, too, had sensed something. The cat froze in its steps, eyes like slits, tail stiff as a board.
“Alice, stop.” Peter grasped her arm. “Sit down, have some water—”
She wriggled away. “Stop, listen—”
Archimedes yowled.
A flurry of color emerged out of the rock—rippling skeins of reds and pinks and purples, truly, an attack on the senses, after all that endless gray and burning red. At first Alice thought they’d been swarmed by butterflies, or sentient rosy clouds, until the silks stopped ballooning and settled against the form of a tall and slender woman.
“Hello, there.” She beckoned to them, waving. “Come closer.”
Alice froze, unsure whether that was the kind of “come closer” mermaids uttered before they dragged you underwater.
“I’m sorry I’ve been rude.” The woman lifted a sleeve to her lips and giggled in a way that was not sorry at all. “I get so nosy. Don’t run, dears.” Her silks rippled, and suddenly she was right in front of them. “I don’t bite.”
She was terribly beautiful. A dimpled smile against a round, open face. Black hair so shiny it was reflective, drifting weightless around her waist. She floated within robes changing colors as quickly as water dappling under sunlight. She held skeins of thread in both hands; as she spoke, her fingers worked quickly, pulling them through some loom that floated on its own, and the cloth she produced seemed to disappear just as quickly into the rippling folds of her dress.
Alice racked her mind but could not match this woman to any of the descriptions of Hell’s deities. The woman lifted a sleeve to her brightly painted mouth and tittered. “Cat got your tongue?”
The silks at her waist arced back and forth in the air. Some bell rang faintly in Alice’s mind; some half-forgotten footnote, some arcane mention she hadn’t bothered chasing up. Not Arachne, not the Yellow Emperor’s wife. A deity of stars, feathers, and longing.
“You’re from above.” Alice remembered now. She hadn’t run across the Weaver Girl in any of her research on Hell, but rather in an undergraduate seminar on translated mythologies. The Weaver Girl, a daughter of the stars, fell in love with the mortal Cowherd, and their love was forbidden by the gods. Only on one day of the year were they permitted to reunite, and when they did, a flock of magpies formed a bridge beneath their feet. “You’re the goddess of lovers reuniting. Lovers long separated.”
The Weaver Girl beamed. “Very good!”
“But what are you doing here? Your sort don’t die.”
“Right again,” said the Weaver Girl. “But mortals do.”
“Your lover,” Alice realized.
“My Cowherd.” The Weaver Girl’s silks flashed blood-red, brown, then listless gray. “My star sisters warned me his hair would whiten, that his bones would crumble, that one day I would look into that face and feel no passion at all. But it all happened soquickly. One day, the strapping man I adored. The next, a skeleton. Then one night his heart stopped. I followed him to the next world. But this was not enough!” Her silks turned pitch-black, heavy. “He wanted to reincarnate. I could not. Our souls are not like those of humans; to be washed clean and plopped into new bodies to try again. I begged him to stay here with me. But he grew bored by sands with no ocean and a sky without stars. We thought once we had conversation enough to last through eternity. It turns out we couldn’t even last the year.” The Weaver Girl’s voice shook. “One day, I awoke and found he had abandoned me for the Lethe. Ever since I have roamed these fields alone. At the crossing from Desire to Greed, where desire runs dry, and lovers think only of themselves.”
A tear trickled glistening down her cheek. The effect was very tragic, though Alice thought she was rather hamming it up. Perhaps this was how immortal deities passed the time, perfecting their own mythologies.
The Weaver Girl pointed up, and the two ends of her sash did a spiraling dance toward the sky. “The next chance you have, look up at the night sky. It’s missing a constellation. A bridge is broken.” Her sash collapsed. “Darkness, now.”
“Haven’t you ever tried to find him?” asked Peter.
