Long lay the world in sin and error pining
There are many tales of women and weaving, and this one is no different. Yet, if the scholars are true to their texts, they will be forced to admit that all those tales are merely copies of this one.
Iris lived alone in a house too big for her needs. In fact, it was a castle. Her only companion was her handmaid, a woman named Iffy (short for Iphigenia), who was getting on in years but still as ruddy-cheeked as a young child and cheerful as one, too.
The castle was perfectly round, and all other things peculiar to it flowed from this first peculiarity. This wasn’t something Iris knew from looking at it on the outside; in fact, she had no memory of ever stepping foot outside of its confines. She knew about it because the halls of the house joined up in one big circle. And because, in the center of the castle, there was a perfectly round courtyard that mirrored the wider circle of the house. Inside the courtyard were fruit trees—all kinds of citrus, as well as pomegranate and apple—peppered in between with trim topiary and blushing rose bushes. Bordering the courtyard was a portico with Roman columns that were quite out of style with the rest of the house.
Now, there were no windows facing outwards in the whole house, just as there were no doors; the only windows were those that looked down into the courtyard, which of course produced only the dimmest light. In consequence, Iris’s knowledge of the outside world was drawn from two sources only: first, the sun and the moon when they crossed the small patch of sky above the courtyard, and second, a tapestry that hung along the inside wall of the portico.
This tapestry had clearly seen better days, for its colors were faded and its threads were worn or hanging loose in many places. But that didn’t change the splendidness, the sheer scope and intricacy of its design, a tenth of which I couldn’t even begin to fit into this narrative unless I talked of nothing but the tapestry. Apart from the company of her maidservant, the tapestry was Iris’s only solace in such a dismal place, and yet, whenever she looked at it, she was sad, exceedingly sad. Often after viewing it, Iris would have strange dreams and wake confused the next morning.
One such morning, when Iffy came in with breakfast on a tray, she noted the wild look in her mistress’s eye, which was drawn to the brightening patch of sunlight filtering in from the courtyard. While the maidservant lit the candelabras to chase away the morning gloom, she readied herself for the barrage of odd questions she knew were about to descend on her.
“Have we always been in this house, Iffy?”
“Where else might we have been but here, my lady?”
The lady of the house did not answer.
“Was there not a stream and a tree?”
Good-natured Iffy could only smile and respond in the key of “I know not, my lady, for I never heard of such,” but as on other like mornings, it was the only time her smile was stretched a little too thin, for it wavered at the corners. Sometimes, if Iris asked this while Iffy was at her own embroidery, Iffy’s hand would hover with the needle in the air, her thread pulled taut and her eyes seeming to stare out of her head without settling on anything in particular. Iris knew that look. The shadow behind the eyes was the same shadow Iris felt in her mind when she tried too hard to remember.
But Iris continued. “Were there not…thorns that sprang up?”
Iffy paused as she was in the middle of pouring the tea; her hand became unsteady and she spilled some on the saucer. Iffy’s manner was distracted as she dabbed the saucer with the edge of her apron, but she shook her head like a cat shaking its ears, and when she handed Iris the cup of tea, her eyes were clear and merry again. “I know what you’re thinking of. The blackthorn on the edge of the tapestry.”
Iris’s brow drew to a crease. “Perhaps. Yes, perhaps that’s it.”
The truth Iris couldn’t admit to her maid was that the dreams were coming more and more often. Rather than putting her questions to rest, the dreams pulled at the corners of her mind until she knew not whether their dim and fragmented images were memories or mere fancies.
The tapestry, as I’ve said, was a perfect circle, but I don’t mean it was a long rectangle meeting up at the edges. I mean that it was a perfect circle of whole cloth, with no inner edges joining up, and so no beginning and no end. With this in mind, what was the ordering of pictures in the tableau? There was a blooming garden at the top of a high mountain, burnished in golden sun and wrapped in a rainbow, and Iris often thought this was the ending of the tableau. But almost as often, she thought it might have been its beginning. Other scenes ranged from happy to grim and despairing. In one section, a troupe of men and women with blushing faces joined hands and danced together in the bright daylight. In another section, they wandered lonely and scattered, pair by pair, under a crescent moon. There were some scenes so shot through with joy that they hurt to look at, but even these were given a mournful tone by the bare, leafless blackthorn that bordered the whole tapestry along the top and bottom.
Yet there was one part of the tapestry’s narrative that Iris was late in discovering. Hidden deep in the background of a busy scene—a scene that was either a war or a city being built or a great migration or all three—was the figure of a man whom Iris somehow knew with certainty was a prince. He was facing the scene from a higher ground amid some trees, but the details of his face were hidden by a few lines of silver moonbeams woven into the design.
Had he always been in the tapestry? Had she missed him there the whole time? Iris didn’t know, but it seemed impossible that it should be so since she knew the tapestry backwards and forwards. She didn’t tell Iffy about it, either. But each night before retiring to sleep, her routine was to examine this exact place in the tapestry to confirm that the figure was still there. It would be impossible to tell how long she kept up this habit, for time passed oddly in that house, and Iris couldn’t keep track of more than a few weeks at a time.
Once upon an evening, the figure had vanished. Disconsolate and rather panicked, Iris circled the portico, shining the light of a candelabra all over the tapestry, well aware of how mad she must look. But then, she reasoned, it’s no madder to suppose he’s moved to another place in the tapestry than to suppose he’s vanished at all! She kept this up the next night, and the night after that, and the night after that, having resolved to work her way more methodically over every square inch of the tapestry.
It wasn’t long before Iris grew pale and the light fled from her eyes. She barely slept for she couldn’t bear to dream, and all of it was enough to worry Iffy, who begged to know the cause. Finally, Iris told her about the prince in the tapestry.
Iffy had words of comfort but somehow none of them were convincing. Some of Iris’s confusion and melancholy seemed to rub off on her as the story was related, much as the maidservant pushed through it with hollow smiles. But one thing her maidservant said remained with her.
“I feel as if I’m under some sort of spell, Iffy,” Iris had said.
And Iffy answered: “All spells are circles, my lady. It does no good to wander around in them.”
After that, Iris only sat in the courtyard without going to the portico. Iris’s health improved; she dreamed less, was more composed, and the frustration of sorting out the real from the unreal subsided. But so did the rebel feeling of irrepressible hope that came with it.
One morning, Iffy came in with the breakfast tray as usual and began lighting the candles. She asked if the mistress had slept well? Iris answered that she had, but there was little brightness in her manner of saying it. A thought occurred to Iris that she couldn’t help expressing. She said that perhaps it were better to wander, if there were some hope or object in it, than to stand in one place with no hope at all.
“No hope, my lady! The master of the house would desire your cheer.”
Iris went very still. Iffy, her hands busy with the tea, hardly seemed to realize what she had just said. When she did, her hands began trembling and she dropped the cup to the floor in a shatter of porcelain that neither of them bothered to look at.
The two women faced each other, both pale as statues. “I—I don’t know why I said that.”
“Have you remembered something, Iffy?” asked her mistress, eagerly.
The words came slowly and Iffy tilted her head to one side, as if the memories would flow better that way. “I thought it were all fancies of mine. Old age and a lonely life playing tricks on this addled brain. But then I saw—,” Iffy gaped, as if she were looking straight through her mistress to a vision on the wall behind, “—in the tapestry—I saw—”
Iris didn’t wait for her to finish, whether Iffy had it in her to finish or no. She ran down the staircase, half stumbling. She needed no candelabra to examine the tapestry in the full light of the morning sun.
She didn’t find it—find him. Not that time. Doing so within the vastness of the clothbound story proved overwhelming, but an unexpected alteration in the tapestry’s design gave her a new clue. She found that the whole tapestry was transformed by the presence of a red thread, woven throughout the whole thing, flowing around and within and through each part of it in circuitous curls and spirals, interlocking and drawing together each scene and story. She followed its labyrinthine route all around the circle, until the thread disappeared behind a hill.
The prince, she thought, must be there, but he was hidden. When she cross-examined Iffy later that day, Iffy could indeed describe him in exactly the same way that Iris had seen him, leading the end of the red thread but in an altogether different spot in the tapestry.
Iris returned in the evening and with a candelabra—partly out of old habit and partly out of a vague conviction that more might be revealed by the light of the moon.
And that time, she found him. When she found him, he was not half hidden somewhere against the horizon but prominently placed in the foreground, the subject of his own scene. He was framed all around by the red thread, which, though one, seemed as if many in its overlapping spirals and curlicues. Iris was astounded to find that the tapestry had a focal point at last. The prince’s scene somehow drew together all the others and made sense of them, tightening their threads of meaning into a cohesive whole.
The awe of it occupied her so long that she barely noticed what the prince’s scene depicted. His arm was raised, the hand poised, holding something. Light flickered off a sliver of silver embroidery. He was holding a needle. The fluid line of red that filled the rest of the cloth crossed here. This all made sense to Iris. But whether of thread flowing from the needle or of blood flowing from the hand, she couldn’t tell.
The candelabra suddenly felt intolerably heavy, and she kneeled to set it down on the paving stones. But just as she did so, a gust of wind blew through the portico and the flames guttered out. The chill of the streaming moonlight seemed to cut straight through her bones, but she ignored it and, on hands and knees, searched on the pavement for the candle pieces as her eyes adjusted to the moonlight. As her hand closed around the last candle, her fingers brushed against something wet. Dark and shining, it dripped from the edge of the tapestry and down the stone wall into a thin pool on the stone floor.
The tapestry was weeping blood.
The wind picked up in a sound gale, blowing Iris’s hair about her face, howling like an animal caught in a trap. Iris put her hands to her ears and bolted as fast as she could into the hallway and up the stairs.
She was curled up on the bed, still wearing her boots and cloak, when Iffy found her. Even Iffy, when told what had happened, couldn’t think of a reason to talk her mistress out of her woe and started weeping with her. “This place is cursed,” said Iris, half into her tear-stained pillow. “We will die here.” For she remembered wholly now. Remembered everything from the beginning. She remembered all too well her cursed willfulness, her stubborn foolishness that had enacted the spell and closed up the house, banishing herself from her husband. She knew now that he’d placed the tapestry here to remind her, but she’d been too slow, too late. To her shame, she wondered if her forgetting was another willfulness of its own.
Iris’s curiosity wouldn’t admit of her staying in bed. But the next day, she could find no sign of the blood on the stone—not even a stain. The pattern of the red thread had not changed, but to her despair, she could find no sign of the prince. In the place where he had been standing, where the blood had dripped, the tapestry had torn in two.
An untimely frost and light powdering of snow had rimed the whole courtyard. Even a single night of that chill had proven too much for the trees, whose fruit had withered and fallen from the branches. She sat under one of the dead trees and wept until there were no more tears left in her. Iffy found her there the next morning, having fallen asleep wrapped in her cloak and shivering.
Iffy chafed Iris’s hands to warm them but didn’t seem overly concerned for her mistress. “The sun will soon warm you. See?” she said. “The snow has melted.” The merry glow in Iffy’s smile was not the same strident good cheer that she usually wore. It was concealing nothing, forgetting nothing. It was pure joy. Iris did not understand it.
Iffy explained slowly. “The house has windows again. Windows and doors. Spring is outside and ripe as a strawberry. Do you remember in the tapestry, my lady, the troupe of dancing men and women? They are your servants. They are come in the flesh to prepare the house for its master.”
As if to punctuate Iffy’s commentary, a window opened above them and a young maidservant was seen shaking out a rug. Iris saw it and was thankful for it, but paid it little heed.
She was on her feet in a moment. She stood in front of the rent in the tapestry and remembered Iffy’s words. All spells are circles. This one was broken.
The blackthorn that bordered the tapestry had broken out into a riot of white blooms. She saw it and was thankful for it, but paid it little heed.
She stepped through the tear in the tapestry. A hand found hers and pulled her up and through, into her own story. Into a realm that seemed fuller, with more color and dimension than the one she had left.
Her husband turned to face her.
Thank you for reading!
Click here to read the first and second stories in this fairy tale series, begun during Advent:
A Feast of Penny Loaves by Jennifer Downer (Theme: Bread from Heaven)
The Enchanted Pen by Alexis P. Johnson (Theme: The Word Became Flesh)
The stories are not connected and may be read in any order!
A marvelous allegory! The veil has been torn in two -- we can return to the Garden.