The Eyes of the Dragon(59)

Beson and his Lesser Warders were convinced of it. They had, in fact, begun to wager on when it would happen. One night, about a week after the onset of his fever, while the wind raged blackly outside and the temperature dropped down to zero, Ro-land appeared to Peter in a dream. Peter was convinced that Roland had come to take him to the Far Fields.

"I'm ready, Da'!" he cried. In his delirium he didn't know if he had spoken aloud or only in his mind. "I'm ready to go!"

Yell not be dying yet, his father said in this dream... or vi-sion... or whatever it was. Ye've much to do, Peter.

"Father!" Peter shrieked. His voice was powerful, and below him, the warders-Beson included-quailed, thinking that Peter must be seeing the smoking, murdered ghost of King Roland, come to take Peter's soul to hell. They made no more wagers that night, and in fact one of them went to the Church of the Great Gods the very next day and embraced his religion again, and eventually became a priest. This man's name was Curran, and I may tell you of him in another story.

Peter really was seeing a ghost in a way-although whether it was the actual shade of his father or only a ghost born in his fever-struck brain, I cannot say.

His voice lapsed into a mutter; the warders did not hear the rest.

"It's so cold... and I am so hot."

My poor boy, his glimmering father said. You've had hard trials, and there are more of them ahead, I think. But Dennis will know...

"Know what?" Peter gasped. His cheeks were red, but his forehead was as pale as a wax candle.

Dennis will know where the sleepwalker goes, his father whis-pered, and was gone.

Peter lapsed into a faint that quickly became a deep, sound sleep. In that sleep, his fever broke. The boy who had made it his practice over the last year to do sixty push-ups and a hundred sit-ups each day awoke the next morning too weak to even get out of bed... but he was lucid again.

Beson and the Lesser Warders were disappointed. But after that night, they always treated Peter with a kind of awe, and took care never to go too close to him.

Which, of course, made his job that much easier.

All that is an easy enough tale to tell, though it would no doubt be better if I could say for sure that the ghost was there or that it was not. But like other matters in the larger tale, you'll have to make up your own mind about it, I suppose.

But how am I to tell you about Peter's endless, drudging work at that tiny loom? That tale is beyond me. All the hours spent, sometimes with frosty breath pluming from his mouth and nose, sometimes with sweat running down his face, always in fear of discovery; all those long hours alone, with nothing but long thoughts and almost absurd hopes to fill them. I can tell you some things, and will, but to convey such hours and days of slow time is impossible for me, and might be impossible for anyone except one of the great storytellers whose race is long vanished. Perhaps the only thing that even vaguely suggests how much time Peter spent in those two rooms was his beard. When he came in, it was only a shadow on his cheeks and a smudge under his nose-a boy's beard. In the 1,825 days which followed, it grew long and luxuriant; by the end it reached the middle of his chest, and although he was only twenty-one, it was shot with gray. The only place it did not grow was along the length of the jagged scar left by Beson's thumbnail.

Peter dared pluck only five threads from each napkin the first year-fifteen threads each day. He kept them under his mattress, and at the end of each week, he had one hundred and five. In our measure, each thread was about twenty inches long.

He wove the first batch a week after he received the dollhouse, working carefully with the loom. Using it was not as easy at seventeen as it had been at five. His fingers had grown; the loom had not. Also, he was horribly nervous. If one of the warders caught him at his work, he could tell them he was using the loom to weave errant threads from the old napkins for his own amusement... if they believed it. And if the loom worked. He wasn't sure that it would until he saw the first slim cable, per-fectly woven, emerging from the loom's far end. When Peter saw this, his nervousness abated somewhat and he was able to weave a little faster, feeding the threads in, tugging them to keep them straight, operating the foot pedal with his thumb. The loom squeaked a little at first, but the old grease soon limbered up and it ran as perfectly as it had in his childhood.

But the cable was terribly thin, not even a quarter of an inch through the center. Peter tied off the ends and tugged experi-mentally. It held. He was a little encouraged. It was stronger than it looked, and he thought it should be strong. They were royal napkins, after all, woven from the finest cotton thread in the land, and he had woven tightly. He pulled harder, trying to guess how many pounds of strain he was putting on the slim cotton cable.

He pulled even harder, the rope still held, and he felt more hope come stealing into his heart. He found himself thinking about Yosef.

It had been Yosef, head of the stables, who told him about that mysterious and terrible thing called "breaking strain." It was high summer, and they had been watching huge Anduan oxen pull stone blocks for the plaza of the new market. A sweat-ing, cursing drover sat astride each ox's neck. Peter had then been no more than eleven, and he thought it better than a circus. Yosef pointed out that each ox wore a heavy leather harness. The chains that pulled the dressed blocks of stone were attached to the harness, one on each side of the animal's neck. Yosef told him the cutters had to make a careful estimate of just how much each block of stone weighed.