Free Daughter of Necessity by Marie Brennan Page B

knows what she has been doing; they all know, for Melantho has told them. Leodes has always been more tolerable than the others, for he is their priest, and alone among them he respects the obligations of a guest. He chides her now for her dishonesty, though, for lying to them all this time about the progress of her weaving. There will be no more thread for her, no days and nights spent safe in this room, trying to weave a path away from danger.
    He leaves her there with the empty frame and empty hands. She is not without choices: she has woven a hundred of them, a thousand, a new one every day. But every one ends in disaster. She will not choose disaster.
    In fury she takes up her scissors. There are no threads here for her to cut; she sets the blades instead to her hair. When she wed she cut a single lock in sacrifice; now she cuts them all. She kindles a fire in a bronze dish and gives her hair to the flames, an offering to the powers from whom she descends. If she cannot weave a good fate with her own hands, then she will pray for those powers to have pity upon her instead.
    The flames rise high, dancing twisting flickering tongues, weaving about one another in ephemeral knots. In their light, she sees her answer, and she thrusts her hands into the fire.
    When she withdraws them, threads of gold follow.
    She casts them quickly into the air, the steady lines of the warp, the glowing bundle of the weft. There, without loom, without doubt, she begins to weave the fate of one man.
    *   *   *
    He is on the island of Kalypso, prisoner and guest. The nymph sings as she walks to and fro across her loom, weaving with a shuttle of gold. But Kalypso is no kin to the Fates. Her pattern will falter, give way to a power stronger than her own.
    The gods themselves will order his release. One will try to drown him at sea, but he will come safe to the island of the Phaiakians. There he will find hospitality and tales of the war in years past, and one—the tale of his most clever strategem—will provoke him to admit his true name.
    He will tell them his tale, the long years since that war, and out of respect they will aid him in his final journey. In the house of the swineherd Eumaios his son will find him: Telemachos, evading the trap Antinoös has laid. Together they will devise a new strategem. The king will return to his palace as a beggar, to be ridiculed and mocked by the men who have impoverished his house for so long.
    And she …
    She will put a challenge before her suitors, to string and shoot her husband’s bow. One after another they will try and fail, until the filthy old beggar does what they cannot. And then he will turn his bow upon them, until every man among them lies dead.
    Odysseus, king of Ithaka, will come home at last.
    *   *   *
    The tapestry hangs in the air before her, a perfect creation, glowing with fire and hope.
    In the darkness beyond, her half-blinded eyes discern a silhouette. A woman, helmed and regal, who studies her work with a critical eye.
    Her own gaze follows, and she sees the flaw. The error which, perhaps, underlays all others, turning her every bid for victory into failure. And she knows how it must be mended.
    It is not easy to cast the final row. To cloud her own mind, robbing herself of this memory, the knowledge that she has woven Odysseus’ fate and through him, the fate of them all. But she must. If she knows what is to come, she will ruin it; she will betray the truth through a careless word or a toocautious act. There is a reason this gift is a thing of gods and not mortals.
    The thread settles into place, binding her own fate. She will see her husband and not know him; recognition will not come until he proves himself to her again.
    Her weaving is done. She kneels before the grey-eyed goddess and bows her head, accepting the ignorance that wisdom bestows. The brilliant light of her creation flares and then fades away.
    Her maids