Cat in Glass by Nancy Etchemendy Read Free Book Online

and jeered at her because it was unheard of for a woman to build her own house. They said that Jacinth must wish she were a man. Noa ordered her to stop, for her actions were unseemly and embarrassing. But Jacinth only smiled and went on.
    When it became clear that her project would succeed, the villagers stopped laughing and grew sullen. Still she worked, and before the summer ended, she moved her loom from the loft above the millstones to her own snug cottage with its thick window, straw roof, and warm hearth. In a corner by the fire, she propped the unfinished tapestry she had cut from the loom so many years before. There it stood mutely, where she could always see it.
    By the time the leaves changed color, the world seemed a different place to Jacinth. Her senses, which had for so long been deadened by her sorrow, began to awaken again. When she wandered in the groves and fields in search of dyestuffs, the songs of hidden birds swept over her like wind, and the autumn sun made her body tingle with pleasure. The smells of soil and ripe fruit and leaf mold no longer made her think of wintry death. Instead, they seemed a part of something wonderful and vast, a ritual of the earth much larger and more lasting than that of men.She gathered berries and insects and flowers that she had never noticed before, and the dyes they yielded gave her a palette like that of no other weaver in the land. When winter came, all the corners and nooks of her house were stuffed with skeins of yarn in every color, ready to be threaded into warp and weft and woven into the images of Jacinth’s heart.
    While the snow fell and the sharp wind blew it into drifts, Jacinth sat at her loom. She worked long hours every day, stopping only when she needed firewood or food, or when her eye grew too tired to decipher the threads before her. In the cheerful warmth of the cottage, her fingers stayed supple much longer than they had in the drafty mill loft. From dawn till dusk, the well-made window let in winter’s pale light, which served her much better than the flames of tallow candles had. Jacinth finished tapestry after tapestry, each one alive and powerful in its own right, each one an improvement on the last.
    When the ice and snow began to melt and the first green shoots of grass pushed up from the muddy fields, three men came to Aranho asking for the one-eyed weaver. Two of the men were ordinary merchants who had driven donkey carts from villages in the nearby countryside. But the third man wore rich clothes and rode a glossy black horse.
    “I am here in the service of a wealthy nobleman,” he said. “My master asked me to pay you for some tapestries to warm the stone walls of his house.”
    Jacinth shrugged and spread her winter’s work in the sun for the men to see. Then she watched with her armscrossed and her lips pressed tight together as they argued and compromised with one another over who was to get which of the pieces. A part of her felt elated and triumphant at this evidence of her success. But the old bitterness still lay inside her like a small, sharp jewel. And the part of her that cherished it could not forget that although men might desire her tapestries, they had never desired the woman who wove them.
    The next week, Jacinth took her dye pot to a sunny glade near the creek. She filled the pot with water and set it to boil over an open fire, then went about gathering enough meadow flowers to make a good yellow dye. As she stooped to pick a handful of wild mustard, she heard someone whistling in a tuneless and preoccupied way among the linden trees that grew by the water. She stood up to see who it could be, and the whistling stopped.
    “Jacinth, is that you?” someone called.
    She recognized Joth hobbling toward her over the muddy spring soil. She sighed, for in a small, mean way, she resented the fact that no one except another cripple ever took the trouble to greet her with such kindness. Nevertheless, the air was so sweet and