Blackwork

by Shelly Jones

in Issue 95, December 2019

Aelif threaded her way through muddy alleys and darted toward the shop district. It had rained all night while she was diving in the sea for the byssus. “Good,” she thought, “no one will notice that I’m wet.” Aelif wrung the sea water from her dark braid and kept her gaze down at the uneven cobblestones. She had to dry herself as much as possible before sneaking back into Holbein’s. She had become adept at this, skimming excess water from her clothes and stopping in the alley behind the baker’s to bask in the heat radiating from his snug kitchen. The open masonry oven outside the bakery would always be roaring in the early morning hours when she would creep back to the embroiderer’s shop from her sea silk harvesting. There in the shadows of the brick fire, she could dry off, warm up and stay hidden. She’d rub her hands over the masonry, working out the knots of her palms and forearms. Harvesting the byssus was hard work as she had to be both gentle and fast, attacking the algae with quick, sharp jabs of her bodkin, prying the delicate fiber free from the mollusc, before propelling her body back to the surface for air. As a child she had tried to test herself, gathering as much byssus as she could and holding her breath for minutes at a time. Then, it had been a fun game, a way to pass the time while her grandfather did the hard work of harvesting the fine silky plant. Now her very life depended on her speed and precision. Each night she left her stifling attic and dove into the sea, the water bracing, reviving her after a day spent in quiet ossification.  Sometimes she thought about starting over, swimming far away to a new life. She could always sew. Surely a seamstress could always find work. But no, not if the guilds were in charge, she knew. And Aelif knew she could never abandon the byssus, which only grew in small pockets along the coastline. She wouldn’t let her grandfather’s death, his memory, be in vain. She thought of him as she stood in the firelight of the baker’s oversized oven, her forearms aching. In the crackling of the fire, something caught her attention: a shift in the shadows, a snap. She must move on.
 
The sea silk was heavy at Aelif’s side as she gripped the bodkin tightly under her damp cloak. He had been following her for several blocks. She knew would have to get rid of him. No one could know who she was. Holbein would be thrown out of the guild and she would be hanged. For thievery, for fraud, it wouldn’t matter the charge. The guild would make sure of it. 

She turned the corner at Kreuzplaat, opting to sneak past the church instead of the blacksmith one block up. Their god likes them well-rested and well-dressed, she thought.  They won’t be stirring at this hour, but maybe, if she had to, she could convince them to give her sanctuary. She would show them the byssus that she could spin into a fine thread that she had embroidered on their vestments. Her silk stitches were already adorning their sleeves, their slippers, their caules. But the question was: would they believe her? A woman. That was always the question when she thought about escaping, revealing herself and starting anew. No women were allowed in the guilds, so no woman could possibly have embroidered their clothes. They should believe her, she thought, as she crept past the ornate church, its pinnacles and buttresses looming over her small frame. Their holy mother was far more talented than me, she thought. But Aelif knew that did not matter. Not to the church, not to the guilds. 

She glanced over her shoulder and saw him. He had turned the corner and advanced on her faster than she had anticipated. Her mind raced as she envisioned the city before her. Should she sneak back toward the wharf? The woods? The open market? It was too early to lose him in a crowd. Aelif’s palms itched as she realized there was nowhere for her to hide. Why hadn’t she thought to double back to the shop earlier? In a wild gesture, she lurched down an alleyway and tucked herself into the door frame of a long-abandoned boarded up storefront. She sucked in her breath as if she were about to dive, and waited for him. She knew he would come like she knew how much thread she needed to back-stitch a vine border of a priest’s sleeve. And as she envisioned her hand positioned over the black fabric, he was upon her.  He exhaled sharply, his breath sour and hot on her face as he started to grin. He swept at her, the knife lashing at her cloak like a hawk diving for a fish, talons splayed. Aelif pulled back, pushing herself up against the wall, making herself as taut as possible. The thief sneered at her, eyeing her satchel, “Nowhere to go now. Let’s see what’s in your pack, eh?”

She waited for him to get closer before she thrust the bodkin up between his ribs, her other arm wrapped around his back. To a passerby it might have looked like a young couple enjoying the privacy of a dark corner. 

With a raspy, gurgling sound that reminded Aelif of her father cleaning fish, the dying man asked, “What, what’s your name?”

She paused, her breath cut short at the ordinary question. No one had ever asked her that, she realized. She had been called “girl” or “you” by most, even by Holbein. Only her grandfather ever called her by her full name, Aelif, his voice full and rich. She remembered an olive-skinned girl who used to call her “Lif,” a pleasant sound as short and sweet as the snip of a pair of fine shears.

“Blackwork,” she replied, finishing her work. She let him fall into the doorway and dove into the alley, backtracking toward Holbein’s, keeping her satchel tucked close to her chest. 

Back in her attic room, she was careful to lay out the byssus to dry on her work table. There was no moonlight tonight, making the work difficult.  Holbein didn’t allow her the use of a candle, fearing someone might see her at night, a candle illuminating her talent, her presence. He couldn’t risk anyone seeing her in the attic space intended for an apprentice he didn’t have. But Aelif was used to the dark, the work so ingrained in her it now felt mechanical, almost hollow. It was hard to recreate the mysticism of her grandfather, his reverence for the sacred sea silk, in the dark void of her attic room.  

As she delicately stretched the fibers out, pinning them lightly to the table, Aelif began to cry. She had killed a man tonight. To save herself, to save the byssus, her grandfather, even Holbein in a way. She wiped away a tear and smelled the faint tinny odor of blood on her fingertips. It hadn’t been the first time. The thieves’ guild, the Line, had grown more and more interested in the byssus over the past few years. Her grandfather’s death should have been the end to the sea silk as he was the only guildsman who knew the fine art, but she had continued the tradition under the guise of Holbein. Her grandfather had been a fine embroiderer, and well treated by the broderers, though she often noticed he seemed aloof about the guild’s inner workings. For years before his death, Aelif had tried to convince him to become the Alderman. She had wanted to see him in a suit of fine clothes, shaking hands with the burgermeister at a festival, maybe even marrying again. He had been more reclusive since his wife and son had died, and relied more and more on Aelif. If he were Alderman, maybe he wouldn’t be so lonely, talking to his stitches so often, snapping at Aelif when she miscounted rows or spun thread too tightly. But he had had no interest in politics or power, and worked only to tend to the byssus and stitch the precious sea silk. He had taught her how to dive and how to spin, and she often wondered why he had never taken on an apprentice in all the years she had been alive. 

Holbein had had his share of apprentices over the years, but he had once told Aelif that he had grown tired of teaching pimple-faced boys how to sew, boys who would only end up his future competition.  She remembered the day he had come to her grandfather’s shop, the day after he had died. Aelif had been sitting in a heap on the floor when Holbein, his hair beginning to grey and thin on top, stood in the doorway of the store, his eyes downcast. 

“What do you call this pattern?” Holbein asked pointing to an undulating stitch of blue on a caule on display at the front of the store. 

Aelif looked up and saw him pointing at the design she had made. She hadn’t thought to give it a name. She had patterned it after the shoreline. To her, it looked like the sea hurling itself against the fractured landscape.  It was what she saw when she dove for the byssus, it was what she saw when she thought of her father, who died at sea when she was just a girl.  “It doesn’t have a name,” Aelif mumbled.

Holbein nodded and stood for a moment as if unsure of what else to say. “You can’t stay here,” he said finally. “They’ll take it. The guild. They’ll take your home soon.” 

“Why do you say ‘they’?” Aelif asked, not bothering to wipe the tears from her eyes. She felt no shame in her grief. “Aren’t you the Alderman? Aren’t you the guild?” 

Holbein had not bristled at her disrespect, but gazed down at Aelif, his voice matter of fact. “It’s the tradition of the guild. Their way. It doesn’t matter who is Alderman. The guild is beyond me. It is not a needle I can control and thread – it is the nature of the fabric itself. You act as if I can make silk out of leather.”

Aelif stared at him, a man who she thought had been so powerful as the Alderman, reduced to nothing. “Then what am I to do?” Aelif asked, standing up. 

“You’ll work for me. Live in my attic. Be my apprentice. I’ll feed you and keep you off the streets, but no one can know about you. The guild would throw me out,” he said, turning away from her. “They could hang you if they find out. But your grandfather was a good man and he taught me many things. I owe him this much.” 

Had Holbein been her grandfather’s apprentice, Aelif wondered. Why else was he being so generous to her. She had recoiled at the idea of doing something illegal,but, she realized, what else was she to do? This way, she thought, she might still be able to sew and preserve her grandfather’s ways. With a slow nod, Aelif agreed and a few days later, she found herself in the dusty attic space above Holbein’s shop.

All day she would be cramped, folded in on herself, her work hugged into her.  She had grown accustomed to making herself small, to fit into her surroundings.  Holbein hadn’t trusted his wife not to accidentally tell a washwoman, a fishmonger, anyone, about Aelif.  He had lied to her instead and embellished on the success of the shop, reclaiming the disused attic as an additional work space for his suddenly booming business. His wife, however, sometimes wandered through the third floor, for an extra blanket, to tidy, to see if he had left a tea cup, a belt, the good scissors up there.  On those days Aelif would slip into a trunk or into the furthest depths of the closet remaining breathlessly still for long stretches of time, something she was used to from years of diving for byssus.

Years had gone by this way. Aelif had a routine in her attic, but at night at sea, she was careful not to establish a pattern. She knew the Line would be watching her. When she thought she felt their presence one night, she did not venture out again until the next phase of the moon. She had to be careful leaving the house as well. She had to watch for signs. If Holbein smelled of peppermint and talc, she couldn’t go out on these nights for he would be awake with his wife, feeding his baser needs. And some days he would reek of camphor oil, his gout aching well into the night, keeping the whole household awake with his brayings. But most nights, the house was still, full only of low breathing and the smell of stale bread and woodsmoke. On these nights she would sneak down the back stairwell, tucking herself against the wall, keeping as quiet as possible. 

Sometimes in the middle of the night, when she could hear Holbein and his wife up late whispering with one another, Aelif’s mind wandered to the olive-skinned girl. She often thought of writing to Seda, explaining her disappearance, telling her she was safe. She imagined long, winding letters that Seda would read, her knees tucked up under her, a sprig of rosemary pinned to her chest. But Aelif could not ever figure out how to articulate her situation, and worse, Aelif thought, Seda could never write back. How could Seda send her anything, addressed to a place that didn’t exist, to a shadow who couldn’t be anything outside of this dark space.  She longed to sit in a field of goldenrod with her once more, the sun warming their skin. They had spent many afternoons that way, Seda with a small basket of pine straw she was weaving in her lap, Aelif working on a bit of embroidery she had pulled from her pack. Sometimes in the unnerving silence of the night, she thought she could hear Seda’s voice, deep and somber, like an autumn rain falling on dead leaves. She remembered a walk through a copse of birch trees, a tall girl, full hipped and with strong legs, tramped on ahead of her. 

“Seda, wait up,” Aelif had called out to her. Catching up to her, the two sat, tucked against a tree trunk. Aelif absently plucked at a chain of goldenrod and began braiding strands together. “What will you be when you’re older? Will you be a cooper like your da?” Aelif had asked. 

“Be?” Seda had repeated. “I won’t be anything. I’ll do. But I’ll never be.” She stared at Aelif with honey-colored eyes. 

Aelif stopped plaiting the weeds, her eyes squinched shut against the sunlight as she tried to look at Seda. “What do you mean?” 

Seda had stood up and continued walking, without looking back at Aelif. “It will be the same for you. You will never be a broderer, you will only sew. There’s no future for us in which we can be or become anything. We will only work and do and others around us will be these great things.” Seda paused and turned back toward Aelif. She was tall and coarse like the birch trees around them and Seda seemed to blend into the grove. “I’ll have to marry whoever Da chooses, probably his apprentice.” 

“But I am a broderer,” Aelif replied indignantly, ignoring the image of Seda as a bride to someone else.  “I stitch and work hard and people like my work. My grandfather says,” Aelif’s voice grew louder as Seda raised up her hand. 

“Your grandfather won’t always be alive. You can’t expect to always help in his trade. That’s not realistic,” Seda said, her voice softening. She squeezed Aelif’s hand lightly, but Aelif turned her back, pretending to take in the view of the terrain they had climbed. Craggy stones jutted out of the hill with tufts of scrub grass dotting the path. Sometimes now in her little room, Aelif would stitch those stones in her cloth and sigh, realizing that Seda had been right. In her darkened attic she wondered if her life could ever be different, if she ever could be.


***


One clear night Aelif rose from the green brackish water, her grey tunic taut around her. She had been diving for over an hour and her satchel was swollen with sea silk. As she began wading toward shore, she felt something move ahead of her. Uneasy, Aelif froze, waiting for an attack, her bodkin gripped, ready. She inhaled deeply, prepared to retreat below the water, if necessary. But no attack came and there was no movement beside the gentle lapping of the waves around her. Aelif shook her head, chastising herself for being foolish.  

Aelif continued on her way, drying off at the baker’s and then continuing to Holbein’s, taking a circuitous route there. She slipped up the back stairs to her room with ease, closing it noiselessly behind her. While carefully pinning the byssus to her table to dry, Aelif heard a faint noise below her. After years of listening to the creaks and groans of the stuffy house, she was attuned to its sighs and wheezes depending on the season: a distant crackling in the fireplace in winter, the wail of the swollen door in summer.  This, she thought, was different. This was not the gurgling of Holbein relieving himself in the middle of the night, or the mewing of his two young daughters sneaking cookies to bed. This sounded more like the soft padding of an animal on the shop floor below. Aelif set down her pin and began slowly toward the door, feeling for the bodkin in her skirt pocket. She remembered suddenly that Holbein’s wife had taken their daughters out of town to visit her mother, who, from the snatches of conversation Aelif could make out, was ailing.  

She stood alert at the door, her ears straining to hear any sound from the floors below. Again, she heard a faint thud, a tentative step. She knew that sound from her own boots treading up along the wooden staircase each night. Someone was below her, and it was not Holbein. Aelif reached for the door handle and turned it slowly, listening for the click of the latch within the doorjamb. She waited a moment, waiting for someone to burst in upon her. But there was nothing. Cautiously, Aelif opened her attic door, peeking out into the darkened stairwell. The warmth from the dwindling fire down below reached her face and Aelif sniffed the air: no camphor oil, no peppermint, just a hint of woodsmoke and something else. Fish and sea salt, she thought to herself. The thieves’ guild. Aelif tightened her grip on the bodkin and pulled it out before her.  

Why had they come here, she wondered. What did they want? They had followed her from the sea. What had that man asked her in the alley that night? “What’s in the pack?” They were after the byssus, Aelif suddenly realized. But why? The Line had never tried to attack her grandfather all the years he had spun byssus. What had changed, Aelif wondered as she waited at the bottom of the stairs listening. As she stepped down to the second floor, Aelif  heard a deep guttural noise like the bleating of a sheep before being sheered. She darted down the hallway toward an open bedroom door. There she saw a dark figure standing over the bed, a tussle of sheets as Holbein kicked and jerked his arms free. As if springing from a rock, propelling herself up to the surface on a long dive, Aelif bolted toward the man, her bodkin out before her. The thief looked up and turned toward Aelif as she barrelled into him. She tried stabbing him, but he blocked her attack and whipped her around into the wall behind Holbein’s bed. Aelif fell to the floor, her head crashing into the wall. She did not notice the thief sprinting out the door as the room spun around her.  She wasn’t sure how long she sat there crumpled on the floor before she tried to stand, bracing herself on Holbein’s bed. Panting, she looked down at the guildmaster’s still body. She threw the sheets back from him, but could find no blood, no wound on him. “Mother of stitches,” Aelif quietly cursed. “If I fainted every time I was attacked,” she tutted, pulling the blankets back up around him. She picked up her bodkin that had rolled under the bed and turned back toward the door. Swallowing hard, she moved tentatively closer to the hallway and listened, but could hear no movement. She looked back to Holbein and saw his chest rise and fall beneath the sheet. She sighed and began heading back toward her attic room. 

As she started up the first step, she paused, wondering if the thief could still be downstairs waiting for her to go back to bed before creeping up to finish Holbein. Slowly, more tentatively, Aelif turned and began heading down the main stair that led to the shop below. She had never, in all her years of living as Holbein’s shadow, gone down the main stairs that led to the storefront.  Aelif steadied herself, her head swimming as she made her way down the steps. Reaching the landing, she peered out into the blackened room. A streak of moonlight shone through the broad windows on the far side of the store and Aelif stood a moment, staring, allowing her eyes to adjust to the light. She could sense no movement, no breathing from around her. She was sure she was alone, but kept her bodkin firm in her hand.  Looking around the room, Aelif felt herself ease, her muscles begin to slacken as if she were bobbing along in the water. She walked towards the front of the shop where wide shelves and small tables held Holbein’s work on display. Carefully, she avoided stepping into the moonlight, still wary of being seen by anyone outside who might be walking by. What had the thief wanted, Aelif wondered as she perused the cauls and cloaks embroidered by Holbein. She examined the stitches and noticed they were sloppy, imprecise. Then she spotted it. In the far corner of the storefront was a large display with two long, flowing cloaks: one with a brilliant stag in gold and vines of green wreathing the edges, another with a blue undulating stitch of the sea. Both she had sewn with byssus over the past few months. Aelif stood staring, her jaw slack, her eyes stinging with tears. She looked at a placard near a shawl she had embroidered with thistle and goldenrod and saw the price: 1,500 signes, more than four times what her family had lived on in a month, she knew. 

Holbein was selling byssus. He had been her grandfather’s apprentice and he was profiting off of his work. That must have been the difference, Aelif thought, the thing that had changed since her grandfather had died. But why did the Line care, she wondered. She tried to understand, but her head was pulsating, bruised and battered. She had hidden herself away to keep her traditions alive only to have Holbein disgrace her grandfather’s memory by profiting off of her work. Her byssus wasn’t a piece of cloth to be bought and sold. It was a gift from the sea, and was only to be given to those reverential enough to deserve it. The clergy wore byssus, but they weren’t the only ones who could. When a woman had come to Aelif’s grandfather wanting a sash to bring her prosperity in marriage or a baptismal gown laced with byssus for her baby, grandfather gave it to her, no signes required. 

Byssus wasn’t for sale, and apparently no one else in the guild, in the town, it seemed, understood that. Except maybe, the Line, she realized. Aelif mulled over the thought as she absent-mindedly moved through the shop. She no longer cared if anyone found her, no longer cared of Holbein’s reputation, or even of his life. She felt the weight of the bodkin in her hand, heavy and dull. Aelif wanted to rip Holbein out of her life like the poorly balanced stitches that he was. She looked up toward the stairwell and imagined jabbing his sleeping flesh as easily as if she were punching out lacing eyelets in a corset. But she shook her head, remembering the feeling of killing the thief in the alley. That had been justified, she had convinced herself. His life or her own. If the Line had tried to kill Holbein, if they had attacked her for her pack of algae, perhaps they respected byssus more than she had known. Maybe they too rejected Holbein for selling the precious sea silk, Aelif mused, and that’s why they wanted him dead. To prevent him from making a profit.  Or to make their own, she thought, disheartened. 

Aelif sighed.  She considered taking the shawl and the cloaks, hiding them in her room until she could distribute them properly. But she hesitated. If Holbein discovered them, he’d throw her out or even report her to the guild, somehow disguising his own guilt. Who would believe her word over that of a master of a guild? She couldn’t risk it. Not without protection. The light outside was beginning to soften; it was nearly dawn. She needed to get back to her attic room. Slowly, she made her way to the back stairwell and ascended the steep steps. 

Aelif tried to sleep, but her mind vaulted like the sea during a storm. Thoughts racked her, ideas pricking her like a wayward pin. Holbein was profiting and the Line didn’t like it. If the thieves’ guild wants the byssus protected, Aelif thought, perhaps they would work with her. She thought about the man looming over Holbein, the man she tried to kill. She was grateful now that he had gotten away, but hadn’t he almost committed a crime? Hadn’t she too? Aelif threw off her blanket, an itchy moth-bitten wool, and wondered: did Holbein deserve to die? Hadn’t he lied, betrayed her, all the while profiting off of her work, while she risked her life? But was that enough to kill him, she wondered. The Line apparently thought so, and they didn’t even know about her. Aelif sat up in bed, her fingers itching for a needle and thread. She had work to do, she realized, if she were going to tell them, if she were ever going to be. 

The next night Aelif returned to the sea.  As she dove into its chilling embrace, she tried to focus, tried not to think about Holbein or the assassination attempt, but with each jagged turn of her bodkin to free the byssus, she imagined the events of the night before. He had not come to her since then, had not talked to her about the incident.  Aelif wondered if he even remembered what had happened. Perhaps he had thought it only a bad dream, a nightmare that his wife was not there to sooth and pat away. 

When it was time, Aelif stepped out of the sea and headed into the city. She did not meander, she did not backtrack or change her course. She knew she was being followed and that was what she wanted. She led them directly to the alley behind the shop. Before slipping in, she took a small piece of cloth out of her pack and pinned it to the doorframe. When she was inside, she did not see a figure glide past the door, rip off the cloth and stuff it into his pocket. 

Aelif sat in her darkened room waiting. She knew they would find the cloth she had spent the day embroidering – a piece of canvas, sturdy and dependable. On it, she had embossed a grizzled hog who grazed freely while a woman stood behind inside a pen, looking out between the bars. In a panel below there was simply a dagger embroidered in the middle of the cloth, glistening as though in the moonlight. Aelif had used a small portion of her byssus, carefully dyeing it with woad leaves to give it a blueish-grey tint. In a final panel below that, the woman was floating in a pool of water of indigo. Aelif had used her favorite undulating stitch to mimic the tide, the waves cresting, spilling over the edge of the fabric. She was not used to crafting such elaborate scenes in her work, but she knew no other way to communicate with the Line. Let the byssus be my voice, she thought as she waited. It was not long before she heard it, a click below. She stood, ready. 


***


Aelif stood on a moss-draped stone, a pine straw basket at her hip. Her bare feet, strong and tanned, held firm from years of practice. She quietly recited the oath of her people, her head bowed, nearly touching her moonlit reflection. As she dove, Aelif closed her eyes and drew a full breath, air pressing at her rib cage. The water felt warm on her face and she dove deeper, with purpose, with ease. She was harvesting byssus and could spin it into a fine thread. Aelif rose to the surface, the bodkin loosely in her hand, sea silk spilling from her pack. She gazed out at the craggy shoreline. In the distance, somewhere in the dark, she knew they were there – lithe figures watching her, watching over her, keeping the byssus safe.

©December 2019, Shelly Jones

Shelly Jones is an Associate Professor of English at SUNY Delhi, where she teaches classes in mythology, fairy tales, literature, and writing. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from SUNY Binghamton. Outside of academia she is an active nerd who enjoys board games, Dungeons and Dragons, being outdoorsy, and knitting. Her speculative fiction has been published in Podcastle, Luna Station Quarterly, and  New Myths. This is her first appearance in ​Swords & Sorcery Magazine.