Gathering Blue - Lois Lowry [25]
"You must learn the dyes," the old woman said. "You come for that, aye? Your mum did, and she was to teach you."
"There wasn't time." Kira sighed. "And now they want me to know it all, and do the work — the repairing of the Singer's Robe? You know about that?"
Annabella nodded. She returned to the drying-rope and finished hanging the yellow strands. "I can give you some threads," she said, "to start the repair. But you must learn the dyes. There are other things they'll want of you."
Kira thought again of the untouched expanse across the back and shoulders of the robe. It was what they would want of her, to fill that space with future.
"You must come here each day. You must learn all the plants. Look —" The woman gestured at the garden plot, thick with thriving plants, many in summer-start bloom.
"Bedstraw," she said, pointing to a tall plant massed with golden blossoms. "The roots give good red. Madder's better for reds, though. There's my madder over behind." She pointed again, and Kira saw a sprawling, weedy plant in a raised bed. "Tis the wrong time to take the madder roots now. Fallstart's better, when it lies dormant."
Bedstraw. Madder. I must remember these. I must know these.
"Dyer's greenweed," the woman announced, poking with her cane at a shrub with small flowers. "Use the shoots for a fine yellow. Don't move it, though, lessen you must. Greenweed don't want to transplant."
Greenweed. For yellow.
Kira followed the woman as she rounded a corner of the garden. Annabella stopped and poked at a clumped plant with stiff stems and small oval leaves. "Here's a tough fellow," she said, almost affectionately. "Saint Johnswort, he's called. No blooms yet; it's too early for him. But when he blooms, you can get a lovely brown from his blossoms. Stain your hands though." She held her own up and cackled with laughter.
Then: "You'll be needing greens. Chamomile can give you that. Water it good. But take just the leaves for your green color. Save the blossoms for tea."
Kira's head was already spinning with the effort to remember the names of the plants and the colors they would create, and only a small corner of the lavish garden had been described. Now at the sound of the word water and also tea she realized that she was thirsty.
"Please, do you have a well? Might I have a drink?" she asked.
"And Branchie too? He been looking for a stream but found nought." Matt's voice piped beside Kira; she had almost forgotten that he was there.
Annabella led them to her well behind the cott, and they drank gratefully. Matt poured water into the crevice of a curved rock for his dog, who lapped eagerly and waited for more.
Finally they sat together in the shade, Kira and the old woman, Annabella. Matt, gnawing his bread, wandered off with Branch at his heels.
"You must come each day," Annabella repeated. "You must learn all the plants, all the colors. As your mum did when she was a girl."
"I will. I promise."
"She said you had the knowledge in your fingers. More than she did."
Kira looked at her hands, folded in her lap. "Something happens when I work with the threads. They seem to know things on their own, and my fingers simply follow."
Annabella nodded. "That be the knowledge. I got it for the colors but never for the threads. My hands was always too coarse." She held them up, stained and misshapen. "But to use the knowledge of the threading, you must learn the making of the shades. When to sadden with the iron pot. How to bloom the colors. How to bleed."
To sadden. To bloom. To bleed. What a strange set of words.
"And the mordants too. You must learn those. Sometimes sumac. Tree galls are good. Some lichens.
"Best is — here, come; let me show you. See you make a guess to its birthplace, this mordant." With surprising agility for a woman of four-syllable age, Annabella rose and led Kira to a covered container near the place where a large kettle of dark water, too huge for cooking food, hung above the smoldering remains of an outdoor fire.
Kira leaned forward to see, but when