Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,328

was a filament so fine that Prim had to drop to her knees and bend close in order to see it; but when she did, it was the color of a new blade of grass when the sun first comes out from behind the clouds after a week of spring rain. Edda was using it to correct a sliver of map that had formerly been depicted as the edge of a desert. Now she was making it into a forest by using needle and thread to fashion a lot of clever little knots that looked the way trees must have looked to Corvus when he was soaring high above. The movements of her needle were deliberate, unhurried. Prim, no stranger to embroidery, winced a little whenever Edda’s needle plunged into the map, for it was as fine as the green thread and it seemed impossible to shove it through the tough ancient hide without breaking it. But it slipped through as if Edda were sewing in burlap. The smoothness with which the giantess worked was hypnotic to Prim, who passed into a state that somehow combined the most delicious alertness with a lack of moment-to-moment awareness akin to sleep. Time passed at once quickly and slowly. The tying of an individual tree knot, or a series of running stitches marking the course of a river’s tributary in bright blue silk, was carried out in carefully considered steps, and yet when Prim tore her gaze away from the detailed operation of the needle and rocked back to gaze at the entire map, she saw that a vast territory had been so depicted. And yet the sun had not yet begun to lighten the sky, and the lanterns had not consumed much oil.

Edda seemed to be working her way around the map according to whatever whim took her at the moment. She had begun with some corrections to the network of Shivers through which they would have to sail in order to get past Secondel, but then she had jumped down to the Last Bit and done some work with the silvery-blue silk that she favored for drawing the slender arms of the sea where they reached between islands; it was the color of cresting waves and so it warned mariners that here was surf over shallows and stones. Thence she had jumped over to the mainland and brightened the city of Toravithranax with many fine stitches in all colors, then continued eastward across the Land, running generally parallel to, and south of, the long feature known as the Hive-Way. Though Prim had never seen it, she had been told that it was made of the same stuff as the great Hive that buttressed the tall spire upon which El kept his Palace. In the middle of the Land, the Hive-Way fattened to an elongated lozenge enclosing the spire and the Palace, but east and west of there it was as slender as needle and yarn could make it. If one thought of the Hive-Way as a road, then it connected the Land’s west coast, at Secondel, to its east coast at Far Teem and North Teem, passing round the Palace in the middle. If one thought of it as a barrier, however, it cut the Land in two, between a north and a south half that were roughly equal in area. In order to get round it, one had to travel by sea—or, if one were Corvus, simply to fly over it.

Prim yawned, and all of a sudden had it in mind that she’d been up with Edda for a long time. She had been assisting the giantess by fetching lengths of colored silk, as requested, from her sewing kit, which was small enough to go in a pocket and yet seemed to contain no end of threads and needles. Threading such fine needles ought to have been nearly impossible in such dim light, but Prim had found that if she gazed fixedly upon the eye of one of Edda’s needles, it would seem to open up until it was the size of a doorway.

“Do you ever sleep?” Prim asked.

“I can sleep if I choose,” said Edda, “but if I don’t, it is fine.”

“Why is that, I wonder?” Prim asked.

“You see much in the day that needs to be sorted through, picked over, weeded, made sense of. That happens while you sleep. When you wake up, you remember what was important and you have it all sorted. For me, these things

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