Liar’s Cloth

Stories for Another Day

In the weavers’ district in a large town, a man and his daughter Saydie had a shop where they sold fabric of all kinds, plain blue cotton, exotic patterned silks, and soft warm wool, all of which they made themselves on looms in the back of the shop.

In the house next door, a master-weaver called Zebulun worked with his three sons, Zac, Zeph, and Zy, whom he treated little better than slaves. He was a proud man, and he was most proud that in a town famous for its weaving, his cloth was regarded as the best in the town. Every year a competition was held to judge the finest cloth, and for ten years in a row, ever since Zy was old enough to work at the loom, Zebulun’s workshop had won, for Zy had a sure hand and a good eye for colour.

However, as Saydie grew up, she began to weave in beautiful, striking designs and glowing colours, and many of Zebulun’s customers started to buy their cloth from Saydie instead of at Zebulun’s shop. Zebulun grew more and more discontented. In a fit of anger, he hired men to go to the workshop one night when Saydie was out, and beat her father and wreck everything they could lay their hands on. When Saydie got home, the workshop was in ruins, and her father was lying on the floor half-dead.

In the morning, Zebulun went to visit Saydie and said, “I have heard that your father has had an accident and cannot weave any more. Come, you cannot run this workshop on your own. Give me your designs and I will have them woven by my sons, and we will share the profits together.”

Saydie knew very well that Zebulun would keep the lion’s share of the profits and pay her only a small part of what her work was worth, so she said, “My father and I can still run our shop. Although his hands are too badly broken for him to weave, he can still talk to the customers while I do the weaving.”

Zebulun was angry, but he hid his anger behind a slick smile. “At least let me send workmen to do some repairs on your workshop for you, to show my good will towards you.”

Saydie had to agree. There was so much damage to the workshop that she could never afford to have it repaired herself.

Zebulun kept his word and sent workmen to the house, but he gave them secret instructions. While they were fixing the walls and repairing the windows, they were also to build a secret passage between his house and Saydie’s. That way Zebulun could cross secretly into Saydie’s workshop at night, and spy on her while she was working.

Night after night he crept noiselessly between the houses. He watched Saydie drawing up her designs and he copied them line for line into his own notebooks. Then the next day, he would give them to his sons and order them to weave Saydie’s designs. The result was that every time Saydie completed a new piece of work she found that Zebulun had already made cloth with the same design, but three times as much of it, for he had three sons to do his weaving for him. Her customers began to drift back to Zebulun and he couldn’t have been happier.

Saydie couldn’t understand it. “They’re my own designs, out of my own head!” she said to her father.

“Zebulun must have copied them somehow,” her father said.

“How can he copy them if he has never seen them?” Saydie said. “Some of our customers are beginning to say that it is I who have copied his work!”

“There is only one thing to do,” he said. “For the competition this year, you must make something so extraordinary and so unique that everyone will recognise it as your own work.”

Saydie spent weeks and weeks thinking and planning and drawing and sketching. Finally a design grew in her head different from anything she had ever seen before. To be sure that no-one could copy it, she didn’t put it on paper but kept the whole design in her head.

A week before the competition, she began weaving. As usual, Zebulun crept into her attic and peered down at what she was doing. “Where’s the plan?” he muttered to himself. “Where is the drawing she is working from?” He watched her fingers dart back and forth, making the shuttle fly, and he became more and more agitated. “This cloth is like nothing I have ever seen before – but how can I copy it, when there is nothing written down?”

The day for the competition drew closer and still Zebulun ground his teeth with frustration. His son Zac said to him, “Father, what are we entering into the competition this year?”

Zeph said, “Zy is the best weaver of all of us, and with the new designs you brought us, he has made lots of fine pieces. Why not enter one of them?” But Zebulun wouldn’t listen to them. In his heart he raged against Saydie, sure that her new cloth would win. If only he could get his hands on the design!

The night before the competition he decided what to do. He waited until Saydie had thrown the shuttle for the last time, turned off the lights and gone to bed. Then he crept into her workshop and cut her cloth off the loom. He carried it back to his own house and hid it.

In the morning he showed it to his sons. “This is the cloth we will enter in the competition,” he gloated.

“But Father,”said Zy, “we didn’t make this! We can’t enter someone else’s work as our own!”

His father struck him down, shouting, “You will do as I say!”

Zac and Zeph looked at each other, too afraid to say anything. They helped him wrap Saydie’s cloth and take it to the town hall ready for the competition. Of all the cloth there, Saydie’s was far and away the most beautiful. The crowd gathered around it, marvelling at its excellence and Zebulun strutted proudly in front of it. Zac and Zeph kept their faces turned away, ashamed of themselves and their father.

When Saydie and her father arrived at the town hall, she went straight to where her piece of cloth was hanging and said, “This work is mine. I designed it and wove it with my own hands.”

Zebulun sneered, “If it is your work, where is the plan you made for it?”

“I kept it my head, to stop it from being stolen as so much of my work has been stolen over the past few months,” Saydie said.

Zac and Zeph looked at each other, guiltily. They had suspected that the designs their father had brought them were too good for him to have come up with. Then a voice from the doorway said, “It is true! My father brought us so many designs that he could never possibly have thought of himself.” It was Zy, standing by the door.

Zebulun blustered, “Of course I made them up! You can’t prove that I didn’t!”

Saydie said slowly, “If this is your work as you say, then show us the design. Explain to us how it was done.”

Zebulun took the cloth in his hand and said, “Here I used two shuttles, no, three shuttles and a pick-up stick for the fourth…” but try as he might, he could not explain how the marvellous pattern was made, its lines swaying from side to side like waves of light and shade. He turned the cloth this way and that, growing more and more embarrassed, but in the end he had to admit that he did not know.

The judges stepped forward and said, “Then you admit that you did not make the cloth?” Red-faced, Zebulun had to confess how he had stolen it, just as he had stolen so many of Saydie’s ideas.

He was so ashamed and sorry for what he had done, that he closed up his workshop and went on a pilgrimage to a distant country where he found a job as a ferryman, carrying passengers back and forth across a river. His son, Zac, who actually hated weaving with all his heart, went off and became a rodeo rider, and his brother, Zeph, whose back was permanently damaged by years of bending over the loom and enduring his father’s beatings, married a wealthy woman and spent the rest of his days reclining on a couch, eating pastries.

Saydie and Zy set up their own weaving shop together, and with her designs and Zy’s excellent weaving skills they were soon making cloth that was prized by kings and lord and ladies across the whole of the seven kingdoms. In due time when they had gotten to know each other and a generous love had grown up between them, they were married and had children of their own. In fact Saydie’s own granddaughter once wove a cloth so extraordinary that it could show if a man was honest or not, but that is a story for another day. The pattern which Saydie had won the competition with was copied over and over by generations of weavers, and even today it is known as Liar’s Cloth.