Spindlefish and Stars

by Christiane M. Andrews

  Clo’s gaze shifted between Cary’s bobbin and the first gossamer threads. They were not far. The loops almost touched.

  Hesitantly, Clo raised Cary’s thread to the first hint of gossamer. She thought she might try to tuck it, slip it beneath the gossamer, but just where it touched the golden line, without any tucking or looping or knotting, it held.

  It held fast.

  Clo pulled, gently at first, then more roughly, but where Cary’s thread had caught, it stayed.

  She looked over the expanse. For how long had his story been told? Could she find enough to reach her own?

  For what might have been hours, if there were hours to count, Clo traced the repetitions, the storytellings, of Cary’s descent into the sea. Fathers who told it to their children to warn about the dangers of disobedience. Healers who told it to explain hope and grief and suffering. Children who repeated it for the adventure in the air and in the splash of the waves.

  Inch by inch, Clo raised Cary’s thread up and across the tapestry until it dangled only a hand’s length away from the working edge.

  But how to cross the final stretch?

  No matter how she tried—such a short distance—she could not tie it near her own. She raised it; it fell. She looped it; it slipped away.

  There, where it was last attached, a mother was telling stories to her daughter as they toiled in the fields, breaking up the earth and picking stones to ready the land for planting.

  It was one of a half dozen tales the mother told—the others all about animals, foxes and weasels and cranes and frogs wishing for a king. She told the story about Cary last—as the sun was setting and the daughter was most fatigued.

  It was not the worst place for Cary to return. The mother was kind; the daughter wore a friendly gap-toothed smile.

  Still. They were strangers. And Cary did not want to be alone.

  More—Clo did not want to be alone.

  “What did the boy with wings look like?” the daughter was asking.

  “Oh, well,” the mother was answering. “You know Adalwin, the blacksmith’s apprentice? I imagine he looked something like that.”

  “Could he not look like Master Balbus’s boy instead?”

  “The pigman’s lad?”

  The girl blushed.

  “Well, yes, I think that’s right. I remember now. The boy with wings did have red hair and… ruddy skin and a… prominent nose. But he didn’t tend the pigs, for there were no pigs on his island. He walked on the rocks and collected feathers that had fallen from the birds for his father.”

  Clo started. The pigman’s lad. With red hair. And a prominent nose.

  She scanned the threads of the mother and daughter, looking back over their lives. No, they did not live in the village whose wall Clo had last jumped. But…

  But the pigman’s lad—her heart gave an extra thump—he was the swineherd! The one who had grinned at her with a curling lip. The one who had carried her father from the barn. Here, where his thread twisted with the daughter’s, he was smaller, younger. With his father, selling piglets at the summer market. The girl’s mother had traded a half sack of potatoes for the runt of the litter, and the swineherd had shown the girl—years younger here—how to settle the piglet in her arms and get it to drink a bit of milk from a spoon.

  “My mother told me a story about a boy who looked like you,” the girl had said.

  “An’ wot’s that, then?” The boy was not really listening. He was dipping the spoon into the pan of milk.

  “It was a boy whose father made him fly because he was trapped on an island and then he fell in the ocean and the father was sad.”

  “Oh.” Another spoonful against the piglet’s snout.

  “And he looked like you.”

  “Oh.”

  The story—there was no bubble around the girl’s story, though she had told it with her gaping smile and though the pig, slurping milk with its little pig tongue from the spoon, had seemed to listen intently. No gold gossamer spun out around it to catch Cary’s thread.

  But the pigman, the swineherd—he had heard it. Might he still remember it all these years later?

  Could she bring Cary’s story forward? Bring it all the way to the present? Bring it even to her father in the present?

  Staring into the mirror, Clo looked for the swineherd at the tapestry’s working edge. There he was, just now, sitting at his table, picking at a blister on his palm. Clo’s father lay on the pallet before the fire, his breathing still unsteady. The boy’s mother stood nearby cutting vegetables for a soup.

  Clo could not change the threads or reweave them. She could not make the girl retell the story at the market, could not make her telling more vibrant or memorable. But could she, like Mischief, change… something? She touched a fingernail to the weaving. No, she did not want to tear any threads or damage the fabric as Mischief did. But could she nudge a thread? Just a little? Just enough to change something in the swineherd’s present, something that might make him remember now, in this moment, the piglet, the milk, the grinning girl, the half sack of potatoes? And if he remembered, now, sitting by Clo’s father, might he not tell the story he had heard?

  Clo stared at the scene around her sleeping father. Not the pallet, she thought. Not the boy’s blister, not the fire. But the vegetables his mother was cutting… the runty array of carrots, turnips, potatoes… Yes, she thought.

  The potatoes. Could the potatoes be enough?

  As poor as the gap-toothed girl’s telling was, just the bare bones, really, it was the best Clo could do.

  Holding her breath, she set her pinky as lightly as she could on the thread.

  “Not like Mischief’s claws,” she whispered. “Not so much…”

  If she pulled, just a little, and this potato rolled…

  She nudged the thread a little, the barest nudge, to set a potato rolling across the floor. The swineherd would have to pick it up, wipe off the dirt, hand it to his mother.

  Clo would have to hope it was enough to make him remember.

  CHAPTER THE THIRTY-FIRST

  RELATING TO THE SIGNIFICANCE OF A POTATO

  THE POTATO ROLLED.

  Off the table, across the dirt and straw on the floor, up to the feet of the swineherd.

  He brushed it off, wiped it on his sleeve, and sniffed it, his cauliflower nose hovering just above the tuber.

  He held it out to his mother, who sliced it in two and dropped it into the pot she had placed over the fire. The swineherd watched his mother cutting the rest of the roots she had piled before her: one or two beets, some stunted carrots, a half dozen more thumb-sized potatoes.

  He was watching but not really seeing. He had spent the day mucking the pens, shoveling the soiled, stinking layers, tossing down pitchforks of new straw. He’d carried the slop from the kitchens, the water from the well; he’d pushed a five-hundred-pound sow off the piglets she’d rolled under her. He’d saved all but one, the littlest, with the black snout and black ear. That one had been crushed. He grimaced, remembering.

  He had the reek of the barn all around him, the weight of everything he’d carried still heavy in his arms. Idly, still half watching his mother, he picked at a blister that had opened in his palm.

  “Th’ potatoes are small, Mother.”

  “It is what I could get.”

  The swineherd looked at the man sleeping on the floor. He’d need to be fed, too, spoonful after spoonful, the way a runt might be nursed back to health. Only the broth for him, he’d not chew, but still. That’d be three for the pot to feed.

  “Before Da died, we’d trade a pig for potatoes. Just a runt’d bring a half bushel.”

  “Would it now?”

  “Mm.” The swineherd peeled away the skin that had ballooned over his blister. “One little potato-picker, one time, she tol’ me I looked like a boy she knew with wings.”

  “Wings? And wot wouldst tha do with wings?”

  “The boy she knew, he flew with ’em. Across th�
� sea.”

  “And wouldst tha fly away, too? Leave me here, slicing potatoes?” The swineherd’s mother glanced up, poofing with a quick breath the hair that had fallen over her eyes.

  “That’d be something, now, wouldna it? Think of it—liftin’ over the village, seein’ the rooftops an’ the streets? Then o’er the fields and then th’ pines… imagine, seein’ all th’ birds’ nests from above and coverin’ the length of the forest with just a few flaps…” The swineherd tried to imagine what it would be like to fly, what wings would feel like on his arms. Without meaning to, he flexed, lifting his elbows as though he had wings attached. He dropped them abruptly when he saw his mother still watching him. “Of course I wouldna use wings if’n I had ’em,” he said, laughing. “Where would I want to go? Besides, th’ boy drowned. He fell into th’ sea.”

  “Fell? Drowned?”

  “Th’ wax that held his feathers melted.”

  “Ah. So they wasn’t real wings. Like birds.”

  “No. Made.”

  “And who made ’em? What kind o’ cleverness made ’em?”

  The swineherd shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe th’ boy did.”

  The swineherd’s mother tossed the last of the vegetables into the pot and stirred the coals beneath it. On the pallet by her feet, the sleeping man groaned and shifted.

  “Well, see if thy cleverness’ll mend that stool, so th’ man’ll have a spot to sit if’n he ever wakes.”

  The gossamer line that formed at the swineherd’s telling was so airy, so insubstantial, spider silk seemed ropelike in comparison. Clo hardly dared breathe for fear it might break. Still. It was enough to hope.

  Raising Cary’s thread, she touched it to the golden filament.

  It slipped away.

  She tried again; it would not hold.

  She did not want to have to tuck it, to slip it beneath the swineherd’s gossamer line, but she could see no other way.

  Holding her breath, she lifted Cary’s thread and pushed it gingerly, timidly beneath the gold line.

  It stayed.

  In her hand, Clo still held Cary’s spool. She knew the filament could barely hold the yarn; it would not take the weight of a full, dangling bobbin. Unraveling and unraveling, she let out enough thread to rest the bobbin on the floor.

  She would have to hope that the swineherd would retell his story. That someone might repeat it. That her sleeping father had somehow heard it. Or that she and Cary would return to the present before the old woman picked up or pulled away or knocked over his bobbin and ripped him from the swineherd’s telling, and he was sent back to the mother and the daughter picking rocks out of the field.

  While Clo waited for Cary to return, she gathered the last of her things—a dry crescent of cheese, her father’s notebook, his canvas—and a few things that were not hers—a bit of rag, a few dozen fish. Skewering the fish on the iron the old woman used to poke the fire, she held them above the coals until their scales crackled and they were crisp and pocketable. She wrapped the rag around the hot fish and dry rind.

  For a long moment, she stood looking at the sketch of her mother—Spinning for Clothilde—studying its chalky lines. Her father’s hand. Her mother’s form.

  She knew the old woman did not feel grief or sadness in the way that she did, but still… some part of her, some part deep beneath her apple skin, must miss her daughter. She would leave the portrait for the woman.

  As she smoothed the wrinkles and placed the sketch on the old woman’s table, Clo started, seeing a detail she had not noticed before. Her mother’s spindle… its dark whorl, was it not the button from the cloak? She squinted. Just there in the sketch, along the side of the dark whorl, she could see where her father had left a fishy squiggle. A starry spot.

  She removed the cloak button from her pocket. Was it? Its central hole was just the right size for a spindle. Clo squinted. It was impossible to know for sure. Still. She smiled. Perhaps it was.

  Clo placed the whorl-button carefully on top of the sketch. She would leave both portrait and stone for the old woman.

  Outside, the drone of the villagers’ voices rose again in the street—then faded away as they continued their search for the cat. The keening of the old woman carried over the general murmur, and the cat gargled in distress at her voice. Feeling a flash of guilt, worrying too that the old woman might hear and return, Clo tossed the beast a few fish to quiet his noise.

  When Cary finally did return, he arrived with a clanging, each step down the street marked with a ting-ka-chung. Clo opened the door: Cary was pushing a barrow on a loose, dented wheel, and his face had swelled with exertion.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he said as he ting-ka-chunged his way over the cobblestones. “Everything else I’ve brought, but this… I couldn’t bring it down the cliffs, not by myself, and this is the best barrow I could find. The box is good.” His knock against the metal produced a healthy boom. “But the wheel is not. It won’t roll. I’m sorry.”

  Clo gave a dismissive wave. “Not important.” She stepped aside to let Cary enter. “I think I’ve found a way so we will return together. To the same time. I’m not certain, though.” She hesitated. “I’m not even a little sure.”

  Cary nodded.

  “I’ll understand… if you don’t want to risk… if you don’t want to go.”

  “Don’t you need me?”

  “Y-yes, but…” Clo thought of the filament holding Cary’s thread in place. She thought of her own thread and the decision she had made. “I don’t even know—know for certain—where I will be when we return. And you…” She glanced away. She did not want to tell him this. “It’s possible… you may end up nowhere familiar. You may fall out of the sky and into a field where a mother and daughter are picking stones. Or… maybe not even there. Maybe you’ll fall into the sea again, only this time, no one would fish you out.”

  “I see.” Cary’s moons looked hollow, almost dusty. Cratered. His chin wobbled.

  “If you don’t go”—Clo tried to keep emotion from her voice—“you can still help me. I’m—”

  “No. I am. I am going with you.”

  “You are?”

  “I think… I’d rather… There is a chance, right? There is a chance we’ll return together?”

  “If I’m honest…” Clo raised her eyes to meet Cary’s. “It’s small.”

  “A chance.” Cary’s chin had ceased wobbling. “That’s enough.” He paused, considering his words. “Before you told me about what you saw in the tapestry, when I fell… I didn’t know my father searched for me. I didn’t know why, why the wings… why he’d tied them to me. I didn’t remember I was loved. And falling—I don’t want to… again… but I know what I’m risking. And I know what it would be to stay.” He gave Clo a small smile.

  “Well.” Clo nodded. “Well then.” She felt her own fear rising now. “There’s just one thing…”

  Cary looked at Clo expectantly. She gestured for him to follow her to the tapestry. “You need to help me unweave my thread.”

  “Unweave your thread?”

  Clo looked away to hide her agitation. She nodded.

  “But… won’t that… won’t you—”

  “I wasn’t ever supposed to know my father. I was never supposed to be—or, at least, I was not meant to have the life I have had. My mother… she changed what was meant to happen in the world. She gave herself a thread, and then she gave my father what was left of her thread to save his life… and so that I would have a life with him. So that I would know him. But she didn’t know the thread she gave him was rotting.”

  Clo thought back to her drowning in the grotto, to the pale cloud that had carried her across the darkness, to the soft voice warning her, Do not let my mistakes become your own.… Be brave enough to accept what I could not.… She closed her eyes. Her heart beat heavily. She still was not sure if this was the right thing.

  “I think… nothing happened as she intended. I know she feels she made
a mistake. And my thread, the one that’s there”—Clo pointed to the weaving—“I wasn’t supposed to have this thread in the tapestry. I wasn’t meant to be born in the world.”

  She held up the ball of yarn she had pulled from the cloak and handed it to Cary. “This is the thread my mother spun for me. If I had been born here, on the island, I think she would have given it to me so I could… visit the world one day. But when she decided that I should be born in the world, she couldn’t give it to me. The old woman placed a thread here for me instead.”

  Taking the yarn back from Cary, she turned it over, feeling its fibers buzz in her palms. “Cary, I’m really not sure if what I’m doing… I’m not sure if it’s right. I only know that my father’s thread is rotting… and maybe…” She twisted her hands together. She could not bring herself to say what she hoped she could do. She did not know if it was possible. “Maybe if I can undo part of what should never have been,” she said instead, “maybe I can stop his suffering.”

  “But what will happen to you when you pull your thread from the tapestry?”

  Clo’s throat felt uncomfortably tight. “I think I have to give up… everything. My… memories.”

  “You can’t do…” Cary was aghast. “I won’t let you do that! You would be giving up yourself!”

  “Cary, I have to. It’s the only way I can help my father.” She tried to steady her voice. “I have to choose who to help. And what to lose. To save him, I will have to lose him.”

  “And lose yourself! Lose all your memories! No father would want to lose his child so he could be saved.”