by Alice Major
“I have to all the time.” Her voice was hard.
Joss dropped into a crouch beside the wheelchair, pleading. “Look, let me just climb down and see if there’s anything there worth seeing. If there is, we’ll try and figure out a way to get you down there.”
“Okay,” Molly said at last, slowly.
“Okay.” Joss stood up and brushed the clinging twigs off her shorts. “Here I go.” She disappeared over the edge of the bank, using a small tree trunk as a support while she reached for footing. A thump followed by a rustle seemed to indicate that she was making progress.
Molly rested her head against the high back of the chair and swallowed hard. Then she looked up into the canopy of leaves overhead, and past them to the scraps of blue. The peace of the ravine crept back. She listened to a small chirring sound, wondering if it was a squirrel. Then she remembered the synthesizer and pulled it out. She touched the play button so the five notes sounded. It seemed as though, for a moment, everything stopped to listen.
Meanwhile, Joss was wishing she had jeans on instead of shorts. Her legs were a hatch pattern of scrapes from dead twigs. But she had made it down to the creek. There, on the other side, was what had to be the flat rock her brother had described. There was the pool gathered around its base and a bank—not quite so high as the one she had just climbed down—behind it. She looked up and down the creek, trying to figure out whether there was any possible way of getting a wheelchair down there, and shook her head despairingly.
There was no sign, however, of Mark’s wild woman. Joss waited quietly for a few moments to see if anything would show up, then decided to climb back up. As she stood up, she heard the musical notes play, then play again. She pushed between the branches again to make her way up the bank. A buzz of angry mosquitoes had collected around her almost as closely as the leaves as she sweated and climbed, standing on branches and reaching for others to pull herself up. Just as she gave herself one last heave up over the edge, she heard a strangled shriek.
“S’all right. Only me,” she gasped, and lay face down for a few moments. But when she looked up, Molly wasn’t looking at her at all. She was staring up into the face of another, bizarre figure crouched over her chair. The wild woman.
“Who . . . who are you?” Molly gasped.
The wild woman gave a savage half-laugh, half-snort and said something. Molly couldn’t even guess what language it might be. The words were baffling, but the tone was an exact mockery of her own voice.
“What are you saying?” Molly’s voice rose even higher.
The woman mocked her again, her deep brown, clear eyes peering intently at Molly’s face, then reached down to grab the fragile shoulders. Joss started to pull herself up from the ground. “Don’t touch her.”
But the strange figure stopped her in her tracks with a compelling gesture, and gripped Molly by the shoulders again, shaking her until the girl’s head fell back. Then the wild woman bent down and placed the tip of her tongue deliberately on Molly’s forehead, clamping her shoulders more tightly while the girl squirmed. The scene only lasted a second or two until the wild woman let go so abruptly that Molly’s head flopped sideways on the back of the wheelchair. Then the woman said something again in her strange, guttural language.
“I ... don’t ... know. I don’t know,” Molly said.
The figure turned her bright, ancient eyes towards Joss, and with another sharp gesture of her arm—this time it looked like one of exasperation or disgust—walked rapidly past her to the lip of the embankment. She swung herself over the edge and disappeared with hardly a rustle.
Joss’s knees came back to wobbly life and she ran over to the wheelchair. “Are you all right? What did she do to you?”
Molly put her hand to her forehead. “She just touched me with her tongue,” she said. “It hurts a bit. Like a sunburn.”
“Let me see.”
Molly pushed her hair back to show her a small, semi-circular reddened patch on the forehead, right in the middle. Joss looked at it intently. “I think it’s fading,” she said after watching for a few minutes. “You’re okay otherwise?”
“A little shaky,” Molly admitted. “Where on earth did she come from?”
Joss sat down beside the chair. “I have no idea. I couldn’t even guess what language she was speaking.”
Molly looked puzzled. “Well she spoke English a bit, anyway.”
“What do you mean? It was all gibberish.”
“No.” Molly shook her head. “She was asking me where the spindle is. That’s what she kept asking at the end.”
Her friend stared up at her. “No, all I heard was that weird language.”
“Maybe you just weren’t close enough to hear.”
“I could hear all right. She was not speaking any language I’ve ever heard.”
Molly felt strangely upset, almost queasy. “I heard her,” she insisted. “She was asking for the spindle. You must have heard her.”
Joss shook her head, slowly and definitely. “I didn’t hear anything at all like that.” She paused and thought. “And what the heck is a spindle?”
Chapter Three
Mark hesitated. He wondered whether to go back home and get his bike. Decided he didn’t want to chance running into Ariel again, and began the walk to his best friend’s place. Molly lived on a street with large, stately, affluent houses flanked by trees and landscaped gardens. Mark’s family lived only a few blocks away, but on the other side of a busy road that divided the rich homes from the not-so-rich. Their house was much more modest and the garden just a lawn with a few bushes down one edge. Alasdair Leung lived further away again, in a condominium townhouse with a scrap of grass at the front. Mark pressed the doorbell.
Alasdair’s mother answered. She was a small, fair-haired woman, usually rather quiet and reserved. Today she was almost cold.
“He’s downstairs,” she said shortly and went back into the kitchen.
Alasdair was lying on the battered rec-room sofa, headphones clamped to his ears. He took them off when he saw Mark.
“What’s the matter with your mom?” Mark asked. Then wished he hadn’t, because of the expression on his friend’s face. Alasdair’s eyes squinted like someone with a headache who had just felt an extra-strong pain shoot through.
“There was a big scene with Dad last night.”
“Oh, I see,” said Mark. Alasdair’s parents were going through a divorce. His mother and Alasdair had already moved out and into the townhouse, while his father stayed in the big house nearby. Scenes were happening every couple of weeks.
“Now he wants me to live with him.”
“What do you want?”
“I don’t know.” Alasdair got up restlessly and started shuffling through DVDs. “Sometimes I wish I didn’t have to live with either of them, to tell you the truth. They’re both so stubborn. A Scot and a Chinese—you don’t get any more stubborn than that.” He stood for a while flicking a plastic DVD cover with his thumbnail. “Sometimes I think I’d like to go back with Dad. Mom treats me as though I’m still twelve years old.”
Mark nodded, thinking maybe that wasn’t so surprising. Alasdair looked much younger than his fifteen years. He had just recently started to grow a bit taller, but he still seemed—well, young. And right now he seemed depressed.
To distract him, Mark pulled the weighted stick out of his pocket and said, “Well, listen what happened to me . . .”
Alasdair’s attention was caught immediately by the story. “Let me see it,” he said at the end, holding out his hand for the stick.
The weight at the end was a polished stone, about the width of his palm with a hole bored in the centre where the stick fitted. It was an unusual light blue in colour, streaked with white. It was strangely heavy and cool, and stayed cool even as he handled it. Curving shapes were carved into it, wrapping the hole in
sinous lines. Alasdair, fascinated, let the weight nest in his palm and stared at it.
“Those carvings almost look Chinese,” he said.
“Do they say anything?” Mark asked promptly.
Alasdair shook his head, slightly exasperated. “How would I know? You know I’ve never learned Chinese. They just make me think of something like that.”
Mark took it from him, studied it again, then shrugged. “Could be.”
“Let’s go and see if we can see her again.” Alasdair had lost all the listlessness he’d had when his friend arrived. Mark hesitated and looked at his watch. The afternoon was getting on, and Ariel was insisting that they have supper at six o’clock every night.
“Okay,” he said. “But we’ll have to hurry.”
So, for the third time that day, there were visitors to the flat rock. By now, the June warmth had soaked into the ravine, making the air feel heavy as a water-filled sponge. The breeze had dropped to nothing, and in the quiet it felt like the two boys were crashing through underbrush like rogue elephants. “Shhh,” they told each other, but couldn’t seem to go any more quietly. Mark wasn’t surprised that there was no one on the rock. They crouched on the embankment for twenty minutes or so, waiting. At last, Alasdair said, “I guess we’re not going to see her.”
He sounded so disappointed that Mark said, “We can come back again.” Although by now, he was beginning to wonder if he had ever seen any antlered figure. If it wasn’t for the stones in his pocket and the stick Alasdair was now carrying, he’d think it was all a hallucination.
It seemed less of an illusion after supper, when Joss told him about her adventure.
“She put her tongue on Molly’s forehead?” he asked, slightly revolted at the idea.
“Yeah, it sounds gross. I didn’t think of it at the time. And then it seemed as though Molly could understand what she was saying.”
But Mark was wholly unconvinced by this. “No ... you must have that wrong, Joss. That couldn’t be. You just couldn’t hear her. Or else Molly just imagined that’s what she was saying.”
His twin ignored this “What is a spindle? Do you know?”
“Well . . .,” he searched his memory for something elusive. “Isn’t there something in a fairy tale. Someone pricking a finger on a spindle?”
“Sleeping Beauty!” said Joss triumphantly. “Of course. But I was never quite sure what a spindle is. Something sharp, I guess.”
“Something on a spinning wheel, too,” said Mark, trying to remember the picture book that his mother used to read to him. A girl reaching out towards an old crone at a spinning wheel.
“Right!” Joss said, remembering the same picture at last. “Well, I can’t imagine she was looking for a spinning wheel. You’re right. Molly must have imagined it.”
Chapter Four
The whining sound climbed higher and higher in pitch, then seemed to lift itself up over a hump and fade away. P’eng looked up.
The air had stopped shuddering. Yao-chi’s thread had spun itself back into a single, softly glowing strand across the sky. The plain beyond the garden stretched before her, empty, reassuring, the same as it had always been. But P’eng, looking around her and then down, gave a cry of distress. At her feet, the sacred bowl lay tumbled in the dust, sticky with porridge. Such a thing had never happened before and she had no idea of the correct behavior. It seemed an omen of terror.
She made a hasty gesture to ward off the Tiger’s eye and picked up the bowl. After a few moments’ hesitation, she scraped as much porridge from the ground back into the bowl as she could—it seemed sacrilege to leave the lady’s meal in the dust. Then she scurried back down the path to the li. As she came close to the huts, she heard her sister’s voice shouting for help.
She flew to the centre open space by the fire and looked around. Chuan’s voice was shouting from inside Li-Tsai’s hut, the middle one on the north side of the square. The pile of firewood by the hut’s entrance had slipped sideways like a small landslide and was holding the door closed.
“Are you hurt?” P’eng called, putting the bowl down by the fire and rushing to pull the wood away from the door.
“No,” Chuan shouted back through the hut’s walls. “I was bringing in some kindling-wood. Then old Tsai’s pile came tumbling down and I couldn’t get the door open.
“Stupid old man,” she went on grumbling. “He never piles the wood right. I tell him again and again. . .”
P’eng was pulling logs away from the doorway as fast as she could. Breathlessly, she asked, “Did it fall down because of the sky?”
“Did it what?”
“Fall down because of the sky.”
“What in the Lady’s name are you talking about?”
“Didn’t you see it?”
“See what?”
“Wait a minute.” P’eng redoubled her efforts at pulling away the wood. In a short time, she had enough cleared so that Chuan could push the door open a little and squeeze out. She stood, hands on her hips, surveying P’eng. Although they were twins, Chuan was much taller. Their hair was pulled back into the same tight, single braid, but Chuan’s hung longer and thicker than her sister’s, and her arms were well-muscled from swinging the axe-head into tree trunks. Although Chuan complained that she had to do most of the work now that Li-Tsai was so feeble, P’eng thought she seemed to get quite a bit of satisfaction out of chopping and splitting firewood.
“Now what’s this about?”
P’eng described the untwisting of Yao-chi’s thread and the terror of the sky.
“Didn’t you even hear anything? A high, whining sound?”
Chuan’s face was sober. “I did. I thought it was just me being dizzy from chopping and then coming into the hut.”
“What should I do about the Lady’s meal?”
Chuan shrugged impatiently. “Oh, wash the bowl out and fill it up again. What does that matter?”
“Would that be proper? Such a bad omen?”
Chuan gave a short, sharp sigh through her nose.
“Shouldn’t I ask Li-Tsai at least. He’s the guardian, he should know what to do. Where is he?”
“He wandered off to look at the millet field. We’d better go after him anyway, I suppose. But what good he’ll be ...” She set off sharply, skirting the tumbled wood pile and the corner of Li-Tsai’s hut, leading the way along the path in the opposite direction to the one P’eng had walked earlier.
The path led through the broad band of twisted, thorny trees that sheltered the li and provided their firewood. Beyond it lay the millet fields. Once, the fields had sprawled over a wide area of hillside, but most of that cleared land had now gone back to the native grass. Only a small portion of it was still used to grow crops. The areas where the millet would be planted were brown and bare after the last harvest, dug into rough clods.
The patch where turnips were planted was only half dug up. Li-Tsai was sitting at the edge of the patch, a few newly dug turnips at his feet along with the shovel. He stared at the sky, his thin, old faced creased with worry. He heard them approach and pulled himself to his feet again, using the shovel for support. P’eng ducked around Chuan and ran towards him.
“Did you see it? What was it?” she asked.
He smiled at her with some affection, but his voice was said. “The thread unravelling. Danger.”
“What kind of danger?” Chuan’s voice was sharp.
He sighed. “I do not know. It is an old saying—’Yao-chi’s thread is the safety of the world. Beware of it unravelling.’”
“What should we do?” asked P’eng.
“Keep the ritual,” answered Li-Tsai, but his voice did not carry its usual conviction.
“Is that all?” Chuan asked impatiently. Her sister gave a little cry.
“The ritual! Oh, and I dropped the bowl.” Distressed, she put her ha
nd on the old man’s arm. “Did that cause it? Did I put us in danger?”
“Don’t be silly,” said her sister. “You dropped it because of what you saw—not before.” Li-Tsai nodded agreement.
“But what should I do now?” asked P’eng.
“We will wash the bowl and take it to the God of the Soil for blessing. Then you will refill it and take it back to the garden. Don’t worry, daughter of the garden. The meal has been spilled before. Not in your time, but it has happened.”
“But surely we should do something more than that,” said Chuan. “Surely we should go to the capital and talk to ...” she paused, seeing the quizzical expression on the old man’s face.
“Talk to ...?” he prompted.
“Well, to the king or the officials or someone.”
“Your place is here, daughter of the garden. You are needed for the ritual, to see that the meal is carried to the garden and the God of the Soil is honoured.”
“P’eng could do that by herself. Let me go.”
“Twins are appointed. As twins you must stay until you are relieved of the duty.”
Chuan snorted. “Well, you go then. Tell them that we’re here, just the three of us now. Tell them everyone else has drifted away or died and the huts are in ruins and the daughters of the garden cut most of the firewood and plant the millet. Tell them to send someone else out here before we go crazy talking to ourselves.” She turned and marched back towards the path.
P’eng saw the tired look in the guardian’s eyes and touched him timidly on the arm. “Chuan doesn’t really mean it,” she said, although she knew in her heart that her twin did mean everything she had said. He looked at her and smiled.
“Ah,” he said. “Let us go and clean the Lady’s bowl.”
Chapter Five
The next week was exam week and passed in a blur of last-minute cramming and Joss’s usual panic attacks. Mark and Alasdair found time to go back to the ravine once, and Molly frequently went down to the end of her backyard to look for the wild woman. But mostly, everyone was trying to cope with the fact that they weren’t quite as ready for the end-of-year tests as they thought they were.