by Alice Major
“Who are you talking to?” Ariel came into the kitchen, with her pen in hand and poured herself a glass of water from the kitchen tap. She had been studying upstairs all afternoon.
“Just the spaghetti sauce. It never thaws when you’re in a hurry.”
“What’s the hurry?”
“Oh, nothing special,” Joss said evasively. “Supper will be ready in a couple of minutes.”
“I’ll go wash up.”
She upended the noodles into the collander and was pulling plates from the cupboard as Mark wandered in. “Spaghetti again?” he said.
“It’s only ‘again’ because you made it last night.” She loaded a dollop of pasta on each plate and waited for the microwave to count down its last few seconds. Get the cheese out of the fridge, will you? And put knives and forks on the table.”
The pasta swam in a wash of reddish water that filled each plate almost to the rim. “You didn’t drain it properly,” Ariel said, pushing the lukewarm sauce around with her fork. “And it’s stone cold.”Couldn’t you have at least let it get up to body temperature? What was the big rush?”
“We just want to get out of here,” said Joss.
“What are you going to do?”
“Just going ... over to Molly’s.” For some reason, Joss felt herself stumbling in the middle of her sentence.
“Both of you?” she asked, surprised.
“Sure. What’s the problem with that?”
Ariel frowned. “What’s will you be doing there?”
“Nothing. We’re just going to sit around and talk.”
Genuinely puzzled, their eldest sister put down her fork. “So why the hurry?”
“Oh who cares,” said Joss with a groan. “We just want to get out of here.”
Ariel got out of her chair huffily and put her plate in the microwave. “Well go on then. But remember you have to be home again by ten.” She punched the buttons to heat it up, took the plate out and went upstairs.
Joss choked down the last of her spaghetti and hurried to fill the sink up with water. Mark carried his plate and fork over to the counter. “Not bright,” he said. “Now she thinks we’re up to something.”
Joss ignored him, and went on scrubbing off the plates. “Put this in the dishwasher,” she ordered, swirling the plate under the tap to rinse it. As she went to get the pot from the stovetop, she said earnestly, “I’m just worried about her, Mark. If you’d seen her this morning, scraping away in the grass. I think she’s desperate. I don’t know how much time she has.”
She turned the tap on urgently, spraying water all over.
“Careful.” Mark jumped back. She mopped the counter quickly and said, “That’ll do. Let’s go.”
It was another evening of slanted gold light and calm air like a warm shawl on their shoulders. The usual weekend drone of lawnmowers had stopped, replaced by an occasional crik-crik from crickets. Molly was waiting for them down on the back lawn, with the synthesizer laid across her lap.
“What do we do?” asked Alasdair, eagerly.
Mark had thought it out. “She wouldn’t come near us to take things. So I think we put the stones and things on that stump there, and stand back. Then Molly plays the synthesizer and we see what happens.”
The stump was a large patch of smooth, hard wood where a tree had been cut down to ground level. It had weathered to a brownish-grey colour. Mark arranged the five pieces of crystal in a line and laid the weighted stick beside them. Then as a group they moved farther back on the lawn.
“Try it, Molly,” said Joss.
Molly touched the keys. The notes floated out, one ... two ... three ... four ... five clear sounds in the evening air. Joss caught her breath and looked keenly at the edge of the ravine.
But nothing happened.
Ariel put her pencil down on her scarred wooden desk that was really too small to work at, and pushed the history text away. She couldn’t concentrate any more. She hadn’t been able to concentrate, really, for most of the afternoon. She noticed the spaghetti plate sitting on the the bed, some melancholy noodles like an abandoned bird’s nest in the centre of the plate. Her mouth tightened at the corners in irritation.
She picked up the plate and carried it down to the kitchen. The house was very quiet. Outside the sun had set, but the twilight lasted a long time on these days close to the summer solstice—until well after ten at night. It would be an hour or so before it was really dark.
An hour or so. Ariel looked at the clock. It was already nine-thirty. Somehow she knew, she just knew the twins wouldn’t be home by ten. It was one of the rules their parents had set before going away on the trip to Britain where her father was to be teaching some special course for four weeks. They’d all agreed—they would be in the house every night by 10 o’clock.
So far they’d kept the agreement. Not that Ariel found it all that hard. There weren’t many occasions when she went out anyway. She pushed that thought away hastily. But she could just bet the twins wouldn’t keep to it tonight. She poured herself some pop and sat down at the table. Joss had been funny tonight—what were they in such a rush for? And what were they up to together? Normally they went their separate ways. There was probably some party going on, thought Ariel. Their class was all finished with exams.
She sat hunched over her glass of pop, glowering at the softly deepening twilight. She didn’t want to have to deal with this. She wished her parents were back home. She wished she were somewhere else. Some other planet, preferably. She felt a lump coming into her throat that seemed to have a whole range of undefined pain pushing it up from inside her.
At quarter past ten, the house was still silent. Ariel had counted every long tick of the clock and worked herself into a rage. So they were just over at Molly’s, talking, were they? She’d go and find out—and probably find out they were nowhere near there. She pulled her jean jacket from the hall closet and went hurrying down the streets, her hands stuck firmly in her pocket as if she was trying to keep her anger from squirming away. As she got to Molly’s street, though, her steps slowed as she started to think what to say when she got there. What if the party was there? The thought came suddenly and made her stomach jump. There was no way that she wanted to break into a party of rowdy grade nine kids and be Joss’s gauche older sister who didn’t have anything else to do on Saturday night.
But Molly’s house looked reassuringly quiet when she got to the front gate. Trudy answered the door, and there was no noise of voices or music floating from behind her.
“They’re just down in the back yard,” Trudy said in a friendly way. “Look, if you’re going, could you just take this sweater down to Molly. It’s cooled off.”
“Sure,” Ariel replied automatically.
She went around the side of the house. In the blue-grey light, she could see the four of them clustered together down at the end of the yard, and heard a single note of music play. Molly was leaning forward in her wheelchair with some sort of stick in her hand. Ariel walked over the grass to join them. One last note played and died away.
“What are you doing?” she started to ask, when suddenly the air seemed to change. The soft twilight grew sharp, as though the air itself was paying attention to them. Mark was looking down intently at five stones arranged on an old stump. Joss drew in her breath sharply, and Ariel looked up to see a hunched shape standing a few feet away at the edge of the ravine. But before she could cry out, Alasdair drew her attention back to the stones by his exclamation. “Look,” he said, pointing at them.
It seemed to the five watchers that the air at the centre of the stump started to circle clockwise, very slowly, like the beginning of a tiny whirlwind. The circling column of air grew higher and wider. Staring at it, Ariel began to feel that perhaps the air was standing still and they were spinning around it. Just as she was becoming too dizzy to watch, she saw that a small, da
rk shape was beginning to form in the centre. Beside her, Alasdair gasped.
The figure grew steadily in the swirling air—life-sized, then larger than life.
“What is it?” whispered Alasdair. “The wild woman?”
“No it’s not,” Joss hissed. And indeed it wasn’t. It was a tall female figure in a long, coal-black robe. She looked at them, her eyes flashing in contempt, as she spoke one sharp word.
“Fools!”
And the whirlwind expanded outward, sweeping up and around them, catching them all in its widening circle. The dust forced Ariel to close her eyes; the last things she saw were the strange woman standing perfectly still in the centre and, out of the corner of her eye, the hunched brown shape darting forward. Then, as the air circled faster and faster, she felt horribly as though she was being sucked into a vaccuum, sucked inside out. Her stomach lurched as though she was going to throw up.
Then there was a sudden pop, and the wind ceased.
Chapter Seven
After their third meal—turnips and chicken broth—P’eng found herself wandering the path that led to the slough. She stepped onto the wooden dock that ran out over the reeds, and paced slowly to the end. Out beyond the end of the dock, a couple of posts stood. They supported a system of ropes and wooden buckets. P’eng pulled at the rope so that one of the buckets dipped into the clearer water further out in the slough.
Then she reeled the pail back towards her and unhooked it. But instead of carrying the water back to the li as she had vaguely meant to do, she sighed, put the bucket down and looked around. Off to her left, the millet fields sloped lightly up from the slough. She turned to stare back towards the Lady’s Garden. From this distance, its walls stood like a small square against the pearly sky.
P’eng turned to face the opposite direction again. On either side of the dock, the stems and sharp pointed leaves of rushes stood up out of the water. They were tawny and dry—dull gold against the dull silver of water and sky. It would be a little while before the new green shoots pricked the top of the water. How many times had she seen the new rushes emerge?
She sat down on the gray wood of the dock. From a little pouch hanging at her waist, she pulled a pebble-sized piece of pottery and rubbed it absently while she counted.
Three times, she thought. It had been three times that the light node had shuttled its long way back and forth across the sky since she and Chuan had come to live here. Three of the Short Winters, when the light node was in the north and the rushes turned light brown and swelled their stiff heads with seed. And three of the Long Winters, when the light node was too far in the south for anything to grow; when the reeds turned black and the long stems sank into the water, to wait for the light to return and the cycle to begin again. And in between, six summers, when they planted the millet and harvested it; when they planted turnips to harvest throughout the winter.
P’eng rubbed the pebble in her hand and bent her head to examine. The clay had been shaped like a tiny peach, and was covered in a dark brownish-black glaze that gleamed almost like metal. Her father had made it for her. Of all the potters in the capital, he was the best. He could tease the clay into the finest, thinnest pots and bowls. It was a long time since she had seen him—so long that P’eng realized suddenly that she couldn’t quite picture his face.
She and Chuan, children of an artisan, should not have been sent here as daughters of the garden. That role should have been filled by twins from a noble family, who would come when they were old enough to have seen five passes of Yao-chi’s shuttle. They would stay until they saw the end of their tenth shuttle, then return home to have their hair fastened up with a jade hairpin and be married to some young man from another noble clan.
But twins were rare. Last time, there had only been one set of girl twins of the right age among all the noble families of the capital. And tending the lady’s garden had become a distant duty, no longer a position of great honour. The Lady Wei had screamed and wept and refused to let her daughters go. So the Count of Religious Affairs had come to their father and ordered that his motherless twin girls should come and take on the task of tending the garden. The count had given their father a new potter’s wheel and a parcel of land in exchange.
When they arrived, there had been a number of families living in the huts, although there were much fewer than in the old days when several hundred people had lived here. It was clear, with the arrival of two peasant girls, that the garden was no longer an important matter to the Count of Religious Affairs. The other families drifted back to the capital. They were not punished for leaving; nor were they replaced.
Chuan had been eager to come at first, eager to leave the capital’s walls and set out across the wide plain. She had been quick in picking up the ritual, in learning from the guardian. For a little while, anyway. But then she had grown tired of it, and realized with horror that she would spend five long passes of the shuttle here. She was desperate to get back.
“What will become of us when we go back?” she would ask. “I’ll be almost too old to marry. Who will there be to marry anyway? The people of our class will be all paired off.”
But P’eng was not anxious to go back. She did not know what would become of them either, and felt a little afraid at the thought. It had been so long now . . . She found herself shrinking from the thought of the bustling market place and the faces of strangers. She had not wanted to come here in the first place, but now she knew it and her duties, and felt comfortable.
She was still sitting on the dock, staring, when she heard Chuan’s footsteps on the wooden planks beside her.
“Old Tsai hasn’t eaten anything,” she said. “His bowl was still full when I got it from his hut.”
P’eng looked at her in concern but didn’t say anything.
“The Lady’s still gone, too. Her bowl is still full again this morning.”
“Do you think something’s wrong?”
Chuan shrugged. “Who knows? She’s gone off before for a while and come back.”
“But the sky . . .”
“It probably means nothing. Something happened and now it’s over. Everything is back to normal.” She spoke drearily. “If only something would happen.”
Chapter Eight
Molly slumped sideways in her wheelchair. Dimly, she was aware she could hear someone choking and retching nearby. But she was more aware of tremendous pain in her left hand that pulsed up her arm in slow waves. She tried to move the hand but couldn’t. She had the same weak feeling that she had felt in her legs years ago as one of the first symptoms of her disease. Panicking, she forced her eyes open, to see two anxious faces hovering over her—Ariel and Joss. Somewhere the retching was still going on.
“My hand. My hand,” she whispered.
“Thank heavens. You’re alive.” Joss was almost in tears with relief.
Molly felt her fingers being pried apart, and the waves of pain turned to sharp agony. “Oh, jeez,” Joss said. “Don’t look, Molly.”
But she looked anyway. She had been holding the stick with its sky-blue stone weight cradled in her palm. Ariel had taken it from her hand, and the stone’s round shape had been burned into her skin leaving an angry red welt. The pain reached a crescendo as if someone were ringing bells and buzzers in her head. She closed her eyes again, trying to get her breath.
“Molly. MOLLY!” Joss’s voice was urgent.
“I’ll ... be ... okay ...” she tried to say, to reassure her. “Just have ... to get ... my ... breath.”
And shortly the pain started to become more bearable. The retching noises had stopped and, after a while, she heard Alasdair’s voice asking, “Is she unconscious?” Cautiously, she opened her eyes. Now all four faces were hovering over her, blocking the sky.
“Let her have some air.” Ariel’s voice was sharp with worry and fright.
“Where am I?” she asked, feeling
foolish as soon as she asked the question. Surprisingly, the others didn’t seem to think it foolish.
“That’s the question of the century,” said Mark, waving his arm at the scene before her.
Gone was the stump and the figure that had appeared on it. Gone was the green grass of the lawn and the bushes bordering the ravine and the whole world that they knew.
They were surrounded by an expanse of open plain, covered as far as they could see in knee-high grass, pale gold in colour. The sky was no longer the luminous blue of a summer evening. Instead, it was pearly white and hazy, as though covered by a film of high cloud. Nothing broke the landscape to give them any sense of direction, except what might be a low ridge far off to the left. But it was so distant that it was only a slightly blue smudge against the horizon.
They all stared around in baffled silence. Words seemed inadequate, until Mark stepped back and put his foot where someone had been sick. “Yuck,” he said. “Let’s move away from here.”
Ariel turned on him, suddenly fierce with panic. “No, don’t move a step,” she said. “We’ve got to get back, back home. Right now.”
“Oh, not yet,” murmured Alasdair, but only Joss heard him.
“How?” Mark asked flatly.
“The same way we got here, whatever that was.”
“Ariel, we don’t even know how we got here,” Mark said wearily. “I had just shown Molly what I saw the wild woman doing. She was copying me. You walked over and joined us and that’s all I know.”
“So do it again. It will probably take us back.”
“It’s not that easy.” Molly leaned her head back wearily. “We don’t have those five pieces of crystal,” she said. “They’re back there on the stump.”