The Present

by Nancy Springer

  The Present

  By Nancy Springer

  Copyright 2014 by Nancy Springer

  Cover Design by Ginny Glass

  The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher or author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. The characters, dialogue and events in this book are wholly fictional, and any resemblance to companies and actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Also in the Fantasy World by Nancy Springer and Untreed Reads Publishing

  Dreamfisher

  Iris

  Mariposa

  Rumple What?

  The Boy Who Called God “She”

  The Boy Who Plaited Manes

  The Kingmaker

  The Scent of an Angel

  The Youngest One

  Vend U.

  We Don’t Know Why

  http://www.untreedreads.com

  The Present

  Nancy Springer

  Because she had only one stylus, Saffron pulled the teak-stick from atop her head, letting her hair-spiral fall loose down her back until it met the hot yellow grass on which she sat. On the slab of wood across her knees lay a thick disc of clay with her stylus standing upright in its exact center. Over the stylus she placed a loop of flax, then inserted the point of the teak-stick into the same loop, pulled it taut, and, taking greatest care to obey its length, traced in the clay a perfect circle around the stylus.

  She took a long breath—so far, so good. Then she moved the stylus to a place on the edge of the circle, and once more tightening the loop of flax with her stick, she drew across the circle another line curved like a rainbow.

  Again she moved her stylus, this time to the juncture where one end of the rainbow-arc touched the edge of the circle, and again she traced. When she had done this six times, she removed stylus, flax, and teak-stick to sit for a moment just gazing. In the moist-scented roundel of fresh clay she had etched a perfect shape with six points—no, not just points. Narrow almonds, like the petals of the blue saffron flower after which she was named.

  Her father’s voice, sounding from above and behind her, interrupted her pleasure. “What are you making?”

  “A spindle whorl to give to Grandmother when I see her once again at the gathering.”

  “And what makes you think, my foolish young daughter, that she will want it?”

  Although her father’s tone was teasing, not scolding, Saffron frowned. With the sun of her fourteenth summer baking her shoulders, she considered herself neither young nor foolish.

  Father was saying, “Do you not realize how old my mother has become in the past four years?”

  Grandmother wandered with the Loomcloth clan, but Saffron and her father lived with the Clayglazer clan, which he had joined when he had wed her mother. Others, the People of Spotted Wildcat Pelts, the People of the Yellow Cowrie Shells, the Troutfishers and so on, all roamed, rarely meeting, for the world was vast. So it had been since the Greatest Gifting before time or memory. But just as the four seasons measured a year, so four years measured a year of years when all of the clans, Deerspearers and Stoneshapers and the People of Blue Beads and many more, all traveled to meet at the gifting place, the world’s navel.

  This was the fourth year. After the melons were harvested and the figs fell, at the time when days grew short and many torches were needed to fight back the darkness, all would gather together.

  “Wipe the clay off your teak-stick and put your hair back up where it belongs,” chided Saffron’s father before he walked on to meet the other men by the river.

  Saffron did so, but without letting her father’s shadow take away her smile; nothing could diminish her pleasure in what she was making. She herself had found the red clay and shaped it into a flat circle on the potter’s wheel, rounding and thickening its edge against chipping. And now that she had centered her design, she cleared a hole at its hub for the spindle-stick, then took yellow clay and began to shape it into tiny balls which she would press one after another into the grooves she had made, forming raised lines like strings of little pearls. She would glaze the decorated areas separately, a different color than the rest. Grandmother would praise the gift and be pleased with her granddaughter, its giver.

  *

  “Finally,” Saffron breathed as she eased her heavy pack to the ground. Atop the mountain pass she stood with others of her clan, reveling in each breath of air so cerulean, blue, new from the sky, gazing upon the wide valley lying below, a soft green bowl with a high white rim—snowpeaks encircled the gifting place, a haven of peace and protection. Caves and cliffs sheltered encampments—Saffron could see tents like mushroom tops far below, and the backs of horses like brown eggs nestled, and wildflower-hued clusters that swirled apart and together as people greeted one another.

  “Grandmother is here already!” Saffron could tell, by the looms standing outside distant tents, that her father’s mother’s clan had arrived.

  “So I see.” But Father did not smile, only jerked his chin at the treacherous path winding steeply downward. “It will be dark soon. Follow me and be careful.”

  What was the matter with him? If I had a mother who was yet alive, I would be rife with joy to see her again, Saffron thought, but she said nothing. Her father, named Auroch after the wild bulls of the mountains, had made his mark in his wife’s clan, the Clayglazers, by sheerest stubbornness. When he wore a hard face, as he did now, it was wiser not to speak. Men! So loathe to show what they are feeling. Rolling her eyes only a little, Saffron shouldered her pack and trailed after Auroch. But surely his mask will crack when he sees his mother again.

  Only a brief time later she would have taken back the wish if she could have.

  Only a brief time after they descended the valley wall to greet and be greeted by the others, Saffron followed Auroch to the Loomcloth encampment.

  In front of the largest, most elaborately woven tent, in waning daylight the matriarch hunched amid her own encircling skirts—lavender, leaf green, dusky blue—like a turtle in its shell not moving as the newcomers stood before her.

  “Mother,” Auroch said, kneeling, ducking his tall head to look into her face.

  A diminished face, Saffron saw with an unexpected ache beginning to clot in her heart; Grandmother’s was a face shirred tight and small. Into their orbs of bone her eyes seemed to have withdrawn like shy glistening fish into caves.

  “Mother,” Auroch repeated, touching her crinkled cheek to coax her gaze toward him.

  Saffron saw how all in a long-awaited moment her father’s mother grew aware of him, how her turtle head tried to lift, how her face creased all its wrinkles into the widest, most joyous of smiles. Her trembling, knotted hands faltered toward him.

  “Greetings, my mother,” Auroch said, and yes, Saffron knew by his voice how his mask had cracked—

  “Leon, my brother!” Quavering, the matriarch yet spoke all too clearly. “Dear Leon, my great black-maned lion of a brother, where have you been for so long?” Her skewed hand grasped Auroch’s arm.
<
br />   He stiffened under her touch. “No, Mother, it is I, your son, Auroch.”

  But she seemed not to hear him. With her shrunken eyes alight she teased, “Have you yet succeeded in taming the trout-speckled gray horse, Leon?”

  “I am your son, Auroch.” But father’s voice had gone soft and flat like trampled clay.

  Scarcely able to take in what was happening, Saffron had not noticed others gathering until a woman spoke. “There is nothing you can do, Auroch. Mother lives backward in time now, toward the beginning and the end.”

  “Roe!” Auroch turned away from his mother. As her father stood up and went to embrace his sister, Saffron hurried to kneel in his place before the matriarch. I am indeed foolish to have thought such ancient hands could yet spin thread. But still… Some invisible strangler seemed to squeeze her throat so that she spoke with difficulty. “Grandmother, look what I have brought you.” She offered the spindle whorl on both outstretched hands.

  Onlookers of many different clans murmured in admiration of the red clay circle with its decoration limned in yellow and glazed blue. But Saffron did not look to them, only to her grandmother.

  With her soft face pleated in pleasure, the ancient woman studied the spindle whorl. “Sweet little Ilex, how did you learn to make such a pretty thing?”

  Ilex?

  Saffron felt jagged stone take form inside her chest. She could barely speak. “Who is Ilex?”

  “My dear little sister,” Grandmother said, although not in answer, “you are so good to me.” Again Grandmother’s fumbling hands reached forth, this time to take the spindle whorl. “What a lovely cake,” she said, and she put it to her toothless mouth, trying to eat it.

  *

  “Our time to live, it is thin, like a thread,” Roe said to Saffron later, after the evening meal, sitting by the night’s fire with her and trying to explain. “Time before memory was vast, an all-colored tapestry without edge or ending, but mortal life is a mere strand that often breaks short.” Aunt Roe picked up the edge of her shawl and fingered the fringe. “Cut off, like little Ilex, your grandmother’s sister, dead before she was grown. Or like your mother…”

  “Time is like a mountain stream hurrying over stones,” spoke another woman of the many gathered around the fire under a limpid sky salted with uncountable stars.

  “Ah, but you are a Troutfisher,” Roe retorted with good humor.

  “Yes, and the brooks run swift and shallow, the water flows away without ceasing, forever new then gone.”

  “Our moments are like this, so the wise ones say.” A woman sitting in a clan leader’s place of honor by the fire took from her neck a string of precious bluestone beads and held it out, one end in each hand, so that it hung like an inverted rainbow, each lapis sphere shining almost green in the yellow light of the flames. “The longer our days, the more the memories, until we can no longer hold them all without breaking.”

  “But in the beginning?” Aunt Roe asked.

  “In the time before time, the Greatest Gifting, one could hold in one’s hands beads without number all strung without beginning or end.”

  “What does it matter?” The flinty words shot like arrows from Saffron’s mouth, surprising her as much as anyone; she had wept, and had been unable to eat, and now sat sullenly in the shadows, with a weight in her chest as if she had put the spindle whorl there instead of back into her pack. Let the stars shine; she did not look to them. Let the fire warm her face all it liked, still the night lay cold and heavy upon her back. She had not intended to speak.

  And she should not have spoken, not so rudely.

  But none of the women reproached her. Aunt Roe said gently to her, Saffron, although the words could be heard by all, “It matters because your grandmother’s life is like such a shining necklace, so very long, with its end now meeting its beginning.”

  The chieftess of the Blue Beads clan drew back from the fire, lifting her hands to fasten her jewelry once more around her neck.

  “All of life is a circle,” someone else was saying, “a wheel ever turning, seasons returning…”

  “Look here, my brother’s daughter.” Once again Aunt Roe showed Saffron the fringe of her shawl. “Most threads are cut short, but see, here is a long one. It loops back and enters again into the weave of the cloth.”

  “In the beginning,” said the Troutfisher woman, “was a vast pool of water without end, and the water lay shining and sleeping and deep beyond knowing, and time had not yet begun.”

  “Long rivers flow to the ocean,” said Aunt Roe to Saffron, “and long threads return to the tapestry of the time before time. Such a thread is your grandmother’s life.”

  And what good does that do me? Saffron wanted to cry out, although she said nothing.

  “A beautiful strand in a pattern we are too small to see. Saffron?”

  But Saffron shook her head and turned her face to the ground.

  *

  Saffron sat beside her Aunt Roe at the loom and would not look where her father sat by his mother. She combed wool for the distaff in her lap and would not lift her eyes. Often she wished she were allowed to plug her ears.

  “Leon, it has been a long time, hasn’t it?”

  “Leon has been dead for a long time, Mother. I am your son, Auroch.”

  “How can you say you are dead? You are sitting right here beside me. Do you think I am dead?”

  “No, Mother, I suppose not yet.”

  “Look, the chickens are flying!

  “Those are eagles in the sky, Mother.”

  “Leon, why have I not seen you for so long? How are you? Does the fleece grow thick and curly on your sheep?”

  “I prosper, Mother. I am your son Auroch. I have a fine daughter.”

  “A daughter! How wonderful. I must make a new, rose-colored sling for her. Do you still have the sling I gave you for the first baby?”

  “Do you still have a mind, Mother?” Auroch spoke in exactly the same sociable tones that she did. Aunt Roe actually giggled.

  “It’s not funny!” Saffron snapped at her.

  “I know, dear, but I must laugh sometimes or I will cry.”

  “I am Auroch—” Father was saying.

  “Auroch the Bullheaded,” Roe put in, smiling—but Saffron could not answer her aunt’s smile.

  “I am your son. Mother—”

  “How good to see you once again, Leon.”

  And so it went on.

  For four days.

  Father was not called bullheaded for nothing.

  And on the fourth day he got, in a way, what he wanted. The winds blow, skies cloud, the winds veer, skies clear; it was like that, like a change in the wind, unaccountable, inexplicable. Somehow there was a turning within Grandmother’s mind. And in that first windshift moment, surely it seemed like the fairest of dawnings to Saffron’s father when he saw his mother’s faraway gaze catch upon him and draw near, when he heard her cry, “Auroch!”

  Saffron heard the cry and dropped the distaff, heard the shuttle fall from Roe’s loom as both of them jumped up and turned to look, gasping, ready to rejoice—but within the next moment, stunned to stone.

  “Auroch, my son!” This was no joyous dayspring; this was a cry of agony. A fit of sobbing like an earthquake shook Grandmother. “What is wrong with me? I am losing my mind!”

  “No, you’re not, Mother, you’ve just found it!” Helpless, Saffron watched her father lurch toward his mother, on his knees to hug her. “It’s all right.”

  “I am an evil mother! Evil!”

  “No, you’re not.” Father embraced Grandmother in a kind of panic, as if trying to hold the frail old woman and her mind together.

  With pain as if bones had broken Grandmother wailed, “How could I forget my son? How could I forget I had two daughters and a son?”

  And—it would have been funny if it were not so awful—Saffron heard Father saying, “Mother, it’s nothing. Truly. Everybody forgets things sometimes.”

  But G
randmother clawed at herself with her hands, tore the thin hairs from her own head, beat herself upon her breastbone, weeping, weeping, and would not be comforted. And Saffron could not bear to look at her father’s face.

  *

  “Won’t you come with me, Father?”

  “No.” He wore his hard face today. “Haven’t I done harm enough?”

  “But Aunt Roe says she’s all right this morning. She has forgotten again.”

  “I will not risk causing her any more pain.”

  “But I myself may go?”

  “If you must.”

  Knowing that indeed, she must, Saffron left her father where he sat in the shadows of his tent. Walking toward the Loomcloth encampment, she felt the aching of her heart, but that pang was a sister feeling to the tentative touch of sunlight on her hair. She heard the whispers of the clay-red leaves that still clung to the mountain oaks, looked up into sky brighter than bluestone—somewhere behind that lapis bowl hid myriad stars; she would never turn her eyes away from them again. Everywhere around the mountain valley she heard the soft singing of springwater running.

  There, in front of the largest, most ornate tent, Grandmother hunched once again, encircled by lavender, green and blue but herself gray, bleaching in the thin winter sunshine.

  Sitting cross-legged on the crisp grass in front of the old woman, Saffron waited for the little fish that were Grandmother’s eyes to swim in her direction, then smiled a wordless greeting.

  “Why, hello, dear!” Grandmother’s toothless mouth returned the greeting tenfold. Delighted to see her.

  “Hello, Grandmother.” Saffron hesitated, then asked, “Do you know what my name is?”

  “Dear,” replied Grandmother promptly.

  “That’s right.” With a pang that felt familiar now, yet sighing with relief, Saffron stretched out both arms, offering a pretty thing. “Look, Grandmother, I have a gift for you.” She handed to her grandmother the spindle whorl, into the hub of which she had fitted a strong dowel of wood worked smooth, a spindle.

  “A gift! I love presents.” With eager, fumbling hands Grandmother took it.

  “It’s not to eat,” Saffron told her.