Spindle

by E. K. Johnston

  “I never understood why it was spinning,” Arwa said, as we sat around the campfire. We were high enough in the mountains that trees were few, which made the fire difficult to maintain, but soon we would be across the top of the range. In the meantime, we huddled together and ate smoked bear meat with whatever plants Arwa had gathered as we walked during the day.

  “What does it matter?” asked Saoud.

  “I only mean that there are other crafts to pick from,” Arwa said. “Why not blacksmithing? Or weaving? Why not farming?”

  “It had to be something small,” I said, my tongue so thick with bitter feelings that I could taste them. “Something that no one considers, something that goes unnoticed.”

  “How can spinning be unnoticed?” Arwa asked. “It is the base of everything.”

  “We know that,” I said. “We have been taught it. But do you think the Little Rose looks at her dresses when she puts them on in the morning, and wonders how they are made?”

  “That’s not fair, Yashaa. Your mother taught the Little Rose to spin herself, and she was the most important spinner in the castle.” She paused for a moment. “When she helped teach me, she said that spinning was the beginning of everything. Maybe that’s why the demon picked it. Because that’s where Kharuf begins.”

  Tariq and I exchanged a look, and Tariq shrugged.

  “It’s like fine silk, magic,” Tariq said. “Most people cannot see the threads until they are unspooled.”

  “Why would a demon want Kharuf to be unspooled?” Saoud said. “Why make the curse at all?”

  “I don’t think demons need reasons,” I said. “I think they just enjoy destruction.”

  Tariq looked like he had his own answer to that question, but didn’t want to start an argument. I was not very reasonable when it came to discussion of the curse, and my head still ached, which made me irritable. I resolved to be less obstructive, but before I could say anything encouraging, Saoud interjected.

  “My father says it is not wise to engage an enemy you cannot predict,” he said.

  “That is why we are going to find the Little Rose,” I reminded him. “I fought the bear with you, Saoud. I do not wish to fight another demon, in any form, until I know more.”

  Saoud looked at me for a long moment, and then nodded. Tariq moved closer to Arwa, and wrapped his blanket around her. I would be so glad when we were back in the lowlands, where summer remembered that it was meant to be warm.

  “Tell me again what you remember of the castle,” Saoud said.

  It wasn’t very much. I remembered the Great Hall and the spinning room, and our own living quarters, but I could not tell him the shape of the gates, nor how many soldiers guarded them. Tariq remembered the Little Rose’s playroom and nursery with some detail, but we had no way of knowing if those rooms would still be hers, or if she would have moved to different ones once she was older.

  “We are going to have to find a village near the castle and ask questions,” Saoud said. “I don’t like that idea very much, but I don’t like wandering into the castle and making an attempt on the princess with no directions at all.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “But how do you intend to get them to tell us?”

  He was silent then, and so was I, as we cast about for a solution.

  “I’ll ask them,” Arwa said.

  We all looked at her, surprised.

  “You’ll just ask?” Saoud said. He wasn’t mocking her, not quite, but he never could help smiling when he looked at her, so it looked rather like he was.

  “People tell me things,” she said practically. “You have seen them do it.”

  This was true. More than once over the years, we had concocted some sort of plan to eavesdrop on the merchants who visited our parents when we had been forbidden to listen to their talk. The plans had always failed, but it had taken Arwa only moments to sit next to someone’s wife, stir a pot over a cookfire, and ask the questions we wanted to have answered. She was small, and so they often thought she was younger than her true years. Even if they did not speak to her directly, they spoke around her without heed to her presence, and her memory for such overheard conversations was excellent.

  “Very well,” said Saoud. “But Tariq must go with you, even if he hides himself. I don’t think any of us, even Yashaa or I, should be alone once we come down from the mountains.”

  “Or in the mountains,” Tariq said, tearing a strip of bear meat with his teeth with particular ferocity.

  “Yashaa, how is your head?” Arwa asked me.

  I grimaced, for I had hoped that they had all forgotten.

  “It’s fine,” I told them, which was not quite the truth. Saoud frowned. “It’s better, in any case. The headaches are almost gone, and I can look at the fire without fainting. We have walked for days, and I haven’t faltered. Sometimes I feel a bit light-headed, but my sight has cleared and my mind no longer feels fuzzy, like it did in the first few days.”

  “You will tell us if something changes?” Arwa pressed. “I know you are well enough, but, Yashaa, we are all we have.”

  “I will,” I told her, “and I know.”

  And silently I promised her that someday, I would make sure that she had more.

  WE WEREN’T SURE IF the border between Kharuf and Qamih was at the highest point of the mountain pass, or somewhere else along the way. The mountains were not inhabited, for the most part, so it mattered little which kingdom laid claim to them. Anyone might climb partway up and trap for meat or furs, and anyone might scratch the surface of the mountain rock to look for iron ore, though most of what had been easily exposed was long since depleted. We knew that Qamih lay behind us, but we weren’t certain where Kharuf would begin. At least, we weren’t until we crossed into it.

  There was a little creek, one we had followed down the mountainside because it was clear, and if we kept to it, then we didn’t have to carry our own water as we walked. It turned sharply south where we needed to continue east, and so we crossed. As soon as our feet touched the dry dirt on the other side, we knew that we were home.

  Tariq, who spun the most of us, coughed so hard that his paroxysms took him to his knees, and there was blood on Arwa’s handkerchief when he handed it back to her. For her part, Arwa caught her breath easily enough and kept her feet, though she swayed enough that Saoud put his arm around her shoulders to hold her up. My head, which had ceased to ache as the air thickened on our way down the mountain, pounded anew, though I too was able to stand.

  “Give me your spindles,” Saoud said. “Now.”

  Tariq didn’t try to talk, but rummaged in his pack as his strength returned to him. Arwa retrieved both of hers—one from her mother, and one from the father she had never met—and I got mine.

  “Are you going to break them?” Arwa asked, and she handed Saoud the tools of her craft. She didn’t sound sad or scared, just resigned to whatever would be decided.

  “No,” Saoud said. “I will keep them for you.”

  He had sat around the fire in the evenings with us all these days in the mountains, and all the years before. He had seen how unconscious it was; how, as soon as we were settled, a spindle appeared in our hands and wool for us to spin. Even I did it, and my feelings about spinning were complicated. He knew that, though we might not mean to, our hands tended to find craft to work, and he knew that if he left us our spindles, we would spin whether we meant to or not.

  “The king’s decree was for our own protection, as much as it was for the Little Rose,” said Tariq, as his spindle disappeared into Saoud’s pack.

  “Maybe,” I said. “But he still drove our parents away to save one girl. I am not ready to forgive that so easily. Are you?”

  “No,” said Tariq, but his heart was not in it. He was still looking at Saoud’s pack. “The magic must have grown stronger in the years since the curse was laid. Our parents weren’t affected so quickly, even right after the birthday party.”

  “Can you walk?” Saoud asked
, hoisting the pack onto his back again. “Are you ready to go on?”

  In truth, my body was, but my mind had seen clearly for the first time the illness that was killing my mother. She had always kept it from us, even when Tariq’s father and then Arwa’s mother were dying in the spare tent. She never let us see the full power of her illness, never let us feel the fear of it in our lungs. I felt it now, though, in my own breathing, and when I looked at how Tariq’s shoulders still heaved.

  “I am,” I said.

  “So am I,” said Tariq, pale and determined, and beside him, Arwa nodded.

  Our pace was slow, though the ground was even and the air was plentiful again. Saoud took the front, and did not push us. I guarded the back, poorly, I’ll admit, as I was halfway lost in my own thoughts.

  I had always carried a spindle. Even though I hated it and loved it in turn, it had always been in my pocket, in my belt, in my pack. When we had no food upon the road, I’d had my spindle. When I was angry with my mother, angry with the Little Rose, I’d had it. I set it down only for sparring, when the manic energy of the staff or the knives took me over, and made me into a tool for crafting of a different purpose. The spindle didn’t weigh very much, even with the weighted whorl, but I knew it was with me when I had it, and now that it wasn’t, I felt its absence.

  This was the burden my mother had borne that whole last year in Kharuf, when she stayed for love of the queen. To keep the spindle and feel her lungs fail her, or to give it up and always be searching for it? I had been without mine for not even an hour, and I was nearly mad from wanting it back. How had she lasted? How had she felt the pull and stretch of her craft and ignored it until she was safely in Qamih, and could work again?

  I nearly tripped when I realized it: she hadn’t. She had spun for the king and queen, and for the Little Rose, even though she had felt it killing her. She had not been able to stop. Not even after it was made illegal. She had spun and spun, and unspooled, until finally she had crossed the mountains with the illness already set into her lungs, drowning her with every breath. She had done her duty—no, she had done more than that—and she had carried the price of it across the mountains, where it was still killing her. I wished I had been kinder.

  Our days went well enough. We walked and walked, and there was plenty to keep us occupied. The evenings, however, were not so easy. Saoud sharpened knives until the sound of iron grating on the whetstone made Arwa beg him to stop, to give her some peace and quiet. But the quiet was even worse. I could hear Tariq’s fingers move against the fabric of his trousers, spinning wool that wasn’t there with a spindle he didn’t have. I could hear Arwa’s breathing, and wondered if it wheezed more today than it had yesterday. I could hear my own heart beat, hard against my ribs, for lack of anything else to do.

  We sparred, each of us taking a turn against the others. I even squared off with Arwa, and though I tried to go easy on her, she fought with such ferocity that I was forced to maintain my guard, and strike at her harder than I might have liked. We fought each other with the staff, and with our fists, and with knives, which was something Saoud’s father had never allowed, because there was no way to make it safe.

  “There is no safe,” Saoud said, panting, when I reminded him of this. “There is no safe, and the three of you are wild here. Knives, I think, are the least of our worries.”

  We were lucky that he kept his head.

  It was Saoud who planned how far we would walk each day, now, and where we would camp and what we would eat. Left to ourselves, Tariq and Arwa and I would not have managed it. We skirted what few villages we passed, and not even Saoud went into them to seek news or food. He would not leave us alone, and neither would he take us with him into a town. Instead, he shepherded us up and down the heathered slopes with the care and attention of the best herd master, and took care of us when we could not take care of ourselves.

  One night, I woke to Saoud carrying Arwa out of our tent. She struggled against his hold, her veil and robe loose in the night breeze, and her arms flailed against him in useless blows.

  “What are you doing?” I hissed at him.

  “She was trying to get into my pack,” Saoud said, and I heard the words he would not say: she was trying to get her spindle.

  “Please,” she begged. “Just for a little while. Just for a little while.”

  “No, little goat,” he said to her, and I heard his father’s gentlest voice when he spoke. “You mustn’t. You must sleep without it.”

  He put her in her tent, and then came back for his pack. I had never given it much consideration before. It was merely a part of Saoud, Saoud’s pack on Saoud’s back. He saw how I looked at his pack now, though, and sighed.

  “Yashaa,” he said. “We need a better way than this.”

  He was tired. We were killing him, and the spindles were killing us. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t stop staring at the pack. I watched while he picked it up, wrapped it tightly in his arms, and went to sit by the fire alone.

  It was a long time before I could go back to sleep.

  “Saoud,” I said, when we rose gritty-eyed in the morning. Tariq and Arwa had gone to the river for water, and would not overhear us. “Saoud, tonight I should spin.”

  “No!” he said.

  “Listen to me,” I said. “This is what we know: spinning makes us sick. Not spinning makes us mad. I will suffer the least if you let me spin, and then you and I can make a plan when my head is clear.”

  He did not like it. I did not much like it either, but I knew that it was the only way. It would be only the finest thread, the smallest line between sanity and sickness, and I would hold it for as long as I could, but I needed a place to start.

  “Very well,” he said. “But I will hold the wool.”

  He would stop me before I spun too much, I knew. He would help me find the middle ground.

  When Tariq and Arwa returned with the water, we cooked dinner and sparred until it was too dark to see. They crawled into their tents and slept, and Saoud and I pretended to do the same while we waited for them to quiet. Then Saoud went to his pack and pulled out my spindle and a handful of wool he had taken from Tariq.

  As soon as he put the shaft in my hands, I felt better than I had in days. The weight of the whorl pulled my hands down, the way my mother had taught me when I was a child, and when Saoud gave me the wool, I knew that this was what I was meant to do. There was a tickle in my throat, even before I dropped the spindle the first time, but I ignored it.

  I spun quickly and well, and long before I wanted to stop, the wool ran out. Saoud would give me no more. The thread was not my best work, but it was work, and I was glad of it, even though I coughed when it was done. Saoud gave me water, and I coiled the thread around the spindle shaft, finishing the job as I had been taught.

  “Are you better now?” Saoud asked.

  “Yes,” I said. My throat betrayed me with a cough, and Saoud’s eyes narrowed. “At least, my mind is better,” I said.

  “You look much calmer,” Saoud said. “You have scared me these past days.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “And I will be sorry later, too. I can already feel it coming undone.”

  “Then we’d better talk now,” Saoud said, “while we still can.”

  IN THE END, THE BEST IDEA we had was to give Arwa her spindle. As she spun the meager wool that Saoud allowed her, her eyes lost the red-manic glint; her smile became the one I was used to, not the feral look of a strange girl who scared me as much as I am sure I scared her. The hardest part was watching Tariq, whose face grew longer and longer as he watched her spin, hunger writ on every part of his skin, and his fingers still moving absently against his thigh.

  “I’m sorry, Tariq,” I told him. I didn’t try to still his hands, though I wanted to. “You know I don’t hold you back to hurt you.”

  “I do,” he said. “I do. It’s only…”

  I knew what he meant. I had only felt the call to spin since we had ar
rived in Kharuf and fallen under the curse. Tariq lived with it of his own accord, this calling to our craft, and loved it, all his days. Now he could not have it, and he felt mad for wanting.

  Arwa came out of the tent. She had scrubbed her face, and was wrapping a newly washed veil around her head. She was dressed neatly, with none of the dust of the road on her knees, in the best clothes she had remaining. She looked like a poor merchant’s daughter, one who could pay for what she needed, but could not pay very much. The truth—that she was not even that well-stationed—pulled even harder at my heart.

  “Are you sure you are all right?” I asked her, probably for the tenth time.

  “Yes, Yashaa,” she said to me, and coughed lightly into her veil. “My head is clearer now, and I remember how the market works.”

  “We will be close by if you need us,” Saoud told her.

  I would be the closest, since my head was still clear enough. I would watch her as she went among the stalls. Saoud would be with Tariq, tucked out of the way but ready to come if we needed them.

  The town we were close to had a fair-sized market. There were more than two dozen stalls, and we knew that more artisans and traders would set up in unofficial corners of the market to do their business.

  “They talk to Arwa because she is small enough that they think it does not matter what they say to her,” Saoud’s father had told us. Arwa had overheard two merchants discussing how the Maker King’s soldiers might be bribed to rout us out of the crossroads, despite the fact that it was our right to stay there. Arwa had been right next to them when they’d said it, her dress and appearance making it obvious who she was, and they had not cared. When she told Saoud’s father, he had been able to remedy the situation, and the two merchants had found themselves unwelcome at the market thereafter.