Spindle

by E. K. Johnston

  “It will only be a day, Yashaa,” she said. She did not remind me that I hated my spindle most of the time, and I was glad of it, for otherwise I might have wept to leave it behind in the dirt.

  WE REACHED THE CASTLE well before noon and settled in to wait. We had no way of knowing which of the towers was the one the candlemaker’s wife had told us about, except that it was one of the towers that guarded the castle’s corners, where the view from the wall was obscured. Saoud’s father had told us that the palace in Qamih was protected by a double wall that bent back on itself at the corners, so that there would be no blind spots. There was plenty of stone in Qamih, after all, and they could quarry it readily enough. In Kharuf, they had to be more economical when they built the castle, so it was a simple square, with the main keep in the middle, and the outbuildings all around it. It was, I suspected, far less grand than the palace in Qamih. And yet when I saw it, my heart lurched: this had been my home.

  I had played in that courtyard, chasing balls or chickens; or Tariq, when it was my task to mind him. I had gone to the kitchens to look for extra bread between mealtimes, and the cooks had pretended I was stealthy enough to take it without their notice, slipping me sweets and more besides. One of those rooms had been the spinning room, where I had learned my craft at my mother’s knee, and one of those rooms had been mine—where I’d slept, and where I had stayed when I was sick with the sheep pox.

  “I don’t remember it,” said Tariq beside me, great sadness in his voice. “I thought I would see it, and remember. But I don’t. I know I lived there, and spent three years in the nursery with the Little Rose, but I don’t remember anything.”

  “It’s all right, Tariq,” I told him. “I don’t remember very much, either. It’s more that I know this was my home, our home, and that we were happier here than we have been anywhere else. Does that make sense?”

  “Yes,” said Tariq. “That’s how I feel too.”

  “I feel like it’s a story,” said Arwa. “A story I’ve heard so many times that I think it’s real after all. A good story. An important one. A story that I love.”

  “Me too,” said Saoud.

  We sat, and we watched the castle, and we waited for it to get dark.

  “I see a light!” said Tariq.

  The sun had just disappeared behind the mountains, and the sky above us was dark blue and blackening as we watched. Tariq was right: there were lights in the castle. Dozens of them in the main keep, though we could only see the topmost level over the wall. The Great Hall shone dimly, as though only a few lights were put there. The king and queen must have been taking their dinner somewhere else tonight. A few torches lined the walls.

  The towers flanked the gate, and I had hoped they would not be the dark ones. It would be hard enough to climb the tower, and I didn’t fancy doing it close to the gate, where the guards were likely to be concentrated. Saoud pulled my arm, and the four of us began our long walk around the castle, careful and quiet, to check the other towers.

  The castle in Kharuf was not overly fortified. There was no moat, merely a ditch, and the land around the castle had not been flattened or cleared. There was a village over the rise to the east, so we went westerly, and stayed as low in the heather as we could. We passed what had once been the outbuildings, where the hunters and falconers had stayed. Now they lived inside the walls of the castle—not out of fear for their safety, but because there was space for them and their animals. With the spinners gone, the weavers and seamstresses and tailors had left too, and their rooms were taken over by those who remained behind in the service of the king. There were no patrols, nor any sign of them, though we did watch the torches moving along the top of the wall, and knew that the soldiers there took their duties seriously.

  At last we came around to the north side of the castle. This side was darker. I looked up at the towers. One had a lit window, but the other was dark. The candlemaker’s wife was right. That was our way in.

  I took off my tunic, which was pale linen. Even with the dirt of the road on it, it would shine like a beacon against the dark stone walls. Saoud handed me his spare, dyed forest green. Wearing it, I would be well enough hidden, unless light fell on me directly, in which case I would be discovered anyway. My trousers were dark, so I kept them, but I left my shoes. Climbing would be easier in bare feet.

  “Remember,” said Arwa, “there are other paths than up. You can go sideways and get just as far as you can if you only look in one direction.”

  “I will remember,” I told her.

  “Go slowly,” said Tariq. “If the mortar crumbles, they might hear you.”

  “I will,” I said.

  “Are you all right?” Saoud asked. “Is your head clear?”

  “It is,” I told him. “Having something to do helps, even if it is not exactly what I want to be doing.”

  He put his hands on my shoulders, and pressed his forehead close to mine.

  “Be careful, my brother,” he said. “And come back to us.”

  I tried to answer, but the words stuck in my throat. Instead I nodded, and slipped away from them, into the night.

  I reached the ditch with no trouble, and paused to rub dirt on my face. It was brown enough on its own, in all likelihood, but I wanted to take no chances, and the dirt would make it more like the color of the night. I was about to brush my hands on my trousers when I remembered that Arwa sometimes climbed with dirt on her hands on purpose, to help her find grips. I flattened my hands on the earth again, and then rubbed them together so that the grit was all over my fingers and palms. Then I scrambled up the other side of the ditch, to the wall.

  The stones were worn smooth by years of long exposure to wind and rain, but there were places between the blocks where I could find purchase for my hands and feet. I offered up a prayer to my ancestors, the ones who had come across the desert and brought magic with them, and began to climb.

  I would have gone slowly whether Tariq told me to or not. It was difficult to find good places to put my fingers, and they had to bear most of my weight because it was even harder to find good spots for my toes. My arms ached before I was even halfway up. I thought longingly of the rope I carried on my back. At least I would have that for the way down.

  Course by course, I made my way up the side of the tower. When I reached the level of the top of the wall, I had to move sideways to make sure I was on the outermost corner. There were guards on the walkway on either side, though they didn’t pass through the tower. I wondered, not for the first time, what could be inside. Saoud thought it was probably storage, but Tariq was less sure. I agreed with Tariq. There was nothing that needed to be stored up so high. The room ought to have been a guard’s office or lookout, and yet with no light, it could be neither of those things.

  Above me, high in the sky, the moon was rising. It was not quite full yet, but it was full enough. If it rose too high before I climbed back down, it would light the wall well enough for me to be spotted. That, more than anything, limited the amount of time I could spend in the castle looking for our answers.

  At last, at long last, my fingers gripped the window ledge. This was the hardest part, not the least because I could feel the closeness of my goal and wanted it badly. The ledge was made of wood, so soft after all that stone, and I ignored the screaming protests of my arms as I pulled myself over it, so that I perched on the ledge, one leg in the tower room and one still outside.

  It was not storage. It was not an office either, even an abandoned one. What it was, was very, very strange.

  The room was wide, the size of the entire tower, with no divisions. I could not see a door, only two very high windows on the courtyard side, and an odd compartment where the door ought to have been. There was a cot with a straw tick mattress near the window. There were two pillows and a heavy quilt. There was a chamber pot and a low table with nothing on it. There was no hearth or brazier, and I wondered how the room was kept warm when the snows came.

  The not-quite-
full moon was shining through the courtyard windows, and I saw that the floor was thick with dust. Patterns were drawn into it. Lines a finger-width and wider, as the design called for. Flowers and men and horses, and swirls beyond counting.

  And footprints.

  I was so surprised I nearly fell out the window, but instead caught myself on the ledge and waited there. There was no door. No person could have fit out through the odd compartment I saw. Whoever had made those footprints was in the room with me. Slowly, I pulled my other leg through the window, and stood on my feet, as steadily as I could manage given the dark unknown I was peering into.

  Over the hammering of my heart, I heard her. She laughed, when she realized I was afraid. Maybe no one had ever been afraid of her before. And then she stepped into the moonlight, and I saw her.

  She was my age, or perhaps younger. It was hard to tell. I thought that maybe if she had lived in the tower for a long time, it would be like how we’d worried about Arwa when her mother had had to carry her on the road. If she never walked properly, if she never got to see the sun, then she would be small and frail.

  Except Arwa had never been frail. And I didn’t think this girl was, either. If she had been plague-ridden, they would have taken her out of the castle, or she would have died. The candlemaker’s wife said that they had not come here in years, and yet this girl was still here. She could not be sick. She must be locked up in this tower for another reason.

  She wore a simple dress and slippers. It was good cloth, for all it was a plain design, and the fit was very good. Her hair was mostly covered by a scarf, but a few tufts of it stuck out as though they yearned for freedom from their prison, and I knew that her head had been shorn. It was her hair that gave her away. The color of summer wheat, of rice cooked with saffron, carried across the desert by an ancestor old out of time.

  “Hello, boy,” said the Little Rose. I had never heard a human being sound more resigned. “Have you come to rescue me?”

  The petty humans do not remember the moment of their making. They cannot recall that first spark of life, nor the painful pathway to their first breath of air. They do not carry the memories of their first word or their first step or their first food. They do not remember the beginning, but if they were a spinner in Kharuf, I gave them the gift of every feeling of their end.

  This was how it went: first a tickle in the back of the throat, and then a cough. These things were easily ignored, shrugged off as summer colds or the whisper of pollen on the back of the throat. They drank tea with honey and put fresh flowers in the spinning room to clear the air. They threw the windows wide open and sent the rugs out to be cleaned. There was dust in the courtyard, they said to one another; it was dust from the sheep brought in for counting.

  It was not the dust.

  After the first tickle, the cough became more persistent. They struggled to breathe, and slept propped up on pillows or sitting in chairs. The faintest amount of smoke, from the hearth or from a torch or even from a candle, was too much for them, and they wheezed for air. They took walks along the top of the castle wall. They went out into the meadows, and sat under the shade of the broad-leafed trees that grew there. They tried compresses to draw out infections; they tried teas to clear the lungs. They tried every remedy they could imagine, except the one they knew would do the trick.

  The spinners took council with each other and argued long into the night. No agreement could be reached, and so they left each master of the craft to make their own decisions. Most took their tools, families, and apprentices and set out on the roads, leaving Kharuf to seek their fortunes in other lands. Some few stayed behind and tried their hands at other crafts, but were not made content by them. No matter how busy their hands were or how occupied their minds, their bodies yearned for the downward drop of the spindle, the weight of the whorl, and the steady pull of growing thread, until they could do nothing but reach for the spindle once more.

  No fewer than a dozen stayed and kept to their craft’s traditions. They spun for the king and queen because they loved them, and they grew more and more ill as time progressed. When they finally died, it took days. They could not eat or take water, only breathe, slower and slower. The nurses who minded them measured every rise and fall of the chest, breaths spacing out so far that just when the caretakers were prepared to check the time and give the final blessing, the spinner would heave again. It drove the nurses nearly mad to hear it, rusty, slow breathing, echoing down the stone walls of the corridor where the spinners were brought to die.

  The mind, by my design, was the last thing to go. When they drowned in their own lungs, they knew it, though there was no one for them to tell, even if they’d had the air and strength to do it. I gained nothing from this additional suffering, except that it entertained me to watch it unspool before me.

  In the end, Qasim did the only thing he could think of. His last few spinners loved him so dearly that they would not forsake their craft for his sake, nor for his wife’s, nor for the sake of the Little Rose. So he made a new law, and forbade all manner of spinning in his kingdom. There was a great bonfire in the courtyard when he had the spindles and wheels burned. And the last remaining spinners were driven out from his house.

  Kharuf was a country made for sheep and little else. The sheep were still caught and sheared, but the wool could no longer be turned into thread, even in secret, so it was sold to Qamih. At first, the Maker King only sold back thread and yarn at a higher price than he’d paid for the wool. But his greed grew ever more, and in time, he only sold cloth. At last, he ordered his merchants to sell only finished clothes to the people of Kharuf, and they were so dearly bought that the people could barely afford to eat.

  Their only hope was for the day that their princess would marry the Maker King’s son, and the two kingdoms would be united once more. Then the Maker King would ensure they did not starve, and that wool and thread and yarn and cloth were fairly traded on either side of the mountain. It was a vain and small hope, but it was what they waited for on the heathered slopes of Kharuf.

  It was not what I waited for. I waited for two kingdoms, one falling and one strong, to come together. I waited for a baby girl to grow to womanhood. I waited for an undeveloped mind to learn what a future queen is taught. I waited while her parents tried to protect her and their own desperate subjects from the tightly spun threads of magic that made up my curse. I waited, and I did not care how many spinners breathed themselves to death while I did.

  And all the while, the Little Rose grew up in a dark room at the top of a stone tower, and the king and queen guarded the secret of her confinement more closely than they guarded the castle itself. For they knew what I knew—what I had declared to them on the day of her fifth birthday. The age I gave was a number pulled from the air to give weight to destiny. The truth was that I would have the girl whenever I wanted. I knew that her parents would do all manner of desperate things in an attempt to thwart me, and that in turn would serve my purpose. The spinners were cursed, the land of Kharuf was cursed, and the Little Rose could break it in a heartbeat—if only, if only they would let her have a spindle.

  “MOST OF THE PEOPLE who come here come to kill me.” The Little Rose had a calm voice, a beautiful one, but I got the idea that she didn’t get to use it very often. “Though before, they always came through the gate and pretended to be friendly before they turned to murder. They would want to see me, I suppose, to see what they were after. They would speak to my parents, and then when they saw me, they would fly at me with a knife. Killing me won’t work, you know. I mean, it will work in that I will be dead. But it won’t break the curse.”

  That she could speak of assassination so calmly chilled my blood. Not so long ago, I had considered harming her, too, and now the thought was wrapped in shame. I pushed it away.

  “But you, boy, have not come here for murder,” she continued. “Murderers bring masks and sharp knives or poison. Or they shoot an arrow from the roof of the rookery. That one ne
arly worked, only it was windy that day, and a great gust of air turned the arrow from its course. The arrow was the last one. My mother and father took steps after that, and now I am here. You are not like that. You brought me a rope.”

  I was still pressed back against the window ledge, unable to move or even to answer her. She spoke like she didn’t care if I answered her or not. She moved about the tower room, fetching an extra dress from a small cupboard I hadn’t noticed and a tiny necklace from the drawer underneath it. These she placed on the bed, and then began to strip the casings off of the pillows.

  “I’ve considered the window before, of course,” she said. “But it’s dreadfully high, and none of the blankets they give me are ever any good for shredding.”

  She was, I realized as I watched her jam the dress, the necklace, and the quilt into the pillow casing, packing. She wanted me to take her with me. She expected it.

  “I’m very sorry that I am so ill-supplied,” she said. “They don’t let me keep even my cup between meals, and I don’t know if I have ever owned a pair of proper shoes. I expect I will be quite a burden to you, but I promise to keep my complaints to a minimum. As you can see, I will not be leaving behind anything of value or use.”

  It was true. Even before she had taken the quilt off the bed, the room had been ill-appointed at best. My mind unfroze all at once, and I was nearly overcome with questions.

  “Why are you up here?” I asked, as it seemed the best place to start.

  “For my protection, of course,” she said. “First, you see, there were several assassination attempts. Then I turned seven, and I started to wander away from my mother’s side. I could get into anything then, and oh, I did.”

  “But it’s a prison,” I said, rather obviously. “And you are a princess.”

  “A cursed princess, boy,” she corrected—rather primly, it must be said. “That makes all the difference.”