Spindle

by E. K. Johnston

  I called my thoughts back from that far distance and focused on the rolling plain directly before me, though I could hardly see it in the dark. First we would have to get through Kharuf—where we would be hunted, where food would be scarce, and where there would be nothing to break the wind as it bore down on us. Then we would worry about the desert.

  “Yashaa!” Tariq shouted from near the cookfire, and I turned to run toward him.

  We had gone down the slope a ways to find a place to spar, so the camp was uphill from us. As soon as I turned, I froze, for I saw why Tariq had shouted for me.

  The Storyteller Queen had made a chain of discrete mountains, most with a single peak, though they were joined together by lower hills everywhere except the pass. Therefore, I could see quite clearly that it was the peak of the mountain on which we stood that had called Tariq’s attention. Its neighbors were all black-topped with the dark of night and with their own dark stone. Our mountain blazed with light, burning golden, as if the iron ore that laced its very bones glowed in the dark. I shook myself, and raced toward the others.

  “It can’t be a forest fire,” Saoud said when I drew near. “There aren’t any trees up there.”

  “Is it a dragon?” Arwa said, her voice very small in the dark depth of the night.

  “No,” Tariq said. “Dragon fire can’t burn stone without some kindling to start it, and there’s none up there. It’s phoenix fire.”

  Saoud and I had told the others about the sprite we’d seen in the glade, of course. Tariq’s eyes had gleamed when we’d described it, but the Little Rose had looked sad.

  “Does it want us to stay?” she asked. “Is it trying to warn us about something?”

  “I don’t know,” Tariq said. “Phoenix fire is very rare.”

  “Wonderful,” said Saoud. “Maybe it would like to fly to the Maker King’s son and tell him exactly where we are.”

  “Saoud,” Arwa chastened him. By the dim light of the campfire, I could tell he was abashed.

  “Phoenix fire means a good start in most of the stories,” Tariq said.

  “What does it mean in the rest of them?” I asked. If I had known how useful Tariq’s father’s tales would be, I might have paid them more attention. As it was, I had no problems relying on Tariq, and listening better to what he said now.

  “A good end,” said the Little Rose.

  “I suppose we shall be happy with either,” Saoud said. It was as close to an apology as we, or the phoenix, were likely to get. He smiled at me across the fire, and I knew that whatever trouble had been between us, he had decided to let it go. Perhaps that wasn’t the beginning or ending the phoenix had intended, but I would take it.

  “Come on,” I said. “I’ll watch first, but the rest of you should sleep.”

  The noises of the night never changed, even though the phoenix-fire glow above us didn’t dim as the night drew on. No other animals were disturbed by it, and I hoped against hope that it meant the sight of the fire had been for us alone.

  WE WALKED FOR TWO DAYS across the heathered slopes of Kharuf without seeing so much as a sheep on the horizon, but we took no chances. We set up camp at night in whatever concealment we could find, digging the fire pit as deep as we could and burying it again as soon as we were done cooking. Even the Little Rose took her turn at watch now, though she didn’t usually watch for very long. She still didn’t trust herself with the blanket on her own, and it was too cold for her to sit up without it. She usually took the first turn, as a result, but it spared us all a couple of hours to reorder our thoughts after a long day’s march.

  Saoud’s father had told us that there was more to trekking than simply taking the steps. You had to plan food and water, which were both easy enough for now, and you could only move as fast as your slowest companion. Usually that was Arwa, who absolutely hated the idea of us slowing our pace to match hers, but with the Little Rose’s gift for stamina, it was complicated. She could, as we had seen, walk farther than anyone should be able to, but it cost her to do it. Saoud talked with her, reminding her that we must reach the desert fit to keep going, if we had to, and she conceded the point. Though it chafed her more than it chafed Arwa, she called a halt when she needed it, and it was she who set our pace across Kharuf.

  On the second day, just after we set out, Tariq stopped in his tracks and put his hand to his chest. I reached for my water skin, sure he would need a drink after he had finished coughing, but then I realized he wasn’t coughing. None of us were. I still had a tickle in the back of my throat, but that was all. Saoud walked back to us, and I saw the question in his eyes.

  “We’re all right,” I said. Then, again: “We’re all right.”

  “How is that possible?” Tariq said. “The first time we came into Kharuf, I nearly left a lung on the riverbank. Arwa?”

  “I’m fine too,” she said, breathing deeply to confirm it.

  “What’s different this time?” Saoud said.

  “We ate food from the gnome’s garden,” Tariq said. “But I don’t think that’s it.”

  “Could it be because the princess has started to make things?” Saoud asked. We all flinched away from the implication that her making could ease our illness.

  “No,” said Tariq. “That doesn’t feel right, either.”

  “Feel right?” Saoud said.

  “No, Tariq, think,” I said. “Or don’t think. However you figure things out, no matter how strange it seems, follow the thread of it.”

  “Our parents got sick, but they weren’t immediately incapacitated,” he said, speaking slowly. “They were able to hang on for months before they had to leave.”

  Once I would have interrupted him with an angry remark about King Qasim, but now I knew better, and held my tongue.

  “They didn’t have the gnome’s food, and Zahrah wasn’t making anything,” he continued. “But she was there.”

  He looked directly at me, his eyes bright.

  “Yashaa, your mother was completely devoted to her princess and to her king and queen. It was like they were a focus, some bit of magic that no one even knew about. Not a spell or anything, just…a connection.” He turned to look at the Little Rose. “It’s you. That’s why we’re better this time. It won’t save us, not forever, but you’ll help us get through.”

  The Little Rose’s eyes were bright, too.

  “Come on,” Saoud said, his gentle voice drawing us forward again. “We should take every advantage we can.”

  On the third day, we came to what had at one time been a village. The wooden walls of the huts and houses had collapsed, but the foundations were still there. Heather grew everywhere, topping the low and rotting walls, and crowding over the paths that had once been the village roadways.

  “Find the well,” Saoud said to Arwa. “And see if it has been fouled.”

  She nodded and went off. It was a small enough village that even if she strayed beyond our sight, we would still be able to hear her. We busied ourselves checking the other houses, in case anything of value remained in them. The settlement had not been quickly abandoned. This was one of Kharuf’s forgotten places. With spinning forbidden, the people who lived here had nothing to support themselves with. They had gone south, to where the land was marginally better for farming. If they were lucky, they got there early enough that land was still available. Most were not so fortunate. The few people who had remained in the north were shepherds, and only needed help during the annual shearing.

  The Little Rose stood in the middle of what I guessed had once been the town square. The remains of a raised platform rotted there, and the houses that faced it had stone foundations and dugout cellars, like the ones shops needed for storage.

  “This is my fault,” she said. “Everything is always my fault.”

  “And now you are working to fix it, princess,” I reminded her. “And we are here to help you do it.”

  “It’s been years, Yashaa,” she said. “So many have suffered and died.”

>   “They won’t blame you,” I said.

  “You did.” The accusation was quiet, and it stung because it was the truth. If she had been Arwa, I would have put an arm around her shoulders. But she was the Little Rose.

  “I was sick during your birthday party, did you know that?” I said. “I had the sheep pox, so I had to stay away from you and Tariq, because you hadn’t caught it yet.”

  “Most of what children remember is told to them,” she said. “No one ever wanted to talk to me about that night, but I made them. I don’t want to make you, but if you would do it anyway, I would listen.”

  “It was beautiful,” I said. “The most beautiful night I have never seen. I didn’t even get to see the hall when it was empty, before the guests arrived. But when it was full of light and song? Before the demon came…princess, I imagined that night for years.”

  “Is it a happy memory?” she asked.

  Behind me, I was aware that Saoud and Tariq had come into the square. I expected them to join us, but instead Saoud took Tariq by the shoulder and led him into another abandoned house. I wondered briefly what he had spotted there.

  “No,” I told her. “It is an angry one. It has been angry since I made it, lying in my bed all those years ago and barely able to hear the music. It was torturous, princess, to be so close to it and miss it entirely. Your mother sent me a plate she had made up herself, and I barely ate it, I was so furious with my own circumstances.”

  “Children can be vicious,” she said. She looked away from the platform and smiled at me. “What made you change your mind?”

  “You did,” I said. “I carried that anger with me for so long. Every time my mother tried to tell me what she had seen that night in the Great Hall, I twisted her words to match my rage, and I focused all of it on you. I thought you were selfish and spoiled. I thought my mother’s love of you had ruined her, and I thought your parents were terrible rulers for letting your safekeeping outweigh the safety of their subjects.

  “But then I climbed a tower,” I said. “And I saw you at the top of it. And I understood.”

  “What did you understand?” She took a step closer to me and looked like she was about to take another.

  “That you aren’t just the Little Rose,” I said. “You aren’t a far-off person that I can ignore, and you never will be. I understood that you are my princess, and even if your court cannot have spinners, I would still be in it.”

  She froze, her weight half pushing toward the step she was about to take, and seemed to shut in on herself.

  “I would never keep you in a place you could not spin,” she said, so quietly I had to lean in to hear her speak.

  “I think that’s why I would stay,” I told her.

  She had wanted something from me before, I was sure of it, and I was just as sure I had not given it to her. Before I could ask, Arwa came running into the square at her usual carefree pace.

  “The well is still good!” she announced. “It’s not even overgrown, like so many of the houses are.”

  Saoud and Tariq came out of the house behind us empty-handed, and we followed Arwa back to the well. Saoud fell into step beside me. I knew that he had overheard everything I had just told the Little Rose. I had made promises to them both, and that had been a foolish thing to do. Saoud did not rebuke me, and I was glad, for I had not yet had the time to muster a defense.

  The well was more than good. It was nearly untouched. Even the rope and bucket were still there. Only a slight crack in the mortar that held the stones of the cover together betrayed the well’s age.

  “Wait,” said the Little Rose and I, speaking in the same breath. She looked at me, as though the conversation in the square hadn’t taken place, and I knew we were of a common mind.

  “It’s like the gnome’s garden,” the Little Rose told Arwa. “There are creatures here.”

  “Listen,” said Tariq, and we heard it.

  The wooden walls of the village houses had been held in place by wattle and daub. Nails might have been used around the windows, to fasten the coverings down, but they were still a luxury. The technique meant that wall collapse left pockets of decayed plant matter between the planks. With the summer sun and the shelter of the wind, it was warm enough for bees.

  Once I heard the buzz of them, I wondered how I had missed it. They must be in every wall, returning now to the safety of their hives as the day drew to an end. There would be hundreds of them, thousands likely, and where there were that many bees…

  “Piskeys,” breathed Tariq.

  “We should go,” Saoud said. We all gaped at him in protest. “Not far,” he said. “Just to the edge of the village. We’ll camp there, and see if we can come up with a way to fix the well cover. In the morning we’ll do the work, and then if the piskeys come out, we will ask them.”

  We retreated to the western side, and found a place to pitch the tents. Tariq and I worked quickly to set them up, and Arwa went to dig a privy without being told.

  “Yashaa,” said Saoud, “come. Let’s see if we can find where the villagers got their mud from.”

  I went with him, and before it was fully dark, we found a good-sized pond. It was shallow and on a path from the village that had once been well-trod, so we guessed that it was the source of both the reeds used for the wattle and the mud used for the daub. It was too dark to gather any great quantity, but at least we knew where it was, and were able to take a small amount back in my drinking cup.

  I gave it to Tariq when we returned, and he ground it between his fingers.

  “This should do,” he said. “It will have to bake in the sun for a few days, but it’s still warm enough for that. We’ll make the cover out of reeds. It won’t be as strong as the stone cover, obviously, but it will suit, and it will be easier for the piskeys to maintain, if they have to.”

  “The reeds won’t be dry,” said the Little Rose. “Won’t they just rot?”

  “We can take them from the edge of the pond,” I said, “where the summer heat has dried the bed of it a little. It won’t be perfect, but it will be better than something with holes in it that might crack at any moment.”

  Arwa passed out our dinner. It was the last of the food from the gnome’s garden. After this, it would be back to vetch. At least Tariq was better at cooking it than I was, and we still had the supplies they had brought back from their short excursion south.

  The buzzing, which had all but stopped as the night grew dark, intensified again. I listened and realized that the pitch of the noise had shifted. It was lighter somehow, and the movement of it was more carefree than a honeybee, driven to its task, would be.

  “There,” said Saoud, as the first small shower of gold dust appeared in the sky by the village edge.

  The noise grew closer, and though we couldn’t see them fully, we knew by the trailing golden lights that the piskeys were dancing in the village below. The sight of their stately patterns further calmed the itch I had been feeling since we’d come back to Kharuf. Even if it was less oppressive this time, thanks to the influence of the Little Rose, I knew what it would do to my body if I did the work. The dance was beautiful, and we watched it for hours until we finally dragged ourselves inside the tents and went to sleep.

  IN THE MORNING, SAOUD TOOK the Little Rose with him and went out to see if there was anything in the area that he could hunt. It was odd for them to go off together, but I supposed that watching Saoud hunt would be more interesting than watching us weave mud and reeds all day. I didn’t know if they would catch anything, but I supposed there were rabbits everywhere, and a bit of fresh meat would suit us all well. I didn’t regret my decision not to trap when we were in the mountains, but now that we were away from them I remembered what hunger felt like, and I had not grown any fonder of it. In truth, I saw it as a mercy: Arwa and Tariq and I would spend most of the day weaving, which would mean boredom to Saoud but outright torture for the Little Rose to watch.

  Arwa and Tariq went to cut reeds and fetch
as much of the mud as our cooking pot could hold, while I went back into the village and tried to find a wooden frame of the right size, if any such thing remained intact. With the new day’s sun on the heather, the buzzing this morning was impossible to miss, and there were bees flying everywhere back and forth between clumps of flowers and their hives. Since they were usually territorial, I knew that the piskeys must be influencing the bees directly to have so many in one place. They were busy at their work, as I planned to be, and I knew that if I didn’t disturb them, they would leave me alone.

  I found the ruins of a house that was less overgrown by heather than its neighbors, and didn’t appear to have a hive concealed anywhere in what remained of its structure. I sifted through the ruins of the collapsed roofing material until I found what I was after: the planks that had once framed the window of the house. Windows were a sign of luxury in wattle and daub, so once upon a time, this house had been well done by. I was thankful for it now.

  I shook the frame experimentally, and it didn’t fall to pieces in my hands. I tested the joints at the corners. The edges had been fitted together, not fastened, and therefore were much more stable. Whoever built this house had cared for it a great deal. The fact that they had been forced to leave it, for almost certain poverty in the south, turned my stomach.

  By the time I returned to the campsite, the pile of reeds was large enough to get started. Arwa was the best weaver of us, having learned from her mother before her death. She selected the largest reeds and used them to set the warp. She took some care with the knots, both because the reeds were fragile and because, unlike a normal weaving, this one would stay on the frame when we were done with it. The warp she set was very tight. We wanted this to be as waterproof as we could make it before we added the daub, because we wanted the finished project to be light enough to be easily moved.