Spindle

by E. K. Johnston

  “The first thing you made wasn’t a fence, Zahrah,” Tariq said, coming to our rescue. “It was your ties to us. It was our friendship and our loyalty. Of course we will help you.”

  “Usually we start with spinning,” I said. “But we can’t do that.”

  “I spun as a child,” Zahrah reminded us. “And I sewed once, too. I made the cloth bags my mother used to wrap the gifts she gave to the creatures who came to my birthday.”

  “I remember,” I said. “I was appalled that such messy stitches made it past my mother’s watchful gaze. I was never allowed to do such work.”

  She stuck her tongue out at me. She was much more fun now that she was a girl and not a rose.

  “Here,” said Arwa, passing over her sewing kit. “There’s got to be something that needs hemming.”

  In the end, we settled for hemming the last of Saoud’s spare tunics for Tariq, who had grown again.

  “We had to replace his shoes, too,” Saoud said, while we watched Arwa show Zahrah how to set the pins, and Tariq stood there as a clotheshorse. “I did it when we got Zahrah’s. Do you remember growing that much so quickly?”

  “We must have,” I said. “I only remember that it hurt.”

  “I trip a lot,” Tariq said. “And sometimes when I’m sewing, my fingers forget what they’re doing. But eventually I’ll be back to normal.”

  The girls finished the hem, and Tariq changed back into his old shirt. Later, I was sure, he would take it apart to use for something else. It was fraying a little bit, but there was a lot of usable fabric.

  “Your turn, Yashaa,” Arwa said.

  I went to sit with them and began the task of helping Zahrah remember how to work the awl and needle. Tariq was the best at it, but he moved so quickly it was sometimes difficult to follow his movements, and he wasn’t very good at slowing down. He watched us for a moment before turning his attention to Saoud.

  “Rabbits?” he asked.

  “If we’re lucky,” Saoud replied. “Come on, before they pin you to the ground.”

  I missed hunting, to be honest. I didn’t have Saoud’s gift for it, but I was competent enough, and I could make better snares than he could. We had been a good team. This was the part of my spirit that had never taken to spinning and craft, despite my mother’s hopes. The part of me that liked to move more than just my hands, and was not content to sit in a room with thread and wool and the easy rhythm of work to fill my time.

  If I wasn’t a spinner for Zahrah, I didn’t know how I would spend my time. There would be others to hunt and guard, and she would have better people to give her lessons. She needed to learn things I didn’t know how to do, for a start. Plus, there was the ruling of her kingdom to think of. I couldn’t help her with that.

  Or perhaps I could. Saoud said that I listened, even to people like Arwa who often went unheeded. Perhaps that would be my task. I could work, and I could listen, and I could help the Little Rose, if I was married to her.

  I stuck the needle into my thumb and cried out.

  “Yashaa!” said Arwa.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and turned away because I didn’t want to bleed on the tunic. I scrambled for an excuse. “It’s been a while since I did this.”

  Married! To Zahrah! The thought was both laughable and desperately appealing. Of course that was how the story ended. We break the curse and both of us are heroes, and then we wed. The thought was so ridiculous I could barely think it, and it was so necessary that I wanted it with all my heart. I looked at her as furtively as I could. She was sewing slowly, with Arwa guiding her. Her brow must have been furrowed in concentration, because her veil was slipping forward.

  She had thought of this before I had, I knew it. She had thought of it from the start. Once she had seen a grand and gallant tale, but now she saw a quiet, oddly feasible future. It was still a dream, but it was closer than it had been when we were in the mountain valley, and closer than it had been when I crawled through the window of her tower. If we did this, if we were successful, we would marry. We wouldn’t have the abandoned love of my mother and father. We wouldn’t have the arrangement-made-good of her own parents. We would have ourselves, and we would make something of that, too.

  “Yashaa, has it stopped?” Arwa said.

  I made a show of examining my hand and wiping my thumb in the grass.

  “More or less,” I told her. “I’m safe to return to work.”

  “Is the work safe for you?” Zahrah asked.

  “I can only hope,” I told her. “Because otherwise it’s going to take so long to hem this tunic that Tariq will have outgrown it before he even tries it on again.”

  It was like a great weight had been lifted from me, knowing the full end of my own dream. It would be different work than I had learned, and different than what my mother had planned, but it would still be good. And if we didn’t break the curse, well, then we were all going to need new dreams anyway.

  I looked at the stitches that Zahrah had done. They were even, at least, though they were larger than anything we might have done. I watched her sew two handspans’ worth of stitches, and then I called a halt.

  “I can keep going,” she said. “I’m getting faster, I think.”

  “I want to see the headache you get before we turn you loose on our alterations,” I said. “You told me it was nothing in the mountains, and I knew you were lying, but you concealed more than I thought.”

  “The phoenix’s gift lets me recover,” she admitted ruefully. “It does not precisely ease my recovery. I thought it would get easier, but so far it hasn’t. I do feel better eventually, but every time it’s like I am adding on more weight.”

  “It’s like that when you practice anything, at first,” I told her. “Eventually, you’ll have all the weight you need, and then you’ll get better at bearing it.”

  “I hope so,” she said.

  Arwa and I continued to sew, and while we worked we told Zahrah the craft knowledge that our mothers had told us when we were small. We told her about the different kinds of sheep, and the ways to herd and shear them. We told her which plants could be used in place of wool, though they were not commonly found in Kharuf. We told her which trees make the best needles and spindles, and how to find the best pieces of finished wood if you were setting the frame for a loom.

  I don’t know if she remembered any of it from when she was small, but it was wonderful to talk to her like that. She asked good questions and didn’t fidget, the way we had when we had been forced to sit still. Perhaps it was because she wasn’t a child. We talked until the hem was nearly done and we were sewing mostly by firelight.

  “Saoud and Tariq should be back soon,” I said. “Even if they haven’t caught anything, it will soon be too dark to continue.”

  “I’ll start boiling water, in any case.” Zahrah stood up to get the pot, but made it no further than her feet before she collapsed back onto the ground.

  “Zahrah!” said Arwa, dropping the tunic and crawling to her side. “Yashaa, help me.”

  But there was nothing I could do. It was the headache, the same as she’d had in the mountains, and this time it was worse. Her eyes ran with tears if she so much as looked at the fire, and I imagined she felt the light of it in her skull the way I had felt the needle in my thumb, only multiplied a hundredfold. I sent Arwa to soak a veil in cool water and pulled Zahrah into my arms.

  “You were right,” she said, grimacing through the words. “Yashaa, it feels like my head will explode.”

  “It won’t,” I told her.

  “It’s magic,” she said. “How can you know?”

  “The demon needs your head, Zahrah,” I said. “That means it won’t explode.”

  It was cold comfort at best, and I knew it, but it was the truth. I held her until Arwa came back, and then we helped her to sit up so we could wrap the cool cloth around her head. She vomited twice, and again when Saoud and Tariq came back with a rabbit and she smelled the blood. She didn’t even
try to eat, so I put her to bed.

  “Stay,” she said. “Please.”

  Arwa could sleep in the tent with Tariq. Zahrah’s reputation was already ruined. It could do no harm.

  “All right,” I said, and I held her until she finally fell asleep.

  OUR TENTS WERE ALL THE SAME, so I was awake for a few moments before I remembered where I was. I had slept fitfully at first, worried that Zahrah would vomit again, but once she was asleep she didn’t stir at all, and eventually I had drifted off and stayed asleep. Saoud had not come to wake me for a watch, probably thinking he would wake Zahrah if he did so. I hoped that when she did wake up, her headache would be gone.

  The ground was hard underneath the tent, and we had reached the season when damp rose through the dropcloth, making the mornings cold. Usually I slept wrapped in my bedroll and was warm enough, but this morning, with the press of Zahrah’s body against mine, it was actually almost comfortable. Or at least it was until I shifted, and realized that the ground was not the only thing that was hard.

  It wasn’t an alien feeling, of course, but usually I was alone when it happened, and I could push it out of my mind. With Zahrah so close, all I could think of was getting out of the tent before she woke up and noticed. I moved as carefully as I could and exited the tent with all possible speed, though I did make sure that she was still tucked underneath the blanket.

  It was barely dawn. The sky was grey except for the east, where pinks and oranges were beginning to bleed over the mountaintops. The heather blossoms were still closed, though I knew they would soon unfurl, and everything was quiet. Saoud sat near the fire pit, feeding kindling into the small flames, and he looked up when he heard me approach.

  “Here,” he said, passing me a piece of the rabbit he’d caught yesterday. I had missed supper, so I tore into it. “How is she?”

  He did his best not to sound anxious, but I knew he wanted to be on the move again as soon as we possibly could.

  “She slept all night,” I told him. “And she didn’t vomit any more. She might be all right to walk today if she drinks enough water, but we have to be careful.”

  “She’ll keep going, even if it hurts,” Saoud said, and nodded. We both would have done the same, of course, but eventually our bodies would have given out. I didn’t know if Zahrah’s would, and I was not in a hurry to learn.

  I finished the rabbit and shifted my weight uncomfortably. Saoud looked at me, and I could tell he was trying not to laugh. He knew perfectly well what had happened, and I was torn between wanting to hit him and wanting him to explain what on earth his father had told him about these matters. He decided for me.

  “Shall we spar?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said, and saw that the staves were already beside him.

  He did laugh at my discomfiture then, but I forgave him because he let me skip the pattern warm-ups and go straight to actual fighting. It was messier than usual, and I struggled to concentrate, but as we lunged at one another I felt myself relax into it. By the time Tariq and Arwa came out to the fire, I had recovered my form enough to dump Saoud on the ground. He was still laughing at me, but I decided to take the win.

  He got up and we began again. This time my movements were more precise, approaching the measured rhythms I had practiced. I was able to read his intentions, and I took fewer hits. When I knocked him down for a second time, I felt that this round I had earned it. I pulled Saoud to his feet, and we ceded the ground to Tariq and Arwa so that they could have their turn.

  “Better?” he said, as we returned to the fire to check on breakfast.

  “Yes,” I said. I paused, considering my words, but decided to plow through them. “I think she wants to marry me, if things go aright.”

  “Yes, Yashaa,” Saoud said. “That is exactly what she wants.”

  He did me the favor of not speaking the words like he was talking to a small child, but I knew that he might as well have.

  “I didn’t prepare for that,” I told him. “I didn’t expect it.”

  “She knows that, Yashaa,” he said. They had covered a lot of ground while they were hunting, apparently, including much of my future. “And she knows that you’d marry her out of duty, even though that’s not why you’ll actually do it.”

  “If this works out, I hope we find your father,” I told him. “I mean, I hope we find him anyway, but I need to ask him some questions.”

  It was just as well Saoud was already sitting down, because he laughed so hard that I thought he might stop breathing. I ignored him and turned my attention to the pot of vetch that was now threatening to boil over on the cooking fire. I saw Zahrah come out of the tent, and smiled at her in what I hoped was not too foolish a manner. She came over and sat down beside me—close, but not as close as I might have hoped.

  “Good morning,” she said, her voice quiet. Saoud pretended he couldn’t hear her. “Thank you for watching over me last night.”

  “Of course,” I said. “Are you feeling better?”

  “I’m hungry,” she said. “Yes, I do feel better. I thought I would feel weak and useless this morning, but I don’t. I’m stronger, and I’m not sure that’s a good thing.”

  “Is it the phoenix’s gift?” I asked. Saoud coughed, and we both looked at him.

  “I think it might be that you slept for so long,” he said. “We haven’t had a restful time of it lately, and you’ve been keeping watch too. It’s possible that you just needed sleep.”

  “Whatever the case, I am ready to keep going,” she said. “Both the trek and the sewing.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” I said.

  She went to take a turn against Arwa, and I saw that she hadn’t exaggerated how much better she was feeling. Last night she had hardly been able to stand, and now she could circle Arwa and hold her staff steady as she moved. If she was always able to sleep off the effects of her evening’s work like that, then we might not need to slow our pace much at all.

  By the time we had eaten and struck the tents, the sun was clear of the mountains. We walked carefully today, wary that we would soon come to the border of Kharuf. We were not sure how it was guarded, or if it was marked. Kharuf ran into the desert, which was technically beyond the rule of Qasim and Rasima, but it wasn’t claimed by the desert kings either, at least not in any material way this far north of the Silk Road. We weren’t sure if the curse would follow us into the desert or not. We would have to wait and see.

  The heather grew sparse and yellowed around us, and was replaced by short plants with spiky leaves we didn’t recognize. We came to a dry wadi bed when the sun had more than halfway completed its descent from the sky. Here at least there was the smell of oleander, which I knew. We followed the wadi until we found a pool of clear water, and decided to stay there until we knew which way to go next. The map Saoud had from his father went no further than the border, such as it was, and we couldn’t go into the desert until we knew which way to find water.

  The pool was sheltered from view, but Saoud took no risks by camping close to it. Instead, we went several hundred steps down the wadi until he found a cave hollowed out by floodwaters where we could be concealed. He checked the cave carefully, looking for traces of snakes or burials, and found none. This was good news in that it meant we could stay there, but discouraging all the same: if no one had ever lived here long enough to bury their dead, there was little chance we would be able to stay long ourselves.

  There was nothing to burn, which was just as well. Fire in the desert was visible for a long way at night, and it was not the season for random brush fires. We had dry rations enough, though they were uninteresting, and even if it was a long walk to water we would not go thirsty. Still, I could not escape the feeling that we were exposed here, more exposed than we had been thus far, and it made me uncomfortable.

  I set the thought aside when Zahrah took up Arwa’s needle again and began to sew. This time I was free to watch her work without worrying about instructing her. As I had seen
when she repaired the fence, there was a calmness to her when she crafted. It was as though all of the pieces of her, carded and rolled when she was five, were finally being pulled from the distaff and spun into something useful and good. I tried not to think about who it was useful and good for, of course, because that is where the demon lurked. Instead I saw the girl my mother had loved, and the one in whom we had put all of our hopes. And she was beautiful.

  Zahrah stitched three handspans’ worth and then set the work aside to wait. We tried not to make it too obvious that we were waiting, too. This time we were better prepared. She had eaten lightly before she began, the better to avoid last night’s terrible dry heaving, and I knew that she had made sure to drink water steadily all day. Her bed was ready, behind the screen she and Arwa had hung up when we were organizing the cave, and she had taken the precaution of setting the cooking pot nearby, just in case she could not make it to the mouth of the cave.

  “Do you want to go outside?” I asked. “I can carry you back in, if need be.”

  “Thank you, Yashaa,” she said, and took the hand I offered to pull her to her feet. She didn’t let it go when she was standing.

  We walked along the wadi bed until we found a slope I deemed gentle enough to carry her back down if I had to. We climbed out and looked over the desert. The sunset here lit the sand with brilliant colors. It was as though we looked at all the beauty in the world, and yet I knew the world went on from where we were. In the direction of the sunset was Kharuf and Qamih, home and hunter, and the desert king ruled somewhere beyond our sight to the east and south, and some of the spinners from Kharuf were at his court.

  The sky darkened, and Zahrah did not wilt. We waited, and the air cooled. The stars came out above us, shining as brightly and steadily as they ever had, and she was still beside me, her hand in mine, her breath a calm wave in the center of a brewing storm.

  “Yashaa, we should go back,” she said when the night was fully dark. “The others will worry, and my head is starting to ache, though it is less tonight than it was yesterday.”