Spindle

by E. K. Johnston

  “I think so,” she said. “And you are going to at least try.”

  I let her pull me down beside her, and she turned so that she was still in my arms. She was, I noticed, very careful not to put weight on my injured hand, though otherwise she was as close to me as she could be without physically crawling into my very skin. Her breathing became measured and even, but sleep eluded me. I looked across her to where the others were sleeping, or pretending to, and felt something sharp and hard in my stomach.

  Saoud’s father, and the demon he carried, had taught us the staff patterns and how to throw knives. He had taught us to survive in the forest. He had taught us how to find water. My mother had taught us the craft of our ancestors, and the stories they had carried with them from the desert. Those things had carried us this far. Tomorrow, none of that was going to do us any good. All we could do now was wait. And then, when the time came, we were going to run.

  THE DAY STRETCHED OUT, long and interminable, and we waited. They did not come for Zahrah, which was a blessing—we had not planned what to do if we were separated when the signal came—and a curse: idleness was worse than the wait. Arwa gathered loose threads from Zahrah’s dress, and from her own clothing, and stored them in her bag. I couldn’t even begin to imagine why, though I didn’t say anything to her. She kept herself occupied, and it was a mercy. Zahrah’s dress was ill-suited for travel, but the soldiers had taken our spares, and so we would have to make do. It was, I concluded, likely to be the least of our worries, and since there was nothing we could do about it, I didn’t let myself linger in my thoughts for too long.

  Instead, I thought of spinning, from the carding, which had been my earliest task in the spinning room, to the careful storage of the undyed wool as it waited on the distaff for use. I thought of my mother’s fingers, cleverly pulling just the right amount of wool and feeding it into the dropping spindle, and then I saw my own hands learning the task. What began as lumpy and uneven became smooth with practice, until I had set the work aside to take up the staff and my knives.

  But that was spinning too, or at least it was still a pattern. In the movements of the training circle, I had found the same peace my mother found in spinning. It was the peace she had hoped I would find in spinning someday. I had peace now, of a sort. Either we would succeed or we would die. I was reasonably sure that this was not what my mother had had in mind.

  We stretched as best we could, to make sure that three days of sitting wouldn’t slow us down too much, and we memorized the way each of us looked, in case there were fewer of us to remember it in the coming days.

  When the sun turned to orange and began to light the desert in dark purples and blood-reds, we stilled and listened hard. The soldiers were cooking supper, from the smell, roasting a goat without herbs or any particular finesse to their technique, and those not on duty were seeing to the horses or waiting in their tents for the meal to be ready. There was only one guard outside our tent flap, the man who had carried Arwa, and he looked uncomfortable as he leaned on his staff. He had left the tent open after his shift began, which we appreciated for the air, except it made it difficult to act like we were meek captives.

  “How are we going to deal with the guard, if he’s still there when the noise starts?” I breathed in Saoud’s ear. He looked at Arwa, or rather, at her bag.

  “I will take care of it,” he said, as quietly as I had. “You get Zahrah away.”

  I nodded, and the wait continued. The goat was finished, and a piece of it was brought to our guard. We had been given lunch and did not expect anything else. The guard ate his portion, turning away from us so we could not see him. I wondered if he had a daughter, and if that was why he was so ashamed.

  Then there was a cry from the center of the camp, and a horde of running feet. We leapt up, all five of us together, and the guard spun to look at us, his staff clutched in both of his hands. Saoud had Arwa’s bag and was moving to strike when the guard dropped his staff on the ground and held up his hands.

  “Go,” he said, and looked at me. “Can you use the staff so that I am wounded but not dead?”

  It was not an easy task. His staff was heavier than the one I was used to. I might kill him by accident. But I didn’t hesitate.

  “Yes,” I said, and picked it up.

  He kissed his hands and held them out to Arwa and to Zahrah, and then turned so that I could hit him. He dropped, and we stepped over him to run.

  We tried for stealth at first, but soon enough we realized there was little cause for it and went for speed instead. The soldiers were entirely diverted, even the ones who had been feeding the horses their evening fodder, because Prince Maram’s tent was in flames. The finely dyed cloth burned hot in the beginning of the desert night, and none of his men could get close enough to the conflagration to even try beating it out. As we circled the camp, we saw a figure emerge from the tent, screaming in agony as he burned.

  He was too short to be Saoud’s father.

  We saw the soldiers tackle him, and frantically try to contain their prince before he could light the whole camp on fire with his own touch. Already the flames were spreading to other tents. The horses, smelling smoke, were beginning to panic and pull at their tethers. Saoud’s father had bought us time, and we would be best set to use it.

  We ran, giving heed only to our direction as we went. The stars were out and the moon was coming, and we ran beneath them, spurred on by desperate hope. When we crossed the border into Kharuf, we had to stop. Tariq and Arwa both started coughing as soon as their feet passed the invisible line, and I felt my own lungs constrict. Zahrah and Saoud were untroubled, but when I waved them on, they did not go. Arwa passed her bag to Saoud, and Tariq straightened beside her. I took three deep breaths to prove I could, and then we were off again, though our pace was slower.

  Zahrah had taken advantage of the short halt to tie up her dress, and she moved easier with it no longer wrapping around her legs. Arwa had lost her veil somewhere, and her long black hair streamed behind her like a banner. Tariq ran with a hand on his chest, as though each breath squeezed him, but his face was determined. Saoud carried the staff as well as Arwa’s pack, and I fell to the rear of the group to watch for pursuers.

  Time played with us as we ran. Our steps got heavier and heavier, our stops to rest more frequent; that should have made the night seem endless. Instead, the darkness passed all too quickly, and we could not run fast enough to make good use of it. Every moment felt squandered, but we could not go any faster.

  It was not yet dawn, and we were weary with the night’s long run when I saw the first sign that our escape had been noticed. It was too early for sunrise, and the east should have been pink, tinged with the promise of yellow day. Instead, it was silver, and edged with hate. I could barely gasp for breath at all, the run and the spinners’ illness working against me, but I croaked a sound close enough to Saoud’s name that he turned around and saw what I saw.

  He stopped, his hands on his knees and his shoulders heaving. Behind him, Tariq fought to keep his feet, and Arwa swayed. Zahrah was resolute, even though she shook. The phoenix’s gift was working. Her feet were bloody with cuts.

  “My princess,” said Saoud. “We have done what we can.”

  “You have my thanks,” she said. “For now and always, no matter what becomes of me.”

  “No,” I said, for I saw that she planned to sacrifice herself to the demon for our sake. “No.”

  “Yashaa, you must keep going,” she said. “You must try. Run all the way to my father and warn him, and then warn Qamih.”

  “No,” I repeated. I would not lose her, not again.

  “Look!” said Tariq, who had not been watching the east, but the west instead. His eyes were lit with hope, shining in a moment of the truest belief I had ever seen on his face. He looked toward the mountains, and saw our salvation. It was how I was always going to remember him.

  It was a swarm of purple and gold, the color of the Storyteller Quee
n, and the color of the creatures she had made. They had seen us. They had come.

  They were too late.

  The silver light grew brighter and then solidified before us. Tariq gave a horrible cry as though something was pulling him to pieces, and then the ground beneath his feet opened, and he was gone.

  Arwa screamed, and reached out for the space where Tariq had been. Saoud grabbed her hands and pulled her close to his chest, muffling the terrible sound. I could only stare at the spot, frozen. I didn’t believe it. I couldn’t. He was alive, somehow. He must be.

  “Stop!” screamed my Little Rose, loud enough for the demon to hear her. “Stop and I will go with you.”

  “You have been mine since the day I first saw you, princess,” the demon said. Its voice was even worse now. “I will have you, and I will do whatever I wish. But if you want, I will stop, so that it is you who murders your friends. They will see you do it, and I will make you watch.”

  Arwa’s eyes were streaming tears now, and Saoud was shocked beyond horror, though his grip on her hadn’t lessened. If the demon took one of them as it had taken Tariq, it would have to take them both, but there was nothing I could do. I was stuck in place, fixed by fear and by my grief.

  “Choose, little rose,” the demon said. “Choose the manner of their deaths.”

  The demon was so fixated on its prize and our pain, so overcome with joy at its perceived victory, that it did not see the piskeys until they were upon it, lifting it up into the sky above us, to battle on a plane we couldn’t reach. The lights of them, warm and cold, strained against each other as we watched, and for a moment, we were locked in the awe of it. Then I shook myself free and fell to my knees, scrabbling at the ground with my bare hands over the place where Tariq had been standing when he disappeared. Surely he was not beyond retrieval. Surely, with magic, he might be brought back. My injured hand sent a wave of pain through me, and I screamed. Then hands locked on my shoulders and pulled me away.

  “No,” I said. Everything inside me focused on that single hope, that vain and foolish hope. “No.”

  “He’s gone, Yashaa,” Zahrah shouted at me, her voice full of tears and rage. “He’s gone and we need you.”

  I howled, uncaring of everything in the whole world except that Tariq was dead and I couldn’t save him. Zahrah shook me again, and I saw that the battle of lights still raged on, though the silver light had dimmed.

  “They won’t kill it, Yashaa,” Zahrah said. “They can’t. When the Storyteller Queen made them, she made them as jailors. They will only imprison it again. Yashaa, the curse will still be in place. Tariq will have died for nothing.”

  It was cruel, but it worked. I stopped up my grief, though I felt that it was boundless, and looked at her.

  “What do you want me to do?” I asked, my voice cracking with the effort of speaking at all.

  “I watched the demon while I was crafting, Yashaa,” she said. Her voice was quiet—only for me—though Saoud and Arwa could hear her, and both of them were weeping enough to break my heart again. “It wants me so badly it is like a physical need. I’m nearly ready for it. If I tempt it, I don’t think it will be able to resist.”

  “No,” I said, at the same time Saoud looked up and said, “How?”

  “I must spin,” said my Little Rose. “Yashaa, you must show me how to spin.”

  “I can’t,” I said. “We have no spindles.”

  “Yes we do,” said Arwa through her tears, and upended her bag.

  Out fell the rags she and Zahrah had sewn in the mountains, the ones she had jokingly told us not to ask questions about, and that had been so distasteful to the guards that they hadn’t confiscated them. Out of the dark of the bag, I could see that the rags were wrapped around four long objects that were heavier at one end then they were at the other. Arwa unwrapped them, her hands hovering over her own spindle, and then mine, and then finally closing around the spindle that Tariq had carried since he was old enough to do the work.

  “Spin,” said Arwa, and pressed the spindle into my hands.

  My fingers ached, but I closed my grip on the spindle out of habit.

  “Spin for him,” Saoud said, and passed me the threads that Arwa had gathered so carefully from the fraying hem of my Little Rose’s dress.

  I laid the scraps out, already trying to tell which would make the best leader to guide the rest of them into a single thread. I attached the one I chose to the hooked end and reached for the next piece.

  “Spin, Yashaa,” said my Little Rose. “Please.”

  I knelt and dropped the whorl. It spun evenly in the light of the rising sun, and the thread grew beneath my hands.

  “Take me home, Yashaa,” said my Little Rose. “Find your mother. Tell her what we have done.”

  She learned quickly, of course. That was her gift. It was just as well, because I didn’t have very much thread to work with. She watched me spin the whorl once, twice, three times, and then on the fourth, she caught it herself and continued to spin.

  Saoud held her upright, and Arwa fed her thread. I could only watch as she fought. She fought to keep her hands moving as the silver light bore down upon her, unable to resist this offering even after the demon had been made weak by its fight. She fought to stay awake, as the piskey’s gift came over her, and she swayed. Her eyes were locked with mine, her work forgotten even as her hands continued to move. She blinked, and I saw instead of my Little Rose the exultation of the demon queen, who had at last the body it wanted more than it had sense to see the trap. She blinked again, and I saw my Little Rose, still fighting. For me. For us. For Kharuf. She reached for the spindle again, and grasped it this time at the tip.

  The spindle dropped one last time, and no one caught it. A drop of blood fell to the ground, and for a moment, I thought the entire world shifted underneath my feet. Then the thread unspooled, the curse shattered, the prison bars closed in around the demon’s head, and Zahrah, my Little Rose, fell asleep.

  They built the tomb of iron, though neither of we who sleep here are dead. To guard against rust and decay, the dragons and the phoenix smelted the ore in their own fire, before turning the molten metal over to human smiths. As long as their power holds, the tomb will stand, apart from the castle but close to its heart. The bier is iron, and the walls are iron, and the roof is iron. But Yashaa dug a moat and filled it with roses, and their thorns grew sharp and long.

  A monster slept there, and so most folk avoided it. But there were some few who came to sit by me, and they reminded me of why I chose this, when it seemed I had no choice at all.

  My parents did not come. They gave Yashaa whatever he asked for to build the tomb, and watched the procession that carried me there, but they could not come themselves. I understood their pain, and I felt it in turn. They had done too much damage for it to be repaired without talking, and those who sleep cannot talk.

  There was almost always at least one piskey hovering around my head, shedding fine gold dust that glimmered in the torchlight. It made the iron seem less cold. I thought perhaps they wept for me, or for the tangle of magic one of their kind had made of my life. They were a comfort to me, though. Like the iron, they weakened the demon that shared my sleep, and gave me room enough in my own mind to fight it.

  Others came too, once or twice each, to pay their respects. They were the ones who had gone out from Kharuf when the curse was laid, and who could return now that I had broken it. They kissed my hand—kept warm and unmarred by time, thanks to the piskey’s gift—and sometimes I felt their tears, too. Though I had not known most of them, or at least I did not remember knowing them in life, in sleep I could feel their work in their hands, and knew that they loved me for my sacrifice.

  And then there were the ones whom I loved.

  The guardsman would bring his whetstone and his knives and sit at the foot of the bier. He talked about the rebuilding of Kharuf, and later, of his wife and his children. He told me that the tower I had lived in was a shrine now, w
here girls lit candles and boys made rash promises in the name of love. I felt them: the flames and the power of the words said there. I felt the words the guardsman said to me, too, as much as I heard them. They gave me strength to continue my battle with the one who slept with me, and every new flame, every whispered prayer, made me stronger in the fight.

  The mountain goat came, too. She did not settle as easily as the other did. Her dreams were haunted by fire and dirt, suffocating her one minute and burning her the next. But in time, she too found peace and joy again. She would bring all manner of craft with her when she came to see me: weaving and fine embroidery, bread dough for kneading, fine copper wires that could be threaded through bright glass beads. I felt her work as much as I saw it, and it strengthened me as much as the guardsman’s tales of candles and promises.

  The spinner came whenever he could, and his visits were always long. He would sit in silence, or else he would tell me the smallest details of his day. He told me when his mother returned, and how she was teaching him the ways of their craft again, now that it was safe. He told me when she died: too young, but happy to have seen the curse lifted from her fellow spinners. He did not ever touch my hand. I missed his touch, though I understood why he could not give it, and I used his freely given words as fuel in my struggle.

  When he could not visit, he always told me why he was gone. He went often out into the world, looking for the magic that would set me free of my demon and free of my sleep. He remembered the stories he had learned, and spoke words for the boy who could not, and he believed for all of us. He told our story to everyone he met, and the words moved across the world. They changed, as stories do, and the truth warped like strings on a broken loom, but it was enough to learn what he needed to know.

  It was years before he found the answers he sought, far away in the desert kingdom where our ancestors had once lived. My father was dead, and my mother was old, and my kingdom had no one else to take the throne. Yashaa was old too, which was enough to break my heart, except I needed a whole one to finally quell the demon. To fuel my fight, I used the thirty years of lit candles and spoken promises, the days that my friends had spent beside me, the attention of the piskeys and the sprites, and the memory of the boy who had died in the desert but who always knew the right story. I brought to bear the full force of my will, made strong beyond human measure by myself and those who loved me. The demon, though it had plagued me for almost as long as I could remember, was gone between one breath and the next, so pitiful it was when faced with me, the focus of the will for everyone who had ever lit a candle at my shrine.