Spindlefish and Stars

by Christiane M. Andrews

  “I remember… how hard it was to wake. How much I de—… w-wanted to sleep.”

  Someone was rubbing her hands. Not her hands. These things were too cold, too lifeless. Too far away.

  “I remember gn—… wo-wondering why they fished me from the sea. Why they saved me…”

  Warmth. So very distant, but warmth. A pinpoint. A fingertip. The shape of her hand.

  Crumbling clay.

  “I remember… how ss—… h-hopeless I felt. I was so alone. So very alone. I ts—… l-lost my father.”

  Breath crossed her skin.

  “I know you le—… f-feel alone. I know you miss your re—… f-father, know you worry you will not see him again. But I am da—… gl-glad you are here. Don’t go. Please.”

  She could feel herself within her body, feel the sensation of her skin returning, the prickling of the cold, the air scraping her lungs. Exhaustion had settled deep into her bones.

  She slept.

  From time to time, Clo was aware of someone tending to her body. Water was raised to her lips. A blanket was tucked under her arms.

  Soft footsteps came and went.

  Someone sat near her. Someone went away.

  She tried to open her eyes.

  If her eyes were open, there was only darkness.

  “Rethguaddnarg. Uoy tsum ekaw.”

  Darkness.

  “Rethguaddnarg.” A shaking.

  Someone lifted something to her lips. It smelled of cold. And ice. And bitterness. She tried to turn her head away, but someone held her firmly and pushed a thing in between her teeth.

  Clo gagged and spat. The taste was of old metal. Another spoonful was pushed into her mouth.

  “Granddaughter! Eat this!”

  Still in darkness, Clo gagged and spat again.

  “Oh, granddaughter. You must!” Sighing, someone wiped at Clo’s lips and face. “There is too much of your father in you…”

  The footsteps padded away.

  “… and too much of your stubborn mother.”

  Darkness.

  When Clo next woke, someone was patting her hand—off and on, a gentle, aimless patting that came slowly through her sleep. It roused her, and the taste of old metal, still heavy in her mouth, woke her further.

  She blinked. The world was shadowy and wet. Smudged paint. She blinked again.

  Above her, Cary’s moonish cheeks were huffed in concern. He was staring at her without really seeing her, and when he at last saw Clo’s eyes open and gazing at him, he jumped.

  “Y-yo… U-uoy era ekawa. Olc. Uoy era ekawa.” Startled, he dropped her hand. “She is awake!” he called over his shoulder.

  Clo’s throat was sore. “What are you saying?” she tried to ask, but only a faint raspy wha came out. She struggled to push herself into a sitting position. She was in her bed in the old woman’s hut; the room had taken on a strange spinning quality.

  The apple-faced woman hurried into the room. “Granddaughter!”

  “Granddaughter?” Again, no sound at all came from Clo. She looked desperately from Cary to the old woman.

  Face crinkling, the little woman stood over Clo and stroked her cheek. “Granddaughter. How good to see your eyes.”

  Clo scrabbled away from the woman’s touch, and the woman frowned. The room spun wildly.

  “She is awake. Wonderful. Boy, wait here with her. Watch that she does not attempt to rise.” The woman shuffled out of the chamber.

  Clo grabbed Cary’s hand.

  “Granddaughter?” she tried to ask, but only “Gra—” came out.

  “C—… Olc, Olc, uoy sh-sh… d-dluohs eil nwod—”

  “Cary, I don’t understand.” Clo’s voice failed her again. She could make no sound. Still holding Cary’s hand, Clo pulled him close. This woman is not my grandmother, she wanted to say. She locked me in here, she wanted to say. She forced me to card fish! She forced me to spin fish! Thousands of fish! Stars! she also wanted to say, but instead she just looked hopelessly at the blue-cheeked boy. “Help me,” she finally managed to whisper.

  “Y—… Uoy kaeps… You speak, learned to speak… I don’t need to reverse—I mean, you can understand me? This way?”

  Clo nodded.

  “This way? And you can speak…” He turned to the apple-cheeked woman, who had reentered the room with a mug and bowl. “She speaks.…”

  Fastening her eyes on Clo, the little woman waved a dismissive hand at Cary. “She has had the stew.”

  “Clo?” Cary said. “You understand?” He reached a hand to Clo, who was now struggling to free herself from the bedclothes. “You should lie down.…”

  “Boy, you should leave now. My granddaughter needs her rest.”

  Heaving herself out of bed, Clo braced her body against the wall. The room wheeled around her. “No,” Clo rasped. “No. I am not your granddaughter.”

  “You are, you are,” the woman crooned, her face folding first in delight and then aggravation. “The daughter of my daughter. And you need to eat. And rest. Boy, you need to leave.”

  “Don’t—” Clo tried to say, but what little voice she had managed to find had gone again. And the room would not stay still.

  The woman held a spoonful of the shimmering liquid out.

  “Take this,” she said, pushing it toward Clo’s lips.

  Clo batted the hand away.

  “Granddaughter. You must.” The spoon had reached Clo’s mouth. The smell of cold. No. She would not eat the soup. The fish. The stars. She gritted her teeth and turned her head away. The room was turning upside down.

  “Boy! Catch her!”

  Darkness.

  It was the piggish cat that woke her next. She felt it kneading her, pushing at her through the blanket, its long claws catching her skin. It was making a rumbling noise, a throaty and phlegm-like growling.

  “Off, off.” She heard Cary’s voice. “Go on, you.”

  She opened her eyes. At the end of her bed, Cary was attempting to lift the snarling, scratching cat.

  “Cary,” Clo whispered.

  He dropped the cat, and it scuttled out of the room. “You’re awake!”

  Clo put her finger over her lips. Cary walked to the head of the bed and knelt beside her, his brow rumpling with concern.

  “Are you feeling better, Clo?”

  For a moment, relieved just to have him beside her, not wanting the old woman to send him away again, Clo did not say anything. She grasped his fingers, soft and damp, and squeezed.

  “Yes.” Clo shook her head. “I mean, no. No, I’m not.” She paused for a long moment, staring down at the blanket that had been wrapped over her form. “Cary,” she said at last, “I don’t understand… how… how did I come here?”

  “You were drowning,” Cary said slowly, his expression pained. “You were in the cave. I saw you just before you fell, saw you splash into the water. It was my… first time on the boat. I swung my net in after you… again and again… I couldn’t reach you. I saw you falling… I thought you were gone. And then, just barely… I caught you, I scooped you up out of the water. Somehow. I don’t know how. You nearly drowned. Nearly…”

  Clo felt again the emptiness she had sunk through. She saw herself as one of his stones tumbling through darkness; she saw his net flashing to save her. She could not find the words for what she wanted to say. Thank you seemed too small for what he had done; still, she said it anyway, regretting the paltriness of the sounds in her mouth. “Thank you.”

  Cary nodded, his face still full of the memory of Clo sinking.

  “Cary…” Glancing away, Clo hesitated. “How did you come here… before?” she finally asked. “How did you come to be in the sea?”

  Cary’s hair looked damper than ever. Dark tendrils clung to his cheeks and brow. “My father… he… he tied… but the sun… and I…” He twisted a corner of Clo’s blanket. He could not say the words.

  Clo nodded, her throat tight. Even without knowing the words Cary could not say, she understo
od the fear and sadness behind them. From the next room, the old woman could be heard sighing to the cat, “Oh, do you want some fish, my sweet?” Cary kept his eyes fixed on the corner of twisted blanket.

  Something sharp, needle-like, seemed to be piercing Clo’s heart. “My father sent me here,” she managed after a long silence. “My father sent me.… He’s abandoned me here. Cary… I don’t understand why he’d do this to me.”

  Cary untwisted the square of blanket and smoothed it around Clo’s shoulder. “I know,” he said softly. His moons drooped sympathetically. “I know.”

  CHAPTER THE TWENTIETH

  WHEREIN SOMETHING GIGGLES AND SOMETHING GMMMS

  CLO, ONCE WALL-JUMPER, FOREST-WALKER, AND WINDOW-breaker, became now a bed-lier. She recovered slowly, drifting in and out of sleep.

  She had been changed, she noticed, her short tunic and leggings replaced with a long, pale smock. Sometimes she would lie staring down at this unfamiliar vision of her body, long and pale and flat and paperlike, and wonder what had become of her own self.

  Though she could now understand the old woman, she found no solace in her prattle, and she did not care enough to ask her questions. Granddaughter. The word held no comfort. The woman was a stranger.

  Clo thought of the airless falling, the stars and water and quiet. She thought of the cloud that had cradled and comforted her in the darkness. She wanted only that comforting; because no comfort was coming, she wanted only to sleep. What was the purpose in waking? She had tried to escape; she had failed. She had before her only endless gray days and baskets of fish. When she thought of her father now, she felt only anger. She imagined him standing under the tallest pine as he should have done that morning long ago. How could you do this to me? she would hiss to her empty room, to the imagined image of her father waiting at the edge of the dew-soaked field. She would curl into her mattress, press her fingers against her eyes. How could you abandon me here? Why would you leave me like this? She would never find her way to him now.

  She thought of the cradling cloud, the words that had echoed around her. Be brave enough to let go of always.

  Let go, she thought.

  She closed her eyes again.

  The next time the little woman entered her room, Clo pretended to be asleep.

  “Granddaughter. You must wake. You must rise.”

  Clo turned away, pulling the blanket higher.

  She heard the woman’s footsteps leave and then return, accompanied by a dragging sound. “Your work, granddaughter.”

  Clo felt herself tugged into a sitting position. She opened her eyes. The woman had pulled in a basket of fish. Clo stared at the black-eyed silvery creatures sliding over one another and onto the floor. She felt a wave of revulsion. Endless fish. Endless fleshy tearing. Endless oily prickling. “No,” she said.

  “Yes. The carding, the spinning.” The woman pushed the carding combs into Clo’s hands. She wrapped Clo’s fingers around the handles.

  “No.” Clo pushed the loathsome combs away. Her voice rose, trembling. “This is not my work.” She lay down again and rolled away from the old woman.

  The woman sighed a long exasperated sigh, but she did not try to make Clo rise again. “So much like your stubborn mother you are,” she murmured as she settled into the chair beside the bed. “Once she fixed on an idea, how she clung to it… no matter how misguided. Headstrong child.” She clucked her tongue lightly. “But she, at least, never shirked her tasks. And this, this is your work, granddaughter. You must see it. You will see it now.”

  Closing her eyes, Clo curled into herself. Her mother was headstrong? She thought of the chalky figure her father had drawn, the woman whose gaze hovered between joy and sorrow. Had this soft-cloud woman been stubborn? She thought of the pale light that had cradled her in the darkness, warning, Be brave enough to accept what I could not.

  Was she meant to accept these interminable days of gray? The never-ending fish-carding, the ceaseless fish-spinning?

  Teeth clenched, Clo lay wishing the old woman would go away—Would she not leave her alone?—but the woman just sat, indefatigably carding and carding. Clo pulled the blanket over her ears to muffle the endless sh-sh-sh of the paddles pulling through the fish-wool.

  Later, much later, it was the woman’s snoring that woke her.

  Sitting up, Clo stared at the woman. She had never seen her sleep before. She had never even thought of the old woman sleeping before, though she realized now she must. She obviously did. Still, it was strange to see the little black hole of a mouth open in the center of her apple face and the long shuddering breaths she took.

  Clo thought of how sometimes in the afternoons in the villages she would see children napping on the laps of their mothers and grandmothers, the women’s cheeks resting on their babes’ soft crowns. She and the old woman were not like this. She did not like to see the woman this way—did not like that the woman felt comfortable falling asleep, vulnerable and open, near Clo. She did not want to go back to sleep next to her.

  Slowly, carefully, Clo began to make her way out of the bed. The woman had dropped the carding paddles on the mattress when she had fallen asleep, and Clo reached to move them.

  She froze.

  The fish-wool…

  She pulled a tuft from the comb and held it between her fingers.

  It was not gray…

  It was full of light and color, vibrant shimmering waves of light and color.

  Not fish-wool…

  So much light and color, so many changing hues and shades—Clo brought the wool closer to her eyes—it seemed like it was almost…

  singing…

  She rushed, as quickly as her weakened legs would allow, to the front room.

  There the walls were still lined with the fish-cylinders she had carded. But now the towers of gray had become towers of rippling color and light, as though the walls were blooming with flowers. The colors opened and dimmed, and opened and changed—the whole room was awash in their light.

  Wonderingly, Clo picked up one of a handful of bobbins that had been left on the table. The color and light were now a single bright strand, twisted and focused and wound around the spool. It, too, shimmered and pulsed and changed. Clo unraveled a bit of the thread.

  Something giggled.

  Clo gasped and dropped the bobbin.

  Its thread unraveled and floated wide around her, a filament of light. Unspooling in the air, its bright coils drifted and settled gently about her. Mesmerized, Clo stared for a moment at the shimmering fiber before she shook herself, bent down, and rewound the thread. Again, a giggle.

  Clo held the bobbin to her ear—nothing—but pulling out the thread again… a giggle. A giggle like a hiccup.

  She squinted at the thread. There was nothing to see in the fibers, nothing but the shifting wash of reds and blues and lights and shades that had been twisted and shaped into a long, strong line.

  She lifted another bobbin from the table, unspooled a little of its bright line. There was no giggle, but a sigh, faint and indistinct, rose from the fibers.

  A third bobbin let out a pensive gmmm when she unwound it. Gmmm. Hmmm, it murmured as she spooled and unspooled it, growing ever more anxious at the noises wrapped in the threads.

  She cast about for another bobbin, but there were none. The bobbins were usually kept by the woman. In her apron. Or in…

  Oh.

  The thought of the tapestry, that vast gray cloth hanging in the old woman’s room, woven with thousands upon thousands of these bobbins, bobbins with light, bobbins with noises that unspooled with the unspooling of the thread, filled Clo with anticipation… then uneasiness. More than uneasiness. Dread.

  This is your work, granddaughter.

  Thousands of gmmming threads. Thousands of giggling fibers. Thousands of sighing strands.

  What had been woven?

  She was not sure she wanted to look.

  She stared at the closed door.

  The quiet was punctua
ted by the rhythm of the old woman’s snores.

  She felt she must look.

  Nervously, Clo wound and unwound the bobbin she still held in her hands. Gmmm. Hmmmm. Gmmm. Hmmm.

  This is your work, granddaughter. You must see it.

  Quietly, quietly, Clo lifted the latch of the door to the woman’s room. The lock she had broken had not been fixed, and the door swung open.

  This is your work, granddaughter. You must see it. You will see it now.

  CHAPTER THE TWENTY-FIRST

  IN WHICH A MAN LEADS A SWEATY OX TO MARKET

  CLO SAW.

  As before, the window was shuttered. But now the whole room was aglow with the light from the tapestry. Its colors did not shift and bloom like the unspun towers of fish-wool in the front room did; instead, the cloth held fast its thousands of bright patterns.

  It depicted nothing—nothing distinct, anyway. Clo could see no scene, but as she turned her head from side to side, she had the sense of bright fields. Dark forests. Glimmering mountain heights. Sleepy hamlets and bustling cities. But each time she thought she had spotted an image in the design and tried to focus on it, it became abstract once again—a wash of light and color.

  Remembering the mirror she had seen hanging behind the tapestry, she realized she was perhaps only seeing the reverse, the wrong side of the fabric without a clear image. Still, her throat tightened with the beauty of it.

  As she stood marveling, the piggish cat darted through the open door into the chamber and took up a spot by the tapestry. Standing on its hind legs, it stuck its thick claws again and again into the fabric, tearing gashes into the cloth. Clo moved to shoo the creature away, to stop its destructive kneading, but just as she stepped forward, she paused. She watched mesmerized as the dark holes the beast opened in the cloth took on brighter and brighter edges. Everywhere the cat ran its claws, the ragged edges gleamed—little in the tapestry glowed as brightly as its torn patches. Even the shadowy gaps the cat made seemed part of the larger design.