The Jade Spindle

by Alice Major

  “No, it’s fine,” he said hastily and spooned up some more of the broth.

  Chuan drank down her soup without bothering with the spoon and asked for the third time, “And you come from . . . where?”

  They had already established that words like “Canada” or “North America” meant nothing here. So Mark explained again, patiently, “We come from a city that must be very far away.”

  “From the other side,” Li-Tsai said abruptly, as though he had suddenly remembered something.

  They all looked at him inquiringly. But his eyes were closed and his face wore a turned-inwards expression.

  “But not from the capital. Or the country of the White Ti,” Chuan resumed, wonderingly. “Where else is there?”

  The phrase, “the White Ti,” had been mentioned before, but was incomprehensible to Mark. The conversation made possible by Molly’s tongue on each of their foreheads was like this—most of it made some kind of sense, but some words just didn’t translate. And sometimes they used words that he basically understood, but somehow seemed to have a different twist than he was used to. “Pulse,” for instance. He was sure it didn’t mean the same thing to them as it did to him. As a result, conversations tended to come to a halt now and again, as everyone tried to figure out what had really been said.

  Such a silence fell now. P’eng poked the glowing embers of the fire. Joss finally broke it, stretching her head back and stifling a yawn. “Jeez, I’m tired,” she said. Then she frowned at the sun, gleaming pale against the silvery sky, noticing for the first time that it hadn’t moved since they first found themselves in the tall grass, so many hours ago.

  “That’s weird,” she said, pointing this fact out to the others. “When does it get dark around here?” she asked Chuan.

  “Dark?”

  “Dark. Night. When does the sun go down?”

  Chuan’s eyes opened wide. “Where could the light node go?”

  Mark had noticed this before, too—that they called the sun “the light node.”

  Joss frowned. “It must go down. Don’t be silly.”

  The sparkle in Chuan’s eyes turned belligerent. “Silly! It’s you who are silly. What would make the light node go away?”

  Joss looked helplessly at her brother. “When the world turns around, of course,” he said. You know, when the planet is facing away from the sun and it gets dark and you can see the stars.”

  Chuan and P’eng were looking at him as though he was a lunatic. P’eng shivered. “What a disaster! The whole world getting dark like inside a cave.”

  “The world turning around? You speak as though it was a chicken on a spit,” Chuan said scornfully.

  Mark laughed. “That’s not a bad comparison.” He held up a stone and twirled it around the fire with his hand to show them how the earth turns around the sun. “I guess you just don’t know here how the solar system works.”

  “That is not how the world is,” Chuan said flatly.

  “Sure it is,” Joss replied, indignant. Mark touched her arm before she could say anything more. “How does it work then?” he asked.

  “The light node is strung on Yao-chi’s thread, like a shuttle on a loom. It weaves back and forth.” P’eng’s spoke carefully, as if she was explaining to very small children. “When it is overhead, it is summer and we grow millet. When it is far to the north, it is cool and we have the short winter. When it is far to the south, it is very cold, and we have the long winter.

  “But what about planets, solar systems, other light nodes?” P’eng looked at him, baffled, as if she was trying to translate unfamiliar words. It was Li-Tsai who answered him.

  “Our world is not like a ball,” he said gently. “It is a string, one long string. There is no other light node.”

  His voice carried an authority that the two girls had not. They looked at him stupidly, trying to take it in. It was Ariel who reacted first. “You just think it’s a string because you don’t know what it’s really like,” she said with a violent motion of her arm as though she was pushing the whole idea away from her. “Just like people used to think the earth was flat,” she appealed to the others. Li-Tsai only looked at her gravely. “At the end of the string,” she insisted, “What do you think would be at the end of the string if you went far enough.”

  “Dragons,” said the old man simply. “The Red Dragon of the south, the Blue Dragon of the north. And then the world dissolves, the thread unravels. Voyagers do not come back from the dragon lands.”

  Ariel flung her arms out. “See? It’s just superstition. They don’t really know.” She turned back to Li-Tsai and said, “That’s not what would happen. If you went far enough in any direction, you’d just come back where you started. Because the world is like the surface of a ball, like Mark showed you.”

  “If you were to walk with the twist of the yarn, that is indeed what would happen,” he answered gravely. (Dimly, Mark was able to realize that “with the twist of the yarn” meant something like “to the east.”) “But if you walk to the north or the south, you do not come back.

  Mark leaned forward. “Do you mean that if you went east or west, you could go right around the world, but if you went north or south you couldn’t?”

  The old man nodded.

  “Mark, you can’t believe him!” Ariel’s voice was anguished. Her eyes were red with tears and tiredness.

  He sighed. “Well, somehow you have to explain that the sun hasn’t moved in hours and hours. It doesn’t matter right now.”

  They fell silent. It was Alasdair who asked, in a practical tone, “Well, if it doesn’t get dark, how do you decide when to rest?”

  “When the light node changes. It gets brighter and fades.” P’eng was speaking slowly and patiently again. She spread her fingers wide and then closed them to indicate a slow, rhythmic pulsing. “Like it has faded now. It’s getting time for sleep.”

  Alasdair looked at the pale sky. He couldn’t see that it looked any different than it had when they arrived, and shrugged. “Well, whatever . . . I could sleep until Tuesday.”

  “Whenever Tuesday comes,” Mark said grimly.

  Chuan and P’eng gave them blankets woven from rough brown thread and piles of straw for mattresses. Joss, Ariel and Molly made their beds in one of the less dilapidated huts on the east side of the square. The boys took another hut on the opposite side of the fire.

  Ariel made a thick pile of straw on the earth floor as a bed for Molly, with Molly’s sweater as a pillow. “Thank heavens we brought this,” she murmured, folding the woolly sleeves into a square. Then she made another bed for herself and stretched out in the dim grey light, pulling the scratchy blanket tight up to her ears. The straw smelled dusty, with a slight tang—almost like the smell of ground pepper, except that it didn’t make her want to sneeze. The blanket smelled the same, only stronger.

  Ariel lay for a few moments, listening to Joss squirm in an effort to get comfortable. “We’ll never be able to get to sleep here,” she thought, pulling the blanket away from her head so she could breath more easily. And almost immediately she dropped into slumber.

  When she woke again, feeling the earth poke its hard bones through the straw, she had no idea how long she had been asleep. The same pale light filtered through the tiny opening high in the wall that served as the hut’s single window. As she stretched her arms and legs cautiously, she found them stiff, as though she had been asleep for a long time. The muscles in her shoulders and arms were painful from the work of helping to carry Molly. The air seemed cooler and moister, making her think that quite a few hours must have passed. Her hazy calculation about the time crystallized into a deeper worry. How long had they been here? How long would they be here? People back home must be frantic. How was she to get them all back?

  She heard Joss’s light breathing break into a short snore and felt a spasm of irritation. Her youn
ger sister could always sleep through anything. Then a small whimper came from the far side of the room where Molly lay. Quietly, Ariel got up and crossed the floor.

  Molly was still asleep, but she was moaning a little as though she was having a bad dream. Her delicate left arm was stretched above her head, with the palm turned up. Chuan had spread some sort of grease on the burn before they slept, but it didn’t seem to have helped the healing. In fact, the red circle blazed even more brightly. Ariel knelt to look at it more closely and was dismayed to see that the blistering was deeper and uglier than before. It seemed as though the burn was getting worse—as though heat was still eating into her flesh. Ariel heard a slight scraping behind her and looked up to see Joss standing at her shoulder, rubbing sleep from her eyes and frowning.

  “Her hand’s getting worse,” said Ariel. “I think it’s hurting her a lot.”

  “I don’t think it’s just the burn,” Joss said soberly. Her friend’s cheekbones were sharp under her skin, which was ghostly pale. The girl was also starting to shiver in her sleep. Ariel pulled the blanket up around her and went to get her own. “You’re right,” she said, tucking the second blanket around Molly. “She’s getting really sick.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  Ariel put her hand on Molly’s forehead. “She’s freezing.” She looked up at her sister. “I don’t know what we can do,” she said, almost angrily. Molly stirred and groaned. Ariel turned back to her and began stroking her forehead lightly. “Sh...sh...sh,” she soothed, then added softly to Joss, “Go get the others.”

  Joss stepped outside and looked around. There was no one in sight, but the fire in its ring of stones seemed as though it had been freshly made up. She crossed the open space to the hut where her brother was sleeping and tapped at the door. Alasdair’s voice sounded sleepily from within.

  “What is it?”

  “Wake up, you two. Molly’s not well.”

  She heard him make a few tentative efforts to wake Mark, then she lost patience and opened the door.

  “You have to shake him. Hard. Here, let me.” She walked over and gave her brother a vigorous shaking. “Wake UP,” she yelled in his ear.

  He rolled over and snorted. His hair was skewered with straws and his eyes were still unfocussed.

  “What the . . .” he muttered.

  “Molly’s sick, really sick. She can’t stop shaking.”

  Mark snapped to attention and he got up quickly. As they left the hut, they saw P’eng and Li-Tsai coming out of their own huts. Joss beckoned to them to follow.

  Molly’s body was now racked by shivers, convulsive and frightening. Mark crossed the room quickly and knelt beside Ariel. “What is it, do you know?”

  His sister was keeping a firm grip on her panic. “I don’t know. If it was a fever, I’d have some idea what to do. But she’s cold, just like ice. I’ve put all the blankets on her, but it doesn’t help.”

  Ariel touched her hand again to Molly’s forehead, and the girl opened her eyes. “Garden,” she murmured indistinctly, and closed her eyes again.

  “What did she say?” asked Alasdair.

  “Garden,” Mark repeated. “Do you think she wants to go back to the garden?” Molly’s eyes flew open again and she moved her lips, but no sound came.

  “I think you’re right,” Ariel said. “And she seemed to be getting better when she was in the garden. But she got quieter and quieter after we left. I can’t think of anything else to do, anyway.”

  “How do we get her there?” Joss’s voice was strained but practical. “We need some kind of stretcher.”

  Li-Tsai gave an cry of protest. “Sacrilege.”

  “What do you mean?” Joss demanded.

  His gentle face wore an unexpectedly stubborn expression. “She cannot go there. None of you can go there. Only the daughters of the garden.” P’eng was nodding in confused agreement.

  “We’ve already been there,” Joss said savagely. “The world didn’t fall apart. And can you think of anything else to do?”

  “I cannot allow it. Such a thing has never been. I am the guardian.”

  Ariel gave a sharp cry. “Stop it. Stop it. MOLLY.”

  Molly’s tossing and shivering had ceased suddenly. She lay very still and white. Ariel grasped feverishly at her hand, wondering how to feel for a pulse.

  Chuan spoke roughly. “She must go to the garden. We cannot let her die.” She turned abruptly and left, saying, “Come, we’ll get branches to make a stretcher. She strode off, pausing only to grasp the axe as she passed the woodpile. Alasdair and Mark bounded after her.

  A few sharp strokes in the grove of trees brought down two thin, strong saplings. They carried them back to the hut, where Joss had folded two blankets together into a hammock-sized strip and was punching holes along the edges with Mark’s pocket knife. P’eng was standing nervously, a handful of leather thongs dangling from her hand. Ariel was still crouched beside Molly, chafing her unburned hand and trying to warm her chilly forehead. Li-Tsai was nowhere in sight.

  They tied the blanket to the poles, Chuan and P’eng making quick, expert knots while the others fumbled. Then they lifted Molly carefully onto the stretcher—she seemed somehow lighter than she had been the day before, Joss thought. She looked down at her friend’s still shape and felt her sight blur through tears.

  “Come on,” she said hoarsely and bent to grasp one end of a pole. Chuan, Mark and Alasdair took the other corners, while P’eng and Ariel each grasped a pole to support it at mid-point.

  “God, I hope this works,” muttered Mark, taking a deep breath.

  Chapter Eleven

  P’eng had never hurried so quickly along the path to the garden. They carried the stretcher almost at a trot, trying not to jostle Molly too much as they ran. P’eng glanced down at the still face with its fringe of bright hair. All the foreigners looked pale and white, but the girl they were carrying looked white in a different way. Almost, thought P’eng, like the clay her father used to bring back from the riverside.

  The boy behind her, the smaller one who looked most like a human being, was puffing slightly and stumbling on the rough grass at the edge of the path. They did not seem very strong, these foreigners. It was hard to remember how frightening they had seemed when she first saw them surrounding her, only a short time ago. They still looked odd and wild-haired, but their eyes were bewildered.

  Her feet slowed involuntarily as they rounded the corner of the high wall and neared the entrance to the garden. She thought of Li-Tsai’s sad face. This was, truly, blasphemy against all her patient years of training. P’eng glanced over at her sister to see if she was feeling the same. But Chuan did not hesitate. Almost defiant, she pushed forward faster so that they others had to jump forward to keep up.

  They carried Molly across the green turf and laid the stretcher down gently, hopefully. Her face remained the same clay white.

  “Put her hand in the water,” Mark said quietly.

  Ariel took Molly’s arm. (“I could wrap my thumb and forefinger right round it,” she thought, feeling panicky.) She moved it gently so that the burned hand could dangle in the pool. Holding Molly’s wrist, she stirred the water with her own hand so that it would move slowly around the limp fingers.

  P’eng and Chuan drew back a little to let the others get closer to their friend. Joss knelt at the foot of the stretcher, gazing at Molly’s face intently, as though willing it back to life. The rest of the group stood silently—a long silence broken only by the tiny trickle of water from its source near the roots of the pine trees. P’eng peered over Mark’s shoulder. Was the chalky face a little lighter? Or was it still the same? Ariel took her hand out of the water, dried it on her jeans and laid the back of her fingers on Molly’s forehead. Was it warmer? Or was it just the contrast with the coolness of the water?

  When the change came at last, it was
so slow that no-one wanted to say anything in case it was a mistake. Molly’s skin slowly began to look different. The clay appearance gradually left. It began to look again as though there was a living person there. Finally, when Ariel’s nerves were stretched to the breaking point, Molly took a short, sharp breath inwards. Then she started breathing deeply and slowly as though she was sleeping normally.

  Ariel felt a surge of relief. “She’s alive,” she said, brushing Molly’s hair back with a gentle hand. “Wake up, Molly.” The girl went on sleeping.

  Joss sat back on her heels, still afraid to hope. “Yes, but will she be okay? She’s not in a coma or something?”

  Ariel shook her head, feeling confident for some reason she couldn’t explain.

  “Should we take her hand out of the water?” Mark asked. But when Ariel started to lift the dangling arm, Molly gave a low moan. “We’d better leave it,” Ariel said. “Just let her wake up.”

  Mark looked around to see that P’eng and Chuan had withdrawn quietly to the space by the door. With relief had come a renewed sense of being in a sacred place, and even Chuan felt it. He walked over to join them, saying “She’ll have to stay here.”

  “But not all of you,” P’eng said, disturbed.

  “We can’t leave her alone.”

  “Not all of you,” she insisted.

  “Okay, okay,” he said and beckoned Joss over.

  Eventually, they decided that Ariel should be the one to stay and watch over Molly. The others returned to the li with plans to come back frequently and check how things were going.

  Hours went by and still Molly slept. Joss came back with a bowl of broth and sat with Ariel outside the garden for a while. After Joss left, Ariel tried again to lift Molly’s arm from the pool. She was able to see, at least, that the blistering seemed to be less. Relieved, she stretched out on the ground with her arms behind her head, gazing at the pattern of pine branches against the silvery sky. And fell asleep.