The Jade Spindle

by Alice Major

  “What’s that?” Molly asked suddenly, reaching to examine it—a long stick with one end inserted into a wooden weight.

  “The spindle,” said P’eng, pulling a few strands from the distaff to wrap around a short piece of thread that dangled from the tip.

  “Spindle!” Sudden recognition flashed across Molly’s face. It was essentially the same tool as the stick that the wild woman had dropped and which now lay, almost forgotten, in a corner of the hut in the garden.

  P’eng sat on a stool and rolled the spindle with one hand down her thigh and let it drop dangling to the floor. With the other hand, she pulled strands from the distaff, feeding a steady stream of fibre that twisted with the turning spindle into a fine thread. She wrapped this length of thread around the whorl at the bottom of the spindle and looked at Molly.

  “Do you want to try?”

  She nodded. P’eng tucked the distaff into the side of her wheelchair. Molly pulled a few more fibres from the distaff and let the spindle roll down her thigh and drop. The thread promptly twisted into a tight corkscrew, bounced back the other way and broke. P’eng laughed.

  “Not so hard.” She demonstrated again. Patiently, Molly tried over and over until she started to get the hang of it—a twist hard enough to wrap the fibres together, but not so hard that the corkscrew effect happened.

  “Very good,” said P’eng at last, getting up and brushing flax from her tunic. “You are a better pupil than I was. My mother thought I would wrap myself in thread before I ever got any on the spindle.”

  Molly took an armload of the flax when she went back to the garden. As the rain pattered down, making fish-scale patterns on the surface of the pond, she got the spindle from the corner of the hut and went on trying to master the skill. A strange stubbornness kept her at it, even though her arms began to ache and her fingers were blistered.

  Giving up at last, she took her spindle full of thread and went to compare it with the skeins hanging on the hut wall. In comparison, her spinning was thick and lumpy, like so many knots in a string. She felt a rush of dissatisfaction. But the feeling passed and she shrugged her shoulders. The last metre or so of thread on the spindle was a little smoother, she thought.

  When the light node faded, she slept more soundly than she could remember since that first, healing sleep in the garden.

  And so the summer wore on. The rains passed. In the millet field, slender, grassy blades pushed up through the soil. In the garden, irises sent up sword-shaped leaves from the marshy end of the pool and hung out flags of pale purple and white. The time came when the travellers could be expected to return from the capital—but no figures appeared on the skyline beyond the slough.

  Molly almost didn’t notice. She seemed to exist in the garden as if she were a silkworm in a cocoon, perfectly centred in itself. She didn’t know why the art of spinning gave her such deep satisfaction, but her skill grew rapidly until she could draw down thread that was much finer than P’eng’s.

  And while she pulled and spun, pulled and spun, she felt her mind grow clear and steady, as though all her scattered fears and thoughts were wound onto the whorl. Her arms, though still as thin as ever, seemed to be stronger. She could spin for an hour and not notice.

  Mark was more restless. He felt there was something he should be doing, although he couldn’t imagine what it was. He took over many of Chuan’s tasks to help Li-Tsai and P’eng and hoed stubbornly at even more stubborn weeds in the millet field.

  “Why haven’t they come back,” he muttered, as much to himself as to Li-Tsai who was working a short distance away.

  “You won’t find the answer under the millet roots,” said the guardian mildly. “Be careful with that hoe.”

  His warning was too late. Mark swore as the stone edge of the hoe cracked.

  “Sorry,” he said, looking ruefully at the break. He sat down sweating from his attack on the weeds. Li-Tsai leaned on his own hoe and watched him as he stared off past the silvery slough to the trail that the travellers had taken.

  “Maybe something’s happened to them,” Mark said at last. “I keep thinking I should have gone along.”

  “Perhaps you are wishing you had gone.”

  “Yeah, maybe. Or I wish they hadn’t.” He punched at the ground with the handle of the hoe, then looked back at Li-Tsai. “Everything seems to be just stuck. Don’t you feel that way?”

  “I have even more reason than you to feel that way,” said the guardian, drily, and started to hoe away at the weeds again.

  When he wasn’t working in the fields, Mark searched the garden inch by inch with Molly. He kept hoping to find something, some clue. Molly searched as much out of love for exploring the garden as for anything they might find.

  They did find some surprising things. One was a tile with a beautifully engraved picture of a tall, crested bird like a crane or a stork. That was set into the garden wall near the gate. On the other side of the gate, they realized that a huge dragon had been painted in shades of brown and grey that blended with the branches, making it hard to notice. Its tail coiled up the wall almost to the top, and a large white stone was set in the centre of its forehead, like an oversized pearl. They found some other statues in niches in the wall: a lion with its paw placed lightly on an intricately carved ball, a water buffalo. Near the roots of the pine trees, they found a statue of a baboon with mournful eyes.

  “Notice anything about its forehead?” Mark was hunched on his knees studying the baboon’s face.

  “What?”

  He reached out and touched a little, crescent-shaped mark on the creature’s forehead. “That mark,” he said. “I think there’s one like it on that bird, too.” When they checked, they realized that each animal had a similar, barely noticeable curve. Even on the dragon had one, just above the central pearl.

  On one occasion, Mark had gone on searching after Molly gave up and went to sit by the pool.

  “Hey, look at this,” he called, after a good deal of rustling in the bamboo clump that stood opposite the gate.

  “What is it?” Molly pulled herself over to the bamboo, where he was still thrashing around. He pulled the stalks aside so she could see a big greenish-brown oval fastened to the wall.

  “What is it?” she asked again.

  “I don’t know. It’s metal.” He knocked against it with his knuckle. It was beaten smooth and echoed faintly.

  “A shield?” she said.

  “No one could lift that.” It was taller than Mark himself.

  “A door?”

  “Oh, hey—D’you think it could be?” Eagerly, he searched around the rim, looking for some way it might open, some latch or hinge. Nothing gave way to his anxious fingers. At last he gave up and went to get Li-Tsai and P’eng.

  But they had no more idea of what it was than he did. The guardian touched it gently with his gnarled fingers. “So much metal,” he said. “And beaten so smooth. This would be the most priceless thing in the whole capital.”

  They all looked expectantly at the oval, but its dull brown suface told them nothing. Mark punched his right fist into the palm of his other hand. “It should all add up,” he said. “The things we keep finding. The answer is here, but I can’t figure it out.” It was an unfamiliar experience for him. For a moment he knew how Joss felt facing a math problem.

  As the time went by, Molly finished spinning the great bundle of flax fibre that P’eng had prepared. Skeins and skeins of thread were taken back to the li to await the winter task of weaving.

  “We’ll be able to line the path to the capital with cloth,” P’eng joked.

  For a long time, Molly hesitated to use any of the baskets of fibre in the hut. Before sleeping, she would sometimes pull herself from basket to basket, touching their softly coloured contents and twisting a few fibres to see what kind of thread they would make. At last, with all the flax used up a
nd each pulse stretching long and empty, she dragged one of the baskets out to the flat rock by the pool. She had found that, by sitting on top of the rock and letting the spindle dangle over the side, she could get a longer, smoother length of thread to wind onto the whorl.

  It took her a short while to get used to this fibre, which was a particularly lovely colour of clear, bright gold. It was slightly waxier and took a firmer twist to make the thread smooth and strong. She was delighted by its sheen as she coaxed and pulled.

  The light node stood almost right overhead by now. Summer had brought the garden into full leaf and bloom. The low-growing plant that surrounded the pool with green plush was now covered in tiny white flowers and their perfume hung in the air like music. Molly found herself humming a small, half-remembered tune over and over in time to the rhythm of her fingers ... drop ... twist ... twist ... wind. The spindle grew thick with the criss-cross of gold thread.

  It seemed to her that the spindle had taken on a life of its own—a life that was somehow connected to hers. The rhythm of her breathing was the rhythm of the spinning, sky-blue whorl; it was as though it reached up to pull down new fibres into its embrace. Never had her thread been so fine and smooth. Never had she been so happily aware of the scent of flowers and the trickle of water.

  Only when she had amost reached the end of the distaff-full of fibre did she misjudge ever so slightly. The bottom of the spindle touched the surface of the water with a soft plop. Quickly, she lifted it clear and wound the last stretch of thread onto the whorl. The bottom was only slightly damp.

  Satisfied, she laid the spindle aside and slid down from the rock. Her arms were weary and her fingers sore. She stretched out on the turf to let them dangle in the water. Still half in her trance, she let her fingers explore the rock wall of the pool and touch the small carved frog in its niche. As she stared across the dark brown water, she watched a small speck of light skating above its surface. Then stiffened, as she realized what she was staring at.

  Dancing a few centimetres above the pool, no bigger than a pencil tip, was a tiny gold fly.

  “A fly!” Mark was obviously unconvinced. “You must have made a mistake.”

  It was after the late meal and he and P’eng were sitting near the offering stone. Molly sat near the offering stone, playing with a long piece of string, looping it with her fingers into a pattern that P’eng had taught her. (“They teach this to the daughters of the garden—I don’t know why,” P’eng had told her. “And I suppose you’re as much a daughter as anyone could be.”) P’eng was admiring the skein of gold thread that Molly had laid in her lap.

  At Mark’s comment, Molly disentangled her fingers from the string and laid it on her lap. “It wasn’t a mistake,” she insisted. “I watched it for a long time. When I tried to catch it in my hands, it danced away, but then it came back and kept hovering over the pool.”

  “Look,” he said. “They don’t even know what an insect is around here. Do you?”

  P’eng shook her head. “What is a ‘fly’?” she asked.

  “A little bug. Something that flies in the air. Lots of legs.” Mark made his fingers wiggle.

  She looked horrified. “What a ...”

  “Don’t say ‘monster’“ Molly interrupted. “That’s what you called us.”

  P’eng smiled, then looked puzzled. “But this thing can stay in the air? Like a dragon?”

  “Not as big as a dragon, thank heavens. Just a little tiny thing. We have them all over the place in our world.”

  The other girl shuddered. “No, there is nothing like that here,” she said firmly.

  “It must have been a speck of dust or something, Molly.”

  “No, no. I could see the wings. Like one of those little fruit flies, but shinier.”

  Mark still refused to believe her, and a long hour of staring at the surface of the pool brought the three of them nothing but a headache from squinting. At last, they went back to the li and Molly went grumpily to her hut.

  On the next pulse she took another basket of the gold wool to the rock and began to spin again. P’eng had suggested that perhaps they could weave something special from this thread if there was enough. As she began to twist wool onto the spindle, Molly wondered what that might be. A hanging for the wall? A coverlet for the spindle? Once again, she settled into her absorbing art as the thread drew down sweetly. Once again, she felt that heightened awareness of scent and sound around her; once again, she felt as though the thread linked her to the whole world.

  Mark and P’eng were making their way to the garden with bowls of food when they heard a soft, whirring sound that brought P’eng to a halt. “The Lady,” she said, half-hopeful, half-frightened. “She’s back.”

  But when they came through the archway, it was Molly they saw seated on the rock by the pool. From her hand dropped something that seemed to be a line of light. Her thick, bright hair was lifting around her head in a halo of slender threads, like the one gleaming from her fingers. She looked as though she was caught in the shimmer that surrounded the light node in spring.

  But it was what he saw beyond her that made Mark grip P’eng’s arm and point. On the wall opposite, the metal oval had become a tangled web of light where dim shapes seemed to be meshed in the bright strands. As he watched, one shape in the lower corner stirred very slightly. Mark caught his breath with dismay; at the very same moment, Molly gave a small sound of annoyance—once again, the base of the whorl had slipped a shade to far and touched the surface of the pool.

  She drew it up quickly and carefully, and as she did so, the light in her hair dimmed and the vision in the mirror faded to darkness. She looked over at the watchers by the gate, but her eyes were slightly out of focus, as though she was coming out of some kind of trance.

  In the silence, there was a soft plop, as though something had fallen—or jumped—into the pool.

  “What were you doing?” Mark demanded.

  “Just spinning.” Molly felt confused, jittery, angry at having her serene trance-like state interrupted by two people who came running across the garden waving their arms, shouting. “What do you think I was doing?”

  “I think I should get Li-Tsai,” P’eng said, and without waiting for Mark’s nod, she went flying back along the path to the li.

  “What’s got you all so worked up?” Molly asked fretfully. She turned the spindle full of thread around, touching the thread as though it might restore her tranquillity. But when Mark told her what he and P’eng had seen, she laid it aside and looked at the metal shield in awe. He helped her over to stand beside it, and they touched its surface gingerly. The surface was now as dull and flat as ever.

  The others came hurrying back from the li, and Mark went through the story again for the guardian.

  “What do you think happened?” he asked.

  Li-Tsai shook his head and touched the metal as they had done. The cold, dark surface still didn’t communicate anything. Eventually, they all went to sit near the offering stone—Li-Tsai never felt comfortable being any further inside the garden—to deliberate.

  “Deep in the mirror, there will appear a colour like no other colour and a line like no other line . . .” Mark quoted the tale that Li-Tsai had made them learn word for word.

  P’eng looked across the garden at the oval. “Do you think that’s what we saw?” she wondered, then shivered. “It did look as though something was coming unravelled. But how?”

  “I think it was what Molly was doing.”

  Shee shook her head violently. “I was just spinning,” she insisted.

  “With that particular spindle and that particular thread. In this particular place. You didn’t see it, Molly. You didn’t see what we saw, but you were caught up in it somehow.”

  Li-Tsai’s voice quavered. “It is wrong for us to be in the garden so much. You should not be here, Mol-li. I should never have
allowed it.”

  A cold panic settled on Molly. “I haven’t done anything,” she insisted. “I can’t leave here. I’ll . . .” She stopped abruptly. “I won’t leave,” she said after a stubborn pause.

  “But if you stay, you can’t spin,” Mark said reasonably. “We don’t know what we’re messing around with. I’m sure that’s what caused it.” It seemed as clear to him as knowing what the answer to a geometry problem should be, even before he had worked through the steps to prove it. “Think of that fly you saw . . “

  “You didn’t believe I saw it,” she said angrily.

  “Okay, I believe you now. I think you set something free. But think about it—it’s one thing to set a little fly free. But remember there’s a tiger in that story.”

  “She should not be staying in the garden,” Li-Tsai said.

  Molly felt the white anger make a fist in her chest. “I will. I’m not doing any harm here. I’m ... I’m looking after it.”

  The discussion went on for a long time before they came round to Mark’s compromise. Molly would go on sleeping and spending most of her time in the garden, but she would not use the spindle or any of the baskets of wool from the hut. She agreed at last, resentfully. Not to have that magic sensation of oneness—how could she let it go? How could it do any harm?

  She was silent and resentful as the others finally left to go back to the li. Time dropped heavily around her. What would she do to pass it? She dragged herself back to the flat rock and lay looking into the pool. She could go back to the li and spin there, she supposed. But all the flax had been used up anyway.

  As she lay looking at the water, she realized that, once again, her gaze was following a tiny fragment of light. The tiny fly had returned. Mark was probably right, she admitted grudgingly to herself. This tiny creature was definitely something new in this world.

  She followed the insect’s path as it skated in a zig-zag pattern towards the side of the pool. With surprise, she saw that someone had taken the little carved frog from its niche and left it sitting beside the rock. Who would have done it? When? She was just about to reach for the jade object when she saw that the light green bubble of its throat was moving. Stunned, she dropped her hand and stared. The bright gold eyes opened and closed slowly.