by Alice Major
The long, slow pulses of winter wore away. At last the fogs began to pull back. The light node drew closer from the north along its silvery cord. The countryside began to dry out and turn a brighter, tawnier brown. The lifting of the fog didn’t raise Joss’s spirits much, but some of the numbness left her. She felt restless. Suddenly and passionately, she longed to see the garden. Even more, she longed to be home, in her own world. For the first time she was really frightened that she would never return there, never see sun or stars again. But at least in the garden she would find Mark and Ariel and Molly.
“Help me go,” she begged the old woman.
“But no, it is too soon. The fogs will still come back,” Mei replied. And later, “We have no-one to send with you.”
“Just tell me the way.”
“No. No,” exclaimed the old woman. “Set out on your own through all that wild country?” Later still, she added, “Besides, my grandson will want to thank you himself.”
Joss couldn’t bear the thought of being thanked by the commander of the enemy army and put her hands in front of her face to hide her tears. She began making herself a knapsack from scraps of leather and rough cloth and wondered how to fill it with enough food.
Finally came a time when, as she sat pulling clumsy stitches through the bag, the unmistakable clump-clump of hooves came to her ears. She looked up to see a short train of horses picking its way up the long valley where the village lay. The old woman came darting out of the hut—her ears were as keen as a cat’s—and looked hopefully into the distance.
“It is Deng-Xu’s standard they carry,” she announced. Her hands went up quickly to smooth her hair.
The five horses drew closer and Joss shrank against the wall of the hut. She would have run away if Mei wasn’t standing right beside her, clutching her tunic. The first two riders seemed all too familiar—the boy perched cheerfully and proudly on a small, light horse and looking up from time to time towards the man riding beside him. Joss could imagine that expression of warm pride long before the faces were close enough to see in detail.
But by the time they were close enough to identify, it wasn’t Deng-Xu and his son that Joss stared at. It was the youthful figure on the third horse—someone whose face was unbelievably familiar even though the body seemed surprisingly tall, even gangly.
“Alasdair,” Joss croaked. “Alasdair!”
As he swung himself off the pony, she found herself hugging him fiercely and he was hugging her back. As she looked over his shoulder, blinking back tears, she realized she was looking into the face of Ssu-ma, Director of Horses.
Chapter Twenty-six
Li-Tsai rolled up a scroll delicately, and Mark put aside the bowl of ink made with powdered charcoal from the fireplace and the brush made from a stalk of bamboo. He had learned to use this clumsy instrument well during the long, mist-bound winter as he, Molly and Ariel had helped Li-Tsai tease out the meaning of scroll after scroll. They wrote out translations of the passages that seemed most relevant on squares of linen woven from Molly’s finest thread.
Molly laced her fingers behind her neck and leaned her head with its heavy weight of hair against the wall of the scroll chamber where they sat. “Well, where are we?” she asked.
“Down to the last two scrolls,” Mark replied.
“I know that, silly. But where are we in terms of getting home again?”
“We have some clues about how Huang-ti’s path of numbers works. We have some clues about the jade path, but we don’t have the ritual jades.”
“We have one of them,” Ariel said, pointing to the blue pi that lay on the table near them. They had spent a long time deciphering the ancient symbols written on it.
“Only one—the sky disk. We need the earth tsung too.”
“Which is floating around the capital somewhere,” Ariel said gloomily. “If only I’d known. If only we’d just brought it back when we found it in the cave.”
“You didn’t know. And then we’d still have needed this one anyway. You had to go to the capital to get that,” said Mark.
They’d had similar conversations so often that he spoke automatically. “We’ll just have to head back to the capital when spring comes and see if we can find it.”
Molly held up her hand and began counting on her fingers. “One, the number path. Two, the jade path. Three, the thread. We don’t have what we need for the first two. But we probably do for the third path.”
This was another discussion they’d had many times. “Look, Molly—we don’t know anything about it,” said Mark. “There’s only one mention in all these scrolls.”
“A silver thread, spun on the jade spindle, can stitch the two sides of the universe together for a brief time.” Molly picked up the book they had stitched together from squares of linen cloth and quoted from it.
“And it also says, “The existence of this path was told to the Lady Lo-Tsu by the ancient people, but not the art of making it.” Ariel scrubbed her forehead wearily.
“We could try it.”
“Look what happened before, Molly.”
“What happened that was so awful? I got Loh-ti free and she told us about the scroll chamber.”
“Yes, but there’s a lot more that might have come free.”
“And besides,” she went on, “that was when I was using the gold-coloured wool from the hut. There is some white wool there that would probably look silver when it was spun—a whole three baskets of it. What if I tried that?”
“Oh, Molly!” The others groaned.
“Don’t let’s argue about it again,” Ariel said and got up. She went to the door and peered out. “The fog’s breaking,” she said. “That’s the second break we’ve had in the last two pulses.”
Li-Tsai joined her. “Spring will come soon,” he murmured.
“We should go back to the li while it’s clear,” said Ariel. “P’eng will need some help with the fire. Coming, Molly?”
Molly shook her head. “No. Can you wheel me back to the garden?”
Although she had given up the argument, she hadn’t given up on her idea of trying to spin the white wool to see what might happen. In fact, it seemed more deeply rooted than ever. “It’s the only way we have to get back,” she told herself stubbornly, ignoring the small voice inside her that told her she only wanted to try the spindle again and feel its magic.
The garden was still laced with white mist that blurred the trees in the far corner. Left alone in the hut, Molly plunged her hands into the clouds of soft white wool in one of the baskets. It felt silkier than any of the other fibres she had worked with. She pulled a few strands out and twisted them together, with an itch in her fingers.
“If I just try a little bit . . .” she thought, looking at the spindle nested in its bracket by the door.
She tucked some of the wool under her arm and the spindle in her pocket, then dragged herself over to the rock by the pool. She forced herself to be patient while she twisted some of the wool with the thread that hung from the end of the spindle. Then she began to roll it down her thigh, coaxing the wool into a fine, sleek strand.
Once again, it took a little while to get the feel of this new fibre and to find the rhythm in her task. Slowly it came. She felt the rhythm creep into her fingertips, absorb her whole body into its pattern. At first, she tried to keep an eye on the mirror as well, but soon gave that up. It interfered with the inner music.
Roll, drop, whirl, loop the thread. Roll, drop, whirl, loop the thread . . .
The thread was silver. It was a line of light joining her hand to the wooden shaft and blue whorl. It was joining her to everything in the garden, joining her hair to the grass blades, joining her bones to the rock she sat on. At last she tore her eyes away from it and looked towards the metal oval.
For a moment, she saw something in it—a small, brown, huddled shape wrapped in
white sheets. It was the wild woman, lying in what looked like a hospital bed. Overlaid on that picture, Molly saw a reflection of herself, the silver thread falling from her hand. It looked as though the line of light was arching through the mirror like a lariat. It snaked past the wild woman and further into the reflected depths. Just at that moment, the wild woman opened her eyes and looked into Molly’s face.
Then the picture disappeared.
Molly laid the wool aside and dragged herself over to the metal oval. She tapped it curiously with her fingernail. It looked brighter, shinier, as though some tarnish had been rubbed off. Had it been like that before she started spinning?
There was no sign of the picture she had seen, but Molly was sure that the wild woman had looked into her eyes and recognized her. They had made contact. Somewhere on Molly’s home side of the universe, the wild woman was lying in a hospital bed. And she was very, very ill.
Molly dragged herself back to the rock and tried spinning again. But she was too excited and distracted by trying to look in the mirror to make the magic happen again. “I need the others here to watch the mirror for me,” she thought, and waited impatiently for them to come for her at meal time.
It took a long time and a lot of talking for her to convince Mark and Ariel to let her try again.
“I can reach her, I know I can,” she insisted. “I just can’t do it myself.”
Then the fog came back so heavily that the garden was a space of lost whiteness where they couldn’t see the metal oval from the pool. Finally, it cleared again. Molly woke up to find the garden clear and bright as coins shaken out of a cloth bag.
“Now, if we shout “stop,” you’ll stop right away,” Ariel said anxiously as they gathered near the pool.
Molly nodded impatiently. “Don’t worry,” she said. “Just stand behind me so I don’t lose my concentration. And watch that mirror.”
They watched the back of Molly’s head as she bent over her task. For a long time, it seemed as though nothing particular was happening—just a girl with long, fair hair absorbed in what she was doing. Mark was almost going to say something, when Ariel gripped his arm. “Look,” she whispered.
A silver line was forming in the mirror. At the same time, the ends of Molly’s hair were lifting gently and floating away from her shoulders. Slowly, the metal brightened until it looked like the surface of a mirror reflecting Molly’s intent face. Surrounding her face, moving quietly, were green leaves and branches. But Mark realized that they weren’t the reflected trees of the garden. The pool he was staring at wasn’t the pool here—it was the pool in the ravine back home. On it lay a frail, tiny figure with a scatter of stones at her hands. The wild woman reached up wildly as if she was reaching for a rescuer’s rope.
Ariel and Mark glanced at each other. Molly’s hair was electric now and the silver thread shimmered wildly in her hand. Then, abruptly, the whole picture in the mirror rippled and broke apart.
“Oh, no,” Ariel breathed. “We almost had her ...”
But her brother grabbed her arm and pointed. There at Molly’s feet lay the wild woman.
Molly, still unaware of the crumpled figure beside her, stopped the motion of the spindle and drew it up wearily. “I don’t know what happened,” she said. “Everything just stopped dead.” Then she glanced down and her eyes widened.
The wild woman looked even smaller than she had before. She was a fragile cage of bone and skin that might not even hold any life within it. Her feathered cape and fur robe were gone. Instead, she wore a grey woolen hand-me-down skirt and a shabby pink sweater. She looked more like a bag lady than anything else, someone destitute and lost.
P’eng and Li-Tsai, who had been standing at the edge of the garden during the spell-spinning, now came hurrying over. Together, they turned the small figure on her back.
“Who is she?” asked P’eng.
“I think she’s your Lady,” said Mark.
Molly felt an unexpected weight of sadness at his words. Li-Tsai made a gesture to avert the evil eye and looked towards the entrance of the garden, as though remembering he should not be here.
“She looks terrible,” said Ariel, drawing strands of hair away from the wild woman’s forehead. “Worse even than you did, Molly.”
“What about some water from the pool? It helped Molly,” P’eng suggested. She looked around quickly, saw the ritual bowl on the offering stone and hurried to fill it with water. Ariel let a few drops run between the wild woman’s lips and smoothed some on her forehead. But no change came. The cheeks were sunken in; only the faintest beat of blood at her throat showed that she was at all alive. Even that seemed to grow fainter and more irregular as they watched.
Molly sat looking at the slight pulse with a horrible indecision in her heart.
“She’s dying,” said Ariel desperately. “Can’t we do something?”
Molly slid down from the rock to sit on the green turf beside the still figure. After one more moment of silent battle with herself, she took the jade spindle and laid it in the wild woman’s right hand. Then she folded each of the lifeless fingers around it.
“What ...?” Ariel started to ask, but Molly held up a hand to silence her.
They watched intently. A slight flush crept into the brown, seamed cheeks. Suddenly, the wild woman gasped noisily as if she was coming up from under water and her fingers tightened around the spindle as if it was the edge of a life preserver. She took several frightening breaths that rattled somewhere in her chest, then settled into a deep, slow breathing.
Ariel took a deep breath herself. “How did you know?”
“I just did,” Molly said sadly. “She is the lady of the garden.”
“What should we do now?” asked P’eng.
“Let her sleep,” said Mark. “That’s what Molly needed.”
“Right here?” P’eng sounded doubtful. “It doesn’t seem ... fitting.”
“In her hut,” said Li-Tsai in a voice of sudden authority.
They went to prepare a stretcher. In the sleeping chamber of the hut, Ariel and P’eng took off the wild woman’s scarecrow clothes and dressed her in the white robe that hung beside the door. P’eng bound poultices of green leaves on her scratched arms. They combed the tangles out of the long hair. The wild woman, breathing slowly, looked like a bag lady no longer.
While the others went for the stretcher, Mark helped Molly into her wheelchair. Her chest felt tight and her fingers empty. Finally, he noticed the sadness in her eyes.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. ... nothing.” She hesitated and shook her head. “It was hard to give up the spindle. And it’s hard to give up the hut ... It seems like my hut.” She leaned her head on the back of the wheelchair and looked around. “My place,” she said softly. She closed her eyes for a moment and clasped her fingers as tightly together as she could. Then she looked at him. “Okay, so tell me I’m just going spinny.”
He smiled, but touched her shoulder comfortingly.
Chapter Twenty-seven
Joss dragged Alasdair towards the edge of the village while Deng-Xu and the others were being welcomed into Mei’s hut. The explanations and exclamations took a long time.
Alasdair’s fall had been miraculously broken by something—he didn’t know what, because he’d been knocked out cold. He came around to find himself being dragged away from the battlefield on a rough stretcher.
“Only a broken leg and some smashed-up ribs,” he said cheerfully. Joss had a sudden memory of Alasdair’s anxious mother telling him to be careful on his bicycle, and felt a silly urge to laugh.
The prisoners had all be rounded up and marched off—not too kindly, but without real cruelty—by the White Ti. The wounded followed more slowly to the enemy capital, including Ssu-ma. He had been taken up for dead and carried by his own soldiers to the edge of the battlefield.
&
nbsp; “I thought he was dead when they brought him in,” Alasdair said, shuddering. “There was a horrible gash in his side . . .” He shook himself and went on with his story. “Anyway, they hadn’t found you, or the king, by the time the wounded were taken off to the capital.”
“The king!” Joss snorted scornfully and told him about the king’s behaviour. “So who knows where he is now,” she finished her tale. “The White Ti never found him?”
“No, but they did find you. I guess all the healers and doctors had already left when you turned up. They didn’t think you’d last ‘til you got to the capital, so Deng-Xu had you brought here. I didn’t know anything about it until after I got to the capital. I wanted to come find you right away, but nothing can move during those fogs.”
“And I didn’t know that anyone was still alive until right now...” Joss caught her breath. “I was afraid to ask. I thought ... I thought maybe everyone on our side had been marched off and killed or something.”
“Oh, Ssu-ma says no good general would waste soldiers like that.” He patted her shoulder again, comfortingly to stop the tears springing into her eyes. “Feed ‘em up and use ‘em again—on your own side.”
She laughed and sniffed. “But generals aren’t all good,” she said soberly. “People are wasted.”
“Yes.” He thought of the pale, still faces he had seen and the hands that would never hold a plough again.
She drew her hand across her eyes. “So, now what?”
“So now we’re headed back to the Middle Kingdom.”
“Who is?”
“You. Me. Ssu-ma. They’re letting him go home to talk about a peace treaty.”
She pushed her hair aside and hugged her knees. “I guess it will be hard for Ssu-ma to go back and explain what happened.”
