The spinning and weaving was, Ara learned, almost better than the walking at silencing her, stilling her, helping to teach her the discipline of control. Her nose grew thick with the scent of lanolin - she spent an hour each day working cotton with one of the two older girls, but spent the rest of the day twilling wool. It was still the work of an amateur, but it was more even now, it could make serviceable, if unattractive, blankets for the coming winter. She had grown attached to the milk-strange smoothness that the wool-fat plumped her hands with, the mild warmth of of the fibers running between her fingers, with the sweaty pressure of the long distaff against her tiny arm.
But most of all the whirling, the way the spindle fell and fell, but never reached the ground, spinning so fast it became, not solid, but a dance of reflected firelight, the elemental spirit of movement. It was the regularity of this that she focused on that gave her the wherewithal to learn to regulate the thread better. Her hands could feel the wobble of slowing, the shiver of the thread when it wound a thicker place in the wool she had not fully smoothed, sooner even then she saw it. There was a power in that, it gave her the feeling of oneness. While the spindle spun, her own identity wound into the slender thread of yarn. Desire passed out of her, need passed out of her, her soul grew silent and dead. She was no more a mortal with a mortal's heart. She was the silent, faithful servant of the tiny, revolving wooden mistress, dressing her in slow circumnavigations of mutton-wool, until she was plump with own skirts, then slowly undressing her again into a rounded skein. Taking the bare wooden body, then, and setting the thread, and slowly, slowly dressing her again. It had the same ritual power and repetition as magic in a children's tale:
And each day she spun twelve buttercream white gowns. And the wood-woman danced, and danced so quick, the gowns grew thick with her, and had to be pulled back off in long twirls.
She looked back on the days when she had been learning, when she had watched her half-sisters at their spinning, and she realized with a passionless honesty, she had been jealous of them. For they spun with a regularity and speed that meant they could chatter away the hours and spin three times as much, with greater regularity and beauty than Ara had been capable of, stiff and sore as she was bent over her own spindle. She was not jealous anymore, only quietly awed by them, by their skill and regularity. And in her mind, she was almost grateful for her incompetence, because it meant that her whole heart and mind was pulled into the slow, regular droning whirl, the vision and feel of the falling-without-falling. Her mind made stories up, slow, plotless tales of Spindlewood, the God of the Eternal Descent. Tales of Zintilla, coursing ever toward the great scar she left when was hurled against her mother's breast. Tales of the web. Most of all these. Tales of the slender cables spun of fibers so fine they were not mortal, tales where the hum of her own falling spindle was only one more harmonic in the great Drykas-song, where she slowly, slowly, dissolved, her identity melting into simply the faint hum of an ever-falling spindle.
And Livvy was always there. Livvy the ever faithful, sat on the ground at Ara's feet, leaned soft against her leg, picking cotton seed with fingers grown painful from the work, the pad of her thumbs criss-crossed with tiny red scratches. When Ara would stop, Livvy would stop, help her to her feet, fetch her a tumbler of water for her smoke-dry throat, hold the skein while Ara wound it, take her arm to guide her around the tent, to stretch her legs before she sat again on the little leather camp-stool, and began to spin again.
When she ate, now, Ara felt clumsy, her hands unfamiliar with the feel of cold, still solidity in them, her mouth and throat still tender to the touch of boiled flesh and rough bread. When she went alone, to practice her webbing, her song was the low, pale droning of spinning, echoed like a sorrowless dirge across the web of her home. She felt, sometimes, when she span, that she could forget which world she was in, for the two had grown so similar, the stillness of continual movement, the genetle telegraphing of signal along slender cords, the thirsty desire for the gentle harmonics of attunement between things. Webbing and weaving were the same in this way - both concerned themselves with transforming the wild into the ordered, the djed as rough and rich as lambswool, and just as heady in the strange perfume of its transformations. Both, in the end, were enclosed in the art of smoothing over, of the interplay of tension and softness.
And when she slept at night, she spun as well,, Herr body was still in the growing chill of late-summer, rolled into the silent affectionate warmth of Livvy beside, but her dreams were thick with the scent of wool, and heavy with the movement of the Little Wooden Mistress. She dreamt sometimes that the wood was the skeleton of her mother, that she kept it moving, because she knew if she stopped, all the bones would crumble. She dreamt sometimes that she herself was the wood, and that she was the one point of stillness in the world, and the rest of existence whirled wildly around her.
The cotton spinning, too, would have been interesting work, had she been allowed at it. The hour a day when she sat with her half-sister - Una, the non-Drykas one - and watched, and tried to perform the work was strange and familiar all at once. The cotton was much dryer first, and thinner second. The aroma of it was fresh and pale and empty, the slender threads hard and sore against her thumb and forefinger. And the spool of thread spun so much faster, it jangled her nerves, worried she would miss something. The feel of the bumps and crackles and wobbles was entirely different - harder, crueler, more demanding. Faster, most of all, still, so much faster. It was almost exciting, it made Ara feel aggressive, it gave visions of leaping onto the spindle, and clawing into her back with her nails, and not letting go.
But, though there was so much spinning of cotton to be done, when the hour was over, her sister unwound the paltry length of her thread, and Ara went back to the woolens. Her sister, trying to be kind, would jokingly tell her that the canvas walls would only slow the cold, that Ara's blankets would be more valuable in the mid-winter. But Ara knew this for what it was - the patronizing attempt of an old girl to comfort a younger one. But, still, she could not manage jealousy. She simply spun. Her pile grew, and grew and grew.
One day, as if by magic, her sisters put their weaving down, and slipped out of the tent.Her father was out with the herds, her brothers as well. Only Ara and Livvy stayed, picking cotton, and spinning wool, and Auntie, who knelt over the pestle, grinding down flour for the winter with a heavy stone mortar. The room was silent for a few moments, but Ara, staring into the spinning fiber, could almost feel the webbing of the little shelter, tautening, with unspoken strain. But still, the room was quiet, but for the faint tearing sound of the cotton, the faint humming of the spindle, and the grinding of the hard grains against the roughly pebbled stone.
And then, the grinding stopped, and Auntie looked up. She stood stretched her back, and then waited awkwardly. Ara, in her mind, felt the pressure of this. This is where she was supposed to look up, invite some sort of conversation. She didn't. She stared, still, with the intensity of subverted grief, at the Little Wooden Mistress, watched the cloud of finger-stained alder-wood and the whirl of yellow-white wool thread, counting soundlessly with her lips. Auntie finally gave up, and reached down to where she had been sitting, and from beneath the cushions there, she drew out a hand axe, about 2 feet long , with a narrow blade and a hammer-back. Not a hatchet or a chopping axe, but a fine fighter's axe., From the back hung a slender thong of blue, tied tightly around a bundle of hawk's feathers.
Auntie set it down quietly in front of Ara, and half-nodded, muttering out quietly, obvious fear and emotion in her voice, "It's too big for you, now. You'll grow into it."
Ara stopped the spindle and set it down. She looked at the thong of fabric hanging from the back touched it, shuddered slightly. Livvy had stopped picking seed by then, and looked on with a quiet, tender worry in her face.
"Ara… your father, he loves you, don't you forget that. I… you aren't gonna want to spin. You're gonna want to be like your mama. That's natural, that's… there aint nothing wrong with that. I ain't never raised a watch-girl. But I'm gonna try my best, and I'm gonna love you too. Maybe not just like your mama, but I'm gonna do my best."
Ara shuddered at the axe, quietly touched the thong, stroked the feathers.
"That's… I'm sorry, that's all 'twas left. Of your wool, I mean. I'm sorry. That was wrong. I'm sorry. I spun it back up, with a little cording in it, what was left, just so it would… would be strong."
Ara stroked the little scrap of blue wool, the heavy hammer-back, the blade. It was keen and new, and she was clumsy - it sliced her finger open, and she inhaled quickly, putting the finger in her mouth to suck the blood and sting out of it. The blade was left with a smear of red on it, and Ara looked at it, felt a little sick. And a part of her heart reviled, twisted, turned. No. No, no, no, her heart cried inside its roiling sea. She was too small to decipher the fear that welled up, but for years after, she would redream that blade, redream Livvy leaping up and taking it, and wiping the blood off, a red-brown smear on her undyed linen skirt, redream the cloud of sound from Auntie, fussing, looking confused.
And she felt the bubble of that hate in her again. She wanted to say it was Auntie's fault, that her own anger was at Auntie's paltry apology, that it was a reflection of the little whispers about the jealousy between Auntie and Mama. It wasn't any of this, though. It was simply that looking up, she had seen her Auntie's hair, golden and curly, and her eyes as chestnut as a horse's coat, and her face, soft and yielding and kind, and kin to her own mother's face hard, strong face, but so terribly different. And she had remembered, before, looking up, seeing her mother's straight, tight braid, just like her own, her mother's grey eyes, just like her own, and a part of her heart, hated this woman, simply for being alive, when her own mother was dead.
But she was dead. She was dead. Ara had danced around this thought every day since the fire, and intellectually she was intimately familiar with it. Her heart, though, in that vast deep, overstuffed well, had not quite accepted the fact of it until it had looked and seen her Auntie, nervously offering to be like a mother to her, now. And with the sudden realization, her heart lost track of a piece of hope. The hollow space had to be filled with something. Mother was gone. She wasn't coming back. Ara took her finger out of her mouth, and said with a quiet, cold, empty tone, "I'm not going to be my mother. Mama is gone. I ain't bringing her back."
But it was just the harsh corner of a whisper, of course. And her Auntie looked at her confused, "Ara, sweetie, I can't hear you."
Ara swallowed hard, and pushed hard at the bubble of hate. Her heart did not want it back. It wanted it to pop, to gush out black anger, just as it had done to Livvy. Ara looked down, and Livvy looked up, the last corners of her black eye still a livid, ugly green. They met eyes a moment, and Livvy frowned gently, and ever so subtly, she shook her head. No. No.
Ara nodded, and looked back to her Auntie. The whole exchange was perhaps two seconds, and she knew that, outside of her and Livvy, it was likely indecipherable. Quietly, then, and with the weak corner of a smile, Ara made a sign across her breast: Thank you.
Her aunt bent over her and wrapped arms around her. Ara was stiff a moment, and Livvy, gently, reached up to squeeze her mistress's knee. Ara hugged Auntie back, and Auntie stood, said something soothing and kind and sweet, and left the tent, now. Ara stood, without a word once the flap was shut, and took the axe back from Livvy. She undid the thong of cloth and feathers, and squeezed it hard in her little hand, crushing the fletching, needing the last pressures of shoving the black bubble back into her heart to be redirected into something else. Then, she relaxed, and without a word or sign, she threw the thong into the fire. Livvy looked up from where she sat on the floor, frightened. Ara looked back, and tried to be proud and stiff like a heroine. But Livvy could see through her, she knew that. The slave girl said nothing. Ara sat down, and set the axe back on the floor. Then, she took back up her distaff and spindle, and started the Little Wooden Mistress whirling again.
"I'm not gonna cry."
She whispered the words, though none, not even Livvy could hear them. Livvy frowned at her and muttered softly, "We gone be a'right, Missy Livvy. We is."
Then the sound of ripping went on, the little black seeds biting at Livvy's fingers again. The spindle whirred. The air was still and wet and cool with coming rain.x
