The Jade Spindle Read online

  The Jade Spindle

  by

  Alice Major

  Copyright © 2012, Alice Major

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the author.

  Published electronically worldwide by eSisters Publishing, Edmonton, Alberta

  Cover: Jessica Hiemstra-van der Horst

  eBook design: Human Powered Design

  ISBN 978-0-9917440-1-5 (ePUB) / 978-0-9917440-2-2 (mobi)

  For my sister, Carol Ann

  on our new adventures

  Prologue

  P’eng bent over the small fire flickering in its circle of stones and stirred her pot. At last, the mixture of grain and water was starting to thicken into a porridge. Satisfied, she put the spoon aside and stretched her arms into the cool, early air. Then she tilted her head back to watch the smoke rise like a piece of tight, white yarn that unravelled a little at the end and disappeared into the pale sky.

  Turning, her head still tilted back, she looked south towards the light node. Yao-chi’s thread—two rays stretching north and south along the sky from the node—was like a taut string with the node strung on it like a silver bead.

  “The light’s getting stronger,” she thought. “We’ll be planting the millet soon.”

  She took up a wooden bowl, filled it with porridge, then held it above her head. Turning first to one end of the thread and then to the other, she murmured the words she had murmured for as many pulses of the light node as she could remember. Holding it out in front of her, she walked the familiar path that led on to the walls that surrounded the Garden of the Lady. Grass swayed waist-high on either side.

  P’eng walked with a kind of patient pleasure. She liked to do this properly —to hold the bowl at the correct angle, to walk in a spirit honouring the lady. Not like Chuan, who hurried on the mornings when it was her turn for the task, bored by having to do it again and again.

  Not that the lady ever gave any sign of caring whether the ritual was carried out properly or not.

  P’eng had never spoken to the Lady, of course. The daughters of the garden went no further than the semi-circle of bare earth just inside the high wall where the offering stone stood. The lady was simply a hunched shape glimpsed now and then by the hut in the far corner of the garden, or moving among the berry bushes that surrounded the hut—a small, distant figure, yet oddly comforting.

  But this time as P’eng turned the corner of the wall, the familiar ritual fell apart. She faltered. The air shuddered around her and a shrill keening sounded in her eardrums. Startled, she stopped and lowered the bowl as she looked around. Far behind her, the thin column of smoke had gone loose and wavery. The air itself seemed to become unstable and unevenly bright. Looking up, she saw that Yao-chi’s thread also seemed to be unravelling, spreading and shaking. Never had she seen such a thing happen. It seemed as though the world itself was dissolving.

  The wooden bowl slipped from her fingers and landed upside-down on the path at her feet, mixing the porridge with dust. P’eng sank to her knees and hid her eyes, dizzy with terror.

  Chapter One

  Leave me a-lone. Leave me a-lone

  Mark’s sneakers hit the sidewalk in time with each syllable. “Just leave me alone” he muttered. It was as though he was pounding nagging sisters, schoolwork, everything into the pavement as he ran.

  He hardly knew where he was headed until he found himself turning into a grassy strip between two fenced yards. It was a right-of-way leading to three stubby posts that marked the beginning of the path into the ravine. Mark slowed down, considering, and realized that the ravine was exactly where he wanted to go for a little peace.

  Beyond the posts, a path dipped down into the ravine. As he followed it into the early-June rustle of bushes and grass, all the other noises fell away behind him — cars, lawnmowers, even the quarrelling in his head. The tiny creek that ran along beside the path hadn’t dried up yet, as it would later in the really hot months. It still made a trickling thread of sound.

  He found his steps slowing and his breath coming a little easier. Finally, he left the main path and climbed down through the brush to get closer to the water. He poked along beside the creek for a while until he found a large flat rock in the bank where a patch of sunlight filtered through the leaves high overhead. He sat down, drawing his knees up to his chin, and stared into the brown water that trickled past the base of the rock. Absent-mindedly, he pulled a leaf from the bush at his shoulder and ran his thumbnail back and forth along the centre vein, half wishing he could just come and live here, away from everything.

  “Lay off,” he muttered to himself again, reliving the scene with his older sister Ariel, telling her what he thought of her. He knew perfectly well how much time he needed for homework. It would make more sense to nag Joss, who always left things to the last minute and then got the whole house caught up in a panic attack. But Mark got decent marks in school. He knew he could do better but it didn’t seem worth trying a lot harder.

  He sat there for a long time, his mood shifting back and forth from angry to peaceful like the sunlight coming through the moving leaves overhead. At last, he started to feel the rock get uncomfortable. A mosquito whined at his shoulder. And then he heard a new sound.

  A few low, musical notes. At first it was just a couple of notes and then silence. He strained his ears, and a few moments later, caught it again. He got to his feet and looked across the creek. There was another path there, opening between two bushes. It seemed as though the music came from that direction.

  Mark’s long legs made the jump across the water easy. He only slipped slightly when he landed on the soft earth at the other side. A tickle of spider webs made him wave his arms in front of his face as he walked between the bushes, and he stopped. It didn’t seem as though anyone had come along here in a while. But as he stood, uncertain, he heard the notes again further along the path. This time he counted—five notes, low and sweet. It repeated. Repeated again. He hummed them over to himself as he walked along.

  He kept on until, in the exasperating way that ravine paths have, the track he was following dwindled off into nothing. He kept pushing through the underbrush, pausing after a while to take his jacket off and tie it around his waist. The morning sun had heated up and he was starting to sweat. The music stopped.

  By now he was uncomfortable. He’d lost the path entirely. The familiar ravine had become strange territory, unexpectedly large. Mark paused to think. If he got back down to the creek, he could follow it as far as the viaduct and get back to the main path from there. He followed the downhill slope as best he could, making his way through the thick brush, climbing over fallen tree trunks. A breeze came up suddenly and shook the leaves into a rustling surge overhead. He didn’t even hear the trickle of the creek until the water opened out just in front of him and he found himself standing on a bank, looking down at another large flat rock like the one he had been sitting on. At its base, the creek collected into a wide pool.

  He had found the musician.

  The figure standing on the rock was the most bizarre creature Mark had ever seen. It looked like a tattered bird of prey. A woman—at least, he thought it was a woman, although the face was so seamed and puckered with age that it was hard to tell for sure. Her dress, if you could call it a dress, was made of furry animal skins sewn together in long strips. Its crazy zig-zag hem came below her knees. Over this, she wore a long cape stitched all over with bunches of black and green feathers and dangling dis
cs of something like horn.

  The most remarkable part of her costume was on her head. A metal band fitted snugly around her forehead to support what looked to be a pair of branching antlers, like those of a small deer. From below this, wiry black-and-white hair straggled past her shoulders.

  From his position above her, he couldn’t see her face, and the wind sounds obviously kept her from hearing him. But he could see quite well what she was doing. She had arranged five stones in a line on the rock. She had a small flute-like instrument in her hand. She sounded the first note, then took a long stick from the belt at her waist and tapped the first stone. Then played the second note and tapped the second stone.

  She was certainly weird, but seemed too small and fragile to be afraid of. Mark tiptoed a little to the right, to where the bank sloped down sharply towards the water, then jumped lightly down to the level of the creek. She still hadn’t heard him, and kept playing and tapping in a kind of trance. But when he stepped towards her, she spun around with a high shriek. He felt himself towering above her. “It’s okay,” he tried to say, but she backed away from him..

  “It’s okay,” he said again. But she only answered in some high, incomprehensible gibberish reaching for something that hung from her belt. He stepped towards her, holding out his hand. She spun and leapt off the rock, vanishing into the underbrush a little ways up the creek. Mark tried to follow her, but she had moved as quickly as a small animal into hiding.

  He came back to the rock. The five stones were still laid out there. So was the long stick, which she had dropped while she scrabbled at her belt. He crouched, studying these objects. The stones were regularly shaped crystals of something he recognized from the days when he had a rock collection on his bookcase.

  “Rutilated quartz,” he murmured, holding one of them up to the light. The thin needles of rutile glimmered in the pale gold crystal like a straight, silver rain. The stick had a kind of weight attached to the end of it—a dull green disc of smoothly polished stone, heavy for its size. He rubbed it thoughtfully, then picked the stones up and put them in his jacket pocket. Carrying the weighted stick, he made his way downstream, trying to find his way back to something familiar.

  Chapter Two

  She was doing what?” Joss leaned forward so that her shoulder-length hair flopped across her eyes. Impatiently, she pushed it back.

  “She’d play a note and then tap the stone with a stick. Go figure.” Mark stretched on the grass in front of his twin sister and her friend, Molly.

  He had made his way down the creek to cold concrete pillars that held up the viaduct. There, he climbed back up to the main path. Walking along, he had heard Joss’s unmistakable hoot of laughter from above him. He stopped, confused for a minute, then realized he must be just underneath Molly’s house, which backed onto the ravine. So he had climbed up the steep slope to the ledge of lawn where the two girls were sitting.

  “What kind of notes?” asked Molly. She was leaning forward too in her wheel chair.

  Molly’s appearance was startling. She had muscular dystrophy. The disease made her painfully, painfully thin so that the upper part of her arms were hardly any thicker than her wrists. Her face was small and pale. The first thing you noticed was a huge pair of blue-grey eyes under a cap of fine, fair, shining hair. Then you noticed the wheelchair and the wasted body that was almost like some slender creature from another world.

  But by now he was so used to her appearance he hardly noticed it at all. He looked at her thoughtfully, trying to replay the tune in his head. “Well, they were like this,” he said and tried to hum them. When he repeated them, Jocelyn hummed too in her croaky, tuneless way. “Shut up, Joss,” he said. “You know you can’t sing. You’ll make me forget.”

  Molly tried humming them too. Her voice was true and clear. “That’s right,” said Mark. He got restlessly to his feet.

  “Where are you going,” asked his twin.

  “I don’t know. Over to the park maybe. Home maybe.”

  “Don’t tell Ariel.”

  “Why not?”

  “Weirdoes in the ravine. She’ll freak.”

  “I don’t want to talk to her anyway,” he said gloomily. “If Mom and Dad don’t get back from that conference soon, I’ll murder her. I’m going over to Alasdair’s and see if he’s around. See you.”

  Jocelyn watched her brother disappear around the corner of the house towards the street.

  “His jeans are getting too short again,” she said. She shook her reddish-brown hair—its colour was about the only point of resemblance between the twins. “He’s getting to look like a telephone pole. Oh, well,” she lay back on the grass and stretched her arms luxuriously. “They say you can never be too rich or too thin.”

  “Yes, you can,” said Molly grimly.

  Joss sat up quickly. “God, Molly, I didn’t mean that. I didn’t think when I said it...”

  “I know.”

  “And at least you’re rich too,” Joss said irrepressibly.

  Molly laughed and pushed the lever on her wheelchair with her long, delicate fingers, turning to face the ravine. “I wonder what’s going on down there.”

  “I could go down and see if I can find her too.”

  “We could go down,” Molly corrected.

  “We’ll never get your wheelchair down here.”

  “We can go round to the main path. It’s wide enough, and my chair goes over just about anything.”

  “It says, ‘No motorized vehicles,’“ Joss said with a laugh.

  Molly laughed too. “So let them give me a ticket.”

  As they made their way across the lawn, Molly said suddenly, “I have an idea. Wait a sec.”

  Her wheelchair growled softly away over the patio towards the handsome house. A minute later, Joss heard her calling, “Trudy, Trudy!” to the pleasant young woman who helped look after her. “Where’s that thing Dad brought me?”

  Then she was trundling back across the patio with a narrow black case on her lap. It had a keyboard like a miniature piano along one side, with each of the keys numbered and a panel of buttons like a calculator at one end.

  “What’s that?” Joss took it up and turned it over, curious. She pressed one of the keys and jumped when it played a short, high note.

  “It’s like a baby music synthesizer. Look.” Molly took it back and touched a few notes on the keyboard. Then she touched a couple of buttons on the end panel. The box played back the same sequence of notes in rapid succession, making a little tune. She touched another couple of buttons and the tune played again, only this time more slowly and sounding as though it was played on a violin.

  “You can store the notes in computer memory and then do all sorts of things to them,” Molly explained. “Dad got it for me when he went to Singapore last month.”

  “Neat,” said Joss. “But what do you want to do with it now?”

  “I was thinking about those notes Mark said the wild woman was playing. I’d like to put them in. I sort of recognized the pattern. If you put them together, they’d make a chord.”

  She touched the keys carefully for a few minutes and finally, satisfied, touched the buttons on the computer panel to make the sequence play back.

  “Now listen, if you put them all together ...” This time, the notes played back almost simultaneously, like a guitar making a sweet strum.

  “But Mark said it was a kind of flute she was playing.”

  “Right.” Molly touched a few more buttons, and the notes came out single, clear and soft. “Okay, let’s go.” She tucked the synthesizer into the carry-bag at the side of her wheelchair.

  The wheelchair’s thick tires bounced heavily on the dirt track down into the ravine. The green peace of leaves folded over them. The birds were mostly quiet in the early afternoon warmth, and insect sounds moved drowsily around them. They went without saying muc
h, until Molly said at last, “Mark was somewhere between the viaduct and my house when he saw her. We need to get down to the creek about here.”

  Joss looked doubtfully down the steep slope. The creek bed had cut a deep furrow and ran well below the path to their right. A little further along from where they had stopped, a side track branched off at an angle. It looked like it might take them down towards the creek at a slightly easier angle. “Let’s try through there.”

  But they’d only gone a little ways before it was clear—to Joss anyway—that the wheelchair wasn’t going to be able to make it. “Look, you wait here and I’ll go on down and see if I can find that rock.”

  “No,” Molly said stubbornly. “I’m coming too.”

  “Molly, you just can’t. What if the chair gets stuck. You know how heavy it is.”

  “I’m coming too.” She put the chair into reverse a bit, then rammed it forward at one particular rut, bouncing over it at last. She put up her hand to push away a branch.

  Joss sighed. “Well at least let me get in front of you and scout out what’s coming.”

  They fought their way along for a few meters more, until Joss shrieked, “Stop!” Molly cut the power to her chair, peering around Joss. The path fell away in front of them “What’s the matter?”

  “Back up, back up,” Joss said breathlessly. “The bank juts out over the creek here, and there’s hardly anything to hold it up. Just get BACK.” Molly was trying to peer over the edge of the bank, but hearing the panic in her friend’s voice, she put the chair into reverse and retreated a short distance up the path.

  “Look,” said Joss, coming to join her. “I think the rock may be down below us, but it’s quite a drop. I’m going to climb down and see.”

  “I’m coming, too.”

  “Molly, you just can’t. It’s a four-meter drop. You’d go down like an avalanche.” Seeing the mutinous gleam in the other girl’s eye, Joss said, “For pete’s sake, Molly, will you ever admit there are things you can’t do?”