Chapter 84 #3
The spinner. Shipwright eyes it. Not quite rig-size, but bigger than a hand and old-fashioned, its muttering plates and gears inelegantly holding the spirit inside.
Who brought it here, she wonders? Traded it for a gallon of dark summer blood?
A fortune at any time. Who else had come from the east? How long had they been coming?
Slowly, carefully, she places her fingers on it, feeling the innumerable rhythms and pulses that run beneath the metal, pushing softly against her touch. It feels like home.
Gently, carefully, she pushes back, and feels its hum run up her skin, over the hairs on her arms, into the threads of her shirt.
That little hitch in its tone, like a hiccup in the metal, a swell under steady water.
It’s an easy fix. Archaic it might be, but its construction is familiar enough that she could bend its fractured harmonies closer to a single, clear tone.
If that’s what she wants to do.
Sing the spinner’s rhythms into a kinder key and this woman will be kept alive indefinitely, forever, perhaps, until the brass at last pits and fails, unleashing her on the people above.
How many summers will it last, she wonders?
How many wet, calling springs? How many nights of darkening flesh fading back to a gentler brown as the fields dry or freeze, as the water slides off tanned, weathered bones?
A lot, Shipwright suspects. She feels the weight of the spinner in her hand, the buzz of the spirit inside, like a wasp in a box.
An old and inelegant thing, but fierce, fashioned with enough sheer weight of metal and will to keep rattling along until anyone above is too old to care.
Probably. Still, there’s that strange hitch in its song, and its design is just unfamiliar enough that she isn’t quite sure if she will catch any errant clicks or slips.
And it would only take one. A single flaw could shred something this size in seconds.
The woman beneath the spinner takes a great shuddering breath as her chest fills like a bellows and her arms raise, dreamlike, grasping.
Shipwright jerks away instinctively, and the spinner swings on its perch.
As it arcs, the air slides back out of the woman’s body, the port-dark swell of blood fading from her face, and Shipwright sighs in relief.
The heat in the room is fierce as a furnace, the struggle between the body and the spinner throwing it off in relentless, battering waves – it’s not sustainable.
Shipwright exhales slowly and takes the brass sphere in her hands again, resting her head against it, trying to feel its rhythms more precisely as they hum through her bones.
One thing’s for sure. The spinner can’t be left untended.
It’s not being used for its intended purpose.
All that ancient metal stressed beyond its limits already.
Whoever left it was clever, but careless.
To leave their handiwork limping like this would endanger everyone, and it would break her promise.
She wonders again who had made it so long ago, who had filled it with a spirit so fierce that it would last, age on age, slipping from hand to hand, from sea to shore to field. There’s no way to tell without taking it apart, and that isn’t going to happen.
Shipwright sighs. Not all mysteries are meant to be solved.
She returns to work, pushing and pulling the spinner’s rhythms like wet wool, getting a better sense of it now, as it clicks and buzzes its way through her skull.
She feels the spirit inside steady, slipping into a more regular cadence, the shell and gears finding a better fit, a scaffold instead of a prison for its fluttering life.
And then, at the spinner’s heart, Shipwright finds another option, so unexpected that it stops her dead, partly at finding it and partly at finding herself capable of thinking it.
It would be easy enough to tune the spinner to overload.
Not immediately, but over time. Shift the resonance up by a single cant, and day on day that hunk of metal would grow in power, until it was uncontainable.
And Shipwright could channel it down into the woman below her, giving her an ending, possibly a release.
She wouldn’t break free to head above, to find those laughing children and smile hungrily at them with her bright teeth.
And she wouldn’t be held down here forever, not living, not dying, perpetually coming back to life and being bludgeoned back down.
There’s a grace in that, a kindness. Shipwright reaches for the spinner and takes its rough curves in her hands.
She begins to change the pattern, then stops and looks again at the woman.
Her host’s mother perhaps? There’s something familiar in the bones of her face and the set of her lips.
She’s not just kept down here, but dressed and changed, her clothes fresh and bracelets on her wrists.
There’s love there, and tenderness. For a moment, Shipwright takes her hands off the brass, and lays them above the woman’s heart, feeling her breath rise and fall.
The fierce heat swells and ebbs inside her, moving with the pulse of her blood, her life. Shipwright has no right to end it.
Reluctantly, she removes her fingers, wet with sweat and dries them on her shirt, then fixes the spinner.
It’s the work of minutes. As it steadies, the scouring heat in the room fades to a hearth-fire glow.
Shipwright watches its curve, and smiles.
Enough of thinking she knows best. Enough of change and ending without consent.
As she finishes her work, the singing of the homestead’s children winds its way down from above, distorted and slowed by the looping corridors. It’s an old tune, a Midlands rhyme:
Come the green, the summer-heat,
bring copper knife and ruddy meat.
Come the rain, the growing wet,
bring calling bird and tight-strung net.
Shipwright shivers as the lyrics fade. She turns as she hears Shroudweaver enter. His face lean and wary, hands fresh with thread and powder.
‘Did you fix it?’ he asks.
‘I did,’ she says and smiles. ‘What happened with the body?’
‘There was a boy,’ he says.
She steps forwards, takes him softly in her arms, and they leave. Behind them the spinner continues to sing, steady, constant and strange.
mist lifts the skin of the world
pale feet beneath black water
the pull of green moss
congregation
They leave after three days. There are no heartfelt goodbyes, no friendships formed.
At another time, perhaps, but here their host gathers at the door with wife and children to watch them leave, back down the path.
The fox skulls clack mournfully in the wind as Shipwright passes, and a black cockerel shrieks indignantly, pointlessly.
She feels eyes on her back until every one of the refugees has crossed the fence-line.
Then quietly, finally, gate and door are closed against them.
But the Green stays with them. The damp myths of the Midlands seeded like spores in the tales of the train.
For days afterwards, the talk around the fires is of damp meadows and their dreamers.
The weather is better now, but the fields on either side of the raised stone roads are still wet enough and deep enough that a tired mind can imagine a half-glimpsed light, a hand stained dark as wood, nails crooked above the water.
Strangely durable, those Midlands legends, worming their way into any old brain.
For the people of Thell, these stories are hard to resist; strange, foreign horrors washing out their own nightmares for a night or two, as they scare each other every evening in the drifting woodsmoke, relaxing as the monsters, this time, never appear.
Another couple of days, and another handful of miles brings them close to Hesper, the ridged roads of the Midlands fading down to broad traders’ tracks, cluttered with travellers. And if she never thought she’d be glad to see that battered squab of a city on the horizon, her heart proves her wrong.
As the road pulls her back towards the sea, the people of Hesper’s outskirts come to watch them. Farmsteads and staging inns cough up gawkers who line the verge in clumps, hesitant, wondering, watching hundreds of strangers lurch from the north with narrowed eyes and tense hands.
Shipwright flicks her eyes over their murmuring bodies, digs her heels into the flanks of her weary dray, and rides on into the long shadow of the grey towers.