Her host hurries her on, into the warmed centre of the house, the floor thicker with rushes, the walls more richly hung. His family are there, gathered around a pot. An angle-faced wife with lively eyes, a fat baby rocking on the bones of her knee. Two older girls are squawking on the floor, battling dolls made of fox-fur and weaseltooth. She’s greeted by the welcome roar of a tended fire and the smell of a stew rendered over days with root vegetables, marrow and patience. The woman tosses a handful of leaves in as Shipwright arrives, shucks the baby off her knee and favours her with a bright, fast little smile that warms her heart.
Her husband beckons Shipwright in and sits her down, smiling. ‘A striking deal then. Ee’ll come ben with me, coddle the spinners back t’purring, and thy loose-grimmed shroudturner’ll see t’body.’ He guides one of his daughters away gently with his foot, sending her scurrying to glower balefully from behind her mother’s skirts. He looks back to Shipwright. ‘In return, I’ll turn out the bare walls of my home to ee and ee’r kitcast babies, so longin’ as they don’t come ben me or mine. I have good straw and the walls tight-laced ’gin spring rains.’ He stares into the fire, picks up a branch from by the side of the chair and whittles it into something slim and curving with long, smooth strokes.
She watches his hands, their gathering of hair and burn and scar.
‘Mark ye,’ he rumbles, waving the stick like a baton, ‘you’ll not be warded in bare-wall byre. Owt comes for ee, ee’ll meet with own steel,’ his voice lowers. ‘Own flesh.’
A careless toss sends the stick into the flames which swallow it whole, licking the soft white wood down to ash. ‘Have thee a deal with me, Shipwright?’
She takes his hand, clasps it, feels the hot blood pulse in his wrist. ‘We do.’
He smiles broadly, his broad gums wet in the light. Calls over to the woman. ‘Mother, take ee kids behind brass and open the scowrin’ barns to them’s as out of walls.’ His wife nods, gathering the girls in tight wrists and flitting from the room. Her husband turns back to Shipwright. ‘You and I ull call on the heart of thehouse tomorrow. Rest ye. Neither wet nor green’ll touch ye here.’
He is as good as his word. In short time, the barns and byres are opened, and if settling down next to the livestock in their hay and grass isn’t perfect, it still puts stone and warmth between the refugees and the gathering damp. The people of Thell fall into each other’s arms, twined like cats, sleeping with the boneless weariness of folk tired beyond reason. Their hosts bring platters of dried meat, the skin flaked to wafers, scented with berries pulled from the hedgerows and place urns filled with warm stones beneath blankets to bite at the edges of this sudden, unseasonable cold. Icecaller they won’t come near. The children shy from her, lacing their fingers across their eyes, while their father only pulls his hood to, pressing brass tight against his eyelids, his offerings fumbling the tension between obligation and terror. Shipwright watches him, and wonders.
Later, they bring Shipwright and Shroudweaver inside. There is work to be done. The children sneak out from behind their mother’s skirts, watching wide-eyed as their father leads his guests deeper into the heart of the homestead. The heat from the wall-fires becomes an almost physical thing, thickening in the air, carrying strange, unfamiliar scents of hot fur, vinegar, something sharp on the tongue.
Down deeper still into the narrow corridor which runs the length of the homestead’s central chamber, the walls pressing in like unwelcome hands. Shipwright’s broad shoulders brush the stone, grazing against the edges. Her mind plays that word, over and over:spinner. Shroudweaver is chattering brightly behind her, a light in his eyes, curious and lively, for once. Their host answers sporadically, cautiously, the Midlands burr dragging his answers out into low tones that rumble gently in the positive or negative.
The noise of the house fades as they draw closer to its heated heart. The stones are fiercely warm here, threaded with a sound like soft bellows and something else Shipwright recognises – a brassy spinning, hitched and unsteady.
When their host beckons them into the room, it’s with a shrug that is already half-apology, his voice a husk in the rising heat. Hegestures regretfully to a body, stretched out black beneath brass.
‘She been a-sundered and growin’ for nigh on six year now. Fallen to the green in winter, rising dry in summer. She ain’t for killin’ so I been keepin’ her steady on t’spinner. Time was I took it in trade for a full gallon of summer blood. She’m growing strong now though, with all ee wet fallen on field.’
His wide, raw eyes tell Shipwright all she needs to know. Whoever’s under that spinner is family. What worse than to keep this at the heart of your home? But where else to hold it? Her heart aches for him. She claps him on the shoulder and moves forwards.
‘Let me see what can be done.’
He ducks his head gratefully, shuffles behind her with haste. Shroudweaver slips back with their host into the depths of house, and she gets to work.
The body of the woman in front of her pulses as she breathes, as the forces within her wax and wane. Her body flushes and darkens, clearing and then clouding again, like wine through muslin or blood against a cloth. She looks old, but strong, iron hair scraped back against the skull, muscles corded with a lifetime of use, skin glowing with that tough clarity that only came as a gift from years in the rain, wind, sun and sleet.
She’s laid out on a stone slab softened with furs, her wrists and ankles tied securely with hide, strung with charms of hammered brass. Her chest rising and falling in slow, steady rhythms, strengthening as her skin darkens and the colour returns. On the in-breath, her eyelids flutter, and her teeth shine bright in her mouth before they fade again with the hitch and chime of the spinner which hangs over her head, dancing and chucking on the lowest of beams.
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, Shipwrighttakes 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.
