Forest Mage (6 page)

Once I passed a long coffle of prisoners and guards headed east. Rather than being flogged or losing a hand for their crimes, these men would become forced labor pushing the King’s Road ever closer to the Barrier Mountains. After a term of work, they’d be given land and an opportunity to begin life anew. Thus, in one stroke, the king offered the felons a second chance, advanced his road building, and peopled the new settlements of the east. Nonetheless, the shackled men I passed did not look as if they were anticipating a new life, while the wives and children riding behind the coffle in mule-drawn wagons looked even more dismal. Dust coated their faces and clothing, and several babies were wailing as Sirlofty and I cantered past them. I will never forget one small boy who sat near the tail of the wagon, his little head jogging miserably with every jolt of the wheels. I thought to myself at the sight of his dull eyes, “That child is near death.” Then I shuddered, won
dered how I could even imagine I knew such a thing, and rode past them.

My cavalla cadet uniform, I am sorry to say, suffered from constant wear. The buttons strained on my chest and the seams at the shoulders and thighs threatened to give way. Finally I bundled it up as best I could and packed it away in my crowded panniers. After that, I wore my ordinary clothes, which were actually much looser and more comfortable for such a journey. I had to admit that I’d put on flesh, and more than I thought I had. I was hungry as I rode, for such exercise consumes a man, and yet I was grateful for the short rations I was on. Surely I’d be my lean and fit self again by the time I reached home.

T
he deeper I went into the Midlands, the more familiar the land became to me. I knew the prairies and plateaus, the green smell of the river in the morning, and the cry of the sage hens. I knew the name of every plant and bird. Even the dust tasted familiar in my mouth. Sirlofty seemed to sense that we were nearing home, for he went more eagerly.

One midmorning, I reined in Sirlofty and considered an unexpected choice. A crudely lettered sign on a raw plank leaned against a pile of stacked stone by the side of the road. “
SPINDLE DANCE
” was spelled out on the coarse slab. The roughly drawn characters were the work of a hand that copied shapes rather than wrote letters. A rough cart track led away from the well-traveled river road. It crested a slight rise; its hidden destination was beyond that horizon.

I debated with myself. It was a diversion from my father’s carefully planned itinerary, and I did not know how long a detour it might prove. Yet I recalled a promise from my father to show me someday the monuments of the Plainspeople. The Dancing Spindle was one of them. I suddenly felt it was owed to me. I set the rein against Sirlofty’s neck and we turned aside from the road.

The trail was not badly rutted, but enough traffic had passed this way that it was easy to follow. When I reached the top of the ridge, I found myself looking down into a pleasant little vale. Trees at the bottom indicated a watercourse. The cart track sidled down to the trees and then vanished into them.

Smelling water, Sirlofty quickened his pace and I allowed him his head. When we reached the brook, I allowed him to water freely, and knelt to quench my own thirst. Refreshed, I remounted and rode on. The cart track followed the brook for a short way and then crossed it. I resolutely pushed aside worry over how much time I was wasting. An inexplicable excitement was building in me; I felt compelled to follow the trail.

We followed the track as it climbed up out of the valley, over a rocky ridge and onto a rather barren plateau. A short distance away, the plateau gave way abruptly to a substantial canyon, as if some angry god had riven the earth here with an immense ax. The trail plunged down sharply to the distant floor. I reined in Sirlofty and sat looking down at a strange and marvelous sight.

The cracked earth of the canyon walls displayed seams of colored stone, sparkling white and deep orange and red, and even a dusky blue. A roofless city, the walls worn to knee-high ridges and tumbled rubble, floored the canyon. I wondered what war or long-ago disaster had brought the city down. Dominating the canyon and dwarfing the city at its base was the Dancing Spindle of the Plainsmen. No tale could have prepared me for the sight. The immense pillar leaned at a sharp, impossible angle. I shivered at the sight.

The Spindle was named for the woman’s spinning tool, and in truth it resembled a rounded rod with tapered ends, but of such a size that it beggared comparison. It had been chiseled out of red stone striated with bands of white. One end towered high above
the canyon floor while the other was set in a deep depression in the earth, as if it drilled a bed for itself in the stony ground. The spiraling white stripes on the pillar and a heat shimmer rising between me and it created a convincing illusion that the Spindle was truly spinning

The monument cast a long, black shadow over the ground at its base. The lone building that had survived whatever had slain the rest of the city was a tower edged with winding steps that spiraled up to almost reach the lower side of the tilted spindle’s topmost tip. For the life of me, I could not see why the Spindle had not toppled ages ago. I sat on my horse grinning and enjoying the deception of my eyes. At any moment I expected the spinning Spindle to waver in its gyration and fall to the earth, spent.

But it did not. As I started down the steep wagon track that led to the canyon floor, I was surprised at how well the illusion held. I was so intent in staring at it that I almost didn’t notice the ramshackle hut built in the spindle’s shadow. It hunched on the edge of the depression that cradled the tip of the spindle. The surrounding ruins were of stone and clay, but the dilapidated cottage was more recently built of slabs of rough wood, gone silver with weathering. It looked abandoned. I was startled when a man emerged from the open door, wiping his mouth on a napkin as if my arrival had interrupted his meal.

As I rode closer, he turned and tossed the cloth to a Plainswoman who had followed him out to stare at me. She caught it deftly, and at a sign from her master, the servant returned to the hut’s dubious shelter. But the man came toward me, waving a large hand in an overly friendly way. When I was still a good way off, he bellowed at me, “So you’ve come to see the Spindle?”

It seemed a ridiculous question. Why else would anyone have followed the track here? I didn’t respond, for I did not feel like shouting a reply to him. Instead, I rode steadily forward. He was not deterred.

“It’s a wonder of primitive design. For only one hector, sir, I will show it to you and tell you its amazing history! From far and wide, from near and far, hundreds have come to behold its wonder. And today you shall join the ranks of those who can say,
‘I myself have seen the Dancing Spindle and climbed the steps of the Spindle’s Tower.’”

He sounded like a barker outside a carnival tent. Sirlofty regarded him with suspicion. When I pulled in my horse, the man stood grinning up at me. His clothes, though clean, were shabby. His loose trousers were patched at the knees, and scuffed sandals were on his large dusty feet. He wore his shirt outside his trousers, belted with a brightly woven sash. His features and language were Gernian, but his garments, stance, and jewelry were those of a Plainsman. A half-breed, then. I felt both pity and disgust for him, but by far the largest measure of what I felt was annoyance. The sheer size and unlikeliness of the Spindle moved me to awe. It was majestic and unique, and I could not deny the soaring of spirit that it woke in me. I wanted to contemplate it in peace without his jabbering to distract me.

I thought the man a fool when he reached for Sirlofty’s headstall to hold my horse while I dismounted. Didn’t he recognize a cavalla steed when he saw one? Sirlofty, long schooled against such a tactic, reared and wheeled in one smooth motion. As he came down, he plunged half a dozen steps forward to be clear of the “enemy.” I pulled him in quickly before he could launch a savage kick at the man. Dismounting, I dropped his reins and he stood in obedient stillness. I looked back at the half-breed, expecting him to be shaken by the experience.

Instead, he was grinning obsequiously. He shrugged his shoulders and lifted his hands in an exaggerated gesture of astonishment. “Ah, such a mount, such a proud creature! I am full of envy at your fortune in possessing him.”

“Thank you,” I replied stiffly. The man made me uneasy, and I wished to be away from him. His Gernian features contrasted with his Plainsman mannerisms. His choice of words and vocabulary were those of an educated man, the guttural notes of a Plains accent almost completely suppressed, and yet he stood before me in his worn sandals, his clothes little better than rags, while his Plains wife peered out at both of us from the shadowed doorway of their hovel. The contrast made me uncomfortable. He drew closer to me, and launched into a rehearsed monologue.

“No doubt you have heard of the fabled Dancing Spindle, the most enigmatic of the five great monuments of the Midlands! And at last you have come to behold for yourself this marvel of ancient stonework. How, you must wonder, did the forerunners of the Plainspeople, with their simple tools, create such a wonder? How does it balance and never fall? How does it create an illusion of motion when seen from a distance? And what, I am sure you ask yourself, did such an amazing creation signify to those who wrought it?

“Well, you are not alone in asking these questions, sir! Learned scholars and philosophers and engineers have all, in their turns, ruminated upon these mysteries. From as far as Skay and Burry they have come, and I who share the heritage of both the Plains and Gernia have been pleased to assist them, just as I will gladly enlighten you, for the modest sum of one hector!”

His glib pitch reminded of the singsong cant of the freak show barkers on Dark Evening in Old Thares. The memory of that evening and all that followed flooded through me. I pushed aside his pleading palm with the back of my hand and stepped away from him. He flinched at my touch, although I was not rough.

“I’ve come to see a rock formation that was doubtless mostly carved by the forces of nature, and only embellished by your people. I do not need to pay you to see what is right before my eyes! Please stay out of my way.”

For an instant, his eyes narrowed and I thought he would snarl at me. Then his eyes widened, and to my surprise, he mimed another of his elaborate shrugs. He gestured toward the towering stone, making a small bow as he did so. “Do as you will, sir,” he said. Then he bowed again and backed away from me. I stared after him, puzzled, for I had detected no sarcasm or rudeness in his words.

But as he turned away from me, I lifted my eyes and perceived the real reason for his sudden loss of interest. Creaking down the steep trail was a team and wagon. The open wagon had been decked out as if for a holiday outing. A sunshade of bright yellow was suspended over its passengers. A banner painted on the side of the wagon proclaimed, “
SEE THE WONDROUS SPINDLE
!”
Within, a dozen passengers of all ages sat on cushioned benches, the ladies holding parasols against the spring sunshine. As my erstwhile guide hastened toward them, I saw my error. I had stumbled into his commercial endeavor unawares. Now that his true prey had arrived, he was forsaking me for a richer prize. That was as well with me. I turned my back on the tourists’ arrival and set my attention on the Spindle.

It was taller than the tallest building I’d ever seen, and far more massive. My eyes traveled to the towering tip, and then down the rod. It appeared to dwindle to a single sharp point touching the ground. I walked to the edge of the depression that cupped it and looked down. The sides of the bowl sloped steeply down, and the narrow point of the Spindle was lost in deep shadow, like a giant pen plunged into an inkwell. The whole structure leaned at a sharp angle, not touching the sides of the well, apparently supported by a small joining hidden within the well. That ran counter to my engineer’s instincts. How could such a small anchorage of rock support that weight? Even at this closer perspective, it still maintained its illusion of motion.

For a time I stood there, my neck craned, staring down at the Spindle’s tip in the deeply shadowed bowl. What had seemed when viewed from a distance a fine point in proportion to the gargantuan spindle was in fact a substantial girth of stone. Where it disappeared from sight in the depths of the hole it had seemingly drilled in the earth, the cylinder’s girth was still as wide as a watchtower’s base. It must have been still. If it hadn’t been still, the grinding of the stone tip against the depths would have been deafening, as if a giant mortar and pestle were at work. But my gullible eyes still insisted that the Spindle spun. I shook my head to clear it of the optical illusion and tried to focus my mind on the real puzzle: What kept it in place? Given its mass and how it leaned, why hadn’t it fallen ages ago?

I had been certain that a closer view would reveal the trick of it. But now, standing as close to the base as I could get without tumbling into its well, I was as puzzled as ever. A lone tower edged with winding steps spiraled up to almost reach the lower side of the tilted spindle’s topmost tip. I resolved that I would hike to the
standing tower and climb the stairs. It looked as if the tower came so close to the Spindle’s tip that I could actually put my hands on it, to prove to myself that it could not be rotating. All thoughts of keeping this side trip to a brief detour had vanished from my mind. I would satisfy my curiosity at all costs. I lifted my eyes to pick out the best route over the broken land and immediately saw a faint footpath across the stony earth. Obviously, I was not the first gawker to have such an ambition. Confident that Sirlofty could mind himself, I left him standing and followed the track.

When my path led me directly beneath the spindle and through its shadow, I went with trepidation. At the heart of the shadow, the day seemed to dim. I could swear I felt a distant chill wind, manufactured of the Spindle’s turning, brush my cheek. I felt in my chest rather than heard the deep rumbling of the Spindle’s eternal motion. The ghost wind seemed to slide a hand across the top of my head, stirring an uncomfortable memory of how the Tree Woman had caressed me. I was glad to step out of that shadow and away from those strange fancies, even though the day now seemed brighter and the sun too hot on my skull.

My path was not straight, but wandered through the broken walls and sunken roads of the fallen city that intersected my route. The stubs of the walls gave witness to the half-breed guide’s claim that the Spindle was a manmade wonder, for some were built of the same reddish stone as the spindle and still bore odd patterns, an alteration of checkering and spirals, at once foreign and familiar. I walked more slowly, and began to see the suggestions of sly faces eroding from leaning slabs of wall. Hollow mouths fanged with now dulled teeth, carved hands reduced by time to blunt paws, and voluptuous women whittled by the wind to become sexless boys teased my eyes.

I climbed up on one corner of wall and looked around me from that vantage point. I could almost make sense of at the tumbled walls and collapsed roofs. I jumped down and once more began to thread my way though…what? A temple town? A village? A graveyard of ancient tombs? Whatever it was, it had fallen, leaving the spindle and its tower to lord it over the time-gnawed remains. How could a folk with tools of stone, bone, and bronze
have shaped such a vast creation? I even considered giving the guide a hector on my return, to see if he had a believable answer to the question.

When I reached the base of the tower, I discovered two things. The first was that it was in much poorer condition than it had seemed from the distance. The second was that it was not a proper building at all. It consisted only of a spiraling stair that wound up and around a solid inner core. I could not enter the tower at all; I could only ascend to its peak by the outer stair. A crude barrier of ropes and poles had been thrown up in front of the tower’s first step, as it to warn people off. I paid no heed to it. The lips of the stairs were rounded. The center of each step dipped, tribute to the passage of both feet and years. The walls of the stair’s core had once been tiled with mosaics. Glimpses of them remained: an eye and a pair of leering lips, a paw with claws outstretched, the fat-cheeked face of a little child with eyes closed in bliss. Round and round I climbed, ever ascending. I felt a giddy familiarity yet could recall no similar experience in my life. Here, in the mosaic, the head of a red and black croaker bird gaped its beak open wide. There a tree, arms reaching up to the sun with its face turned to its rays. I had passed it by a dozen steps before it came to me that a tree should have neither arms nor a face. There was graffiti, too, the ever-present proclamation that someone had been here, or that someone loved someone forever. Some of it was old but most of it was fresh.