#117 The Mark of Water 6

“You were told I would come?” asked Jill, confused. Her sore throat reminded her how she’d screamed when the villagers threw her down the well. It seemed days, ages ago.

The monster nodded, its heavy, shaggy head dipping low in a bow of respect. “You are the one who will bind the south wind and end the drought.”

Jill had no idea what the creature was talking about, but she didn’t move, didn’t speak, didn’t dare deny it. It still might decide to eat her.

“Do you have the binding?” the creature’s face moved close to her own. It smelled like sweet spring water. The twin-moon eyes glowed so bright it hurt to look at them.

“Binding?” Jill asked.

“Ah, yes, there it is,” the creature’s long snout nearly brushed the spool of thread in Jill’s hand. “But why have you left so much of it in the tunnel?”

“I-I… I wanted to be sure of finding my way back,” Jill said.

“You will need all of it,” the creature said. “You must wind it up again.”

“But…” Jill began, glancing back to the dark tunnel behind her.

“Wind up the binding,” the creature ordered.

Jill thought about crawling back down the tunnel to collect all the thread, and then coming here again, and she could not bear it, to traverse that unending darkness two more times. Instead, she went a little ways down the tunnel, where she could still see the light of the creature’s eyes behind her, wound up the thread as far as she could, and pulled.

The thread was strong, and would not come, not until Jill pulled with all her might. Then she felt it snap, and she began winding the dusty strand onto the spool. When the broken end finally appeared, Jill knew there had been a great deal more thread before it was broken. She hoped the creature hadn’t meant that she would need all of it. How could it know how much thread had been there to begin with?

Keeping the spool hidden tightly in her hand, Jill went back to the room with the pool.

“I have the thread,” Jill said.

“Now climb on my back,” the creature’s long body snaked out from the water and coiled in a loop at Jill’s feet. When Jill sat behind its head her feet no longer reached the ground. Its scales were wet and cold, like a fish, and it had no arms or legs, only a long tail and rows of narrow fins down it’s side, and a long glowing stripe all down its back. Jill gripped a handful of the gleaming tendrils that waved like a mane around its head.

The creature dove into the water, and Jill, startled, let out a breath of air.

#116 The Mark of Water 5

The very faintest light shone in the distance, and Jill’s eyes, hungry for it, fixed on it as she crawled forward with the spool of thread in her hand. It could have been daylight reflected off the wall far ahead. Yes, Jill decided, it was daylight, and she would be coming out of this awful tunnel at last. Faster she scrambled over the rough stone as the light grew brighter and brighter in front of her. When she grew nearer she saw that the light seemed to flicker and dance, perhaps there were trees or bushes moving in the wind by the opening. It was taking so long for her to get there, to feel the open air again.

Now the end of the tunnel was near, and the light was still so pale Jill decided it must be night, and there was a moon making a silvery glow, but strangely the glow seemed to come from below, and what she first took for tree trunks were stone pillars, and for a dark landscape was only a wide cavern with a bright pool at the bottom.

Feeling more trapped than ever, Jill stood up, searching the cavern in hopes of seeing a way out. Stone above, stone, below, stone all around. High on the walls, a white coating showed where the water had been when this room was filled. It would have stretched high over her head, covering the opening to the tunnel where she had crawled in.

It was no moon making the light, but something in the pool. A glowing line, like a coiling rope that tangled and tumbled around itself. Curious, Jill crept closer, then jumped back when the line stirred. She held her breath until it stilled again. Was this water safe to drink? She hadn’t had a drink since she’d left home that morning, and this pool smelled so sweet and clean.

Jill reached out her finger to touch the surface of the water. Her fingertip glowed where it dipped beneath the surface.

Two bright orbs, like twin moons, flashed deep in the pool. Eyes, they were eyes, and now a terrible head came rushing up through the depths. It broke the surface, and opened wide a mouth filled with knife-like teeth. Sure of death, Jill threw up her arm to cover her face.

She waited, but nothing happened. She slowly lowered her arm.

The creature had closed its mouth, narrowed its eyes. Glowing white tendrils waved in the air around its face, as if stirred by a breeze only it could feel.

“You bear the mark of water,” the monster hissed. “I was told that you would come.”

#115 The Mark of Water 4

Jill’s voice was gone, but in her mind she was still shouting. What will you say to my mother, Anna Baker? I’m so sorry, Widow Mead, but we’ve thrown your only daughter down the well. What will you say to my mother, Col Smith? Where’s Jill? Why, we threw her down the well and though she begged and pleaded, none would fetch her out. What will you say to my mother? The chant went on in her head as she crawled forward, with her fingers groping at the rough stone, sometimes up and sometimes down, always keeping the spool of her mother’s thread in her hand, letting it play out as she went. Anger filled the darkness, made it throb and press on her until she stopped to beat the rocks with her fists and howl though it made a knife of pain go down her weary throat.

Then, exhausted, the anger left her, and Jill moved forward again, each second expecting to find a dead end, or a sudden drop that she could not reach the bottom of, but each second discovering that she could still go on, deeper and deeper into the earth, until she felt as if perhaps she was going down the throat of a great stone creature that had swallowed her. Now the darkness filled with fear, like needles, like a wall of thorns, and an agony of terror shook Jill’s limbs and made her sob. The weight of all the stone above her seemed poised to crush her flat, like a vast hand coming down on a tiny ant. She curled up against the fear, but it only bound her tighter and tighter. She would die down here, all alone, where no one would ever find her bones.

Another breath of air, this one stronger than the first, came drifting by. Jill raised her head in the blackness and breathed it. Water, it smelled of water. There was water somewhere down this tunnel, and she was so thirsty.

Numbly, blindly, Jill crawled on. Her eyes had seen only darkness so long that now her mind made red and blue shapes dance across her vision. Sometimes they formed faces that leered at her, sometimes odd creatures that lurked at the edge of her vision, sometimes dazzling patterns like mother wove into her rugs that she used to make before the drought came. Some were so bright and so real that when Jill finally saw a hint of light ahead she dismissed it at first. There’s my eyes playing tricks again, she thought, but when she looked away and looked back, the light was still there.

#114 The Mark of Water 3

Jill stared into the black opening at the base of the wall, searching for some sign of how far it went back. Her eyes slowly adjusted to the dark, until she could see the memory of water in the dark coating on the stones. The top of the water had been higher than she could reach if she stood.

Here, in the well, there was light, if only a little, but no way to escape. There before her, the opening might lead… somewhere, but it was dark. So dark. How could she leave the light and go groping in that narrow crawl-way? How far could it go before it stopped, or worse yet, grew so narrow that she became trapped, gripped in the bowels of the earth, unable to be rescued.

A sharp sting of betrayal jolted through her heart. These were no strangers who had thrown her down this well. She knew every last soul in this village, and they knew her and her mother. The pain of it flared into fury, and Jill got painfully to her feet, her heart pounding so hard she thought she could hear it echoing off the walls of her well-prison. She shouted to the blue-white circle of sky overhead, called out to the villagers by name, begging them to let her go.

No one appeared.

At last, Jill’s voice gave out, and she sank down with her back against the wall, curled up with her arms around her knees, and wondered how long it would take for her to die.

A faint breath of air brushed her arm, pulled at her hair. It smelled of water. Jill raised her head and faced the low opening again. The movement of air tickled her cheek, and then was still. It had come from the hole, like an invitation, a beckoning. This was no dead-end shaft, it went somewhere.

Jill took up her shawl and pulled it around her shoulders. She still had one spool of thread in her pocket. She took it out, looking for something to tie the end to. She found a loose rock in the dry dust and knotted the string around it, then rolled the spool ahead of her as she crawled forward into the darkness.

#113 The Mark of Water 2

Jill crouched, stunned, her hands in the cool, dry dust of the bottom of the well, her head against the rough side, her breath coming in ragged sobs. Ignoring the pain in her ankles, she forced herself to stand and reached high over her head. A small, pale circle of light shone down from above, eclipsed by the dark, round shapes of heads. They were black and faceless against the bright sky behind them, moving in and out, crowding each other to see.

“LET ME OUT!” Jill shrieked. The scream ripped from her throat, leaving it stinging, burning.

The heads grew more still, only a few watching now.

“Please?” Jill croaked, groping with her fingers against the rock wall.

Overhead, something blocked the light, and at first Jill hoped they were sending something down to lift her out, like a bucket or rope. Then her shawl, covered in dirt, fell lightly onto her upstretched hands.

The dark shapes above faded away, leaving only a round light like a pale blue moon gleaming down on Jill’s tiny prison.

Jill threw down her shawl and struggled to find hand-holds in the wall, to climb back to the light, but the smooth stone wouldn’t bear her. Her shoulder and arm began to sting. Her head ached, and when she fingered the sore spot she found blood trickling down the side of her face.

Slowly around the side of the well she moved, feeling in the darkness, until in one spot she tried to put her toes against the wall and her foot met nothing.

Nothing?

Jill bent down, feeling with her hands and seeing with her eyes a low, black opening at the very bottom of the wall. If she pressed herself against the opposite wall, it was just large enough for her to squeeze in head-first and crawl on her elbows.

#112 The Mark of Water

Jill held her shawl over her face as a gust of dry wind pelted her with dust. She used to enjoy going to the village, back before the drought, but now she hated it. Death seemed nearer here, the people more desperate. They huddled together in the shade of their huts, watching her pass with their hungry, hopeless eyes.

The wind made her arm sting, and she glanced down at the angry red marks. Her mother had scolded her for splashing the hot oil, loosing those few drops into the dirt floor and against her dry, cracking skin. The burns had left three tear-drop shapes on her wrist. She tried to pull her sleeve down over them, but it didn’t stay.

Jill passed the well, sorry that it had gone dry, for she sorely wanted a drink of water. She had a little with her, but she would save that for her walk home. When she reached the market and went to the place where she usually sold the fine flaxen thread her mother made, she wondered if anyone would even care to buy thread when they were dying of hunger.

There were a few people in the market, moving slowly among the nearly empty stalls. Jill spread her shawl on the ground under one of the tattered canopies and set out her rolls of thread. A long time passed before anyone stopped to look.

“All three for this,” the old woman said, holding out a single egg.

Jill agreed, and reached for the precious egg, but before she took it the old woman gasped and grabbed her wrist.

“The prophecy!” The woman shouted. “She has the mark of water!”

“Let go!” Jill tried to free herself. “What are you talking about?”
A crowd of people formed around them, more hands grabbed her, lifted her to her feet, began moving her through the market. Her arm was thrust into the air.

“See? Do you see?”

“The mark of water!”

“The prophecy!”

Jill’s burn seared with pain, exposed to the dry wind. “It’s only a burn!” She shouted angrily. “I got it yesterday! Get off!”

Someone in the crowd lifted Jill off her feet. She kicked and fought and screamed, but the current of dusty, bony limbs carried her along, eyes too hungry to see, too desperate to care.

And then she fell.

A jolt of pain jarred her whole body as she hit the cool, dark bottom of a deep shaft. The well! They’d thrown her into the well.

#111 The Harp Maker's Apprentice

The boy came every day to the shop. Every day, he would make the same circle around the room, stopping at the harps, one by one. He always held his hands tight behind his back, as if afraid that if he didn’t he might be unable to stop himself from running his fingers over the smooth wood, or plucking the shiny brass strings. He knew every harp in the shop, for if one was sold, the next day he would stand and stare at the empty spot with a sadness in the slump of his shoulders. Then he would move on to look at the next harp.

After he had circled the room he would come and stand by the work bench. Not too close, for if the harp maker noticed him, then the old man would shoo him out of the shop. At least that’s what would happen at first. After a few weeks the boy seemed to have become invisible, and he could stand for hours and watch the slow movement of the tools as they shaped plain wooden blocks and boards into something magical. Something that could sing sweeter than a bird or roar louder than a thunderstorm.

What the boy liked best was when someone would come into the shop, looking to buy, and take a harp from the shelf or sit down beside one of the larger ones on the floor and play. Then his eyes would grow wide, and sometimes even shine with tears. He would hold his breath, lean forward, as if his ears were hungry for the sound. And then, if the harp was sold and taken away, the boy would stand at the shop door in a sort of farewell.

The harp maker had grown to regard the boy as something that was always there, like the mice, or the shadows, not causing enough harm to be worth driving away when there was work to do. So it surprised him one day when the boy came into the shop and instead of drifting around the room like always, stepped right up to the counter.

The boy placed a few coins on the counter and said, “What sort of a harp would this buy?”

The harp maker studied the boy as if for the first time. He was eleven, perhaps twelve. His clothes were plain but clean. There was some craft to them, just enough that the harp maker could tell his mother knew her sewing.

Without a word, the harp maker turned and went to his stock of wood. He selected a few boards and pieces, then set them on the counter.

The boy frowned at the pieces, confused at first, but then he seemed to realize what the harp maker meant. He stuck his chin out stiffly, his eyes shining again, and started to collect his coins.

“You’ll have to earn the strings by tidying up the shop,” the harp maker said. “Have you worked with wood before?”

Confused again, the boy shook his head. “Only a bit of whittling, sir.”

“Then you’ve got a lot to learn. Come around here and let me show you how to hold the plane.”

The boy sucked in a quick gasp of surprise, then bobbed his head with a breathless, “Oh, thank-you sir! Yes, please.”

The harp maker smiled.

#110 Country Gas Station

A handwritten sign stuck on the pump said, “CASH ONLY please pay inside.” The pump had a credit card slot, one so old the plastic was chipped and the keypad numbers were wearing off. I guess it was broken.

“Could I get twenty dollars on pump 2?” I asked the girl behind the counter. She jabbed at the cash register until it spat out a little white piece of paper.

“Here you go,” was all she said.

I hadn’t done that in years and years, gone inside to pay cash for gas. It threw me all the way back to when I was in high school, driving the big blue boat my dad had bought for his teenage driver, and I used to always put five dollars of gas in the tank on a Thursday to get her to the end of the week when Dad would fill it up the rest of the way. I remember trying to figure out some way to get the hood ornament off the car without Dad noticing. Couldn’t he tell that things like that mattered? There was not a single other vehicle in the entire high school parking lot with a hood ornament.

A scrawny red hen with a pack of fluffy chicks crossed my path as I walked back to the gas pump. It felt strange to just pop the gas cap cover, unscrew the cap, pick up the dispenser and start pumping. I was used to having to swipe my card. When I picked up the dispenser, gasoline spattered everywhere. Some hit my sandaled feet, and burned cold there while I fitted the end of the dispenser into the car. I squeezed the lever and the machine beside me set up a rattling whine. Every second or so a loud thump shook the hose, making it twitch like an angry snake. Alarmed, I raised my eyes to the underside of the canopy that covered the gas pumps. Dangerously rusted panels showed pipes with cracked paint visible underneath, like someone on the operating table with arteries exposed. It looked like the whole thing might fall down on top of me.

Was I going to die pumping gasoline at a tumble-down country gas station? Was the pump going to burst? Catch on fire?

A couple of women in a huge red pickup were pumping at the pump ahead of me. Their pump was thumping right along with mine, and they didn’t seem to care. Maybe they pumped gas at this station a couple times a week, and it hadn’t fallen down on them yet. While I watched the pump for any signs of spewing gas or mechanical failure, the digital numbers on the display ticked up steadily until they reached 19 dollars. Then the pump slowed and came to a final shuddering stop at $20.00.

Would you like a receipt? The digital letters ran across the little strip of screen over the keypad.

I pressed no.

The message continued to play, unresponsive, Would you like a receipt?

Grateful to have my gasoline, and that the pump hadn’t gone to pieces, I climbed back in my car and drove away.

#109 About the Cake

He found the piece of cake in the refrigerator, lonely, forgotten. He piled it high with ice cream and berries, then took it to the table, which was still cluttered with dinner’s dishes, and ate it.

She noticed, but didn’t say anything until he was done.

“Did you eat the last piece of cake?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said, a little warily, but with no regrets.

She didn’t say anything more until hours later.

“About the cake,” she said, then paused, sorting through the possible words, trying to find the right thing to say. “It would have been nice if you’d asked.”

“We’ve had it for days. I thought everyone who wanted some would have had a chance to have some.”

“Or maybe if you’d just said something,” she said. “I’m going to eat the last piece of cake, is that okay? And then I would have said, yes, please, eat the last piece of cake.”

“I didn’t know you were saving it for anything,” he said.

“It wasn’t that I was saving it,” she said. “Maybe it was because you were eating it in front of everyone else, and hadn’t offered to share.”

“There was only one piece,” he said.

No one was feeling any better.

She gave up. Trying to explain it, to find a reason, was just no use. “It bothered me that you ate the cake,” she said, and she wasn’t sure why.

But it was probably because she had been hoping to eat it. Later. When no one else was around.

He didn’t have anything more to say.

* * *

“You didn’t save any cookies for me,” he said.

“Oh,” she said. “I gave them to the children. Their friends came over, and so I pulled them out.” And then they were gone. Very fast.

“I only made them yesterday,” he said.

They had been his favorite kind.

Maybe now he knows how I feel about the cake, she thought.

“I’m going now,” he said, and left.

I know how he feels about the cookies, she thought.

Maybe tomorrow, when he was away at work, she would make some more cookies and surprise him.

Why wait for tomorrow? He’d be gone for at least half an hour. Plenty of time to make more cookies.

She snapped on the oven and flipped through the cook book, searching for the recipe, then threw a bowl and ingredients out onto the counter, and mixed them up quick, racing the clock. She broke off large balls of dough and even rolled them in extra sugar.

The cookies had just come out of the oven when he got home.

“I smell cookies,” he said.

“Have some,” she said. “Sorry I gave yours away.”

“Sorry I made such a fuss about it,” he said.

No one said anything about the cake.

#107 The Herbalist's Diary 8

The next morning, Mother’s fever had broken, but Brother Amos did not come back.

With Mother resting quietly for the first time in days, Lyssa felt the worry slowly leave her, but in its place came a dread at what she had done to her precious diary.

Lyssa opened the back page and took out the crushed potato sprout. She flicked it into the fire, but a stain remained on the pages, one she couldn’t sponge out with all her careful work. Poision! But how could she have known that what would poison a living person would have any effect on a ghost.

She hoped he wasn’t still suffering somewhere, babbling strange Latin words or seeing his abbey burn down over and over. The pain of what she’d done to her friend bore into her, softened only a little by seeing her mother gradually recovering. Sometimes Lyssa thought that Brother Amos would surely forgive her. Other times she thought he must have gone away and not come back because he was angry that Lyssa had been so selfish.

It was a week before Mother was strong enough to get out of bed. In that time, caring for the household kept Lyssa so busy she hardly had time to sit down and rest. But then the time came at last that Mother was her old self, singing over the morning kettle and scolding children who would rather play than do their chores. Then Lyssa had some time to herself to sit by the fire in the evening and look through the diary again.

Last fall, Brother Amos had promised to teach Lyssa to read when winter came. Of course he hadn’t known what would happen. Lyssa missed her friend, but it was a comfort to her to look through his book. She could almost remember the sound of his voice, reading her the words on the pages.

Sage. Snapdragon. Lyssa paused and looked again. Those two words began with the same sound, and she could see on the page that their words began with the same symbol. Eager now, she found another pair, Yew and Yarrow. Another symbol, another sound.

Maybe Brother Amos could still teach her to read after all.

In the spring, Lyssa would take the first leaf of green sage and place it between the pages, and maybe Brother Amos would speak to her again. She would beg his forgiveness, and ask him if he could please continue to be her teacher. But even if he didn’t come, she still had the diary, and maybe, just maybe, she knew enough already that she could come to understand the rest of it on her own.