The Present by Nancy Springer Page B

fumbling hands reached forth, this time to take the spindle whorl. “What a lovely cake,” she said, and she put it to her toothless mouth, trying to eat it.
    *
    “Our time to live, it is thin, like a thread,” Roe said to Saffron later, after the evening meal, sitting by the night’s fire with her and trying to explain. “Time before memory was vast, an all-colored tapestry without edge or ending, but mortal life is a mere strand that often breaks short.” Aunt Roe picked up the edge of her shawl and fingered the fringe. “Cut off, like little Ilex, your grandmother’s sister, dead before she was grown. Or like your mother…”
    “Time is like a mountain stream hurrying over stones,” spoke another woman of the many gathered around the fire under a limpid sky salted with uncountable stars.
    “Ah, but you are a Troutfisher,” Roe retorted with good humor.
    “Yes, and the brooks run swift and shallow, the water flows away without ceasing, forever new then gone.”
    “Our moments are like this, so the wise ones say.” A woman sitting in a clan leader’s place of honor by the fire took from her neck a string of precious bluestone beads and held it out, one end in each hand, so that it hung like an inverted rainbow, each lapis sphere shining almost green in the yellow light of the flames. “The longer our days, the more the memories, until we can no longer hold them all without breaking.”
    “But in the beginning?” Aunt Roe asked.
    “In the time before time, the Greatest Gifting, one could hold in one’s hands beads without number all strung without beginning or end.”
    “What does it matter?” The flinty words shot like arrows from Saffron’s mouth, surprising her as much as anyone; she had wept, and had been unable to eat, and now sat sullenly in the shadows, with a weight in her chest as if she had put the spindle whorl there instead of back into her pack. Let the stars shine; she did not look to them. Let the fire warm her face all it liked, still the night lay cold and heavy upon her back. She had not intended to speak.
    And she should not have spoken, not so rudely.
    But none of the women reproached her. Aunt Roe said gently to her, Saffron, although the words could be heard by all, “It matters because your grandmother’s life is like such a shining necklace, so very long, with its end now meeting its beginning.”
    The chieftess of the Blue Beads clan drew back from the fire, lifting her hands to fasten her jewelry once more around her neck.
    “All of life is a circle,” someone else was saying, “a wheel ever turning, seasons returning…”
    “Look here, my brother’s daughter.” Once again Aunt Roe showed Saffron the fringe of her shawl. “Most threads are cut short, but see, here is a long one. It loops back and enters again into the weave of the cloth.”
    “In the beginning,” said the Troutfisher woman, “was a vast pool of water without end, and the water lay shining and sleeping and deep beyond knowing, and time had not yet begun.”
    “Long rivers flow to the ocean,” said Aunt Roe to Saffron, “and long threads return to the tapestry of the time before time. Such a thread is your grandmother’s life.”
    And what good does that do me? Saffron wanted to cry out, although she said nothing.
    “A beautiful strand in a pattern we are too small to see. Saffron?”
    But Saffron shook her head and turned her face to the ground.
    *
    Saffron sat beside her Aunt Roe at the loom and would not look where her father sat by his mother. She combed wool for the distaff in her lap and would not lift her eyes. Often she wished she were allowed to plug her ears.
    “Leon, it has been a long time, hasn’t it?”
    “Leon has been dead for a long time, Mother. I am your son, Auroch.”
    “How can you say you are dead? You are sitting right here beside me. Do you think I am dead?”
    “No, Mother, I suppose not yet.”
    “Look, the chickens are flying!
    “Those are eagles in the sky,