Beautiful Wreck by Larissa Brown Page B

memory. Tall, angular Betta handed up a basket with several spindles in it, and billows of cloudy, whitish fiber, before she pushed herself up, too.
    The stables were set into a single round building with cave-like openings on all sides where the animals huddled and slept. Since it was summer, Svana explained, the stinkiest animals—the sheep and cows—were in the highlands grazing. There were a couple of goats here, a mess of chickens, two house dogs. A few of the horses stayed down all year working. The smell of animal hair and dung was stunning, like a physical blow, and I had trouble imagining how much worse it would be when the entire population came down from the hills and gathered in close.
    My eyes watered from the stink. I blinked and cleared them and lifted my face to see the farm.
    Only when the chief showed me the forest had I gotten any sense of the enormity and wonder of this place. Coming out here, and sitting up on this wall, a green and purple and white immensity opened up and crushed me.
    I was small. A breathless speck under this sky, boundless without buildings to divide it. My breath came fast and shallow and I dug my fingers into the sod on either side of me. I told myself it was just the outside world the way it used to be, before glass towers and labs. I’d dreamed of it. I forced my lungs to work slower, to breathe deeper. I let my mind adjust. And finally my fear fell away, dissolving into the grassy, velvet beauty.
    The house and stables sat on the only flat plane in sight. Hills climbed and fell in a dozen directions, like green waves slapping and sloshing in a pail. Chaotic, and so vivid I could taste grass in my throat. Down to the bath, up to the forge, and beyond, maybe, to the highlands. Land seemed to spill right from our laps and all the way to the distant sea. The merest sparkle of ocean lit the horizon, or perhaps I dreamed I could really see it. A river of impossibly sky-blue water ran past not far below the house and wound through the landscape toward the sea. Where I’d come through. My one link to home.
    Far down the slope, almost too far around the curve of the forest’s edge to see, a single big fire sent out gray billows. I squinted and could make out a long building, another house. A neighbor, so close? Nei, it was the thralls’ house. Where Betta lived.
    I blinked in sequence to save the image and shook my head. Would I be here long enough to learn? My contacts would have been able to take an image, and would have told me just where I sat on the map of the city. Now they sat dry and curled like dead bugs inside my needle case.
    I turned to Hildur, resigned to try spinning.
    I dreaded it. Morgan had replicas of two dozen of the spindle whorls discovered in excavations across Europe. Hers were stone, ceramic, and even one dazzling beauty carved of amber. They were conical, flat, convex, all manner of shapes and weights, and I’d tried at least one of every type, without success. These seemed to be made of bone, though to carve these solid pieces, it must have been the bone of something massive. I looked around nervously, my eyes settling on the edge of the trees. Only little animals lived here, I reminded myself. Birds mostly. Foxes.
    Hildur handed me a spindle that was already started. She placed the shaft against my leg and drew it from knee to thigh, knee to thigh, three times over, then lifted it away and it was spinning. She showed me how the thread was forming, how to feed the fiber, like spun sugar in my hands, a tiny bit at a time. I took over the spindle and tried to let in the right amount of wool, but a familiar sense of being chased came over me.
    In the arcs, the demonstrators said spinning was relaxing, but I felt threatened by it. It was menacing, the way the twist climbed inexorably toward my hand. I knew I would never feed just the right amount at the right time. I would get bound up, the twist getting out of control, the thread turning on itself and bundling.