2/ The Thread That Pulls Up the Rope
For anyone who wasn't there at the start of this story, here it is in short. In her great-grandmother's calendar Luna found Longhair, a long-haired star that comes back once every eighty-four years and can be seen on only four evenings, and those evenings were coming right now. But you can only see it from the Rock Tooth above Bare Stone Meadow, and Luna's telescope, Peekaboo, can't be carried up the scree without getting broken on the way.
George threw his little anchor on its string nineteen times, and it didn't get even a third of the way up the rock. And Mr Barr from the old sawmill wouldn't lend them his rope. He told them it couldn't be done, because he had twice built a wind wheel up there, and twice he had lost it. And he was afraid for them, because he had once seen something hauled up there and then come crashing down.
All the way home, Spark could not settle for a single moment.
"How does he know?" she kept asking. "That it can't be done. How does he know?"
"Well... he tried it."
"He tried the wheel. He didn't try anything else."
She floated up in front of George's eyes.
"You humans have got two little piles, haven't you?" she said. "On one there are things that are. On the other there are things that aren't. And I don't know who puts them there."
"Well... the ones that can be done go on one pile. And the ones that can't be done go on the other," said Luna carefully.
"And before somebody did it for the first time?" asked Spark. "Before the very first person in the world made something — which pile was it lying on until then?"
A neighbour went past with a basket, said hello to the children and did not see Spark.
"On the second one," said George slowly.
"Then that second pile is no use at all."
She didn't say it cheekily. She said it like somebody who really doesn't understand. And that was exactly why it hit George so hard that he never got round to eating that evening.
In the woodshed he sat down at the table and for a long time did nothing at all, which was most unusual for him. Luna sat beside him.
But they were only there in body. Inside his head, George was angry with himself and with the nineteen throws. Luna was counting the evenings. And neither of them said out loud a single thing that was meant for the other.
And so Spark, there between them, was almost going out.
"You're both here," she said in a thin little voice, "and still you're not here together."
Neither of them answered, and that was the worst part of it.
Three evenings were left.
2. Falcons
The next afternoon, Luna sat on the doorstep with her back against the doorframe, looking up.
She was doing what she did best: looking for a long time at something that the whole little town looks at every day.
Falcons were circling over Falcon Peak. It was one of the last warm afternoons of the year, and the falcons knew it before the people did.
She took out her notebook and wrote down three things in it, exactly the way she wrote down numbers for the stars.
First: a falcon goes up without flapping its wings.
Second: it always goes up over the same place, over that bare stone in the meadow.
Third: it does it in the afternoon. Never in the morning. Only when the stone is hot from the sun.
Spark stopped above the notebook.
"So the air goes up there even when there isn't a falcon in it," she said.
An hour later, the children walked past the sawmill. They weren't going for the rope any more, so they didn't even stop.
Mr Barr was in his yard, stacking boards and grumbling under his breath, the way a man grumbles who is used to being on his own.
"...and that wheel, it was a strange thing anyway. It only got properly going after lunch. In the morning it just stood there, dead still. And the wind up there blows from morning till night — there was never any shortage of that."
He picked up a board and carried it away. He had not noticed in the least that anyone had heard him.
The children stood by the fence and didn't move. Very slowly, Luna turned her head towards George. Spark between them blazed up so brightly that the fence threw a shadow.
Mr Barr hadn't got a bad result. He'd got a piece of information. He had carried it around in his pocket for forty years and never once read it, because all he had kept was that it hadn't worked, and he had thrown away everything he'd seen along the way.
3. First You Have to Get a Thread Up There
In the evening, George paced up and down the woodshed.
"I threw that little anchor nineteen times," he said. "And everything you throw comes down. The higher it flies, the more string it drags, and the heavier it all gets. It has to go up by itself. Like those falcons."
He stopped.
"And there's one more thing. We've got it all the wrong way round. We're trying to get Peekaboo up there — and Peekaboo is the clumsiest thing we've got."
He turned to Luna.
"First you have to get a thread up there."
Luna looked at him and said nothing for a moment. Then it all fell into place for her.
"And a thread is so light," she said slowly, "that even an ordinary paper kite can carry it up."
"Exactly. The kite carries the thread. The thread pulls up the line. The line pulls up the rope. And Peekaboo goes up the rope."
A thin thing can pull up a thick one. This is one of those sentences that look as if they're about ropes, and aren't.
The next afternoon they tried the first kite. It was made of newspaper, with a tail of rags. It lasted exactly until the first proper gust of wind, which tore it from top to bottom, and it fell down into the gully.
Luna shut her eyes.
George did not move. He was looking down, but not at the kite. At how it fell.
"Did you see that?"
"I saw it tear."
"Yes. But as it fell, near the stone it went up first. Only then did it go down. The air goes up over there by the stone, and down here, where it fell."
He sat straight down in the grass and began drawing arrows in his notebook.
"We'd never have known this without it," he said.
"So it wasn't broken?" asked Spark.
"It was broken," said George, and kept on drawing. "But it left me something. I'm left with a map."
4. A Rope Made of Pieces
They had no rope, and they were not going to ask for one a second time. So they went through Betweenhills from house to house, collecting it in little pieces, and they explained nothing to anybody, because there was no time for that now.
Mr Sparrow the baker gave them a piece of cloth from a flour sack and a ball of string. He didn't ask what for. He only remarked that if anything should happen to be needed, he was always up before the whole little town, he had two lanterns, and that he would be glad to go and have a look.
Granny Dora untied her washing line, with the two pegs still hanging on it. She didn't ask either. She only stroked their heads, which is worse than a hundred questions.
Then a piece from the well. A piece from a horse's halter. And one piece whose origin nobody knows to this day.
In the woodshed, George knotted them all together, and he tested every knot twice: he hung a bucket of stones on it and pulled. Any knot that so much as moved, he untied and tied again.
"Do you have to do that with every one?" asked Luna.
"Every one. Twice."
"Why twice?"
"Because Peekaboo is going to hang on it," said George. "And Peekaboo is yours."
That evening was the quietest in the woodshed all week, and it was the most important.
Nothing was being built. They were drawing.
The shape of the wing. The length of the tail. Where George would stand and where Luna would stand. Where the kite would be let go from. Where Mr Sparrow would be up top. The arrows of the wind from the afternoon's map, copied out again neatly.
"And what if the thread breaks?" asked Luna.
"Then we let go and step back. Nobody runs after it. Not you, not me."
"And what if it breaks with the rope on it?"
"Then we mustn't be standing under it. That's why we'll stand here," he said, pointing at the paper. "Not here."
And although it was so quiet in the woodshed that you could hear the pencil on the paper, with every line they added, Spark grew stronger between them. Because this time they were silent over the same piece of paper.
By the end, they didn't need the candle any more.
5. The Kite
Only the last evening was left. They launched the kite in the afternoon from Bare Stone Meadow, when the stone was hot from the sun — just as the falcons had said, and just as Mr Barr's wheel had been saying for forty years.
The flour-sack kite lifted, the rising air caught it, and it went up without anybody tugging at it. In circles, higher and higher, exactly like a falcon.
The thread unwound.
Up on the ledge, Mr Sparrow reached out his hand and caught it. He had gone up first thing that morning, by the path from below on the east side, with empty hands — and he was so proud of it that for a whole week afterwards he told everybody who came in for bread.
After that it was simply: the thread pulled up the line, the line pulled up the knotted rope, and the rope drew taut from the meadow all the way up to the ledge. Mr Sparrow wound it round the Rock Tooth up there and checked the knot twice, because he had seen George do that.
Down in the meadow, at last it was the turn of the pulley from the first evening. They slipped it on to the taut rope and hung Peekaboo from it, wrapped in cloth from a flour sack. The rope stayed firmly in place and only carried the weight. Only the line moved: one end was tied to the pulley, and the other end Mr Sparrow held in his hands up top.
Mr Sparrow pulled, and Peekaboo went up the rope slowly and carefully, like a bucket from a well. George counted the knots that Peekaboo passed, one after another.
Luna watched with her mouth open, and she did not trip even once, because she wasn't going anywhere.
Luna went up straight afterwards, with George, on their own two feet. The same way, from the east, over the scree where you need both hands — and they were on the ledge long before it got dark.
Their hands were empty. The one thing that can't be carried up the scree — long and clumsy — was already up there.
6. Longhair
The last evening was clear, and there was no wind.
Luna bent to the eyepiece and for a long time said nothing.
Longhair was no firework. It was a blurry little streak of light with a soft tail, hanging low above the dark horizon and not moving at all. It looked shy. It looked like something that doesn't want to be disturbed.
Luna straightened up.
"I thought it would be bigger," she said.
And straight after that, without giving herself even a moment:
"It's more beautiful."
Then she let George look through the eyepiece.
And so they saw Longhair.
Mr Barr came up onto the ledge that evening too. He must have taken the same way from the east, and he must have set off right after the children, although at the sawmill he had not said a single word about it all afternoon.
Over his shoulder he had a rope slung — a whole one, new, without a single knot in it.
He didn't say why he had come, or why he had brought it. He put it down on the ground.
George didn't let him look through the eyepiece first. He handed him a page torn out of his notebook, with the map of the wind from the torn kite.
"You found one half of it."
"What half?"
"That up there, it only gets going after lunch. You've known that for forty years."
Mr Barr looked at that paper for a very long time. Then he bent to the eyepiece and looked for even longer.
"So it can be done, then," he said at last.
And then, more quietly, and more to himself than to the children:
"I stopped after the second try."
They went down in the dark, all together. Mr Sparrow pulled two lanterns out from under his coat, because he is a man who gets up at two in the morning and always thinks about the way back too. Mr Barr went first, and on the scree he held out his hand, although nobody had asked him to.
7. The Wheel
The next afternoon they stood by what was left of the wheel.
George did not touch it. He had his hands in his pockets, and he asked a question that a week earlier he would not have asked for any money in the world:
"Mr Barr, how did you build it?"
Mr Barr looked at him. Then he crouched down, picked up a stick and began to draw in the dust.
The drawing went on for a long time, and there was a lot of it. Where the wheel had stood. What blades it had. How the wind had broken them off both times, and from which side the wind had struck.
And just at that last part, Luna knelt down beside him and added her arrows to the dust.
Because over the bare stone the wind doesn't strike. There the wind pulls upwards. And the wheel that Mr Barr had built stood twenty steps further along the ridge, right on the edge, where the wind hits and drops down like a hammer.
"I never saw that," said Mr Barr.
"You were looking at the wheel," said Luna. "We were looking at the falcons."
Only then did anyone pick up the wood.
They worked on it until the end of the week. They had Mr Barr's rope, and first four hands to help, then five, and in the end six, because Mr Sparrow had come up too and didn't feel like going home. They built the wheel those twenty steps closer to the stone, where the wind pulls.
The wheel moved on Friday. Slowly, reluctantly, with a creak that could be heard all the way down at the sawmill.
And it only got properly going after lunch — exactly as Mr Barr had been saying for forty years, when nobody listened to him, not even he himself.
From the wheel, a long loop of rope ran down to the sawmill on wooden pulleys tied to the beech trees beside the path — one side going down, the other coming back up, like a belt going round two wheels. Up above, the wheel turned; down below, the saw blade turned; and between them there was only that double line across the slope, which the children went on drawing in their notebooks for a whole week more.
From that day on, the horse at the sawmill never had to drag wood again.
8. At First It's Only in Your Head
And one more thing, quite a small one.
Another picture now hung on the nail in the woodshed. A flour-sack kite, the arrows of the wind added along the side, and in the corner nineteen little marks, so that nobody would forget how many times it had not worked before.
It hangs right next to the picture of that little wind-powered windmill thing that was meant to turn a merry-go-round for the neighbour's cats.
The empty space beside it isn't empty any more.
Later that same week, Spark asked George who it actually was that puts things on that second pile. The one with the things that aren't.
At the time he couldn't answer her. The answer came to him only later, and it went like this:
An invention is not a thing that isn't. It is a thing that isn't finished yet.
Until you can picture something, you can't build it. And the more detail you picture, the less wood you waste along the way.
If you get it wrong, you won't be left empty-handed. You'll be left with directions for where not to go next time. You'll be left with experience you didn't have before. You'll be left with a map.
And when somebody tells you it can't be done, they usually aren't a bad person. Usually they tried — and stopped one try sooner than they should have.
The rope on Falcon Peak stayed hanging there all winter. At the top, the thick rope; below it, the line; and right at the bottom, the thin thread that had started it all.
Each of those things was pulled up by the thinner one before it. The line pulled up the rope, the thread pulled up the line, and the kite carried up the thread.
And the kite? Nobody pulled that up. It was sewn following a picture, the one that now hangs in the woodshed beside the sketch of the merry-go-round for the neighbour's cats.
And that picture was made one evening by candlelight, when two children bent over the same sheet of paper and told each other how they would do it.
That's how it goes. At first it's only in your head.
Below the line
What Is Hidden in This Story
Said quite plainly, without any imagery, so that nobody can miss it.
An invention isn't nonsense. It's a thing that isn't finished yet. Everything that exists today was once just an idea in somebody's head. Even flying was once something that people said couldn't be done.
A failed try is not a waste of time. Every time, you find out something you didn't know before. That the air goes up over the bare stone, Luna worked out from the falcons. The torn kite added a map to that: it showed exactly where to launch the kite and what had to be changed about it.
"It can't be done" isn't something that bad people say. Mostly it's said by people who really did try — and stopped one try sooner than they should have. And often what they tried was something quite different from what is being talked about now. That's why it's worth asking: "And what exactly did you try?"
The answer is often right in front of your eyes. The falcons over Falcon Peak circled every afternoon, and the whole little town could see them. Seeing isn't enough. You have to watch for a long time and notice what repeats.
A small thing can pull up a big one. The thread pulled up the line, the line pulled up the rope, the rope pulled up the telescope. A thought works in exactly the same way: it weighs nothing itself, and yet it pulls a real thing up after it.
When you don't know something, ask. In the end, George asked Mr Barr how he had built the wheel — and what Mr Barr had carried around in his pocket for forty years was suddenly useful to them both. One question can save even forty years.
Together you can do more than alone. The rope on Falcon Peak was patched together from pieces given by the whole little town, and the wind wheel was finally built by six hands. Nobody could have done either of them alone.
And you don't look at beautiful things alone. That is why the calendar says we saw and not I saw.
Juraj Tušš
