1/ The Calendar in the Attic
Almost three weeks had passed since the morning when something miraculous happened at the well, and it was still the same October.
For anyone who wasn't there, here it is in short. One Tuesday a cart came into Betweenhills with grey boxes on it, and people bought them because they looked cosy. Then, one by one, they shut themselves inside. The well in the square stopped giving water, the bell stopped ringing, and above the valley almost the whole Great Web went out.
Two children and one little light that only children can see put it right. The journey that mattered took them one single night; in Betweenhills itself, everything was finally settled only the next morning, at the well.
Anyone who wants to know exactly how and why will have to listen to the whole story of the Great Web. We begin almost three weeks after that morning.
In those three weeks, a great many things in Betweenhills had gone back to where they belonged. The bell rang at five o'clock. The well gave a full bucket to anyone who drew water for the whole street. Mr Shelley had hammered a shelter together out of the boards of his boxes, over the bench in the square, and he went to sit under it even when it wasn't raining.
And one thing had not come back at all.
Spark had divided that morning at the well, and that cannot be taken back.
Since then there is no longer just one of her in the world. There are as many Sparks as there are places in the valley where two palms are really holding on to each other. One on the fence between Mrs Rowan and her neighbour, one above the bench outside the butcher's, one in the bakery, where there always seem to be rather too many of them.
Only children can see them. That hadn't changed.
In the very first days, George kept asking about one thing that nobody could explain to him: which of them is the one that's ours. He walked about the square, looking at them one after another, searching for the one who, even before that morning, had asked him what shoes were for.
It took him four days to stop.
Not because he found her in the square. It was because one evening he and Luna were sitting on the step by the woodshed, not arguing and not wanting anything, and in the air between them the very same light came on that had shone there before.
"Where were you?" he asked her.
"I wasn't anywhere, and at the same time I was everywhere," said Spark. "I'm between you when you really notice each other."
That was an answer George still hadn't quite made his peace with. He stopped asking, but that isn't the same as making peace with it.
In those three weeks Spark had learned an awful lot. She knew what shoes were for, what the fair was, and why people shake hands, even though nothing gets handed over.
But some things still wouldn't fit into her head, even the fifth time round. And they were always the very same things that seemed simplest to children.
This story is about one of them.
2. The Calendar in the Attic
In Luna's attic that Wednesday there was exactly as much light as one gap in the shingles would let in. It was just enough to show the dust — and there was so much dust that you could no longer say it was simply floating about. That dust lived there. It had its own place, and it wasn't going anywhere.
Luna usually climbed up there when it was raining downstairs. That day it wasn't raining, but she climbed up anyway, because she had remembered a box of papers she had seen two years ago, and had thought about it, since then, about six times, which is quite a respectable number for a box of papers.
Inside were old bills, one torn songbook, and, right at the bottom, a thick, soft calendar with the corners torn off.
On the front cover stood a year. It was a year in which nobody Luna knew had been born.
Luna opened the calendar at October, and there, beside one particular day, was a note in tiny printed letters:
Longhair. Returns every eighty-four years. Visible for four evenings, low in the east.
And next to that note, in pencil, two words had been added, in handwriting Luna didn't recognise.
we saw
Luna touched the writing with her finger, as if to check that it was really pencil. It was. Somebody had sat at a table eighty-four years ago, opened a calendar and written two words in it for nobody.
She dashed down the stairs, and on the one step that is lower than the rest, she tripped. She was holding the calendar tight against her chest with both hands, so she fell more clumsily than she needed to.
The calendar came to no harm at all.
3. Great-Grandmother Matilda
In the kitchen, Luna asked her mum whose calendar it was.
It had belonged to Luna's great-grandmother. Her name was Matilda, she had liked the moon better than the stars, and she had died long before Luna was born. Luna had never seen her, not even in a photograph. In those days people rarely had their photograph taken, and not a single photograph of great-grandmother Matilda had survived.
Nothing more could be found out. Nobody in the house knew any longer what great-grandmother had done on any particular evening, and certainly not eighty-four years ago.
Luna went back up to the attic and opened the calendar again.
we saw
Not I saw. We saw.
Great-grandmother hadn't been on her own. Who had stood beside her, nobody today knows — perhaps great-grandfather.
Luna didn't much mind who it was. What mattered more to her was that someone had been there at all. When you see something that beautiful, you want to have somebody beside you.
A long-haired star is the kind of star that doesn't linger. It swoops in, shows itself, and flies off again, somewhere so far away that its journey back is counted in human lifetimes, not years.
Eighty-four years is a long time.
Luna added eighty-four to the year on the front cover and worked it out three times, because twice it had come out the same and she didn't believe it. Then she worked it out a fourth time, on paper, and got the same answer again.
It came out as this year. And when she checked which date that was, it came out as this week.
And if she missed it now, the next chance would come when she was ninety-two years old. Luna had nothing against being ninety-two. It just seemed much too far away to rely on.
4. When?
Luna found George in the woodshed, straightening bent nails one by one, because you don't buy new ones while there are still old ones about.
She tipped it all out on him at once, in no order at all: the calendar, great-grandmother Matilda, four evenings, eighty-four years, two words in pencil, and ninety-two years old.
George listened and didn't say a word. Only somewhere in the middle did he put down his hammer, which with him was the most reliable sign that he was really listening.
When she had finished, he asked just one thing.
"When?"
"This week," said Luna. "Maybe even tomorrow."
And from that moment it stopped being Luna's business. It became a shared one, a problem the two of them had to solve.
5. What the Observatory Can't See
Where to go was clear to both of them, and they didn't even need to discuss it. On Falcon Peak stands the observatory, and an observatory exists so that you can look at the stars from it.
Its door could be opened and its dome could be turned, ever since that important night when George had dug an old mouse's nest out from between the teeth of the toothed wheel and greased the axle with fat. They climbed up the comfortable path past the shepherd's hut, the one every sensible person takes. Luna carried Peekaboo over her shoulder, as always.
The big telescope was still broken. The crack across its front lens was shaped like a bolt of lightning, and nobody in the valley knew how a thing like that is mended.
It didn't matter. Luna set Peekaboo up under the slit in the dome, and George leaned his weight on the wheel.
And then something came to light that they hadn't thought of, because they had only been in the observatory once in their lives, and that time they had been looking up.
The slit in the dome shows a band of sky high above your head. The dome can turn all the way round, but it can't be tilted down. And Longhair was hanging a hand's width above the horizon, which was exactly where the observatory can't see.
So they carried Peekaboo outside, onto the doorstep.
From there they could see the whole valley, from the ford to Smokeby, just as they had seen it shining that night. But at the eastern end of the ridge stands the Rock Tooth, a little taller than the whole rest of the summit, and it cuts off exactly that last piece of the eastern sky near the ground, the very piece that mattered.
Luna looked at it for a long time.
"We have to be up there," she said at last.
6. Bare Stone Meadow
Only one narrow ledge leads up to the Rock Tooth, and the last bit of the climb up to that ledge is sheer.
Up on the ridge, right at the foot of the tooth, there is a patch of level grass, and in the middle of it lies a big flat stone, where lizards sun themselves in summer and where, after lunch, you can warm your back too. In Betweenhills that place has always been called Bare Stone Meadow. It is a name worth remembering, because in a few days' time this whole story will be decided there.
"Can't we go round?" asked George.
"We can," said Luna. "From below, on the east side. Two hours uphill, and at the end there's scree where you have to hold on with both hands."
And that was exactly the problem.
Not the children. They would get up the scree all right, if they were careful and had empty hands.
The problem was Peekaboo. It isn't heavy — Luna has carried it over her shoulder ever since she's had it. But it is long and awkward, and it has three legs that catch on everything nearby. On scree, where you need both hands on the rock, nobody could carry it up, not Luna and not anyone else — not without it getting broken on the way.
It could be taken apart, yes. The tube off the legs, the legs bundled together. But on the last steep stretch you cling on with your hands and your feet, and everything you're carrying bangs against the rock. And the lenses were glued into that tube. Luna had glued them in herself.
Spark floated between them.
"And where does it go in between?" she asked. "That star."
"Away," said Luna. "Far away. And then it comes back."
"That's nice," said Spark, and she meant it completely seriously.
George got up and brushed off his trousers, the way a person does who has just made up his mind.
"I'll sort it out."
7. Nineteen Throws
George worked in the woodshed until night, and it was fine work.
First the hook. Three old nails, hammered into a small log, bent over with the hammer and bound tight with wire, so that the whole thing looked like a tiny anchor. Then the pulley. And last of all, a ball of thin string, the kind that everyone has at home who has ever tied up sheaves of corn.
Spark hovered at the edge of the table and watched.
"What's it going to be?"
"A little anchor. I'll throw it up onto the ledge, it'll catch and hold. Then I'll haul the pulley up along the string, hang it on the hook, and Peekaboo will ride up on the pulley like a bucket from a well."
"And will you hit it?"
"I've got it in my head," said George, without even lifting his head.
On the nail above the table hung the old picture of that wind-powered windmill thing that was meant to turn a merry-go-round for the neighbour's cats. Next to it was an empty space, where something new ought to have been hanging that evening. There was no drawing there.
Spark looked at the empty space and said nothing, because Spark looks at empty spaces differently from people. For her it isn't something missing, only a place where nothing has happened yet.
In the morning George stood on Bare Stone Meadow, under the sheer piece of rock, and threw.
The first time, the little anchor flew as high as three Georges and dropped at his feet. The fifth time, higher. The ninth time, highest of all — and it still wasn't even a third of the way to where it had to reach.
Because the higher the little anchor flew, the more string it dragged behind it. And string, though it weighs next to nothing by itself, is heavier than the whole hook when it hangs halfway up that rock.
He threw nineteen times.
He didn't even begin the twentieth. He sat down on the stone, because his palm was burning.
"George," said Spark.
"What?"
"And what did you see in your head when you were doing it?"
George opened his mouth and shut it again.
"I saw Peekaboo up there," he said at last. "I saw it already hanging on that pulley. How I'd get the little anchor up there with all that string, I never properly pictured."
And he said aloud what he had worked out back then with the little cart that could only go left — and what he had just spoiled, in his hurry:
First you have to see it in your head. Only then can you build it on the table.
8. I've Built Something Up There Before
Even if the little anchor did get up there, they would still need a rope. One that reached from the meadow all the way to the ledge — as long as three carts in a row and a bit more. And in Betweenhills only one person had a rope like that: Mr Barr from the old sawmill.
He had big hands, he spoke slowly, and nobody in the little town had ever said a bad word about him. On the wall of the sawmill hung coils of rope, thick and new, neatly stacked.
George explained the whole thing to him. The ledge, Peekaboo, the scree, the sheer last bit, the four evenings, and the first of them is today. Mr Barr didn't interrupt him once. He put down a plank, leaned on it and heard George out to the very last word.
Then he thought about it. He really thought, you could see it.
"It can't be done, children," he said.
"But —"
"I know what I'm talking about. I've built something up there before."
He pointed with his chin up at Falcon Peak, where something grey and broken stood on the ridge.
"See that up there? That was a wheel. A wind wheel. It was meant to drive the saw, so a horse wouldn't have to. I built it twice, and twice it got smashed up there."
He looked them over and added what he had been thinking all along:
"And a wheel is child's play next to what you're after. Work it out for yourselves."
George reached for a rope on the wall.
"Then at least lend us —"
"No."
And here the child who is listening to this story has to be told one thing, because otherwise Mr Barr would come out as a villain, and he wasn't one, not for a single moment.
Mr Barr did not turn his back. He came over to George, laid a hand on his shoulder and told him why he wouldn't give him that rope: because George would climb up there with it, and Mr Barr had once already seen something hauled up there and come tumbling down.
You see, the sentence it can't be done almost never comes from a bad person. A bad person laughs at you. The kind of sentence we are talking about here is said by good people, tired people, and mostly by people who really did try. And that is exactly why it is so much heavier. A person can step over mockery. But when someone tells you it can't be done and means well by you, it immediately seems to you that you are the one who is wrong.
The children stood in front of the open gate of the sawmill, and it was worse than if it had been shut.
Below the line
What Is Hidden in This Story
Said quite plainly, without any imagery, so that nobody can miss it.
When we really listen to someone, we are together. Spark lit up again between George and Luna when they were sitting on the step, not arguing and not wanting anything from each other. And when Luna told him about the calendar, George put down his hammer and heard her out to the end. Only then did her worry become something they shared. What joins us isn't just being in the same place. It's really noticing each other.
When you can't believe a result, work it out again. Luna added up the years three times, and the fourth time on paper, because she couldn't believe what she got. Only then did she know for certain that Longhair would come this very week. Checking your sums is nothing to be ashamed of. It's how you can rely on what you know.
Even a good tool has its limits. The observatory was built for looking at the stars, but it can only see high above your head. Longhair hung low over the horizon, exactly where the observatory can't see. That isn't the observatory's fault, it's just its limit. When a tool isn't enough for something, it's worth finding out why, and looking for another place or another way.
You can't build anything before you can picture it. And the more detail you picture — not only the finished thing but the way to get there — the less you'll waste along the way.
When a good person tells you "it can't be done", it's harder than being laughed at. Mr Barr didn't want to hurt the children. He heard them out to the last word, he had tried it up there himself, and he was afraid for them. A bad person almost never says a thing like that; a bad person laughs. It's said by good, tired people who really did try. That's why, when you hear it, you straight away feel that you must be the one who's wrong. But that doesn't mean you really are.
Juraj Tušš
