7/ A Path for the Light
The first snow stayed.
That doesn't happen in Betweenhills straight away. Usually the snow shows itself a few times first, gets frightened and goes away again. This year it lay down on the rooftops three weeks after the very first flake, and it stayed, as if somebody had told it that it was welcome here.
With the snow, the preparations for the shortest day of the year got into full swing.
Mrs Rowan carried twigs down from the Crag. Mr Sadler helped Mr Wheeler decorate the pear tree. The tree, not Mr Pearson. From now on the two of them sort of shared it. The first candles appeared on the rim of the well, not lit yet, only so that the stone could get used to them. And Mr Sparrow the baker confessed to everybody who walked past that this year he would bake one night longer, because last year it hadn't been enough.
The days were short. The sun rose late, looked down at the valley from behind the hills for a little while, and was soon gone again.
In the Blind Passage, the bright stripe on the wall moved a little higher every midday. Luna had been there on Tuesday. The stripe almost reached the highest mark. The people who had carved the marks into the rock long ago had known, without any calendar, that the shortest day was near. Now Luna knew it too.
Of everybody in town, George enjoyed these preparations the least.
In the notebook EXPERIMENTS WITH SPARK he still had an empty page. At the top, in big capital letters, A GIFT FOR BETWEENHILLS, and underneath nothing. Three weeks of nothing. Every evening he opened it, looked at it and closed it again, the way you close the door of a room that hasn't been tidied.
"You promised you'd show us where the web is thickest," he said to Spark in the fourth week.
"I did," said Spark.
"So why haven't you?"
"Because for three weeks you kept opening and closing that notebook. It looked as if you were about to work something out by yourself."
George said he hadn't. Spark said she could tell.
They set off in the late afternoon, when it got dark, which at that time of year was shortly after the afternoon snack.
There was nobody in the square. The snow crunched, and from the well came the sound of a drop of water falling a long way down. Spark floated down to the children's faces.
"Close your eyes."
They closed them.
"Now."
Betweenhills was full of threads.
They led from the windows of the upper street, from the bakery, and from Mr Wheeler's pear tree, where the thread had lately grown as thick as a thumb. They came up from the ford below, where Three Words lies, and down from Smokeby above. They came from places the children couldn't even name.
And all of them leaned towards the square.
Not in straight lines. They sagged, the way a spider's web sags. But every single one, wherever it began, ended up meeting the others in the same place: above the stone well.
And from above, out of the dark sky, one more came down to join them. Thin and straight as a ray. The one the children had seen in autumn running from the moon to somewhere above the square.
Now they knew where. Exactly here.
"Like a wheel," said George quietly.
For a moment Luna didn't understand. Then she did.
The threads were spokes. The well was the hub. And the whole valley was one enormous wheel that didn't turn, but held.
Then Spark stopped showing them.
What was left was the square, the snow, the unlit candles on the rim of the well, and two frozen people looking at an ordinary well.
But George could already see it in his head.
He saw something standing by the well, exactly where all the threads meet. Something with hands, so that it could help. With legs, so that it could go wherever it was needed. With a head, so that you could ask it things. And with light from the web.
There was only one thing he couldn't see: how the light would get inside.
In the woodshed he took out the notebook and drew for the first time since the first snowflake.
He drew a body. One head taller than he was, but shorter than a grown man. He drew the arms, the legs and the head. Then he drew it again from behind.
On the back he drew an empty rectangle, and inside it a question mark.
"What's that?" asked Luna.
"That's where the light will go," said George. "I don't know how."
"Neither do I," said Spark, and it was the first time she had said it gladly.
George closed the notebook. Not like the door of an untidy room this time, but like a door with something waiting behind it for him in the morning.
"We won't tell anybody," he said. "It's a gift."
"Between us," said Luna.
In Betweenhills, those words were said only when something was really important.
2. The Wheel That Learned Where to Stop
The next morning George went to the upper street.
In the old days he would have invented the joints himself. He would have taken apart an alarm clock and two hinges from the barn, and a week later he would have had an arm that bent both ways, only not properly in either. This time he went to ask first. Luna went with him, because when George asks, it is good to have somebody there who listens to the answers too.
Mr Wheeler's workshop smelled of wood, iron and a little of smoke. Hoops hung on the wall, from ones small enough for a wheelbarrow to ones George could have stood inside. In the corner was the forge. In the middle stood Mr Wheeler, drilling a hub.
When he saw the children, he put down the drill.
"In the end there was a pot and a half of jam," he said instead of hello. "Mr Sadler added the extra half himself."
George opened the notebook and showed him the drawing.
Mr Wheeler looked at it for a long time. At the arms, at the legs, at the head, and at last at the back, with the empty rectangle and the question mark.
"What is it?"
George hesitated. Luna answered for him.
"A gift. For the shortest day. For the whole little town."
"But nobody must know," added George. "It's between us."
Mr Wheeler straightened up. In Betweenhills those two words aren't said lightly, and he knew it.
"Between us," he said. "And what will it do?"
"Help."
"Who for?"
"Anybody."
Mr Wheeler nodded.
"That's a lot of work for one thing."
Then he took a small wheel from the wall and spun it on his finger.
"A wheel turns round and round," he said. "As long as you like. An arm mustn't turn round and round. Or you'd hurt yourself with it."
He bent his own elbow in front of the children. It goes one way only, and only a little. Then he showed them his shoulder. That goes every way, but never far.
"Every joint knows how far it may go. And above all, it knows where to stop."
He took a piece of wood, a hub and an iron pin, and within half an hour he had an elbow lying on the workbench. It bent one way, and at a certain moment it stopped, the way a polite person stops when you tell them that's enough.
"A joint is a wheel that has learned where to stop," said Mr Wheeler.
George wrote it down. Luna memorised it. Each in their own way, but the same thing.
"And what are you planning to make it from?" asked Mr Wheeler.
"Wood and wire."
Mr Wheeler scratched his chin.
"Wood and wire make a fine scarecrow. But this is meant to be a gift for the whole little town. People should enjoy looking at it."
Then he pointed at the heap in the corner. Old hoops from carts that no longer ran. Sheets of metal. Rivets. Two brass hubs that gleamed even though nobody polished them.
"A skeleton of wood," he said. "But iron on the outside. And shoulders from those hubs. Let it look like something worth looking at."
George looked at that heap the way Luna looks at stars that get a five.
They agreed to work in the early evenings, in the workshop, and that nobody would find out anything.
That same evening, Mr Sadler asked across the fence why there had been hammering at the Wheelers' for so long.
"I'm mending the pear tree," said Mr Wheeler.
Mr Sadler thought about that, and then preferred not to ask any more, because the pear tree was partly his, after all.
Before leaving, George bent the wooden elbow ten times in a row. One way. A little. And stop.
"It works," said Luna.
"It worked today," said George. "Tomorrow we'll try it again."
"That's my sentence."
"Ours," said George, and this time he didn't even try to argue.
Above the workshop Spark shone at full strength, although Mr Wheeler couldn't see her. And that evening a new thread appeared between Mr Wheeler and George. The children didn't see it, because nobody had shown it to them.
But Spark knew about it.
3. It Looks Alive
They worked ten evenings in a row.
Mr Wheeler sawed and drilled, George riveted and Luna held. Luna held most of all, because you can only rivet when somebody holds, and you can only hold when you aren't afraid for your fingers. Luna was afraid, but she held.
Spark floated above the edge of the forge. She wanted to know why iron turns red when it gets hot, and whether that hurts it.
Mr Wheeler couldn't see her. But now and then he glanced towards the forge, as if somebody were sitting there.
By the tenth evening, the body stood.
It stood on two wide legs made from the hubs of old wheels, so that it wouldn't topple over on the frozen cobbles. Its chest was made from a hoop clad in sheet metal, and two rows of rivets ran down it like the buttons on a best coat. Its shoulders gleamed with brass. Its arms had elbows that knew where to stop, and its fingers were made of thin hinges, which George had smoothed with a file so that they could grip a bucket or an egg. Its head was round, made from the bottom of an old copper pot, and in it were two round eyes with nothing in them.
On its back was an empty frame.
And on its side, a crank.
Mr Wheeler stepped back from it three steps, and then two more.
"Well, well," he said. "It looks alive."
From Mr Wheeler, that was the greatest praise anyone on the upper street had ever heard.
Then he put on his coat and went home for supper, because even the greatest praise has to be followed by a proper meal.
George took hold of the crank and turned it.
The arm rose. The fingers closed round the handle of the bucket. The bucket came off the ground and stayed hanging in the air.
"It's helping," said George.
Spark floated down to the bucket. Then to the hand on the crank. George's hand.
"Who is lifting that bucket?" she asked.
George let go of the crank. The arm dropped, and the bucket slowly slid down to the ground.
"Me," he said.
"It isn't helping by itself yet," said Luna. "You're the one helping. It only moves while you turn."
"But it looks as if it's helping," said Spark.
George sat down on a log.
"Looks," he said.
Luna asked Spark to show them the threads. She didn't need to explain why.
"Close your eyes… Now."
The workshop was full of light. One thread led to Mr Wheeler's house, one across the fence to Mr Sadler, and one, thick as a thumb, to the pear tree. The new one, between Mr Wheeler and George, was still trembling, the way everything new trembles. And between George and Luna hung the one that was theirs, just as always.
Nothing led to the iron body.
Not one thread. Not even the thinnest. The air around it was smooth and empty, and its eyes were just two holes in a copper pot.
"It looks alive," said Luna. "But it isn't. It only moves when somebody else moves it."
George was silent for a long time.
"So we've built a scarecrow," he said at last. "A handsome one."
Luna walked around the body and laid her palm on the empty frame on its back. It was cold.
"It isn't finished," she said. "It's missing the thing we're making it for."
George opened the notebook and under the drawing he wrote a sentence. Then he underlined it once more.
Looking alive and being alive are not the same thing. Until a thread leads to you, you only look it.
Then they covered the body with a sheet, so that nobody would see it.
Under the sheet it looked like somebody waiting for something.
4. A Path for the Light
The next day, George tried to catch the light.
He did it the way any boy with a coil of wire in his pocket would. He bent a hook out of the wire, stood by the well and asked Spark to show him a thread.
Spark showed him. George raised the hook and looped it round the thickest thread hanging above the rim.
The hook passed through the thread the way a hand passes through a sunbeam in the air. On the other side, the hook was empty. The thread didn't even quiver.
George tried three more times, because he was George.
"Light can't be caught," said Spark. "You can only connect to it."
"And how do you do that?"
"I don't know. I've always been connected."
Luna had a different idea, and she'd had it since the autumn.
In the Blind Passage they had once caught light on a sheet of metal. So at midday she brought a piece of polished metal from Mr Wheeler to the well and held it up to the sun. In those days the sun fell on the square only for a short while before it vanished behind the rooftops, and Luna didn't let that moment slip by.
The metal flashed. It threw a bright glare straight into the children's eyes.
Spark showed them the threads. Above the metal, nothing had changed.
"That's light from the sun," said Luna. "The metal only reflects it. It hasn't connected to the web."
They had known since the autumn that a sheet of metal reflects the sun. Whether the light from the web would connect to it too, they were trying for the first time.
Just then Mr Jacobs the bell-ringer came limping round the well. His foot hurt more that winter than he would admit, so he admitted nothing.
"What are you doing with that piece of metal in this frost?" he asked.
"An experiment," said George.
"In my day, experiments were done in summer," said Mr Jacobs, and limped on, because lunch was in half an hour, and he was as punctual for lunch as for the bell.
George watched him go, and noticed which foot Mr Jacobs limped on.
Then George looked at the well and remembered the wheel.
All the threads of the valley met here. Like spokes in a hub. The light didn't run wherever somebody pulled it. It ran along a path.
"We have to show it the way," he said slowly. "Not catch it."
In Mr Wheeler's workshop he took the same piece of metal and with a nail he engraved into it what he had seen by the well. Lines from the edges to the centre, like spokes. Then lines across, like the threads between the windows. By the time he finished, the metal looked like a dark little window covered in a fine grid.
"And what about the middle?" asked Luna.
Spark floated over the centre and shone blue for a while.
"Water in the middle," she said. "The water from the well is a signpost for the light from the web."
The next day at midday, Luna lowered the bucket into the well and counted to seven.
The bucket came back full. The water was so cold that your tooth ached just from looking at it.
"Do you think the well gives full buckets for experiments, too?" asked George.
"We're not drawing water for ourselves," said Luna. "That thing will be for the whole little town."
Then she added quietly, more to herself than to him:
"If we were drawing only for ourselves, we might hit the bottom."
They poured a thin layer of water over the engraved metal and held it up to the sun. The water settled into the lines, and the sun sparkled in them as if in a thousand tiny channels.
Spark lowered herself into the centre. She sank into the water the way a finger sinks into it, and her light spilled along the lines all the way to the edges.
"Close your eyes," she said. "Now."
From the thread above the well, the one that had come all the way from the moon, a little bead of light came loose. It dropped down onto the metal. It ran along the engraved line from the edge to the centre, and across, and once more, like a child letting a bead run down a tilted thread.
Then Spark flew up out of the water.
And the bead vanished.
George knelt by the metal so fast that he soaked his knees.
"It connected. For a moment."
"While I was there," said Spark. "I showed it the way. Next time the light has to know the way itself."
"That will go on the back," said George. "A big sheet of metal. The whole frame."
"And when?" asked Luna.
Spark shone blue for a while.
"On the shortest day. At midday."
"Why then, of all times?"
"I don't know," said Spark. "But from that day on, there is more light. Let it connect when there starts to be more of it."
Luna remembered the highest mark in the Blind Passage. The people who had carved it had known this too. And they hadn't said why, either.
Below the line
What Is Hidden in This Story
Below the line. For anyone who wants to know what the story was really about, said plainly and without imagery.
Looking alive doesn't mean being alive. The iron body lifted the bucket, but it was George who lifted it, with the crank. In the real world, too, there are machines that do clever things and look as though they are thinking. But they only do what somebody has set them up to do. Imitating something alive and being alive are not the same thing.
A gift for everybody. George wasn't building for himself, but for the whole little town. Luna recalled the rule of the well: whoever draws water for everyone will not hit the bottom. Big things that help many people usually come about not because one person makes them, but because several do it together, even if one of them had the idea.
To help yourself, first ask. George didn't think up the joints by himself. He went and asked Mr Wheeler. Whoever asks before reaching for the thing saves themselves a lot of spoiled work.
The shortest day of the year. In the real world, around 21 December, it is the shortest day and the longest night in the northern half of the Earth. After that, there is a little more light, bit by bit. In many places around the world, people have long celebrated this time together, with light in the windows and with gifts.
Juraj Tušš
