The Present by Nancy Springer Read Free Book Online

The Present
    Nancy Springer
    Because she had only one stylus, Saffron pulled the teak-stick from atop her head, letting her hair-spiral fall loose down her back until it met the hot yellow grass on which she sat. On the slab of wood across her knees lay a thick disc of clay with her stylus standing upright in its exact center. Over the stylus she placed a loop of flax, then inserted the point of the teak-stick into the same loop, pulled it taut, and, taking greatest care to obey its length, traced in the clay a perfect circle around the stylus.
    She took a long breath—so far, so good. Then she moved the stylus to a place on the edge of the circle, and once more tightening the loop of flax with her stick, she drew across the circle another line curved like a rainbow.
    Again she moved her stylus, this time to the juncture where one end of the rainbow-arc touched the edge of the circle, and again she traced. When she had done this six times, she removed stylus, flax, and teak-stick to sit for a moment just gazing. In the moist-scented roundel of fresh clay she had etched a perfect shape with six points—no, not just points. Narrow almonds, like the petals of the blue saffron flower after which she was named.
    Her father’s voice, sounding from above and behind her, interrupted her pleasure. “What are you making?”
    “A spindle whorl to give to Grandmother when I see her once again at the gathering.”
    “And what makes you think, my foolish young daughter, that she will want it?”
    Although her father’s tone was teasing, not scolding, Saffron frowned. With the sun of her fourteenth summer baking her shoulders, she considered herself neither young nor foolish.
    Father was saying, “Do you not realize how old my mother has become in the past four years?”
    Grandmother wandered with the Loomcloth clan, but Saffron and her father lived with the Clayglazer clan, which he had joined when he had wed her mother. Others, the People of Spotted Wildcat Pelts, the People of the Yellow Cowrie Shells, the Troutfishers and so on, all roamed, rarely meeting, for the world was vast. So it had been since the Greatest Gifting before time or memory. But just as the four seasons measured a year, so four years measured a year of years when all of the clans, Deerspearers and Stoneshapers and the People of Blue Beads and many more, all traveled to meet at the gifting place, the world’s navel.
    This was the fourth year. After the melons were harvested and the figs fell, at the time when days grew short and many torches were needed to fight back the darkness, all would gather together.
    “Wipe the clay off your teak-stick and put your hair back up where it belongs,” chided Saffron’s father before he walked on to meet the other men by the river.
    Saffron did so, but without letting her father’s shadow take away her smile; nothing could diminish her pleasure in what she was making. She herself had found the red clay and shaped it into a flat circle on the potter’s wheel, rounding and thickening its edge against chipping. And now that she had centered her design, she cleared a hole at its hub for the spindle-stick, then took yellow clay and began to shape it into tiny balls which she would press one after another into the grooves she had made, forming raised lines like strings of little pearls. She would glaze the decorated areas separately, a different color than the rest. Grandmother would praise the gift and be pleased with her granddaughter, its giver.
    *
    “Finally,” Saffron breathed as she eased her heavy pack to the ground. Atop the mountain pass she stood with others of her clan, reveling in each breath of air so cerulean, blue, new from the sky, gazing upon the wide valley lying below, a soft green bowl with a high white rim—snowpeaks encircled the gifting place, a haven of peace and protection. Caves and cliffs sheltered encampments—Saffron could see tents like mushroom tops far below, and the backs of horses like