[story] smaller than the blink of an eye
author: hacy morris
The city had been awakening for months, and they were still being surprised every other week. Just last month Amaline had heard that volunteers had found an abandoned store of spinning wheels and spindles, still in good condition in one of the warehouses.
That must have from the day when the king's proclamation came, Amaline thought, when it was ordered that there must no spinning wheel or spindle in the kingdom, lest the king's daughter should one day prick her finger and fall into a deep sleep until her true prince came for her. She vaguely remembered how they had carried Grandmother's spinning wheel to the city square, to find many others doing the same, until they created a veritable mountain of spinning wheels.
The city elders decided against burning them, as they were doing in the countryside, but they took them away anyway.
She wondered, if she went to the wharf now, she could still find Grandmother's spinning wheel and her handcarved spindles. No, she thought, smoothing down her skirt. What use did she have for spinning her own thread now, or weaving her own cloth?
There was no one to teach her, in any case. When Amaline woke from her slumber, it was to find that though her mother had survived, Grandmother had not: there were nothing but bones on the withered bed.
The rescuers - aid workers, she amended - had brought with them better cloth than she could ever weave. Thin and finer than even the ones her father had brought from Antwerp when she was a child. It was made of polyester, they said. And in such brilliant colours! Not even the weavers of Chine - known as China, the aid workers said - could make such cloth, she was sure.
"Amaline!"
It was her neighbour from down the street. "Beatrice," she said, raising one hand in greeting. They went to the same school, though she was really too old for school. But she had to learn how to make a new life, ever since she found her father freshly dead on the cobblestones beneath their open second-storey window. He had been leaning out when the curse hit, and and when the curse lifted, he had simply fallen.
The aid workers said school was to help them learn about modern things, now that the city had awakened and was no longer hidden in their little valley. The world had changed, her teacher told her. But Amaline knew that already, a week after she had first woken up from her own long sleep, stamping out the devil's vines with her bare feet (which no longer pricked the skin, but withered almost instantly to nothing), and come to the door of their townhouse to see a strange carriage with a red cross on it just at the street corner.
At her greeting, Beatrice came running. She was wearing those jeans that were growing in popularity throughout the city, and Amaline looked enviously at her. Her mother disapproved of breeches for females and had forbidden her to wear them.
"Have you heard?" Beatrice asked, her face flushed from the exertion.
On the other hand, it was really too hot for jeans, Amaline thought, ruffling her own skirt. They had awakened at the start of spring, as soundlessly as snowmelt flowing through the mountains, and it was going to be summer soon. The curse had come at the start of winter, and in her moments of wonderment Amaline wondered if they would go back into slumber when the seasons turned.
"Good morning, Beatrice," she said politely.
Beatrice tugged on her hand. She was the only one left of her family, and though she was Amaline's age, she tended to act much younger.
"They've found another one of the seekers!" she said excitedly. "Want to go and see?"
"Another one?" Amaline said. "Where?"
"At the castle stables," Beatrice said. "He must have thought it was a path to her" - she made the usual grimace to indicate that she meant the king's daughter - "but those devil's vines got him, in the end." She rolled her eyes. "They're still looking through the rest of the castle, to see if there're any more seekers stuck in a corner somewhere."
That sounded more interesting than wondering about spinning wheels, Amaline thought. "Let's go," she said. Hand in hand, she and Beatrice set off on the cobbled streets towards the castle, talking of the newest thing they had learnt. Amaline had seen pictures - and on TV, at school - that in other cities, there were now buildings as high as church spires. No, much higher: rising up from the ground, tall and straight, made of panes of glass as wide as a man, with dozens of levels. The windows didn't open in such towers, the teachers said.
"They said that the world's round, like a ball. Can you believe it?" Beatrice said. "And we live on the surface of this ball, and we go around the sun!"
Amaline had to laugh. They had gone through that in her class too, but she hadn't found anyone to talk about how unbelievable she found the whole idea.
"Really? But the sun's so small. What makes the world move, then?"
Beatrice shrugged. "We didn't get into that. They showed us pictures... and models." She waved a hand as though to encompass the models. "Oh, and did you know that most countries don't have kings anymore? Or princes. They said that in some countries, they killed kings." She lowered her voice in awed horror.
"Wish they'd done that to ours," Amaline said sourly.
"Amaline!"
"What, don't you think so?"
"But if we hadn't been cursed, we'd have died hundreds of years ago," Beatrice pointed out.
"Yes, but-" Amaline shrugged. She and many others had survived, but she still felt cheated somehow. And uneasy, whenever she thought about how much had changed in the rest of the world while her city slumbered, and how much they had not known. We're not supposed to be alive, she thought morbidly. The city had taken their proper fates from them.
They continued talking as they walked, ignoring the men who stared rudely at them. There were more journalists and curiosity-seekers (tourists, teachers said) each day, come to gawk at the people of the city and even to try to talk to them. But try as she might, Amaline just didn't understand what they were saying - even the teachers at the school struggled to make themselves understood sometimes.
"Look!" Beatrice said, tugging Amaline to a stop and breaking her chain of thought.
Were they were at the stables already? Amaline started to ask, then stopped as a mass of devil's vines seemed to float down the street.
Beatrice's hand gripped hers more tightly.
It was a jumble of brambles on a lorry, Amaline identified after a few seconds, pleased with herself for remembering the name for the wheeled contraption. Brambles made of the devil's vines, Amaline saw as the lorry came closer, and smelt the drowsy stench they gave out.
"Ugh," Beatrice said, holding her other hand to her nose. "Do you think there's really someone inside there?" she whispered. The other people on the street were also staring and many had taken out more of those 'cameras' so the air was full of clicking noises.
"I think so," Amaline said, shivering despite herself. The devil's vines must have been too thick to cut through when they found the seeker, so they hacked out the part containing him first. Somehow it was more horrible to think of a total stranger trapped inside those vines for the hundreds of years of the curse, than the rest of the city-dwellers who had fallen asleep where they stood.
They had all learnt that in the years the city lay in slumber, there had been any number of adventurous young men who came to seek the king's daughter and break her curse. But they had all fallen afoul of the devil's vines, either pierced and killed by the sharp thorns, or rendered immobile and then quite likely, simply wasting away - aid workers had found dozens of skeletons of seekers the first week they woke.
Then there was a loud bang, and the lorry stopped moving. A murmur of puzzlement came over the growing crowd, and heated discussion broke out. Another car, which must have been following the van, arrived, stopped, and the two people in it got out to talk to the driver of the lorry.
"What happened?" Amaline asked.
"I think one of its wheels is broken," Beatrice said.
Amaline saw where Beatrice was pointing, and saw that one of the wheels of the lorry sagged. She frowned; the wheels of these new vehicles were hardy, she had learnt. Then she saw a tell-tale spike, green as poison, poking from it. "It's the devil's vine," she said.
Beatrice made a face. It was the city's curse. Though most of the devil's vines had faded away, especially in the city, there were pockets where they still thrived, and they were nasty and dangerous, carrying a venom that could render a grown man unconscious when the thorns pierced skin. Hard enough to cause a lot of damage, it seemed. The aid workers had said they needed to do tests on it, whatever that meant.
"I think I can see the seeker," Amaline said, staring at the lorry's load, and gave a shiver. She could see the hint of something like clothing - or perhaps it was simply a dried leaf - which was probably all that was left of the seeker, other than his bones. "Wonder where he was from?" she wondered. There was little left of the seekers to show where they come from: only rusted swords and weapons.
"Look. The vines are dying," Beatrice said with satisfaction.
"Oh," Amaline said, swallowing, not sure if she wanted to see a skeleton revealed in front of her like this. Away from the castle, the vines were indeed wilting, shriveling up on themselves, turning from green to brown to black, curling away. The roses on the vines, too, were turning black and falling off.
More cameras were clicking, and the two men in the car seemed torn between wanting to drive the crowd away, and wanting to check on the bundle on the lorry.
Amaline and Beatrice watched, mesmerised. Though they had all woken up to see the devil's vine twisting away from their houses, in some instances, disappearing like mist under the morning sun, they had all been sleep-befuddled. Now they watched as the bundle of vines seemed to blacken, shrink...
"It's an actual body," Amaline said, swallowing, as more of the seeker was revealed.
"And he's alive," Beatrice said. "I think he moved." She tugged at Amaline's arm again, and dragged her closer. The crowd, emboldened by her action, moved out of its paralysis and surged forward too.
"That can't be," Amaline said, suddenly finding the tourists surrounding them, "He's been trapped for hundreds of years. He can't be alive."
"Why not? We were trapped for hundreds of years," Beatrice said. "Maybe he's asleep, just like the city was." She pulled her along again, and rushed past the lorry driver and the men in the car, who were trying to wave the crowd away. In her jeans, it was easy to climb up to the lorry; Amaline hiked up her skirts and did the same.
Since she had awoken, she had only been all too conscious of what the city had taken away: Her father, Beatrice's family, the world that she knew, and even the life that she had been expecting. The curse had made her sleep, only to awake when she and the others in the city were unlike all the rest of the people in the land. Now, if there was a chance that the city left something...
They stood for a moment, ignoring the shouting crowd, then nodded to each other, knelt down beside the bundle, and began to pull the vines away.
There were shouts of horror: Amaline remembered that the vines were supposed to be dangerous, and the aid workers always wore gloves and masks when they touched it. But that was silly, she thought. The city had awoken, right?
There were more of the vines than she thought, but they were dying anyway. Amaline pulled handfuls away and squeezed them between her fingers with vengeful satisfaction. Beatrice had a grin on her face and she was pulling the vines off just as vigorously.
Amaline was suddenly aware that the crowd had stopped scrambling forward, and was watching the two of them instead, but it didn't matter to her. All that mattered was grabbing the vines and throwing them away. She could feel the remains of sharp thorns against her skin, but she didn't care. After hundreds of years, surely, she had... what was that word for those injections? Immunity.
It was not until they uncovered the whole seeker that Amaline and Beatrice stopped, and studied the man. He had been pierced with thorns in dozens of places, and he was wearing nothing more than rags.
But his chest was moving up and down slowly, as though in sleep.
the end
The city had been awakening for months, and they were still being surprised every other week. Just last month Amaline had heard that volunteers had found an abandoned store of spinning wheels and spindles, still in good condition in one of the warehouses.
That must have from the day when the king's proclamation came, Amaline thought, when it was ordered that there must no spinning wheel or spindle in the kingdom, lest the king's daughter should one day prick her finger and fall into a deep sleep until her true prince came for her. She vaguely remembered how they had carried Grandmother's spinning wheel to the city square, to find many others doing the same, until they created a veritable mountain of spinning wheels.
The city elders decided against burning them, as they were doing in the countryside, but they took them away anyway.
She wondered, if she went to the wharf now, she could still find Grandmother's spinning wheel and her handcarved spindles. No, she thought, smoothing down her skirt. What use did she have for spinning her own thread now, or weaving her own cloth?
There was no one to teach her, in any case. When Amaline woke from her slumber, it was to find that though her mother had survived, Grandmother had not: there were nothing but bones on the withered bed.
The rescuers - aid workers, she amended - had brought with them better cloth than she could ever weave. Thin and finer than even the ones her father had brought from Antwerp when she was a child. It was made of polyester, they said. And in such brilliant colours! Not even the weavers of Chine - known as China, the aid workers said - could make such cloth, she was sure.
"Amaline!"
It was her neighbour from down the street. "Beatrice," she said, raising one hand in greeting. They went to the same school, though she was really too old for school. But she had to learn how to make a new life, ever since she found her father freshly dead on the cobblestones beneath their open second-storey window. He had been leaning out when the curse hit, and and when the curse lifted, he had simply fallen.
The aid workers said school was to help them learn about modern things, now that the city had awakened and was no longer hidden in their little valley. The world had changed, her teacher told her. But Amaline knew that already, a week after she had first woken up from her own long sleep, stamping out the devil's vines with her bare feet (which no longer pricked the skin, but withered almost instantly to nothing), and come to the door of their townhouse to see a strange carriage with a red cross on it just at the street corner.
At her greeting, Beatrice came running. She was wearing those jeans that were growing in popularity throughout the city, and Amaline looked enviously at her. Her mother disapproved of breeches for females and had forbidden her to wear them.
"Have you heard?" Beatrice asked, her face flushed from the exertion.
On the other hand, it was really too hot for jeans, Amaline thought, ruffling her own skirt. They had awakened at the start of spring, as soundlessly as snowmelt flowing through the mountains, and it was going to be summer soon. The curse had come at the start of winter, and in her moments of wonderment Amaline wondered if they would go back into slumber when the seasons turned.
"Good morning, Beatrice," she said politely.
Beatrice tugged on her hand. She was the only one left of her family, and though she was Amaline's age, she tended to act much younger.
"They've found another one of the seekers!" she said excitedly. "Want to go and see?"
"Another one?" Amaline said. "Where?"
"At the castle stables," Beatrice said. "He must have thought it was a path to her" - she made the usual grimace to indicate that she meant the king's daughter - "but those devil's vines got him, in the end." She rolled her eyes. "They're still looking through the rest of the castle, to see if there're any more seekers stuck in a corner somewhere."
That sounded more interesting than wondering about spinning wheels, Amaline thought. "Let's go," she said. Hand in hand, she and Beatrice set off on the cobbled streets towards the castle, talking of the newest thing they had learnt. Amaline had seen pictures - and on TV, at school - that in other cities, there were now buildings as high as church spires. No, much higher: rising up from the ground, tall and straight, made of panes of glass as wide as a man, with dozens of levels. The windows didn't open in such towers, the teachers said.
"They said that the world's round, like a ball. Can you believe it?" Beatrice said. "And we live on the surface of this ball, and we go around the sun!"
Amaline had to laugh. They had gone through that in her class too, but she hadn't found anyone to talk about how unbelievable she found the whole idea.
"Really? But the sun's so small. What makes the world move, then?"
Beatrice shrugged. "We didn't get into that. They showed us pictures... and models." She waved a hand as though to encompass the models. "Oh, and did you know that most countries don't have kings anymore? Or princes. They said that in some countries, they killed kings." She lowered her voice in awed horror.
"Wish they'd done that to ours," Amaline said sourly.
"Amaline!"
"What, don't you think so?"
"But if we hadn't been cursed, we'd have died hundreds of years ago," Beatrice pointed out.
"Yes, but-" Amaline shrugged. She and many others had survived, but she still felt cheated somehow. And uneasy, whenever she thought about how much had changed in the rest of the world while her city slumbered, and how much they had not known. We're not supposed to be alive, she thought morbidly. The city had taken their proper fates from them.
They continued talking as they walked, ignoring the men who stared rudely at them. There were more journalists and curiosity-seekers (tourists, teachers said) each day, come to gawk at the people of the city and even to try to talk to them. But try as she might, Amaline just didn't understand what they were saying - even the teachers at the school struggled to make themselves understood sometimes.
"Look!" Beatrice said, tugging Amaline to a stop and breaking her chain of thought.
Were they were at the stables already? Amaline started to ask, then stopped as a mass of devil's vines seemed to float down the street.
Beatrice's hand gripped hers more tightly.
It was a jumble of brambles on a lorry, Amaline identified after a few seconds, pleased with herself for remembering the name for the wheeled contraption. Brambles made of the devil's vines, Amaline saw as the lorry came closer, and smelt the drowsy stench they gave out.
"Ugh," Beatrice said, holding her other hand to her nose. "Do you think there's really someone inside there?" she whispered. The other people on the street were also staring and many had taken out more of those 'cameras' so the air was full of clicking noises.
"I think so," Amaline said, shivering despite herself. The devil's vines must have been too thick to cut through when they found the seeker, so they hacked out the part containing him first. Somehow it was more horrible to think of a total stranger trapped inside those vines for the hundreds of years of the curse, than the rest of the city-dwellers who had fallen asleep where they stood.
They had all learnt that in the years the city lay in slumber, there had been any number of adventurous young men who came to seek the king's daughter and break her curse. But they had all fallen afoul of the devil's vines, either pierced and killed by the sharp thorns, or rendered immobile and then quite likely, simply wasting away - aid workers had found dozens of skeletons of seekers the first week they woke.
Then there was a loud bang, and the lorry stopped moving. A murmur of puzzlement came over the growing crowd, and heated discussion broke out. Another car, which must have been following the van, arrived, stopped, and the two people in it got out to talk to the driver of the lorry.
"What happened?" Amaline asked.
"I think one of its wheels is broken," Beatrice said.
Amaline saw where Beatrice was pointing, and saw that one of the wheels of the lorry sagged. She frowned; the wheels of these new vehicles were hardy, she had learnt. Then she saw a tell-tale spike, green as poison, poking from it. "It's the devil's vine," she said.
Beatrice made a face. It was the city's curse. Though most of the devil's vines had faded away, especially in the city, there were pockets where they still thrived, and they were nasty and dangerous, carrying a venom that could render a grown man unconscious when the thorns pierced skin. Hard enough to cause a lot of damage, it seemed. The aid workers had said they needed to do tests on it, whatever that meant.
"I think I can see the seeker," Amaline said, staring at the lorry's load, and gave a shiver. She could see the hint of something like clothing - or perhaps it was simply a dried leaf - which was probably all that was left of the seeker, other than his bones. "Wonder where he was from?" she wondered. There was little left of the seekers to show where they come from: only rusted swords and weapons.
"Look. The vines are dying," Beatrice said with satisfaction.
"Oh," Amaline said, swallowing, not sure if she wanted to see a skeleton revealed in front of her like this. Away from the castle, the vines were indeed wilting, shriveling up on themselves, turning from green to brown to black, curling away. The roses on the vines, too, were turning black and falling off.
More cameras were clicking, and the two men in the car seemed torn between wanting to drive the crowd away, and wanting to check on the bundle on the lorry.
Amaline and Beatrice watched, mesmerised. Though they had all woken up to see the devil's vine twisting away from their houses, in some instances, disappearing like mist under the morning sun, they had all been sleep-befuddled. Now they watched as the bundle of vines seemed to blacken, shrink...
"It's an actual body," Amaline said, swallowing, as more of the seeker was revealed.
"And he's alive," Beatrice said. "I think he moved." She tugged at Amaline's arm again, and dragged her closer. The crowd, emboldened by her action, moved out of its paralysis and surged forward too.
"That can't be," Amaline said, suddenly finding the tourists surrounding them, "He's been trapped for hundreds of years. He can't be alive."
"Why not? We were trapped for hundreds of years," Beatrice said. "Maybe he's asleep, just like the city was." She pulled her along again, and rushed past the lorry driver and the men in the car, who were trying to wave the crowd away. In her jeans, it was easy to climb up to the lorry; Amaline hiked up her skirts and did the same.
Since she had awoken, she had only been all too conscious of what the city had taken away: Her father, Beatrice's family, the world that she knew, and even the life that she had been expecting. The curse had made her sleep, only to awake when she and the others in the city were unlike all the rest of the people in the land. Now, if there was a chance that the city left something...
They stood for a moment, ignoring the shouting crowd, then nodded to each other, knelt down beside the bundle, and began to pull the vines away.
There were shouts of horror: Amaline remembered that the vines were supposed to be dangerous, and the aid workers always wore gloves and masks when they touched it. But that was silly, she thought. The city had awoken, right?
There were more of the vines than she thought, but they were dying anyway. Amaline pulled handfuls away and squeezed them between her fingers with vengeful satisfaction. Beatrice had a grin on her face and she was pulling the vines off just as vigorously.
Amaline was suddenly aware that the crowd had stopped scrambling forward, and was watching the two of them instead, but it didn't matter to her. All that mattered was grabbing the vines and throwing them away. She could feel the remains of sharp thorns against her skin, but she didn't care. After hundreds of years, surely, she had... what was that word for those injections? Immunity.
It was not until they uncovered the whole seeker that Amaline and Beatrice stopped, and studied the man. He had been pierced with thorns in dozens of places, and he was wearing nothing more than rags.
But his chest was moving up and down slowly, as though in sleep.
the end