Forest Mage. Robin Hobb

forces of nature, and only embellished by your people. I do not need to pay you to see what is right before my eyes! Please stay out of my way.’

      For an instant, his eyes narrowed and I thought he would snarl at me. Then, his eyes widened, and to my surprise, he mimed another of his elaborate shrugs. He gestured towards the towering stone, making a small bow as he did so. ‘Do as you will, sir,’ he said. Then he bowed again and backed away from me. I stared after him, puzzled, for I had detected no sarcasm or rudeness in his words.

      But as he turned away from me, I lifted my eyes and perceived the real reason for his sudden loss of interest. Creaking down the steep trail was a team and wagon. The open wagon had been decked as if for a holiday outing. A sunshade of bright yellow was suspended over its passengers. A banner painted on the side of the wagon proclaimed, ‘See the Wondrous Spindle!’. Within, a dozen passengers of all ages sat on cushioned benches, the ladies holding parasols against the spring sunshine. As my erstwhile guide hastened towards them, I saw my error. I had stumbled into his commercial endeavour unawares. Now that his true prey had arrived, he was forsaking me for a richer prize. That was as well with me. I turned my back on the tourists’ arrival and set my attention on the Spindle.

      It was taller than the tallest building I’d ever seen, and far more massive. My eyes travelled to the towering tip, and then down the rod. It appeared to dwindle to a single sharp point touching the ground. I walked to the edge of the depression that cupped it and looked down. The sides of the bowl sloped steeply down, and the narrow point of the Spindle was lost in deep shadow, like a giant pen plunged into an inkwell. The whole structure leaned at a sharp angle, not touching the sides of the well, apparently supported by a small joining hidden within the well. That ran counter to my engineer’s instincts. How could such a small anchorage of rock support that weight? Even at this closer perspective, it still maintained its illusion of motion.

      For a time I stood there, my neck craned, staring down at the Spindle’s tip in the deeply shadowed bowl. What had seemed when viewed from a distance a fine point in proportion to the gargantuan Spindle was in fact a substantial girth of stone. Where it disappeared from sight in the depths of the hole it had seemingly drilled in the earth, the cylinder’s girth was still as wide as a watchtower’s base. It must have been still. If it hadn’t been still, the grinding of the stone tip against the depths would have been deafening, as if a giant mortar and pestle were at work. But my gullible eyes still insisted that the Spindle spun. I shook my head to clear it of the optical illusion and tried to focus my mind on the real puzzle: What kept it in place? Given its mass and how it leaned, why hadn’t it fallen ages ago?

      I had been certain that a closer view would reveal the trick of it. But now, standing as close to the base as I could get without tumbling into its well, I was as puzzled as ever. A lone tower edged with winding steps spiralled up to almost reach the lower side of the tilted Spindle’s topmost tip. I resolved that I would hike to the standing tower and climb the stairs. It looked as if the tower came so close to the Spindle’s tip that I could actually put my hands on it, to prove to myself that it could not be rotating. All thoughts of keeping this side trip to a brief detour had vanished from my mind. I would satisfy my curiosity at all costs. I lifted my eyes to pick out the best route over the broken land and immediately saw a faint footpath across the stony earth. Obviously, I was not the first gawker to have such an ambition. Confident that Sirlofty could mind himself, I left him standing and followed the track.

      When my path led me directly beneath the Spindle and through its shadow, I went with trepidation. At the heart of the shadow, the day seemed to dim. I could swear I felt a distant chill wind, manufactured of the Spindle’s turning, brush my cheek. I felt in my chest rather than heard the deep rumbling of the Spindle’s eternal motion. The ghost wind seemed to slide a hand across the top of my head, stirring an uncomfortable memory of how the Tree Woman had caressed me. I was glad to step out of that shadow and away from those strange fancies, even though the day now seemed brighter and the sun too hot on my skull.

      My path was not straight, but wandered through the broken walls and sunken roads of the fallen city that intersected my route. The stubs of the walls gave witness to the half-breed guide’s claim that the Spindle was a man-made wonder, for some were built of the same reddish stone as the Spindle and still bore odd patterns, an alternation of checkering and spirals, at once foreign and familiar. I walked more slowly, and began to see the suggestions of sly faces eroding from leaning slabs of wall. Hollow mouths fanged with now dulled teeth, carved hands reduced by time to blunt paws, and voluptuous women whittled by the wind to become sexless boys teased my eyes.

      I climbed up on one corner of wall and looked around me. From that vantage point I could almost make sense of the tumbled walls and collapsed roofs. I jumped down and once more began to thread my way through … what? A temple town? A village? A graveyard of ancient tombs? Whatever it was, it had fallen, leaving the Spindle and its tower to lord it over the time-gnawed remains. How could a folk with tools of stone, bone and bronze have shaped such a vast creation? I even considered giving the guide a hector on my return, to see if he had a believable answer to the question.

      When I reached the base of the tower, I discovered two things. The first was that it was in much poorer condition than it had seemed from a distance. The second was that it was not a proper building at all. It consisted only of a spiralling stair that wound up and around a solid inner core. You could not enter the tower at all; you could only ascend to its peak by the outer stair. A crude barrier of ropes and poles had been thrown up in front of the tower’s first step, as if to warn people off. I paid no heed to it. The lips of the stairs were rounded. The centre of each step dipped, tribute to the passage of both feet and years. The walls of the stair’s core had once been tiled with mosaics. Glimpses of them remained: an eye and a pair of leering lips, a paw with claws outstretched, the fat-cheeked face of a little child with eyes closed in bliss. Round and round I climbed, ever ascending. I felt a giddy familiarity yet could recall no similar experience in my life. Here, in the mosaic, the head of a red and black croaker bird gaped its beak open wide. Then, a tree, arms reaching up to the sun with its face turned to its rays. I had passed it by a dozen steps before it came to me that a tree should have neither arms nor a face. There was graffiti, too, the ever-present proclamation that someone had been here, or that someone loved someone forever. Some of it was old but most of it was fresh.

      I expected to grow weary with the climb. The day was warm, the sun determined, and I was carrying more flesh than I’d ever had in my life. Yet there was something exhilarating about being up so high with nothing between me and a sheer drop to the rocky ground below the spire. With every step I took, the music of the spinning Spindle grew louder; I could feel the vibration in my bones. I felt the wind of its passage on my face. There was even a peculiar scent that I knew was generated by the stone’s movement, a warm smell, delicious: like singed spices. I stopped watching the stairs and looked up to the Spindle. I could see the striated stone core. It, perhaps, was still. But there was a hazy layer of air or mist that surrounded the Spindle, and it spun. I cannot explain the fascination and delight that this woke in me.

      The top of the tower culminated in a platform the size of a small room. A low stone wall edged it, but on one side a crack had corrupted it and the stone had eroded away to an uneven mound only about the height of my knee. I walked to the centre of the platform, and then stood, looking straight up at the tip of the Spindle above me. I am a tall man, but its stony heart was still out of my reach. It puzzled me. Why had they built this spire, to bring someone so close to the wondrous monument and still have it be out of reach? It made no sense. The wind of the spinning stuff’s passage was warm on my face and redolent with spice.

      I took a moment and stared out at the view. The ruined city was cupped in the canyon. The sightseers had disembarked from the wagon and stood in a respectful mob around the half-breed. I knew he was speaking to them, but not a sound reached my ears save the soft hum of the turning Spindle. I gazed up at it. I suddenly knew I had come here for a reason. I reached a slow hand up over my head.

      Suddenly, a voice spoke near by.

      ‘Don’t touch it.’

      I jumped and looked to see who had spoken. It was the plainswoman from the guide’s hut, or someone very like her. She must have