Spin Read Online Free PDF Page A

That she was mad?”
    “ She believed she could tell the future. What else would you
call it?”
    “ She was a poet, Layla Vargas, that’s all she claimed. She
never admitted clairvoyancy for herself, she was like you in that
way, although she was never so fearful or strident in her denials.
You shouldn’t be so quick to thrust back your birthright. Not all
the gods love a savant, you know, especially not an ungrateful
one.”
    “ I’m not a savant, I’m a weaver. And the gods are
dead.”
    She held the
old woman’s gaze for a moment then lowered her eyes. She wished she
had not said that. Taunting Iona with her unbelief was one thing.
But this woman with her amethyst eyes was another, and Layla found
herself hoping she had not offended her. Her thoughts undulated in
slow waves like the sands of the desert, rattling and twining
together like snakes in a pit. Sunlight poured down like molten
metal, scalding the nape of her neck and rendering her tension to a
muddied ecstasy. Her head filled up with the roar of cicadas and
she realised, the irony of it pooling in her mind like grease at
the bottom of a cooking vat, that she was waiting for the
steel-blue heaven to open and swallow her.
    The old woman
shimmered in the heat like a mirage, and for a moment Layla seemed
to see not the monstrous ruined crone’s mask but the angular,
fiercely clever face of Bella Lukic, who began her career by
playing Athena in the vTV comedy at the centre of the KenTech
blasphemy trial, the scandal that made her notorious and then
successful. Layla blinked and then moved towards her, wanting to
see her more closely, to touch her even, but nausea rose in her
throat and she stumbled and fell. She crawled on her knees, feeling
the dust-covered gravel pierce her skin in a dozen places. She
clutched at a fence post, trying to right herself. A nettle bit
into her palm. Later that evening she saw its mark, a row of small
red welts, like the dotted line on a sewing template.
    When she
finally rose to her feet the old woman was gone.
    Idmon Vargas was a good father. He had cared for Layla with devotion even when Layla knew there were
those among his friends and his enemies who had said that it would
be better for him – better for business – if he disowned her as he
had disowned her mother. Layla loved him for his obstinate refusal
to listen to their advice. More than that, she loved him for the
way he had always treated her as an equal. It was from Idmon Vargas
that she first learned about the alchemy of colour, the quality of
silk, the seemingly magical properties of the murex snail. He
himself had learned the hard way: from scratch. He loved to repeat
the story of how he walked out of his own father’s house at the age
of fifteen with a ten-drachma note in his pocket and nothing to
show for himself in terms of work experience but the two summers
he’d spent as a dock worker in Tyre.
    Layla knew her
father’s methods were considered old-fashioned. The press method,
which involved harvesting the murex in their thousands and then
crushing them to a pulp to extract the dye, had been in use for
more than a generation and was the method employed by all the major
commercial cloth factories. By the time Layla was old enough to
card her own silks, even the exclusive couture houses who catered
to top clientele and who had derided the press method initially as
a cheap gimmick had gone over to it.
    Of the
larger producers only her father maintained the live cultivation
method, husbanding the murex snails in their natural environment
and milking them for their extract on a seasonal basis. Idmon
Vargas’s rationale was that the press method was wasteful and that
the dye it produced was never as pure or as rich as dye produced
using live cultivation. It sounded crazy but Layla knew he was
right. The untrained eye perhaps could be fooled, and press dyes
were serviceable enough for most usages, but for Layla her father’s
live bed dyes had a clarity of