Gathering Blue - Lois Lowry [28]
He nodded and said that such things could be provided.
He came each evening to her quarters to assess her work and to ask her needs. It seemed strange to Kira that she could make requests and to have them answered.
But Thomas said it had always been so for him, too. The kinds of wood — ash, heartwood, walnut, or curly maple — each had been brought when he asked. And they had given him tools of all sorts, some he had not known of before.
The days, busy ones, tiring ones, began to pass.
One morning as Kira prepared to go to the dyer's hut, Thomas came to her room.
"Did you hear anything last night?" he asked her uncertainly. "Maybe a sound that woke you?"
Kira thought. "No," she told him. "I slept soundly. Why?"
He seemed puzzled, as if he were trying to remember something. "I thought I heard something, a sound like a child crying. I thought it woke me. But maybe it was a dream. Yes, I guess it was a dream."
He brightened and shrugged off the little mystery. "I've made something for you," he told her. "I've been doing it in the early mornings," he explained, "before I started my regular work."
"What is your usual work, Thomas?" Kira asked. "Mine's the robe, of course. But what have they set you to do?"
"The Singer's staff. It's very old, and his hands — and the hands of other Singers in the past, I suppose — have worn the carvings down so it must all be recarved. It's difficult work. But important. The Singer uses the carvings of the staff to find his place, to remind him of the sections in the Song. And there's a large place at the top that has never been carved. Eventually I'll be doing that, carving it for the first time, making my own designs." He laughed. "Not my own, really. They'll tell me what to put there.
"Here." Shyly, Thomas reached into his pocket and handed her the gift. He had made her a small box with a tight fitting lid, its top and sides intricately carved in the pattern of the plants she was beginning to learn and to know. She examined it with delight. She recognized the tall spikes of yarrow and its dense clustered blossoms; around them twined the flopping stems of coreopsis, above a carved base of that plant's mounded dark and feathery leaves.
She knew instantly what she wanted to place in the exquisite box. The small scrap of decorated cloth that she had carried in her pocket on the day of the trial and that comforted her loneliness when she held it before sleeping, was hidden away in one of the drawers that contained supplies. She no longer carried it with her because she feared losing it during her long walks through the woods and her long days hard at work with the dyer.
Now, with Thomas watching, she fetched the scrap and laid it in the box.
"It's a lovely thing," he said, seeing the small cloth.
Kira stroked it before she closed the lid. "It speaks to me somehow," she told him. "It seems almost to have life." She smiled, embarrassed, because she knew it was an odd thing and that he would not understand and could perhaps find her foolish.
But Thomas nodded. "Yes," he said to her surprise. "I have a piece of wood that does the same. One I carved long ago, when I was just a tyke.
"And sometimes I feel it in my fingers still, the knowledge that I had then."
He turned to leave.
That you had then? No more? The knowledge doesn't stay? Kira was dismayed at the thought but she said nothing to her friend.
Though there was still so much information she needed to acquire from Annabella, Kira was forced to make her learning time at the dyer's cott shorter because it was important to begin to work on the Singer's robe and she needed the daylight. She was glad now of the tiled bathroom that had caused her such confusion at first. The warm water and soap helped to rid her hands of stains, and it was vital that her hands be clean when she touched the robe.
She still had her small frame, the one that Matt had saved from the fire, but there was no need of it. Among the supplies