The greenhouse was almost oppressively humid. The dry air of the outside clashed so completely with the moistness of the inside that Ruth's skin always crawled from the shock. But it was also cooler, somehow. Even though the room was enshrouded in glass on top of a huge crawler with no protection from the oppressive sun, the light streamed in and was filtered through layers of condensation, moss, violets and vines that grew all around. Ruth liked this canopy; it felt alive, like another character in the story of the greenhouse. The mulberry swayed slightly as the crawler hit rocks here or there, the little silkworms inched along on the leaves, munching and digesting to make their product, and the vines, protecting from above and giving the whole room a big hug. It wasn't a particularly large greenhouse - maybe twenty feet wide and sixty feet long. But it was home to her family's livelihood, and today, it housed them both as they sat in the back corner, spinning silkworm cocoons into beautiful silk thread. That's right, today is spinning day, Ruth thought. It would be difficult to interrupt them. When Timon and Zilah got to spinning, they sang merry songs to keep time and make the hours go by. They were somewhat famous for it, and she heard them now as she recovered from the shock of entering the building.
Her mother's high, clear voice pierced the green undergrowth and trunks and echoed a lovely soprano, sounding as if it came from everywhere at once.
Dark am I, yet lovely,
daughters of Jerusalem,
dark like plains that stretch before us,
like the tribe of Solomon!
Do not think me black inside
for I am darkened by the sun,
Tell me you who I love dearly
am I yours as well, the one?
Without dropping a beat, Zilah passed the song to Timon. Her father's baritone was sonorous, emerging from the soil below Ruth's toes and shaking her bones like the vibration of the crawler below.
Liken I my darling fair
to a mare among the horses strong,
though you exceed all in beauty
To your strength have I been drawn!
Glist'ning are your cheeks and bosom
covered in the finest jewels,
But none like your eyes could I see
They have taken me a fool!
Back and forth they continued, and Ruth listened for several minutes. She relished in her parents' spinning songs, and recalled sitting at their feet for hours when she was a little girl. The giant spinning wheels took two sets of feet to operate; they would sit on opposite sides of the wheel facing each other on long planks, the wheel between them. They would lean from side to side, pushing on the long foot pedals they shared, swaying in rhythm with their song, to drive the wheel for hours. The cocoons of the silkworms sat in buckets all around them, and they picked a handful up at a time, adding it to the tuft they already formed in their hands and deftly working it in to create an unbroken strand. The dull grey bundles of fiber turned into beautiful, white yarn with deft fingers, pulling at the tuft just enough to create a thin spot which then twisted over itself hundreds of times as the giant spinning wheel spun their bobbins. They fed the newly minted yarn slowly forward onto the ever-growing spool, and just like that, their song and their handiwork manifested onto a wooden spindle.
Just as she remembered them, she found them, sitting at the back of the workshop-cum-greenhouse. They continued their love song, swaying in time, eyes closed. Their adept fingers scooped up new cocoons at just the right moment, fed them onto the thread, and she could see fifteen or twenty bobbins of ready-to-weave silk thread already sitting on the table next to them. She creeped forward so as to not disturb them, but her cautiousness in being silent failed her: she caught an errant mulberry root and fell forward with a crash. In a second, both her parents rose from their places, the spinning wheel still rotating at nearly top speed. They hopped off and rushed over to her.
"Ruth!" said her mother worriedly. "Are you alright?"
"I'm fine, mother," she said, getting up and dusting herself off, more embarrassed than hurt. "I was trying not to interrupt, I'm sorry," she added, feeling the redness grow in her face.
"My dear, you are never an interruption," said her father warmly. He embraced her, and she felt the flush fade away, replaced with warmth in her chest. "Oh, you're wearing your betrothal cap!" He let her out of his arms, and held her at length, as if to take in every detail. "I still can't hardly believe it. You look just like your mother did when we were betrothed, did you know that?"
"Timon," she warned mildly. "You know she doesn't want to talk about it." Her mother glanced at her with an empathetic smile.
"It's okay, Father," said Ruth. "The cap is beautiful, isn't it?"
"Indeed it is," he replied. "I have to remember to thank Serah for it again."
"I don't blame you," said her mother. "I've always found this betrothal business to be so exhausting. Why, when your cousin Euodia was betrothed last turning, I had to help cook everything because her mother was ill, and the poor girl was so scared she vomited five minutes before the ceremony!" She began waving her hands all around, as if to strengthen her point. "And there's the first meeting, and the feast, and the second meeting, and the confirmation, and the ceremony itself, and it's all so much to put on a little girl!"
At this Ruth bristled. "I'm not little!" she said forcefully. "I'm three and a half Turnings!"
"And I'm thirteen Turnings. I've seen enough betrothals to know it's too much to put on someone so young," her mother replied gently. Her tired, gentle eyes quelled the little fire stoked behind Ruth's, and her father interjected.
"I am so glad that you came over, though," he said. "We told Eleazar's parents that we would bring some silk yarn, and I need you to dye it. After all, it's good luck for the bride to have her hand in the dowry!"
This was an old tradition in the Caravan. Long ago before the Mothers, many had little and few had much, and dowries were how one family convinced the other that a marriage was worth the price of losing a child. Nowadays, they were a mere formality; a token more than anything. But then as now, it was always considered a good omen if the bride made an item for the groom's family, and the groom for the bride's. So it would be Ruth's job to dye the silk that her parents spun. She lifted the heavy spools from the little table, barely able to wrap her arms around them for how full they were, and carried them one by one to the dyeing basin. She added heaps of crushed up violet petals and mulberries to the hot water, stirred with the heavy paddle, and added the spools of thread. The dye wouldn't absorb all the way through the tightly wound silk, but that was intentional; later, her mother would take these to the workshop and weave them into beautiful bolts of cloth that changed from a deep purple on one end to a pearly white on the other.
As much as Ruth loved to watch her parents work the wheel, it was the loom where her mother's prowess truly shone: she used opposing threads, one that started purple and the other that started white, to create intricate woven patterns that mirrored each other at the ends, but blended into an even light lavender in the middle. No one else in the caravan knew her mother's pattern, and Ruth hoped dearly that one day she would learn. But that day was not today; instead, she bustled from table to basin to drying rack, dyeing the spools only a bit faster than her parents could produce them. Before long her brow twinkled with sweat under the increasingly oppressive (though thoroughly unchanging) sunlight, and her arms and legs ached from the work. But she pressed onward as best she could.
Finally, just as she caught up to her parents' rapid pace, Ruth heard the bells of the switchover toll once again. This was the end of work, and the beginning of leisure. She went back to the drying rack and quickly selected the deepest-dyed spool from the first batch. She ran it over to the wringing wheel, where she fed in an end and, switching it on, the thread was taken up into the wheel rapidly. It was stretched over rollers and wheels until it was as taut as could be, and the moisture of the dye fell out of the thread. It took only a few minutes to run the entire spool through the wringer as her parents packed up, and as they began to approach the door the thread was mostly dry and rewound onto the spool.
"The color of this one is magnificent," said her father. He lifted the spool from the wheel and held it up to the sunlight, and the brilliant white, filtered through violets and vines, reflected a soft iridescent purple off the surface. He wrapped his arm around Ruth and put a finger behind his glasses, wiping away a tear. He looked at her mother, whose eyes also shimmered in the sunlight.
"What's wrong, father?" said Ruth. She saw her father cry occasionally, but usually over sad things like someone dying or a crawler breaking down, and her mother she saw do so even less.
"Nothing, my darling," he replied, his voice shaking slightly.
"You be a good girl tonight, Ruth," said her mother, so steadily it seemed pinned in place. "Eleazar's family is different than ours, but it's our duty to be polite when we get to the 9th. They have different rules than ours, and it's our job to be good guests."
Ruth's nose crinkled. "They're part of the caravan too aren't they? What do they do?" Her father had been excited when he found the match, but now he seemed much more hesitant than before.
"Well..." he trailed off for just a moment.
"They're engine-smiths," interjected her mother in the space her father had left. "They are builders and fixers of the great engines that keep our caravan moving." She clapped her hands together, as if to close the conversation. "They are respectable, noble people, and they do respectable, noble work, just like all of us."
Ruth could sense the unease between her parents. They were rarely like this; they almost always spoke as though a river of honey ran between them, but now they were like two rocks attempting to slip past each other. The sweet song of their voices was replaced with grating unease.
And all at once Ruth was in a enormous, dingy metal box on the eighth row. All around her sparks flew and oil dripped as hulking cylinder-boxes were bored, huge round bits as wide as she was lowering on reticulating spiderlike arms. They carved deep gashed holes in the hunks of metal, debris going everywhere. Her parents' rough words cavernously echoed in this cave of a workshop as men in dirty coveralls shouted at each other. Air-drills whirred and whined, clacking against rusted, mismatched bolts salvaged from the carcasses of crawlers long dead. The souls of their former occupants were scattered on the floor with the dirt and grime as they were sanded down to usability. The monstrousness of reassembling alloy homunculi from the spent parts of the homes of the long dead was overshadowed by the oppressive size of the greatest and most terrible engine.
A dozen men hung from trapezes dangling from a ceiling so high up they seemed to float in midair (or maybe it was so dingy Ruth simply couldn't see it). They wore mismatched welding masks and shop goggles, smiling with broken teeth and burnt lips and oil-smudged faces. Their grimaces reflected dimly in the half-light, and one lowered himself to the infernal contraption's side. He fiddled with wires and cables until he found the two he wanted, and he touched them together, creating a blinding arc. The engine roared to life. Fire and smoke poured from its cylinder-box. It spewed oil and grime and burnt and vibrated the air.
Overwhelmed, Ruth curled up on the floor in the metal box and began to sob. She was not in her quiet greenhouse anymore. The mulberries and silkworms felt a thousand miles away, and she would never escape. The sparks burnt her, the oil showered her and covered her in sticky black grime. Her teeth chattered and her lungs burnt. She was lost.
She snapped back to the 11th, in the peaceful greenhouse of her parents, when she felt a firm hand on her shoulder. Shaking, she reached up and grabbed it, rubbing it as if to anchor her to where she was.
"Are you alright, my darling?" Her father looked worried. He was at eye level, and his gaze pierced directly into hers. She looked away.
"I'm sorry, I'm fine," she said. Her hands still shook; they still felt at once tacky and slick, as if they were still covered in grime. She opened and closed them, squeezing hard. they began to feel more like hers.
"I'm so sorry I didn't tell you sooner," he said, his voice still shaking. "I wanted to do right by you, and I found you a good match in age, and his family says Eleazar is kind and gentle just like you, and--"
Her mother interrupted again. "He is from the eighth," she finished. Her lips pursed tightly.
It was taught widely in the caravan that all rows were equal, all labors were equal, and all people were equal, but everyone knew that the best and richest families lived at the front. At the very front were the Mothers of the Turning and the Linemasters, behind them were the merchants and engineers. A move to the eighth was good for the family.
A moment passed, then her mother finally broke the silence. "Ruth, know that no matter what, you are of our blood and of our row. Whether you and Eleazar decide to live here or on the eighth, you will always be welcome." She gave her daughter a hug, and then stood up and held her hand. "Let's get to the cart. We'll go together as a family."