Unplugged Adventure

The spinning lantern was the best thing in Wan Hundred Woods and everybody knew it.

Kiwi had built it years ago out of a lantern, a spindle and a loop of waxed string. You wound the string, you let go, and the lantern spun, and the whole Great Clearing filled up with rings of coloured light going round and round the trees. Green, gold, red, green, gold, red. On summer nights, everyone lay in the grass underneath it and went quiet.

Then one evening the string went twang, and the lantern came off the spindle and landed in the roots, and the spindle snapped in two places.

Everyone looked at the pieces.

"I can fix that," said Cheri.

She could, as well. She was the only one who could. Two summers earlier, Cheri had spent a whole afternoon measuring the spinning lantern, because nobody had ever written it down. She had the length of the spindle. She had the weight of the lantern. She had the number of turns you had to wind, which was eleven, and which she had counted eleven separate times to be sure.

She built the new spindle in a day and a half. Straight. True. Better than the old one, because the old one had been made in an afternoon by an eight-year-old with a knife.

They all came out at dusk to see.

Cheri wound it eleven turns and let go.

The lantern spun. Light went round the clearing. Green, gold, red.

It was fine.

Nobody said anything, because nobody wanted to be the one to say it, and Blueberri put her chin on her knees, because Blueberri already knew.

It was fine. It was not the other thing.

"The speed is correct," said Cheri, to the tally board.

She built another spindle. This one was even truer. It was worse.

She built a third with a smoother collar, and a fourth that ran on vine instead of string. Each one turned more evenly than the last. Every single time, the light went round in a neat, tidy, well-behaved circle, and every single time it was fine.

On the fifth evening Cheri sat under her tally board with four spindles laid out in a row in front of her, all correct, and could not think of one more thing to measure.

"It wobbled," said Kiwi quietly, from behind her. "The old one. The spindle was a bit bent. It always was. I never got round to—"

"A bent spindle is a mistake," said Cheri.

"Yeah," said Kiwi.

Cheri looked at her numbers. Length, weight, turns, speed. She had written down everything about that lantern except the one thing that had been wrong with it, because you do not write down the mistakes. That is what makes them mistakes.

And she had absolutely no idea how to build a wobble on purpose.

Which is when Jackfroot, who had been sitting still for nearly a whole evening and had reached his limit, picked the lantern up off the grass, tucked it under one arm, and ran.

"JACKFROOT—"

He went round the outside of the Great Clearing at top speed with the light swinging beside him, and the trees lit up green, gold, red, green, gold, red, and the ring went round everybody, wide and swinging and completely uneven.

It was better than the lantern had ever been.

Everyone was on their feet and shouting.

Jackfroot came round the third time and started to slow, and the light went sludgy and stopped being a ring and became a rabbit carrying a lamp.

"Faster!" someone yelled.

"He can't go faster," said Cheri. "He's already—"

And then she stopped, because she was already working it out, and she could not have stopped working it out if she had tried.

She watched him go round once more. She counted it. She looked at the size of the clearing. She knew that one. She looked at the height Jackfroot was holding the lantern. She could see that one. Then she called it out across the grass in the voice she uses for things she is certain about.

"From the flat rock to the fern and back is one time round! Jackfroot, that's your pace — hold that! Everybody else, when he passes you, go! Space yourselves out!"

They did what she said, because when Cheri says a number in that voice, you do.

Six of them, spread evenly round the edge of the Great Clearing, the lantern going hand to hand at exactly the speed Cheri had called, and the ring of light never once stopping.

Cheri ran her turn last. The tallest thing in Wan Hundred Woods went round the clearing holding the light up high where only she could hold it, and everybody in the grass turned to watch her go by, and for once being the one everybody was looking at was the best part of the evening.

When they finally stopped, the lantern sat in the middle of the grass, still lit and not spinning, and the ring of it stayed in everybody's eyes for a while afterwards, the way it does.

The four correct spindles stayed under the tally board all night, and nobody went and got them.