The Lady Who Mended the Sky

Part One. The Crack

On Monday morning, there was a crack in the sky, and it was directly over our school.

It ran from one side of the playground to the other, long and thin and jagged, like a line on a plate that has been dropped. The blue on one side of it was a bit darker than the blue on the other side. And every so often, a tiny sparkle fell out of it and landed on the tarmac with a plink.

We all stood in a line at the fence. Nobody went in. Kenji said it was probably a plane. Ollie said planes don't leave cracks. Dot said she wanted to put a plaster on it.

Alex picked up a sparkle. Felix picked up another. They were small, smooth stones, one red and one yellow, and they were warm, like toast.

"They're the ones from last night," said Alex.

"From the voice," said Felix.

"The voice that wanted to know who could mend a hole in the sky," said Alex.

Willow, the Bengal reading cat, sat down in the exact middle of the playground, tipped her head right back, and stared at the crack for a long time. She does not blink much anyway. But she blinked once, very slowly, which is what she does when she thinks something is important.

That's when we heard someone say, "Mind the ladder!"

Part Two. The Lady on the Ladder

The ladder was enormous. It went right up from the middle of the playground to the crack in the sky, rung after rung, and it was wobbling.

At the top was a lady.

She had black hair piled up in two big buns, and a long robe the colour of sunrise. She had a smudge of yellow clay on her nose. And from the waist down, she was not a lady at all. Her body trailed away behind her in a long, shining, green-gold tail, coiled round and round the ladder like a stripe on a candy cane.

She was holding a bucket. She was dabbing at the crack with a very large brush.

"Hello down there!" she called. "Nobody move! I'm doing something delicate!"

We nobody-moved for about twenty minutes. Then the bucket ran out, and she slid gently down the ladder, using her tail like a fireman's pole, and landed in the playground with a soft bump.

Her badge, pinned to her robe, said Mrs Nuwa, Art and Clay.

"Oh, there you are," she said, beaming at us. "I do hope you're the ones who can help. I've been up there all night and the sky is simply not behaving."

Mister Harris came running out of the school. He had his clipboard under one arm and his tie over his shoulder. He looked at the crack, and at the ladder, and at Mrs Nuwa's tail.

"You must be our new Art teacher," he said faintly.

"I am," said Mrs Nuwa. "I'm so sorry about the mess. May I borrow your art cupboard?"

Mister Harris blinked. "Haven't we met before? You were Ms Wa. The pottery lady. With the turtle."

"That was me," said Mrs Nuwa. "I've been promoted. Art and Clay is a much bigger cupboard."

Part Three. Maya Knows

"She's Nüwa," said Maya.

She said it at break, in a whisper, at the end of the bench. She'd been awake since five. She had stuck three extra pages into her notebook, and her pencil had worn down to a stub.

"Nüwa is from China," she said. "She's one of the oldest and most important goddesses in the whole of Chinese mythology. The body of a lady, and the tail of a snake. And the best thing about her is that she's a maker."

"A maker of what?" said Felix.

"People," said Maya. "That's the story. When the world was new, there were mountains and rivers and birds and fish, but no people at all. Nüwa was lonely. So she knelt down by a river and scooped up some yellow clay, and she started to shape a little person, with a head and arms and legs. And when she put it down, it jumped up and danced."

"She made a person?" said Dot.

"She made lots," said Maya. "But there was a problem. Making people takes ages, one at a time. So after a while, she got a long rope and dragged it through the mud, and the drops that flicked off became people too, quickly. In the old story, the ones she made by hand were the special ones, and the ones from the rope were everyone else. But I think that's silly. I think they were all special."

"Me too," said Alex.

"Me too," said Felix.

"And then the sky cracked," said Maya. "Two powerful beings had a terrible fight, and one of them crashed into the pillar that holds the sky up, and it broke. There were floods and fires. The sky had a huge hole in it. So Nüwa went and found five stones, red and yellow and blue and white and black, and melted them down together, and used them to patch the hole."

She held up her hand. In it was a warm red pebble.

"Just like this," she said.

Part Four. The Missing Thing

Mrs Nuwa gave us the full story herself, after lunch, in the art cupboard, which she had turned into a workshop.

There were pots of clay on every shelf: red clay and brown clay and cream clay. There were little clay people drying on the windowsill, each with a different face. There was a clay cat, which Willow circled suspiciously, and a clay dragon, which Ollie kept trying to pick up.

On the big table in the middle were five stones. They were red, yellow, blue-green, white and black, and each one was as big as a loaf of bread.

"I have the stones," said Mrs Nuwa. "I've done all this before. Heat them till they melt, mix them, paint the patch over the crack. It worked every time before, thousands of years ago, and it worked again when I was Ms Wa. But this time, it won't hold."

"Why not?" said Alex.

"Because the crack is wider than before," said Mrs Nuwa. She rubbed her nose, and added a second yellow smudge. "And I think I know why. When I mended the sky the first time, there was only one story about how the world began, and it was mine. Everyone knew it. Everyone agreed. It was easy."

"And now?" said Felix.

"Now there are so many," said Mrs Nuwa. "People all over the world, in all sorts of places, have told how it all began in their own way. And lots of them have been told in this very school, by my colleagues. The sky is big, you see. A patch made from only one story is too small to cover it."

"So what do you need?" said Maya.

Mrs Nuwa looked at the five stones. She looked at the crack through the window, which was a little longer than it had been that morning.

"I need them all," she said. "Every story of how the world began. Every one I can find. I'll weave them together into one patch. And I need the people who know them best, to tell them to me."

Part Five. The Staff Room

She asked at the staff meeting on Tuesday.

We were not meant to be in the staff room. But we had come to return a rather large book, and then we couldn't get out, because the door was blocked by Mister Coyote, who was holding a sandwich. So we stood quietly at the back, behind the biscuit tin: Alex, Felix, Maya, Dot, Willow and a lot of crumbs.

"Colleagues," said Mrs Nuwa, standing on a chair, "I need your help. I need the story of how the world began, from every one of you. Whatever your people tell. I'll take them one at a time."

"I'll start!" said Mister Maui, jumping up. He had a fish hook on a string round his neck, and sand on his feet. "In my part of the world, the islands didn't always exist. There was just water. So I got my brothers to take me out in a canoe, and I let down my magic hook. And I felt a tug, an enormous tug, and I hauled and hauled, and up came the land! The islands, all of them, one after another."

"I like that one," whispered Dot.

"Mine is next," said Ms Athene, gliding forward, with her owl. "In the beginning, there was Chaos. Not a mess, a great yawning space, with nothing in it. And out of that space came Earth, called Gaia, who was wide and warm and good for growing things. And from her came the sky, and the sea, and the mountains."

"Mine," said Mrs Oshun, in her golden dress, with a jingle of bracelets. "There was only water, and a sky above. A great chain was lowered down from the sky. A traveller came sliding down it, holding a snail shell filled with a handful of earth, and a hen. He poured the earth on the water, and put the hen on top, and she scratched and scattered it, and it spread and spread into the whole world."

"A hen!" said Ollie.

"Of course a hen," said Mrs Oshun, with a smile.

Part Six. The Egg, the Corn and the Lotus

"I'll go," said Mister Väinö, from the corner. He had a long white beard and a five-stringed instrument on his lap. "In Finland, we say that long ago there was only the air, and the sea, and a lady called Ilmatar who floated on the waves. A duck came and made a nest on her knee, and laid seven eggs. But when Ilmatar twitched, the eggs rolled off and broke. And from the pieces came the world. The bottom of the shell became the earth, and the top became the sky. The yolk became the sun, and the white became the moon, and the speckles became the stars."

"A duck," said Kenji, dreamily.

"Mine is a good one," said Mister Ketz, from the kitchen door. He was the cook, in a tall white hat, with a ladle. "The old gods wanted to make people who could say thank you. They tried mud, and the mud people fell apart. They tried wood, and the wood people forgot to look up. And at last they tried corn. They ground the yellow and white corn into dough, and shaped it, and people who were made of corn were the right ones."

"That's why I like corn," said Ollie, seriously.

"I was in a clamshell," said Mister Raven, from the windowsill. "Or the first people were, anyway. I found it on the beach, a big one, and inside were tiny creatures, too shy to come out. So I talked them out with chatter and tricks until they stepped into the light."

Mrs Lakshmi told about a lotus floating on a still ocean, and Miss Bastet about a hill that rose out of the dark water, in only a few quiet words each.

"Mine is mostly weather," said Mister Hadad, and his cloud rumbled shyly.

"A tree," said Madam Simurgh, quietly, from the back. "A tree with every seed in it, and I shook it, and they flew out to every corner of the earth."

Mrs Nuwa wrote them all down on a long scroll. She wrote very fast. When she had finished, it ran all the way along the table and off the end.

Part Seven. Whose is Right?

That's when it went wrong.

"Hang on," said Mister Maui. "If the land came out of the sea, how can it have come out of Chaos?"

"Chaos came first," said Ms Athene. "The water came after."

"The water was always there," said Mrs Oshun.

"I wasn't listening," said Mister Coyote, with his mouth full. "I was busy with my sandwich. But I'm sure mine was first."

"Mine was first," said Mister Väinö, going pink.

"It was a clamshell," said Mister Raven, ruffling.

"It was corn," said Mister Ketz.

"A lotus!"

"An egg!"

"A chain!"

"A hill!"

"We were here first!"

"Yes, but we were here loudest!"

It got louder and louder. Mister Hadad's black cloud came out and began to rumble. Miss Pele's hair started to smoke. Baba Yaga banged her ladle on the table. Mister Harris shouted for order, and nobody listened, and in the middle of it all, a thin, high, creaking sound came from the window.

We all stopped and looked.

Out in the playground, the crack in the sky had split down the middle. It had gone from a line to a gap. And through the gap, we could see something we had never seen at lunchtime. It was black, and speckled, and bottomless.

It was the night.

Part Eight. Things Start to Float

The first thing to go was Mister Harris's hat.

It lifted off his head, very slowly, as if someone had tied a string to it, and rose into the air. It drifted across the playground towards the gap, turning round and round.

"My hat!" shouted Mister Harris.

Then a lunchbox went up. Then a football. Then a pair of wellies, side by side, then a whole row of coats from the pegs. They rose into the air in a slow, silent flock, all heading for the crack, and the sky seemed to be breathing them in.

"It's pulling things up!" cried Maya.

We clung to the fence. We clung to the railings. Willow dug her claws into the grass. Ollie wrapped himself round a lamp post, and Kenji grabbed Ollie. And in the middle of the playground, in the open, hopping up and down because she wanted to see better, was Dot.

"Look at me!" shouted Dot. "I'm light as a feather!"

She was. Her shoes were an inch off the ground. Then three inches. Then a foot.

"Dot!" shrieked Maya.

"I'm going up!" shouted Dot, with enormous interest.

Alex and Felix did not stop to think. They ran across the open playground, side by side, with the wind tugging at their coats. Alex leapt. Felix leapt. And as Dot rose above their heads, Alex caught her left ankle with both hands, and Felix caught her right ankle with both hands, and they dug in their heels and held on.

"I've got her!" shouted Alex.

"I've got her!" shouted Felix.

The three of them hung there, a little chain, wobbling in the wind, with the dark of the sky above them and the school below.

Part Nine. The Twins Have an Idea

"Don't let go!" shouted Dot, cheerfully.

"We won't!" shouted Alex.

"Mrs Nuwa!" shouted Felix. "We need a rope!"

Mrs Nuwa had already come out. She was racing across the playground, her tail whipping behind her. In one hand she held the long scroll of stories. In the other, a fat coil of clay-coloured rope. She flicked it, and it wrapped round Dot's waist, and Mister Harris and Mister Coyote took the other end and hauled.

Dot came down with a bump, hugging both twins at once.

"That," she said, "was the best thing that's ever happened to me."

But the gap was still growing. We could feel it. The cold was pouring out of it like water out of a bath. A star winked in the dark, then another, then ten, then a hundred, and every one of them seemed to be leaning down to look.

All the staff had come out into the playground. They stood in a worried ring, looking up. Nobody was arguing now.

"I told you the patch wouldn't hold," said Mrs Nuwa, quietly. "It is too small. We can't agree on one story, so we have none."

Alex and Felix went quiet.

"Why does there have to be one?" said Alex.

"Why can't you use all of them?" said Felix.

Everyone turned round.

"You said a patch of one story is too small," said Alex.

"But a patch of lots of stories..." said Felix.

"...would be bigger," said Alex.

"It'd be like a quilt," said Felix.

"A quilt!" said Maya, who had been scribbling. She circled it. "A patchwork! Each person's story is a different square, a different colour, and they all sew together to cover the hole!"

Part Ten. Not One Story, but Many

Nobody said anything.

Then Mister Maui took off his fish hook and held it up. "Well, mine's the colour of the sea," he said.

"Mine's gold," said Mrs Oshun. "Like honey."

"Mine's all the colours of corn," said Mister Ketz.

"Mine's blue-white," said Mister Väinö. "Like an egg in the moon."

"The thing is," said Ms Athene, slowly, "I never actually thought that mine was the only one. I only thought it was mine."

"And that is allowed," said Mrs Nuwa, gently. "We don't have to agree. We only have to listen. The world is big enough for everyone's first story. I should have said so at the beginning."

"We were silly," said Mister Raven.

"We were loud," said Mister Coyote.

"We were scared," said Madam Simurgh. "Because when the sky cracks, everyone wants to hold tight to the one thing they know."

"So how do we do it?" said Dot, who was still wrapped in clay rope.

"Like this," said Mrs Nuwa. She clapped her hands. "Miss Pele! I need a fire!"

Part Eleven. The Melting

Miss Pele stepped forward. She cracked her knuckles and breathed in, and her hair rose up in flames.

Mrs Nuwa laid the five stones on a flat rock in the middle of the playground. The red one, the yellow one, the blue-green one, the white one and the black one. Miss Pele breathed on them, a long, low breath, and they began to glow. Orange, then gold, then white. Then they softened and slumped and flowed into each other, and became a bubbling pool of colours, swirling like paint.

"Now," said Mrs Nuwa. "One at a time. Tell your story into the stones."

Mister Maui went first. He told how the islands came up out of the sea on the end of a fish hook, and as he spoke, a ribbon of silver-blue curled out of his mouth and dropped into the pool.

Ms Athene told how the world came out of a great open space, and a ribbon of grey-green slid in. Mrs Oshun told about the chain and the hen, and her ribbon was honey-gold. Mister Väinö told about the duck's egg, and his was blue-white. Mister Ketz told about the corn, and it was yellow. Mister Raven's was black, shot with green. Mrs Lakshmi's was pink. Miss Bastet's was sand. Madam Simurgh's was copper.

The pool grew deeper, and brighter, and richer, and more beautiful, until it looked like a stained glass window lying on the ground.

"There's more," said Mrs Nuwa, looking down. "There's room for more. A lot more."

"That's all of us," said Mister Harris.

"Not all of us," said Mrs Nuwa. And she looked straight at Alex and Felix.

Part Twelve. Our Story

"What's yours?" she said.

Alex and Felix looked at each other.

"We don't have one," said Felix.

"Everyone has one," said Mrs Nuwa. "Everyone has a story of how they began. Even if it isn't an old one. Even if it's only a few years long."

Alex thought for a long time. Felix thought for a long time. And then they both started at once, and then they both stopped, and laughed, and Alex nodded at Felix to go first.

"There was a mummy and a daddy," said Felix. "And they were waiting."

"And they didn't know it was going to be two," said Alex.

"They thought it was going to be one," said Felix.

"And then there were two heartbeats," said Alex.

"Two!" said Felix.

"And Nana was waiting at the door," said Alex.

"And when we arrived, everyone cried," said Felix.

"Because they were so happy," said Alex.

"And we were made," said Felix, "one at a time. Well, two."

"And we were loved before we even got here," said Alex.

And a ribbon came out of the two of them. It was a ribbon of two colours twisted together, warm red and bright yellow, like two threads wound into one. It curled through the air, and dropped into the pool, and the whole thing flared up, brilliant as the sun.

One by one, the rest of us added ours. Maya told hers, and Dot told hers, and Kenji told his, and Ollie told his, which was mostly about snacks. Even Willow, who did not speak, put her paw in the edge of the pool and left a single golden paw-print.

Part Thirteen. The Patch

"Hold the ladder!" shouted Mrs Nuwa.

She scooped up the blazing pool in her bucket. It didn't spill or burn. It shimmered in her hands like a bucket full of rainbows. Then she coiled her tail round the ladder and began to climb, faster than a squirrel, higher than the school roof, higher than the tallest tree.

At the bottom, we held the ladder. Alex had the left side, and Felix had the right. Mister Harris and Mister Hadad leant against the legs. Miss Pele sent up a plume of warm air, to carry Mrs Nuwa higher, and Madam Simurgh opened her wings behind her like a net, just in case. And Willow, who hates anything that wobbles, climbed onto the bottom rung and sat there as heavy and still as a paperweight, so the ladder could not slide.

At the top, Mrs Nuwa dipped her brush into the bucket. She leant out over the dark gap. And with a great, sweeping stroke, she painted the first colour across the hole in the sky.

It stuck.

She painted another stroke, and another. Gold, silver, green, pink, copper, red. The colours poured out of the brush and spread across the dark like spilt dye, knitting the edges of the crack together. The stars winked out, one by one. The cold stopped. The pull stopped. And all the things that had floated up, the hat, the lunchbox, the wellies, the coats, came tumbling down like autumn leaves.

Mister Harris's hat landed on his head. He put his hand up and held it there.

And above us, where the crack had been, there was a sky.

Part Fourteen. The New Sky

It was the same sky, but different.

It was the same blue as before, but threaded all through it, from one side of the world to the other, ran a long, thin, glowing seam. It was every colour at once. It rippled slowly in the light, red and gold and green and silver and pink, like a ribbon. It didn't look like a mend. It looked like a river of colour, flowing quietly across the whole sky.

"It's beautiful," said Dot.

"Look how it shines," said Mrs Nuwa, as she slid down the ladder. She was covered in paint from head to tail.

We all looked up for a long time. Even Mister Hadad's cloud had gone quiet, and was hanging in the air like a puffy white hat. Mister Coyote didn't say anything. Ms Athene's owl had its beak open.

"There's a rule in this school now," announced Mister Harris, who had put on his hat and then taken it off. "Nobody gets to say that their story is the only one. Everybody tells theirs, and everybody listens."

"And nobody laughs at anybody's," said Maya.

"And nobody laughs unkindly at anybody's," said Mister Coyote, "because some of them are funny, and it's okay to laugh together."

Part Fifteen. What Mrs Nuwa Said

That evening, the sky burned gold and rose behind the seam, like a quilt held up to the light.

Mrs Nuwa sat on the steps of the art cupboard with her tail curled round her, scrubbing paint off her nose. Alex and Felix and Maya and Willow sat on the step below. Dot was asleep in a heap of clay, with a small clay person in each fist.

"I'll tell you the secret of making people," said Mrs Nuwa. "Since you were the ones who worked it out."

"What is it?" said Felix.

"It's that you can't make two the same," said Mrs Nuwa. "Not even if you try. Not even if you use the same clay, and the same hands, and the same river. They come out different. One has a bigger nose. One has a lopsided smile. One is slow and one is fast. And I have never, ever made a mistake. Because every one of them is exactly right."

"Even the ones made with the rope?" said Maya, who had been worrying about this.

"Especially those," said Mrs Nuwa, and smiled. "Nobody was quick. I loved every one."

"And us?" said Alex.

"You were each made with care," said Mrs Nuwa. "Both of you, together, and the world has been waiting for you for a long time. That is the first part of your story, and it will always be true, however many more parts you add."

She looked up at the shimmering seam.

"And when you're older," she said, "and somebody tells you their story of how the world began, and it is different from yours, remember the sky. It does not need one colour. It is stronger with every single thread."

Alex looked at Felix. Felix looked at Alex.

"We'll remember," they said.

Maya wrote it down. She wrote it very slowly, in her best handwriting, and drew a little rainbow in the margin.

Part Sixteen. The Ending, with a Hook

The sun went down in a blaze of colour.

We went home through the playground, past the quilt-coloured sky, with the scroll of stories rolled up under Mrs Nuwa's arm. Willow walked between the twins with her tail up. Maya trailed behind, drawing a picture of the whole new sky, seam and all.

At the gate, Felix stopped.

"Look," he said.

The sun was setting behind the hill, a great, round, golden disc. But as we watched, it did something it had never done before. It flickered. It flickered like a lamp with a bad bulb. It dimmed, and brightened, and dimmed again. And then, very quietly, as if someone had gently closed a door on it, it went out.

All at once, there was no sun, and no sunset, and no light at all. It was night, in the middle of the evening, with the colours of the new sky glowing faintly overhead like a rainbow in the dark.

From somewhere behind the hill, a long way away, came a sound. It was the soft ringing of bells. And under the bells, someone was laughing, a big, loud, happy laugh, like a lot of people having a party in a cave.

And then a voice, clear and bright and a little worried, drifted over the dark fields.

"Excuse me!" it called. "Has anyone seen my mirror?"

Alex and Felix stood close together, in the dark, with the glow of the sky on their faces. They said, at exactly the same time, "Monday."

The End.