The Ropemaker

by Peter Dickinson

  For a moment it was touch and go, but then Calico took the strain and heaved, and they were moving upstream with Tilja probing the way ahead with Meena’s cane. As soon as they were clear of the timber wrack she turned toward the shore. Once the raft was under way it came easily. The water varied in depth, but by now Calico had seen that dry land lay ahead and made for it with a will, so it wasn’t long before they were trudging up the gentle slope of the bank, until the raft grounded in the shallows behind them. Tilja turned to unhitch the towlines.

  “Behind you, girl,” Meena called from the raft. “I don’t like the look of him.”

  Tilja turned again and saw a large yellow-orange dog watching them from the top of the bank. It was a shaggy, gawky beast, but despite what Meena had said didn’t look dangerous, and she stood her ground when it came trotting down toward her, with its long, plumed tail waving gently. It sniffed at her, as dogs do with strangers, but backed away as soon as she reached to scratch between its ears.

  “I think it’s friendly,” she called.

  “Better had be,” Meena answered. “Hey! Get off! Shoo! You’re not wanted!”

  The dog paid no attention, but splashed through the shallows and up onto the raft, where it sniffed much more thoroughly at Meena than it had at Tilja, then turned to the sleeping bodies of Alnor and Tahl.

  “Meena! Quick! The food bags!” Tilja called, and ran down the bank.

  “Where’s my dratted cane? Beat it! There, that’s for you!”

  Before she’d loosed Calico, Tilja had removed her water bucket and set it down by the side of the stall. Now Meena had snatched it up and flung its contents over the intruder. The dog didn’t mind. It backed away, grinning. Then, very deliberately, it shook itself.

  The drops sprayed out all round it, drenching the raft. It was hard to believe that a half-full bucket could ever have held so much water. Tilja saw the arcing spray against the light of the rising sun, which made the whole shower seem to glitter with golden fire, with the golden dog glowing at the center of it. Meena was yelling, trying to get at the animal and belabor it with the bucket. Tilja was laughing till she could hardly stand. In the middle of all this Tahl, and then Alnor, sat up. The dog gave one last, tremendous shake, splashed ashore, loped up the bank past Tilja and disappeared.

  “Just think,” said Meena. “We’d have saved ourselves a lot of bother if we’d thought to throw a bucket of water over the pair of you.”

  “Perhaps,” said Alnor. “I am not sure. For myself, I felt that something came to me in my sleep and made me ready to wake.”

  “Well, all I can say is you’re both of you looking a sight better than you did last evening,” said Meena.

  They were sitting at the top of the bank eating a midday meal. The dog had come back and was watching them from a little distance away, but made no further attempt to be friends.

  It was Tilja who had put her foot down about moving on as soon as they were ashore. It wasn’t fair on Calico, she insisted, after what she’d been through. So she gave her a good rubdown and then hobbled her and let her ramble around and browse what she could while the four humans talked. As soon as he’d eaten, Tahl, restless as ever despite the remains of the forest sickness, rose and unlashed pieces of the raft and started to build a frame to help Meena climb onto Calico’s back.

  “It is time we were on our way,” said Alnor. “We will need to buy food tomorrow, and for myself I am still somewhat shaky, and cannot walk far or fast. I propose that we should follow the river. Then at least we will have water.”

  They rose and gathered their baggage together. Tilja caught Calico and bribed her with a nose bag while Meena, voicing her distrust at every move, climbed the creaking structure Tahl had made and settled herself into the horse seat. Tilja was buckling the last bedding roll into place when Meena said, “At least we’re rid of that dratted dog. Where’s he got to, now?”

  “There,” said Tahl. “I think he knows where he’s going.”

  Tilja straightened and looked. The dog was already some distance away, moving at an angle to the river, trotting purposefully toward a low ridge. There it stopped and gazed back at them for a short while before disappearing over the far side.

  “The boy’s right,” said Meena. “He’s going somewhere. And inviting us along, by the look of it. Let’s go up there, and see what we can see.”

  Beyond the ridge stretched a plain, visible for an immense distance in the dry, clear air. To the left the reedy lake continued far out of sight. The plain itself seemed almost as barren and rocky as the hills behind them, but at least there were trees there, in scattered clumps, with more and greener trees in the distance. A mile or so away on the right something was moving, slowly, like a small patch of cloud shadow. Sheep? Goats? Too far to be sure, but yes, somebody was walking behind them, herding them along . . . and there, much further off, under the trees, something darker, more solid than shadow. A hut or a tent of some kind.

  They watched for a while. The hut thing under the trees was about two miles away. The herd drifted slowly across the plain. Nothing else stirred.

  A tied dog yelped, not the one they had seen. A child came out of the low, dark tent, stared at the strangers and ran back in. A woman emerged, told the dog to be quiet and strode to meet them. She was square and sturdy and very differently dressed from the women of the Valley, with a skirt that reached to her bare feet and a long scarf that wound twice round over her head, framing her face, and its tasseled ends dangling at her waist. She held herself like someone used to carrying loads on her head. Halfway to meet them she stopped and waited for them to reach her, her face expressionless.

  “Health and good fortune,” she said, with a strange, twangy accent.

  Alnor was at the head of the party, with his hand on Tahl’s shoulder.

  “Long life and good fortune,” he answered, using the normal Valley greeting for strangers.

  “You have come far?” said the woman.

  “From beyond the forest,” he said.

  The woman’s face became blanker still.

  “All men die in the forest,” she said.

  “We came quickly, on a raft down the river,” said Alnor. “But indeed I and my grandson nearly died.”

  She nodded, frowning.

  “This is not good news,” she said. “But you are a stranger and I must welcome you. It is our custom, here in the outlands, though I have little to offer a guest since the soldiers took my husband.”

  “We would be more than grateful,” said Alnor. “We have food, but we are still not well, and need to rest. And perhaps you will tell us some of the customs of this country, for as you see we are strangers here.”

  She shook her head.

  “Ask me and tell me no more. Tomorrow I will take you to Ellion. You must talk to him and he will decide. My name is Salata.”

  Alnor told her theirs, and she led them back to the trees and found water for Calico, and then made them sit down and brought them cheese and goat’s milk and pieces of hard, flat, biscuity bread, but when they tried to offer her some of their food in exchange, she became offended and insisted it was not the custom.

  “Well,” said Meena. “It’s not my custom to take something for nothing, but at least there’s something I might do for you. You said the soldiers had taken your husband. Would you like me to have a go at telling you how he might be getting on?”

  Salata’s face, her whole attitude, changed completely. She stared at Meena, hesitating, both eager and afraid.

  “Oh . . . oh, please!” she whispered. “Anything . . . anything!”

  Tilja fetched Meena’s baggage roll and Meena opened it and took out the leather bag in which she carried her spoons and the things that went with them. She laid the blue cloth out on the ground, put the spoons on it and told Salata to choose one. Salata chose one of the darker two. Meena poured a drop of oil onto the back of its bowl, gave her a piece of cloth and the spoon and told her to rub the oil well in and put the spoo
n back between the others. She bent forward until her face was only a few inches from the cloth, and concentrated, wheezing heavily.

  “Ah,” she whispered. “Here it comes . . . here it comes . . . beautiful . . . my, that’s clear. Maybe you can see it for yourself, Salata—this line here—look close, and you’ll see it’s two lines, really, running side by side, that’s you and your husband, I’ll be bound, and these little lines branching off and running alongside, that’ll be your two little girls getting born. . . . But now, here this one, twisting away all of a sudden and going off into this muddle of stuff over here, that’s got to be him getting taken off by the soldiers, and this is you, going straight on but running a bit thin, and no wonder, things being difficult for you without him. . . .

  But see, here, this one running back out of that mess, straight as an arrow to where yours is, and fitting in alongside it again as if it’s the one place in the world it wanted to be . . . that’s got to be him coming back to you. . . .”

  “When? When?” croaked Salata.

  “Can’t say for sure,” said Meena, pushing herself upright. “Doesn’t look that long, if you measure it off, but that’s not really how it works. There’s most of a lifetime in a space not as big as half your hand, so it just fits in what’s important, best it can. But I tell you it’s all clearer than I’ve ever seen, so that’s how things are going to work out, or my name’s not Meena Urlasdaughter.”

  Hesitantly Salata reached out and took the spoon, as if she thought its touch might burn her.

  “It’s going,” she said, peering at it. “Fading . . . I can’t see it anymore.”

  “That’s right,” said Meena. “And if you asked them again they wouldn’t tell you anything special. But you saw it like I showed you, didn’t you? It was all there.”

  Salata nodded, at first unable to speak. “Oh, you have given me a rich gift in exchange for your poor meal,” she said at last. “You have given me hope.”

  She was crying now, holding the spoon and stroking it between her fingers as if its touch still spoke to her of her husband’s return.

  “There, there,” said Meena. “Don’t you take on so. It’ll all come right in the end, and you won’t help nor hinder, making a song and dance.”

  She managed to sound irritated by Salata’s burst of emotion, but Tilja knew her well enough to see that really she was very moved herself, and didn’t want to show it.

  Salata pulled herself together.

  “Since you are strangers in this place, I will say this to you,” she whispered. “That is a great power you have. Such things are very dangerous. Even here, so far from people, they are dangerous. Among people you must be very careful.”

  “What do you mean, careful?” said Meena.

  But Salata would say no more.

  The elder daughter brought the goats home at sunset to be herded into a corral under the trees and milked, while the younger daughter stirred the pile of ashes in front of the tent and got a fire going. They sat round it and ate again, and talked; that’s to say Tahl asked endless questions and Salata answered. She now seemed happy to do so, but still asked none herself. It was clear that she positively didn’t want to know anything about the forest, or what lay beyond it.

  She told them that her goats and all the land around there, as far as the eye could see, belonged to an official in the court of the Emperor. She made cheese from the milk, and once she had made a certain weight could keep what was left. She could also keep one in twenty of the male kids to fatten and eat, when the rest were driven off to market. Her husband was a trapper, hunting a kind of rock squirrel that lived among the hills to the north, whose fur was prized. Then, two years ago, soldiers had come to look for a way through the forest. Some of them had died of the sickness, and they had made up their numbers by seizing any able-bodied men they could lay their hands on, including Salata’s husband. Now she and her daughters had to live on her allowance from the goats and whatever they could glean from the land.

  “A bad season, and we will all three die,” she said.

  “So you’re some kind of slave?” said Tahl, in his usual pert way.

  “If I were a slave I would be better off,” she said, and explained that all land belonged to the Emperor, who then gave the use of it to his nobles, and the officials who ran the Empire for him, to pay them for their services. These were the Landholders, and long ago everyone who lived on the land, including Salata’s ancestors, had had to buy the right to do so from them. Since they’d not had the money to pay the price outright, they had borrowed the money from the Landholders themselves. The cheese Salata made and the kids she reared to send to market were the interest she was still paying on that debt, fixed so that it could never be paid off. And under that ancient contract neither she nor her descendants could leave the land until it was.

  Salata told them this without anger, just accepting that that was how things were, but Meena became very indignant.

  “Well, I say it’s a scandal and a shame,” she said. “I’d not put up with it, and I’d give this Landholder of yours a piece of my mind, and the Emperor too, if I was to run into him.”

  Salata, who had been reaching to stir the fire, dropped the branch she was using, stared at Meena for a moment, drawing herself away, then rose and moved round to the far side of the fire, where she knelt and scooped up a handful of ashes and poured them over her bowed head. Her two daughters copied her. All three stayed like that while Salata muttered rapidly, under her breath, what sounded like some kind of charm or prayer.

  They rose. At a gesture from Salata the children went into the tent, but she stayed and stared at Meena across the embers.

  “Do you wish to bring more misfortune on me and my tent?” she said.

  “I’m very sorry, I’m sure,” said Meena. “It’s just my way of speaking. I didn’t mean to offend. Besides, who’s to know, apart from us here? There’s no one else, miles around.”

  “A bird may fly to Talagh with your saying. A wind may carry it there. The Emperor keeps great magicians at his court, who listen for all such whispers. If your words come to his ears, you who spoke them, and your friends and I and my daughters who heard them, will be thrown into the furnaces. If you were not my guests I would set my dog on you and turn you from my tent.”

  She spoke with such hissing vehemence that even Meena was grudgingly impressed.

  “Well, I’m sorry,” she said. “I see I’d best watch my tongue— it runs away with me sometimes.”

  Salata nodded, but didn’t relax.

  “I accept that you spoke in ignorance,” she said. “When you came to my tent you foretold good fortune for me and mine. Now, perhaps, you have undone it. How can I feel the friendship for you that I did only a moment ago?”

  Meena heaved herself to her feet, hobbled round the fire and took Salata by the hands.

  “You’ve done right by us, and more than right,” she said, “and I’m not laying my head down tonight with this kind of feeling between us. Even just now, telling me to my face what a fool I’d been, why, that was a help, or who knows what I might’ve come out with somewhere, with a pack of strangers listening? Now, listen. You read the spoons just now. You saw what they said was coming to you. It was clear as clear, and there wasn’t anything there of the sort of bad luck you’re talking about. If there’d been something like that on its way to you, you’d’ve seen it, just as clear—I promise you that. But if there’s anything I can do to make you feel better about it, just tell me, and I’ll do it.”

  Salata gave a stiff half smile and shook her head.

  “It is done,” she said. “We will do as you say, and lay our heads down in friendship. And tomorrow I will take you to the house of Ellion. He is our Landholder’s steward, a good man, who does what he can to protect us. He will advise you.”

  “That is Ellion’s house,” said Salata, pointing.

  They had started soon after sunrise and walked steadily all morning. Alnor and Tahl had almost re
covered from the forest sickness, but Calico was so stiff that she was nearly lame, and in an even worse mood than usual. Now it was early afternoon and they were standing at the edge of the open, half-wild country where Salata and the other herdspeople grazed their animals. In front of them lay mile on mile of farmland, small fields, every inch tilled and sown, and the first crops already green and reaching for the sun. Tilja couldn’t see anything that looked like a real farmhouse, though, only a scatter of shabby little huts among the fields, each no more than four windowless mud walls and a straw roof, with a rolled mat above the entrance to act as a door. Three or four miles ahead a mound—you couldn’t have called it a hill— rose above the rest of the plain. On it stood what looked like a village, a tight cluster of buildings with whitewashed walls and orange-tiled roofs.

  The path picked its way between the fields. In some of them several people were working together, two or three adults and some children, just as you might have seen in the Valley at this time of year. The women were dressed like Salata, though their long scarves were of different colors and patterns. The men wore little conical hats with upturned brims and a tassel, loose brown jackets and baggy knee-breeches without stockings or shoes. They looked up, called their greetings to Salata, stared for a moment at the strangers, and went back to their tasks.

  Slowly the village came nearer, and now Tilja could see that it was nothing like the villages in the Valley, where the houses all stood separate from each other with their own garden plots around them. Here, beneath the jumble of roofs, the walls of one building mostly joined straight on to the next, with only a few gaps between them. Perhaps, she realized, it wasn’t a village after all. The whole thing was Ellion’s house.

  Salata led the way to one of these gaps. A man stood there, wearing a loose pale cloak and a red floppy cap with several tassels, and carrying a long staff with a sort of badge at the top. Salata spoke to him. He frowned at the strangers and looked as if he wanted to refuse them entry, but Salata argued urgently with him and he gave way. The gap was the start of a steep alley, so narrow that Calico’s saddlebags scraped against either wall. It led into a central courtyard, almost as large as some of the fields they’d passed, with many doors opening onto it, and more onto a sort of balcony that ran almost the whole way round the upper story. Toward one end of the courtyard there was a roofed-over area where three men sat at a table piled with hundreds of scrolls and ledgers. (Coarse paper was made in the Valley and bound into handwritten books. Ma had two, a recipe book and a collection of herb remedies, from which she’d taught her daughters to read and write, but Tilja had never seen anything as huge as those ledgers.)