The Ropemaker

by Peter Dickinson

  The pulse behind the humming lost its implacable beat and dwindled away. The lamps and skyline and stars steadied, and the light around Silena herself died out.

  Before it faded completely Tilja saw the proud figure of the magician stoop. Lines creased the emotionless dead face and made it human, the face of an ordinary woman, extremely old, but alive.

  Around them sleepers stirred and muttered. There were cries of alarm here and there, as if some had woken from nightmares.

  Silena’s voice came out of the dark.

  “Well, it is I who am destroyed,” she said quietly. “The Emperor must find another Watcher. Give me back my dog and I will go. You need not be afraid. It is too late for me to start again.”

  Tilja didn’t need to ask herself if she could trust her. She had both seen and felt what had happened. She set the dog down. Silena called it and it ran to her. Tilja could hear it fawning happily, as any dog might do on a mistress just come home.

  “Do you know if anyone else is looking for us?” she said.

  “I cannot say,” said Silena wearily. “But the Trunk Road lies in the sector that it was my task to watch. I could tell whenever you used the thing that you carry. It shone in my mind like a meteor each time. I could not come before—we watch each other constantly—but this evening I took my chance. None of the others would have had cause to be watching so steadily this way. But tomorrow they will find my tower empty, and their interest will be aroused. That is all I can tell you.”

  “What about the magician outside the walls—the one whose monster you and Dorn drove away? I think he really wanted . . . the thing I’m carrying.”

  “You know all this, child?”

  “I was there, hiding in one of the towers. You almost found me.”

  “Ah . . . no, we know nothing of this other man. We searched all the Empire, but he hides himself too well. He has great power. You should be wary of him still, I think.”

  “Thank you,” said Tilja. She felt no fear or hatred of Silena now, this tired old woman who still had her dignity when everything else was gone.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “It was not all your doing, child,” said Silena, and moved away into the darkness.

  Immediately the whole enclosure was in an uproar. Calico woke with a squeal, answered by a chorus of squeals from around the courtyard. Knowing her nature, Tilja had tethered her securely, but at least two of the other horses broke loose and went charging around in the darkness.

  Tahl had woken with a shout, Meena was muttering incoherently, and Alnor rose groaning to his feet and started to stumble away through the dark. Tilja ran and grabbed his arm, but he shook her off, and then blundered into a stranger who came rushing in panic toward him and knocked him aside. Tilja managed to catch him and stop him falling, and then he let her lead him back to the others. By the time she had him settled down Meena and Tahl seemed to be coming to their senses. All three had had much the same nightmare about being hurtled to and fro inside a dark swirling cloud full of explosions of light and faces with monstrous gaping mouths and screaming shapes that swirled by in the storm. (“Only it was and it wasn’t a dream,” Tahl explained. “It was something else, too.”)

  From the snatches of talk she could hear around them Tilja could tell that it was the same with everyone else in the enclosure, but they were still all too taken up with their own nightmares to eavesdrop on their neighbors.

  “I know what happened,” she said in a low voice. “Silena was here. And her beast. They’d come to look for Axtrig. She’s gone now.”

  She told them what she’d seen and done. By the time she’d finished all her fear and excitement were gone. There was nothing left but utter exhaustion.

  “A donkey?” said Tahl. “It was still light when they closed the gates, and there wasn’t a donkey anywhere around then.”

  “It was a donkey,” said Tilja, yawning and scrabbling for her rug. “Nothing else makes a noise like that. We used to have one at Woodbourne.”

  She found the rug, wrapped it around her, lay down and was asleep before he’d finished asking his next question.

  Usually the first light woke her, but she slept late that morning, and by the time she sat up and looked around most of the other travelers were already getting ready to leave. She couldn’t see a donkey anywhere in the enclosure, but it might already have gone.

  She was still tired as they traveled on, tired all through, but it was an odd sort of tiredness. What had happened in the enclosure had been extremely frightening and dangerous, and she wasn’t at all sure that Silena mightn’t have broken through her defenses if the donkey hadn’t brayed at exactly the right time. Would she be able to do it again if the need arose? Do what? She didn’t even know that. She had broken Silena’s power, yes. She had chosen to do it rather than just have it happen to her, but she couldn’t describe, even to herself, how. Suppose she were to wake at the next way station and see, say, Dorn, or the unknown magician, stalking toward her through the sleeping wayfarers, she knew she would be just as terrified, just as deep in the nightmare, as she’d been when Silena came.

  But that didn’t alter the fact that she’d done it, alone and without help, and done it by discovering something totally new about herself. That discovery filled her with a sort of peaceful exhilaration. She didn’t want to sing, or dance, or talk to the others about it, only to walk in silence, relishing the feel of it. It was like the new-risen sun on night-chilled limbs, like the smell of rain on parched earth, like the morning, years ago, when she’d gone out before breakfast to look at the little patch of garden that she’d hoed and raked and planted all on her own, and seen that the first bean seedlings had come through in the night, shouldering the crumbs of earth aside and spreading their first two leaves to catch the sun. Hers.

  The mood lasted all day. But that night at the way station, at the exact hour that Silena had come (she could tell by the stars), she woke with her heart slamming, her body locked rigid with dread and her palms chill with sweat. And the same next night, and the next, and the next. Usually at least one of the others would be awake at the same time, and they would whisper to each other for a little, and Tilja could hear quiet mutters of reassurance from elsewhere in the enclosure, which told her that they were not the only ones to have woken at that particular time. It was as though Silena had somehow set a clock in all their minds that triggered a danger signal at the hour of her coming. The effect didn’t start to fade until the moon had waned completely and waxed again almost to its full, and midnight was no longer dark. But no more Watchers came stealing into the enclosure, with whatever beast or demon they had chosen as their companion, to search for Axtrig.

  Those night wakings were the only alarms in all their seemingly endless journey. Steadily the days became warmer, both with the coming summer and the more southern climate. Soon mornings and evenings seemed as hot as noon had been north of Talagh. The landscape changed, and changed again, and yet again, flat miles of fields, green wooded hills, dry and broken ground where immense flocks of sheep and goats were herded, ancient forests full of strange calls and odors, cities, villages, fortresses, grand houses ringed by rich estates.

  Only the road did not change. Broad as a fair-sized river, well paved from side to side, it headed on south. Despite the Emperor’s decrees it was thronged from dawn to dusk with travelers, all of whom must have proved they had good reason for their journey. The wind swung round to the east and for three long days rain fell, warm and dense, from sagging low clouds. The road became truly a river, ankle deep in places, but then shedding its load into the drowned fields on either side. Through the downpour everyone plodded on. The way stations were cleared each morning, to make room for the next night’s travelers, so there was nothing else for it but to endure the drenching. It was the Emperor’s will.

  After what Silena had said about how she had traced them, Meena and Tilja were even more careful about using Axtrig to point the way they should go. They knew t
hat by now there would be a new Watcher in Silena’s tower, who might notice the quick flicker of potent magic, moving further south each time. And perhaps more dangerous still, there was the unknown magician who had sent the great creature to attack the walls of Talagh. He was hiding now, Silena had said, but he had put forth that enormous power for the sake of the old spoon, and he would do so again, if he got the chance. But they had to take the risk, or the time might come when they actually plodded on past the point where they should have turned aside.

  So sometimes, though at longer intervals than before, the two of them would slip away from the road during the midday rest, and Tilja would bring Axtrig out from under her sleeve, and Meena would stand well apart and whisper the name of Faheel, and the old spoon would wake and move.

  Wake was the right word. Especially since Silena had come to the way station, Axtrig had seemed more and more deeply asleep. It was something Tilja was doing to her with her own increasing powers, wearing her against her skin day after day after day, not destroying her magic, but burying it deeper and deeper in the grained wood, where only Faheel’s name would wake it. At the whisper of that name there would be a pause, a stillness, and the strange, eager tree-life would wake and remember itself in a pulse of magic, and point their direction, with a greater sureness each time, as if the spoon heard more and more clearly the summoning voice of the man in whose garden the peach had hung whose seed had become the tree that had grown at Woodbourne.

  Then Tilja would touch her with a fingertip and she would sleep again.

  On the ninety-third day of their journey, at last, the great river rejoined them. They slept the night at a way station beside it. Here a mile-long bridge crossed to an ancient city, ringed with a turreted wall, and with a huge fortress crowning the rocky hill at its center. The bridge had been widened to make room for market stalls all along its length. Waiting for their dole of food that evening, Tilja heard an old man talking to the boy who was accompanying him to Goloroth.

  “See that fort there?” he was saying. “Take a good look at it. You’ll be right glad to see it again on your way back. That’s Ramram, last city of the living. And that on the bridge, that’s the Ramram fair. You want something pretty to take home to your ma from the south, that’s the best place to look for it. There’s nothing else south of here except the place we’re going. That’s no place for a child, and it won’t have changed much since I came this way myself with my own granddad, this fifty-seven years ago. You’ll see what I mean tomorrow morning.”

  He was right. Almost as soon as they had left the way station the nature of their journey changed. The road was as well kept as before, but less than half the width, and almost no one was using it except the old people going south to die, with their companions, and groups of weary children who had made that same journey earlier now trudging back north.

  By that evening the river too began to change, breaking up into a network of reedy channels which spread out to left and right while the road speared straight on, striding from island to island on immense timber bridges.

  “We are near the end,” said Alnor. “The waters can feel the sea. Can the man we are looking for still be south of here? There is nothing to come but Goloroth. You are sure, Tilja, about the way the spoon was pointing last time?”

  “Yes, quite sure.”

  They had checked their direction only the day before, when Ramram had come in sight. It had certainly looked the kind of place where a powerful magician might choose to live, but Axtrig had unmistakably pointed on past it, south. Still south.

  “Then he’s got to be in Goloroth,” said Meena.

  “I bet he isn’t,” said Tahl.

  “Tell you one thing,” said Meena. “I don’t know how Alnor and me are going to get ourselves back out of here. We’re going to stand out like two sore thumbs, the only old folk going north.”

  “There will be a way,” said Alnor, with absolute confidence.

  That night’s way station was on one of the islands. Despite the steamy heat, braziers were lit all around it and piled with damp reeds whose smoke helped keep the swarming night insects away.

  There was a change in the travelers. When they settled down in the dusk, one of the groups started to sing, as usual, but it wasn’t the usual kind of song. Tilja had never heard it before, and didn’t know the language of the words, but the long sad notes told her that it was a song of farewell, a song of ending. Everybody listened, and when it was over there was silence for a while before one of the other groups began its own song in answer. And so on all round the enclosure, some peaceful and resigned, some full of fierce grief for the bright world that the singers were leaving, but all saying good-bye. Tilja lay down to sleep that night with her cheeks wet with tears.

  10

  The City of Death

  My, it’s getting strong here,” Meena muttered as they waited in the still, dense heat outside the walls of Goloroth. She clutched at Calico’s saddle to steady herself as if something invisible had suddenly cannoned against her. Alnor was already holding firmly on to Tahl’s shoulder, and ahead of them an old man staggered and fell, caught in the same gust. Tilja could feel nothing, and that in itself told her that Meena had been talking about magic.

  “It’s like a current round a rock,” said Tahl. “It can’t get in, so it swirls all round. I don’t think there’s going to be any magic in Goloroth. I bet those walls are warded, like Talagh.”

  “There’s got to be,” said Meena. “He’s in there. There’s nowhere else left.”

  Only an hour before, when the low brown walls of the City of Death—so much smaller than they had expected—had first come in sight, she and Tilja had slipped aside from the road, in among the reeds, and there for the last time asked their question. Axtrig had still pointed south, straight at Goloroth. And Goloroth lay beside the mouth of the Great River, at the southernmost tip of the Empire. There was nothing but ocean beyond it. Unless Meena was wrong about what Axtrig was telling them, Faheel must be inside those walls.

  “Perhaps that’s why he chose it,” said Tahl. “Good place to hide—no one would think of looking for him here.”

  They were waiting in one of the lines that had formed to enter the city. There were several gateways in the otherwise blank wall. To either side of them officials sat at long tables. As each pair, old person and child, reached the head of the line they waited until a place was vacant at one of the tables and then went up to be interviewed by the official, who spoke to them briefly, wrote their answers in a ledger, wrote again on a sheet of paper and handed it to the child. The child then turned back and the old person went off alone through the gate. Chairs with carrying handles were brought for those who had difficulty walking.

  Even here, under the walls of the City of Death, as everywhere else in the Empire, there were traders looking for a profit, selling food and supplies for the return journey, or offering to buy possessions that the travelers no longer needed, now that they had reached the end. Some of these too were sensitive to the gusts of magic. Tilja could see them automatically adjusting their footing as they carried on with their business.

  Slowly the line in front of the gate edged forward. As it did so children came walking back, some solemn, some weeping, some seeming simply dazed that the thing was over and now they had to make their own way home, alone. Meena and the others seemed too preoccupied with fighting the invisible buffetings to notice, but Tilja became more and more anxious as she watched what was happening at the head of the line on their right.

  Mostly the procedure went smoothly enough, but every now and then either the old person or the child would say something to the official at the table, and perhaps even begin to argue as the official shook his head, and then two other men would come up and lead the pair aside to say good-bye to each other, and though they might cling to each other and weep, before long the men would part them gently and lead them off in their separate directions. Tilja didn’t see a single child go on into the city. N
either Meena nor Alnor seemed very put out when she told them.

  “I’d been wondering about that,” said Meena. “But no point meeting trouble till trouble meets you, I always say.”

  “I also have been thinking about this,” said Alnor. “I am less certain than Meena that the man we are seeking is within the city. If he is here, perhaps he will do what we ask, and then help us to return. If so, well and good. If not, I do not care what happens to me. But if he is not here, then we have no choice but to search further on. Who knows what lands may lie south across the ocean? After all that has happened to us, I am fully convinced that our search will be rewarded, and that in the end we will find him. If I have to travel south on a raft, so be it. He cannot be very far. Every time Meena and Tilja have used the spoon, I have felt the pulse of magic more strongly.

  “But let us for the moment assume that we find him here, and he is prepared to help us not only leave the city, but find Tahl and Tilja and return to the Valley. We cannot go home without his help. We would be questioned at every stage. So for the moment the best thing would be for you two to wait here for, say, five days, and then start north. Somehow, I do not know how, we will meet again.”

  “Best we can do,” said Meena.

  “I don’t want to leave you,” said Tilja. Despite Alnor’s confidence, she felt that when in a very short time they parted at the gates of the City of Death, she would be saying good-bye to Meena forever.

  “Nor me,” said Tahl. “And anyway I want to see what happens. I mean, after getting this far . . .”

  “I want to come with you,” said Tilja, already close to tears.

  “Looks like we’ve got no choice,” said Meena.

  “We’re still going to get in somehow,” said Tahl.

  “What about Axtrig?” said Tilja. “She’s asleep now, but . . .”

  “Think she’ll stay that way? Long enough for me to get her in, at least?”