The Ropemaker

by Peter Dickinson

  “Thanks, girl,” came the sick whisper. “I’ll live. Better had, after all this to-do. What about the spoon, then? Not doing much out here?”

  Before she could answer, Tilja became aware of what was happening inside her blouse, unnoticed by her in the urgency of tending to Meena. As she had crawled to and fro the spoon had fallen into the fold of her blouse and now seemed to be trying to nudge and nuzzle, blindly but insistently, against the fabric, like a newborn pup searching helplessly for the unknown thing it wants, until its mother noses it toward her teats.

  “She’s not just turning,” Tilja whispered in astonishment. “She wants to go somewhere. Over there. Is that south, Tahl?”

  “Hard to tell. The sun came up over there, if the line of the waves hasn’t shifted, so where you’re pointing is a bit east of south, maybe.”

  “We are still in the flow of the Great River,” said Alnor. “The water is almost fresh. Let me listen. Tahl, come and help.”

  So Tahl joined him and they sat side by side in silence, with bowed heads. After a little while they started to sing, the same sort of quiet, wavering, almost tuneless chant Alnor had used to control that other raft when they had left the Valley. Tilja strapped Axtrig safely onto her arm, crawled back to the side and scooped water into her mouth. There were old stories in the Valley, going back to the times before it had been closed off, and some of them were about the sea. They all said that seawater was too salty to drink, but this had only a faint refreshing tang to it. She got a mug from her bedroll and gave Meena a drink, then she ate one of the flat cakes Tahl had bought on the sandspit outside Goloroth.

  After that she lay down, pulled her head scarf over her eyes, and for a short while listened to the song as it mingled with the rippling whisper of the waves brushing along the timbers of the raft. The sound filled her with a sort of vague amazement. They were so far from home, out in the blank ocean, where there was no magic at all and all waters are lost in the end, but Alnor and Tahl could still persuade the current to carry them where they wanted to go. Then the great wave of tiredness took her again.

  This time she woke and knew where she was as soon as Tahl shook her shoulder.

  “We’re moving out of the current,” he said. “We may have been doing a bit of good, but we can’t keep it up now. Can we have another fix?”

  With a groan Tilja sat up, crawled to the edge of the raft and rinsed her face. The water was now too salty to drink. To judge by the sun, it seemed to be about midafternoon.

  She untied Axtrig and wrapped her in a fold of her skirt so that she could keep her grip on her without touching her when she let go with her other hand. When she did so, the shock of the spoon’s attraction to her unseen target was so strong that it felt that if Tilja had let her she would have slithered across the raft and gone swimming off sidelong across the slow, rolling swell. The direction was unmistakable. So was the need, and the power behind the need.

  “There,” she said, pointing.

  “Not too good,” said Tahl. “We’re still in some kind of current, but far as I can make out we’re heading well south of that. Not much we can do about it, either.”

  They tried twice more as the afternoon wore on. Each time the line Axtrig longed for slanted slightly more across that of the waves, so that they all could tell that if the current carried them on as they were going they wouldn’t ever come to the place they had journeyed so far to reach.

  By the time the sky was red in the west the waves had eased, and Meena was feeling better and sitting up.

  “We’re not doing much good so far,” she said. “We’re going to go sailing right past unless we try something else. What about if I say the man’s name? Then maybe he’ll hear us and give us a hand or something.”

  So Tilja knelt with her back to the sunset, facing the way Axtrig seemed to want to go. Her left arm was already numb to the shoulder, as if the spoon understood what was happening and was readying herself for the moment, and when Tilja took her in her hand she was like a living force. Tilja shifted her grip so that the bowl was toward her, and with her other hand wound the end of her shawl round the handle as Meena counted, “One. Two. Three . . .”

  Tilja let go of the bowl of the spoon and grabbed for the handle, so that she had it in both hands. She heard the whispered name begin. A violent jerk pulled her flat on her face against the timbers of the raft, almost jarring the spoon free, but she managed to wedge the handle down into the cleft between two of the logs and pin it there. The whole raft seemed to be shuddering. She realized that she had heard cries from the other three, and looked round.

  Both Meena and Alnor had tumbled onto their sides, and Tahl was on his hands and knees, shaking his head like a sick dog.

  “What happened?” she gasped.

  “Magic . . . the raft . . .”

  He collapsed on his face.

  Tilja stared around. Nothing else had changed in the huge emptiness of ocean. Behind her the fuzzy orange disk of the sun seemed to rest on flame-streaked wave tops, and ahead lay the darkness of night. She was helpless, trapped by the need to keep Axtrig pinned in place. It took her a while to discover that that need was gone.

  The first inkling came from the feel of the raft when she tried to shift her position. She had been kneeling on her skirt, but now her left shin touched timber. For a moment the familiar numbness spread along it, and she realized that every timber of the raft, infected with Axtrig’s desperate need, had been faintly quivering with eager life, until her touch had stilled it. When she tucked her skirt back under her knee she felt the life reawaken.

  Cautiously she raised her other hand an inch above the cleft, ready to grab again, but Axtrig lay content. Even so, careful to keep the spoon in contact with the raft all the time, she managed to shift her along the cleft and wedge the shaft tight under one of the cords that bound the logs together, then knelt up and looked around.

  The sun was down and night looming ahead. Ahead. No longer directly into the waves, but slanting across their northward march, slanting in a rush of foam down the back of each one, across the hollow, and up the slope of the next one to its crest, and then slowly down again.

  In the last light she made the others as comfortable as she could, drawing their clothes around them and wedging the garments in place, trying to see that no flesh came into contact with the magic-infected timber. When she lay down herself she did the same for herself, but for the opposite reason—to keep the magic active in the timber, and so carry them all wherever it was that Axtrig was determined to go.

  Light woke her, stiff and cold. The sky in the east was pale with dawn. Dark against it rose an island, ringed with cliffs.

  The other three lay as she had left them, but when she tried to wake them they didn’t stir. She couldn’t find their pulses, or hear their breathing above the sound of the waves. And yet their bodies were still as warm as hers beneath their clothes, so she tried to hope they weren’t dead. She was too worried to eat, but simply sat, watching the island draw nearer. There was nothing to see but the cliffs and a rocky shore, with waves breaking gently against it. The top was hidden.

  Slowly her fear for Meena and the others left her, and she began to feel strangely calm, confident that whatever had brought them so far would see them safe to the end. A kindness was in the air. She seemed to smell it in each breath she drew, and to sense that even in their tranced sleep the other three were blessed by the same faint sweetness. There was peace in their faces. So as the dangerous-seeming shore drew nearer, with the long ocean swell being tumbled and shredded by jagged rocks, she felt no tension, but rose and watched, ready.

  The raft headed for a sloping shingle beach lying in a fold of the cliffs. It was moving—Tilja could now see, with the motionless island for comparison—as fast as a cantering horse. At the last moment a wave added to that speed, lifting the whole raft up, laying it with a heavy crunch far up the beach, and withdrawing down the shingle in a pother of foam.

  Tilja knelt and
worked Axtrig out from beneath the lashing and tied her to her forearm. Faint numbness flowed into her flesh, but the spoon now felt peaceful, with the calm of a cat sleeping by its own hearth. When she laid her hand on the timber of the raft she could tell that the magic was gone from there. Hopeful, she waited for the others to wake, but they slept on and neither her voice nor touch would wake them. Still with that strange sense that all was well she left them and looked for a way up the cliffs.

  She had been half expecting to find a stair, so easily had the last few hours gone for her, but there seemed to be only one possible place in the sheer rock, where a thin dribble of water trickled down a kind of slot, with a few juts and crannies on either side for handholds and toeholds.

  She started up it, and soon found herself wondering whether there wasn’t a stair because it was not in the nature of the cliff to carve itself so, but it was doing what it could to help, all the same. There was always something to climb, provided she trusted it. When she looked down she could see the plain rectangle of the raft below her, with her three companions lying asleep on it. Rest after weary days—on this island it could be nothing else. She smiled and climbed on.

  It was midmorning before she dragged herself out onto smooth turf. Three rabbits glanced up, then went back to nibbling, unperturbed. Ahead of her stood a low stone wall, with what looked like a garden beyond it. She walked to her left and found a gate, opened it and went through, closing it carefully behind her because she could see that wall and gate were there to keep the rabbits out.

  This vaguely surprised her. The man they had been looking for surely had no need of such things. He could point out a line with his finger, and no creature—except perhaps an even more powerful magician, and the rabbits didn’t look that—could come beyond it. But now she thought of it she sensed that, apart from Axtrig, whom she carried sleeping against her arm, the only magic on the island was its own magical calm. And . . . and . . . a curious faint buzzing close beside her right thigh. Not an audible buzz, a buzz of feeling. But otherwise just like some tiresome insect.

  Automatically her hand had moved, brushing her skirt to get rid of it. The buzzing shifted but continued. She patted around. It was coming from inside her pocket. She felt and found her hair tie, and the buzzing stopped.

  Her first thought was that the two things had nothing to do with each other—her movement had driven the buzzing thing away and her touch had emptied the hair tie of its magic, but it hadn’t. Not quite. A trickle of numbness seeped out of the hair tie into her palm. She stood and stared at the trivial little object, and for the first time realized how strange it was that her hair had stayed in place, without one strand drifting free, ever since Tahl had last put it up for her while they were waiting for darkness before they could find their way into Goloroth. It had stayed in place in the heart of the warded city, and through the turmoil of the breaking of those wards, and again through the long journey out across the magicless ocean, until she had woken that morning and found her hair tumbling down to her shoulders and the hair tie wedged between two of the timbers of the raft. Tahl had been deep in his tranced sleep and there’d been no point in her trying to tie it herself, so she’d slipped it into her pocket.

  She gazed at it, puzzled. Morning after morning she had held it, ready for Tahl to finish braiding and coiling her hair, so that he could then tie it into place, but had felt nothing in it but the feel of any other hair tie. Now, though, as it lay cupped in her hand, the unmistakable numbness in her palm told her that it was very, very different, a tiny magic object, even smaller, even more everyday-seeming, than a wooden spoon. But still full of its magic, on this island where no magic came.

  Close ahead of her a voice spoke, softly creaking, and seeming to share something of her own bewilderment.

  “So who are you . . . ? And what brought you here?”

  She looked up, unalarmed, still sure that nothing bad could happen to her in this place. A grassy path stretched in front of her, and a short way down it an old man had emerged from between two rows of vines. He wasn’t dressed in any of the fashions of the Empire, but wore a broad-brimmed straw hat, a plain unbleached-linen garment that fell from his shoulders to below his knees, sandals, and a brown apron with pockets for garden tools. He might once have been tall but was now stooped. His face was lined with innumerable wrinkles, but his white beard was combed and clean and his pale, yellowish eyes were much clearer than they should have been at his age and barely blinked at all.

  “I’m looking for a man,” she said.

  “You must answer my questions first,” he reproved her.

  “I’m sorry. My name’s Tilja Urlasdaughter and I came here on a raft from Goloroth.”

  “Alone?”

  “No, but my friends—the magic was too strong for them, and—”

  “What magic is this? There is no magic here but mine.”

  “It happened yesterday evening. It was something to do with Axtrig.”

  “Axtrig?”

  “She’s just a wooden spoon, but—”

  “You have it? Show me.”

  Tilja rolled her sleeve up, untied Axtrig and held her out toward him. He peered at her.

  “Just a wooden spoon,” he said, nodding his head, as if amused by a puzzle. “I have been wondering . . . from time to time, you see, something that I made long ago still finds its way home to me. Last evening I felt this thing coming, but did not know what it was, and now I see it I still do not remember it. Indeed, it seems to me to have no magic in it.”

  “That’s because I’m touching it.”

  He peered at her with sudden intensity, his face unreadable.

  “You had better tell me about it,” he said quietly. “Where did it come from?”

  “From the Valley, in the far North. I’m afraid it’s a long story, but ages ago two people came from the Valley to get help from a magician. He did what they asked, and gave them peaches from his garden. When they got back the woman planted the stone from hers at the farm where I live, and it grew into a tree, and years later when it blew down they used the wood to carve things from. Axtrig is one of them. We didn’t know how magical she was, because there isn’t any real magic in the Valley. She just told fortunes.”

  “Yes, I see. The Northern Valley. The Lost Province, beyond the forest . . . And now, what you said about yourself. The spoon has no magic when you are touching it. That is why you had it tied to your arm?”

  “We met a magician who told us it was a good idea, because otherwise people might sense we’d got her, and we’d be in trouble. I don’t really understand, but magic doesn’t seem to do anything to me—in fact I sort of undo it some of the time. Mostly I don’t do that on purpose—it just happens—it’s something about me. I didn’t even realize how tiring it was until we were out in the middle of the sea, where there isn’t any magic.”

  He stood looking at her for what seemed a long while, but perhaps not really seeing her. Then he sighed.

  “Yes,” he said. “Tiring. Tiring beyond belief . . . Will you please let me hold the spoon for a little?”

  The numbness shot up Tilja’s arm as he reached forward. Axtrig seemed to leap from her hand into his. For some while he stood silent, holding the shaft between his clasped palms with his head bowed over them and his lips lightly touching the bowl. Then he straightened and handed the spoon back to Tilja. The moment she took it Tilja knew that the magic was gone. The shaft was still wonderfully carved, the grain of the bowl still intricately beautiful, but it was all just dead wood. Axtrig was “her” no longer, only “it.” With a pang of loss she slid it into her pocket and without thought dropped the hair tie in beside it.

  She stared at the man. He seemed to be standing a little taller now, and when he spoke his voice was stronger than it had been before.

  “I have taken back some of my powers from your spoon,” he said, smiling at her surprise. “It is remarkable how they have grown over the years. . . . Well, I think I am the man you are l
ooking for. My name is Faheel.”

  Already, with a sinking heart, Tilja had guessed this was so. So old, so feeble and unsure of himself. So quiet and peaceful too. How could he wield powers enough to hold back the might of the Empire from the Valley for twenty more generations? Was all their long and dangerous journey for nothing?

  “Th-that’s wonderful,” she managed to stammer. “We hoped you’d let us find you, somehow. . . . Can you do anything about the others? They’re asleep on the raft on the beach. I couldn’t wake them up. Strong magic does that to them, but I’ve taken Axtrig away and it feels as if there isn’t any other magic here. Anyway, Meena and Alnor are the ones who want to talk to you. Tahl and I just came to help them.”

  He shook his head, smiling as if he knew her thoughts.

  “Best let them sleep,” he said. “Nothing will harm them. And you are both right and wrong. There is no magic here, except one, and that prevents all the others. And it is very strong. Your friends could not endure it, waking. In spite of what you say, it is still astonishing to me that you are able to. Well, you must come in and tell me the rest of your story, and then we can decide what to do.”

  He turned and started to lead the way along the path, but then stopped and turned back, frowning.

  “I think you are carrying something else besides the spoon,” he said. “The force of the spoon hid it earlier. What is it?”

  In the astonishment, relief and dismay of meeting Faheel, Tilja had forgotten about the hair tie, though it was still producing that faint, insectlike buzz beside her right thigh. She fished it out of her pocket and showed it to him.

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “It’s just something a traveling magician gave me to keep my hair up. Somebody else had to do that for me. If I touched it the magic didn’t work. But since I came here something seems to have woken up, and it’s much stronger than the plain hair-tie magic. I can feel it even when it’s me holding it.”