The Ropemaker

by Peter Dickinson

  Her mind was full of a jumble of thoughts about the Ropemaker. They didn’t seem quite to fit together, in the same way that the Ropemaker’s own gawky body didn’t . . . and the animals he’d been didn’t either, if Faheel was right, the lion, the donkey perhaps, the cat on the walls of Talagh, the dog by the river, the unicorn on the crag, guarding them, helping them all the way south. . . .

  Except for the unicorn. The unicorn was one of the things that didn’t fit. It had been different, menacing, dangerous, almost an enemy, nothing like the Ropemaker himself, strange but friendly, not frightening at all—until she remembered what Tahl had said about the bit of rope that had wrapped itself round Calico’s legs in the pine forest . . . and . . .

  And—she really didn’t want to think about this—Ma’s dream. It touched me with its horn. What else could she have been talking about . . . ?

  Tilja was jolted out of her wonderings by the appearance of the bird. A little to her right, beyond the nearest flower bed, was a small meadow cropped by a pair of sheep, each tethered to a single peg so that they mowed a series of circles. The bird appeared in what must have been one of yesterday’s circles. At one moment there was just a patch of short-cropped grass; the next it was filled by an enormous brown bird, far larger than the elephants Tilja had sometimes seen hauling loads of timber on the journey south. It had a fiery red crest and a black, hooked beak, which looked as if it had been designed for tearing at meat, but the two sheep merely glanced up at it and went back to grazing. The bird put up an immense, taloned foot and started to scratch itself under the chin, like a farmyard hen. A moment later a large, cushioned litter appeared on the grass beside it. There were poles at each corner with a striped canopy stretched between them and what looked like a sort of carrying handle lying loose on the cloth.

  Before the bird had finished scratching, time stopped. Tilja both saw and heard it happen. The bird stuck, motionless, with its claw against its chin and a look of idiot absorption on its face. The sheep stuck with their mouths against the turf. The gulls wheeling above the cliffs stuck in midglide on slanting wings. All over the garden the birdsong stilled in an instant, and in the same instant the endless faint rustle of leaves and hush and shush of waves against the cliffs became a silence so intense that Tilja could hear not only her own breath but, at last, that of the three sleepers in the room.

  She frowned. Time ought to have stopped for them. They shouldn’t still be breathing. Then wood creaked on wood behind her and she turned and saw Faheel, now back in the shape of an old man, climbing shakily down the ladder.

  “Ready?” he said. “We will need food and drink, if you will carry the basket.”

  With trembling hands he fetched stores out of a cupboard and she stowed them neatly away.

  “Why hasn’t time stopped in here?” she asked.

  “Because you are here. Your friends will stop breathing as soon as you are out of the room, and when you are close to the roc it will wake and carry us to Talagh. Now, if you will let me lean on your shoulder . . . I shall be stronger after a rest.”

  As they passed the nearer sheep it began grazing again as if nothing had happened. A few paces further on, the bird woke and went on with its scratching. When they reached the litter Tilja put the basket down and helped Faheel settle onto the cushions, where he lay back with his eyes closed while she found a place for the basket and made herself comfortable at the other end. The bird—a roc he had called it—seemed to know what was expected of it. It rose and settled its feathers into place with a thunderous rattle, so huge, standing, that that she could see only its scaly, yellow lower legs beneath the canopy of the litter, and then only one as it reached out with the other to grasp the handle above the canopy. With a deep thud of its enormous wings it drove itself into the air.

  The litter lurched across the grass, almost spilling the passengers before the flight had begun, then swung wildly forward and round as they rushed into the air. Tilja grabbed one of the corner posts and clung to it. Faheel spread his arms wide but stayed where he was, still with his eyes shut. By the time their flight steadied they were already far into the air, and Faheel’s island was dwindling below and behind them. The spume against its rocks neither rose nor fell, but stayed poised in the instant when time had stopped for it.

  And still they rose, and the air shrieked past them, fiercer than any winter gale. Now Tilja could see a change in the northern horizon, a darker, grayer, fuzzier line than the blue curve of ocean to east and west, and knew she was looking at the shore of the Empire. The sky was mottled with small clouds that came nearer and nearer as the roc continued to climb. The steady pulse of its wings boomed in Tilja’s ears like strokes upon a monstrous gong. When she tried to shut the sound out with her fingers the bones of her body still rang with it.

  Faheel’s eyes were open, looking at her. She saw him beckon and crawled forward against the clawing wind. He put a hand into the fold of his overshirt and drew out the black box in which he kept the ring. Careful not to touch his flesh with hers, she put her ear close to his mouth so that she could hear what he was saying above the wind-shriek and the thud of the wings.

  “We go high. It will be cold. Cover me, and then yourself. But first, take this and put it in safety. I must sleep.”

  So Tilja took the box and stowed it in the bottom of the basket, and wedged that well with cushions. Then she chose furs and rugs from a pile and spread them over Faheel, and did the same for herself, but sat up for a while and watched the Empire draw nearer. By the time they crossed the coastline they were above the clouds. Between them, over to their left, she could see the innumerable channels of the Great River delta, and so was just able to make out Goloroth, but only its largest details, the wall, the big sheds, and the launching pier. As it slid away behind them she realized how fast they must be going.

  It grew colder, and her eyes were watering too much to see, so she coiled herself down into her bedding and pulled a cushion over her head to muffle both wing thunder and wind wail, and closed her eyes. She didn’t expect to sleep, but lay for a while wondering at the strangeness of what was happening—far stranger, she thought, than anything else in her adventure, from the unicorns in the forest to the roc in Faheel’s paddock, stranger even than her gradual discovery of the power that lay in her own lack of any magical power—this business with time. Suppose in the wild hurtle of the start of their flight she had fallen out of the litter, but landed unhurt, what would have happened? Would the roc have stuck in its flight between wing beat and wing beat? Or would Faheel have found the strength to wear his ring again? And if neither of them had been able to do that, what then? Would she have been stuck, moving and breathing, in a world forever still?

  She need not have been alone. She could have gone to Faheel’s lower room and Meena and the others would have started to breathe again and she could have waited for them to wake, but they would have needed to stay in her presence in order not to be stilled once more. They could have walked in Faheel’s garden and picked grapes from his vines and eaten them, but fresh grapes would not ripen, ever, unless she stayed near enough to draw them back into time. . . .

  But of course, Tahl would have worked out a way of getting her back up to the roc.

  Smiling at the thought, she fell asleep and dreamed of Woodbourne in a winter storm, with a gale shrieking through the thatch and a strange, deep booming in the chimney.

  She woke, and automatically looked to see how far the sun had sunk west, so that she might guess how long she’d slept. It hadn’t, of course, moved. The tearing wind was no less, so she constructed a sort of tunnel from which she could spy out eastward while still lying in shelter. Almost at once a soaring vulture swung past, woke into time, saw the roc, jerked itself into a spasm of escape, and stilled again, motionless wings wrenching at the motionless air.

  Most of what slid by below was too far off for Tilja to see any sign of its changelessness, but once they skirted a mountain range over which a thunderstorm wa
s raging. Time must have stopped in the instant of a lightning stroke, which stood there, a blazing vein of light, branching into twenty side veins between the dark sagging cloud layer and the darker crags below. She had to screw up her eyes against its brightness and even so couldn’t look at it for long.

  After a little she eased herself out of her nest and crawled forward to see how Faheel was doing. He was awake, and looked rested. She fetched him bread and fruit and cheese and a little flask of wine, and then crawled back, found what she wanted for herself and took it in under the rugs and nibbled peacefully. The litter was very comfortable, so when she’d had enough she let the weariness of all those days of travel overcome her, and slept again, and was only woken by the mild bump of landing, and the stilling of the sounds of flight. She looked out and saw that they were in the cleared space before the gates of Talagh.

  12

  The Palace

  Faheel had slept too. He was standing straighter and looked much stronger. He took what looked like a hand-ful of rubies from his pouch and offered them to the roc, which neatly nibbled them one by one out of his palm with the point of its huge beak, swallowed them in a single gulp, closed its eyes with an expression of total bliss, and belched. It then settled down, ruffled its feathers and fell asleep.

  “Won’t one of the Watchers see it?” asked Tilja. “It’s magical, isn’t it?”

  “To perceive something takes time, however short. They are all fixed in the instant when time stopped for them, a little while after you saw the parade in my table. Now, bring the box that holds the ring and keep it in your hand. Good. Over here.”

  The roc had landed in a space to one side of the entrance gate, with nobody near enough to be affected by the flow of time that enclosed Tilja wherever she went but was frozen still for the rest of the universe. Now as they picked their way between the citizens who had been coming and going until the moment that the ring did its work, some of them woke into movement and took a pace or two as Tilja went by, then returned to their stillness. When they reached the throng by the gate Faheel halted.

  “We cannot go through the city like this,” he said. “The streets are too crowded. People will wake round you and push us apart. Will you open the box? The egg of the phoenix is the catch. Good. Hold it in front of me and keep it steady. When I have touched the ring, lay your hand on my wrist.”

  The inside of the box seemed to have no bottom. It was a pure blackness, like the table in Faheel’s room. The ring simply floated in that blackness, resting on nothing. Taking a firm grip on Tilja’s shoulder, he put out his other hand and lightly touched the ring for a moment with the tip of his middle finger. She felt a shudder run through him. His hand rose a fraction and he stiffened into stillness. With a gulp of fear she realized that she was now alone, the only moving thing in a timeless world, but the moment she touched his wrist he relaxed and sighed.

  “Once it would all have been so easy,” he murmured. “Now I cannot spare the strength to exempt myself from the power of the ring. Well, from here on only you and what touches you is not locked into the moment. Let me just move my hold so that you have both hands free. If something causes me to let go of you, you must take me by the hand again. Close the box and keep hold of it. When I tell you, take the ring out and grasp it in your bare hand, and its effect will cease. Now we must find this Ropemaker.”

  So, slowly, with Faheel leaning heavily on Tilja’s shoulder, with his hand firmly against the bare skin of her neck, they made their way past the motionless lines waiting for entry to the city, and under the archway. Again she felt the force of the wards that guarded the city, powerful still in the instant into which time was locked, but it was very different from when she had first come through. There was no numbness, but an intense, strange feeling, as if the hand that enclosed the ring box had been a wine glass round whose rim somebody was rubbing a moistened fingertip, setting up a note that in a moment would shatter the glass.

  No, she told it, and raised her fist in defiance. The finger withdrew and the note stilled.

  “Well done,” murmured Faheel as she led him into the crowded street beyond the archway.

  Remembering what that had been like when she had first come to Talagh, Tilja was worried about how she was going to pick a path through the scrum without waking anybody into life. Fortunately some great lord had been just about to leave the city when time had stopped, and his servants had already cleared a way for him to the gate. She came to the lord himself a little way up the street, riding a beautiful spirited horse which must have been frightened by the tumult and was shying aside, with its rider fighting to control it, when the instant had come, fastening them into the same unchanging, impossible pose. As she edged past, Tilja was tempted to lay her hand on the glossy flank and wake the horse into life, just to see what happened. With a shock she realized that she was experiencing something she had never imagined, a sense of absolute power. All these people, even a great lord of the Empire, even the Emperor himself, were under her control. They could move, or not, as she chose. The thought was oddly frightening. If you had that power you wanted to use it. This must be what magicians were like, all the time. This was why some of them had tried so hard to get hold of Axtrig.

  They passed the ball of contortionists, poised on one foot, the woman smothered in motionless scorpions, jugglers with arcs of flaming torches or daggers hanging in stillness above them, barkers and stallholders with their mouths gaping in the shout they had started and never finished, sneak thieves with purses half cut, the smoke from roasting grills fixed in the windless air, all the bustle and frenzy of Talagh halted, as if forever.

  It was slow going, but Faheel could not have gone much faster if the avenue had been empty. Three times he needed to rest, and each time he rose his face seemed grimmer and grayer, like Meena’s when the weather changed and her hip was hurting her worse than usual.

  “Are you all right?” said Tilja, anxiously.

  “I will manage because I must,” he said. “It is the last chance. Foolishly I thought too much of the magical effort I must make, and forgot the ordinary physical cost of walking from one place to another.”

  “Couldn’t we have got the roc to take us the whole way?”

  “Perhaps, but it is a powerful center of magic in itself. It will wake with everything else when you take the ring out of the box and hold it in your hand, and there will then be more than enough magical forces around us for me to contend with.”

  At last the slope became steeper as the avenue rose to the palace gate. On either side the fantastic building stretched away, walls of white and pink marble carved with the wars and triumphs of forgotten Emperors; balconies and arcades dangling with huge-flowered vines; pinnacles and towers, banners and emblems; all the work of generations of master craftsmen toiling to please rulers who expected a fancy dreamed up over supper to have become fact by breakfast time.

  The gate appeared to have been carved from one immense block of jade. It was guarded by two bronze dragons, each six times the size of a horse. They looked like real dragons, but Tilja couldn’t be sure. They might have been statues. The living sentries beneath the archway stood just as motionless.

  The wall and the buildings behind it were just an outer shell. Inside that stood another palace, even more ornate. From it rose the soaring towers of the Watchers. It was too dazzling to look at long, like a jeweled crown for a giant king, a giant the size of a mountain. Its roofs were lapis lazuli and gold, all set with precious stones. Around it lay a scented garden, with fountains flinging jets of different-colored water far into the air. Directly in front of it was a large open space. It was here the soldiers were paraded.

  At first Tilja could only glimpse them between the motionless spectators who ringed the parade ground, but Faheel looked around and then led the way to a door of a tower beside the gateway they had just come through. An enormous soldier with a fierce mustache blocked the entrance.

  “Take his hand in yours,” murmured F
aheel.

  At Tilja’s touch the man came to life. For a moment he stared at her in furious astonishment, then looked up at Faheel. An odd, blank look came into his eyes and he backed slowly into the room behind him. “You can let go now,” said Faheel.

  Tilja did so, and the man froze. They walked on past him, and found three soldiers squatting on the floor, gambling. One of them had just thrown the dice, which hung suspended beneath his hand.

  Tilja felt an extraordinary impulse to interfere. What possible harm would it have done to leave Faheel for a moment, step across the room, pluck the dice out of the air—her touch moving them into the flow of time—and lay them down as triple sixes on the floor for the men to find when they were woken? Only the urgency of what they were doing stopped her.

  There was a winding stair in the corner of the room, too narrow for Tilja to climb beside Faheel so that he could lean his weight on her. He had to go up it on hands and knees, resting every few steps, while Tilja followed, gripping his ankle so as not to lose contact.

  At the top they found a small room, richly furnished, where several women stood by a pierced screen that looked out over the heads of the spectators. There were dice on a low table, with cushions around it. Some of the women must have been gambling, like the soldiers below. One had a purse in her hands and was paying another. She’d dropped a gold coin, which hung halfway to the floor. Tilja had never seen such clothes, glorious silks and velvets, brooches, necklaces and earrings. What any one of them was wearing looked as if it might be worth half the wealth of the Valley. On Faheel’s instructions she moved along the line of them, touching their hands, waking them for a few moments before he murmured a word to them. One by one they sank to the floor in a different kind of sleep.

  “What would have happened if I’d changed that man’s dice throw?” she asked while he rested again.