The Ropemaker

by Peter Dickinson

  “I’m starving,” said Meena. “May as well eat while she’s telling us.”

  All Tilja wanted to think about was the beauty and sadness of Faheel’s going, so she started reluctantly, but then found it somehow comforting to relive the day and a night and less than a day more that she had spent in his company. By the time she had finished, the moon had moved halfway across the sky, and she lay down to sleep still full of the peacefulness of the island.

  When they rose and looked around them in the morning the island was out of sight astern and the dark shore of the Empire lay ahead. Alnor woke in a bad mood and sat hunched and sullen, but gave no sign of what was troubling him. Tahl on the other hand was full of chat, still thrilled and fascinated by everything Tilja had told them the night before, especially what might happen to the machinery of the Empire with the Watchers gone from their towers and the Emperor himself dead.

  “You may not even need way-leaves,” he said as they breakfasted. “Perhaps the whole system’s broken down. If it hasn’t, we’re in trouble. You two can’t go anywhere without them, except back to Goloroth.”

  “How’m I going anywhere without a horse, if it comes to that?” said Meena. “All this sleeping on rafts and boats. My hip wasn’t that bad yesterday, but it is now.”

  “We can buy a horse, can’t we?” said Tahl. “We’ve got Faheel’s purse. You can get a good enough horse and still have change from a gold coin. There’s horse merchants at Goloroth— we sold Calico to one of them—though perhaps that’s not happening anymore, either.”

  “I’ll tell you one thing it’ll mean,” said Meena, with relish, “it’ll mean robbers on the roads, and the rascals in charge of way stations grabbing what they can squeeze out of us with nothing to stop them.”

  They argued it to and fro. Tilja listened without much interest and said nothing. All her real attention was elsewhere, inward. When, last night, she had told the others about her adventures, she had described in detail their arrival at the island, her meeting with Faheel, the journey to Talagh and back, and everything she had seen and done there, but had said only that after they had come back Faheel had gone up to his attic and given up his magic while she waited with them in the room below. She had said nothing about what she had then seen and felt. One day, perhaps, she might tell Meena, but not yet. She wasn’t ready. She still needed to understand and come to terms with her own discovery —deliberately shown to her, she now felt, by the spirits that had come—that her lack of magic was not in fact a lack, not an emptiness, but a power, a gift—a gift which, if she nurtured it, practiced it, learned all she could about it, might one day be as powerful in its own way as the gifts of a great magician like Faheel. A gift which was a kind of magic in its own right, a flow of power, but in the reverse direction. A gift she must, one day, use. Faheel had said there were two kinds of magician, those who worked with made magic, and those like himself who had discovered natural magic. Perhaps there was also a third kind. Herself. Though who was to say if she was the only one?

  Thinking about it as their seashell boat whispered across the empty ocean, thinking about how she did whatever it was she did, she discovered in herself a need to find a place where it belonged. Not Woodbourne, to whose remembered image she had clung as she had fought her way into Talagh, and again when she had faced Silena. She couldn’t cling to Woodbourne any longer. She had changed. Now she needed a new place, somewhere that would always be hers, which she could explore and learn to know, as she knew her way round Woodbourne, every cranny in the house and outbuildings, every yard of the fields and meadows.

  She closed her eyes and an image filled her mind, so strongly seen that it was hard to believe that it hadn’t been there already, waiting for her to find it. A lake, calm and clear, and deep beyond sounding. Nothing like the cedar-ringed lake in the forest, but set high among mountains, whose white unreachable peaks were reflected from its still surface. Cataracts poured down their slopes in roaring foam and plunged into the lake and became part of its stillness. Perhaps the image meant that she was like that lake. Her gift was to take the raging, demonic forces of made magic and channel them down into a central calm where they would be unbound from their making and loosed into their simple elements, and then perhaps breathed back into the world, rather as the lake on warm days breathed its water back to join the clouds.

  But the lake was more than that, more than a way of thinking about what she did. It was real, as much part of her as her heartbeat or her breathing. She would have it until she died. With closed eyes she gazed at it, seeing it in detail. It wasn’t like a dream image, shifting, unreliable. Shoreline and cataract and peak remained firm. Only the clouds and their reflections moved.

  But everything else was changed, all Tilja’s hopes and fears and expectations, all her life to come. Yes, she was going home with the others, if she could. She was going back to Woodbourne. But she wasn’t staying there. There was no magic in the Valley. Her gift was no use there.

  The shore of the Empire neared. From time to time now the sea-human controlling the unseen creatures that hauled the boat would rise from the surface as far as his waist and stare around and plunge below. When a cluster of fishing boats appeared almost directly ahead of them he changed course to avoid it. Now they could see fields and a small harbor as he skirted the shore, and then a range of barren-looking hills, and then a stretch of marshland. Where the hills met the marsh he turned shoreward, unharnessing his team before they reached the shallows and himself gripping the stern post and driving the boat up onto a muddy beach with powerful thrusts of his tail. Seeing him full length, Tilja discovered that he was at least as much fish as man, with dark green scales almost up to his shoulders and a ridged fin running the length of his spine. They rescued their packs, climbed ashore and turned and thanked him. He nodded briefly in acknowledgment, then scooped up a handful of mud from the seabed and tossed it into the boat. Instantly the hull split apart, shrinking as it did so. In the space of a couple of heartbeats all that was left of it was several fragments of gleaming seashell lying on the dark mud. He waved farewell, turned and slid out of sight.

  They plodded up the beach with Tahl guiding Alnor, and Meena leaning heavily on Tilja’s shoulder and wincing at every step. As soon as they were beyond the tide line she halted.

  “That’s enough for me,” she said. “I’m giving my leg a rest.”

  “We cannot stay here,” said Alnor, without any scrap of sympathy for the pain in her voice.

  “Then you’ll just have to leave me here,” she snapped.

  Even Alnor had to see that this wasn’t possible.

  “Well, we can rest while we eat the grapes, Meena and I,” he said.

  “I don’t know I’m that hungry,” said Meena, arguing for arguing’s sake, because of her hip.

  “We must do as he said, exactly,” snapped Alnor. Something in his tone gave Tilja a clue to the reason for his foul mood. He resented not being in control of things, in the way that he could control a raft on the river; he resented having set out on this difficult journey, by his own independent decision, despite everyone else’s advice, and then . . . Yes, against all the odds they had actually found Faheel, but once they had left Talagh hardly any of that had been Alnor’s doing. He had been swept along, helpless in the rush of the current, and finally lain asleep on Faheel’s island while far away in Talagh the whole Empire was shaken apart. Now he was determined to take control again.

  So they found a clean patch of ground and settled down. Alnor and Meena passed the bunch of grapes to and fro between them, and Tahl and Tilja each ate a nectarine to keep them company.

  “Now, that’s what I call a grape!” said Meena as she swallowed her first one.

  “A grape is a grape,” said Alnor.

  “That all you can say?” said Meena. “You tell me when you’ve eaten a better grape! Go on. Tell me.”

  They continued to squabble about the grapes as they ate them. Tilja, still thinking about what had happe
ned to her on the island, paid no attention; they were just two old people, tired and anxious and disgruntled, arguing like children in the way old people often do. The first thing she noticed was that Tahl had stopped eating. She glanced up and saw that he was sitting stock-still with his mouth open, ready to take another bite at his nectarine.

  She looked to see what he was staring at, and stared too.

  Alnor and Meena were still sitting side by side, engrossed in their squabble as they passed the half-eaten bunch back and forth. But they themselves had changed. Alnor’s snow-white hair was flecked with dark streaks. His lined old face had fleshed out, and his slight body seemed sturdier. While Meena . . . when they’d settled her down she’d made herself as comfortable as she could, half lying against a tussock of reedlike grasses, but now she’d straightened up and drawn her knees sideways under her. . . .

  There was no way, even on one of her best days, that Meena could sit like that!

  And lean and reach across to take the grapes!

  And her face and hair!

  She leaned further to snatch the grapes as Alnor withdrew them.

  “Now, then, turn and turn . . . What’s up?”

  “I can see,” said Alnor in a wholly different voice, soft and full of wonder. “Shapes in a mist, only, but . . . it was like this when my blindness began.”

  “How’s your hip, Meena?” said Tahl.

  “Not as bad as it might be. Matter of fact . . .”

  She twisted herself up, stood and felt at the joint. Gingerly she lifted her foot clear of the ground, balanced and moved the leg around. She put it down and blew her breath out.

  “Now, there’s something I never thought I’d do again,” she said. “What about it, you old fool? Now try and tell me these aren’t good grapes!”

  Alnor actually smiled.

  “I may be a fool,” he said, “but I think I am not as old as I was.”

  “Nor me,” said Meena. “My, I’m sorry I didn’t get to know your Faheel a bit better. He’s a really thoughtful old gentleman— unlike some I could name. Now I’ll be walking back to the Valley, after all.”

  “And I, perhaps, shall be seeing my way,” said Alnor.

  “Hey! Me first,” said Meena, as he started to pull another grape from the bunch. “Turn and turn about, he told us.”

  Even in the wonder of what was happening to their grandparents, Tahl couldn’t help thinking of the practical uses of it.

  “It’s better than that,” he said, as Alnor grudgingly handed the grapes over. “You’ve got to eat the whole bunch, Faheel said. At the rate you’re going, you won’t be much older than us by the time you’ve finished. So you won’t need way-leaves going north.”

  Meena had a grape halfway to her mouth. She paused and stared at it.

  “Perhaps you’ll be younger,” said Tilja with relish. “Then I’ll be able to tell you what’s what, for a change.”

  “May I live to see the day,” said Meena, and popped the grape into her mouth and gave the bunch back across to Alnor.

  “They tell me you were a handsome young fellow once,” she said. “Let’s have a look at you then.”

  For a while they almost gobbled in their excitement, while their grandchildren stood and watched them shed the corrupting years. The wrinkles vanished from their faces, apart from the laughter lines at the corners of Meena’s eyes. Her hair grew and thickened, losing all its gray until it was a soft, light chestnut, with a slight wave in it, reaching down to her shoulders. Her figure changed with almost ridiculous speed, swelling to serious stoutness and then shrinking again to comfortable plump curves. Alnor on the other hand stayed much the same, a slim, wiry, muscular man with almost jet black, short, curly hair and a look of fiery pride.

  Meena glanced at him as she started to hand the grapes across, and jumped to her feet.

  “Tell you what,” she said. “It’s frustrating watching you getting so likely looking. Let’s see if we can’t find a pool I can see myself in.”

  They picked up their packs, but Alnor didn’t at once move off to explore along the edge of the marsh. Instead he closed his eyes and slowly turned his head, as if listening for a distant call. Tahl copied him. They opened their eyes at the same moment and side by side led the way slantwise up across the dry and dreary hillside, halting at last in a place as barren seeming as everywhere else. But when Meena and Tilja came up beside them they found at their feet a rocky ravine, which here widened into a steep-sided basin with a waterfall tumbling down at its upper end. Below the fall was a pool.

  They scrambled down and settled on the rocks beside it for Meena and Alnor to finish the grapes. The water was creased with ripples below the fall, but smooth enough where they sat for Meena to make out her own wavering reflection as she shed the years. She finished as a plump-faced, smiling, lively girl, a year or two older than Tilja, with a mass of glossy chestnut hair that Tilja would have given her soul for. Alnor might have been a year or so older, unmistakably an Ortahlson, absurdly handsome, much more so than Tahl, though they could easily have been brothers. Unlike Meena, who had studied her reflection in the pool every time she ate another grape, he had refused even to glance at his, but from the way he stood and moved Tilja was quite sure that he knew how good he looked.

  Meena ate her last grape kneeling by the water, watching her rippled image, then rose to her feet and took Tilja’s hands and drew her to her and hugged her, cheek to cheek, laughing with pleasure. It was such a natural gesture that Tilja hugged her back, laughing too. Then she stiffened and pushed away and stared at her.

  “What’s up?” said Meena.

  “You didn’t feel anything? No, nor did I, but I was afraid of undoing the magic, like I did with Silena’s dog. You can’t be that kind of magical.”

  “I’m not magical at all, thank you very much. He may have used magic to get me here, but I’m me. Guess what day it is?”

  “What day it is?”

  “It’s my fourteenth birthday,” crowed Meena, laughing at Tilja’s bewilderment. “Look.”

  She held out her left arm and showed Tilja an angry blistered patch on the inside of the wrist.

  “I got that just yesterday,” she said. “Helping Ma with the baking for my birthday tea.”

  They picked up their packs again and climbed the hill. The stream ran out of a boggy plateau that stretched away north. On its further side, two or three miles away, they could see a group of low buildings, and knew at once what they were, having seen so many on their way south.

  “Where there’s a way station there’s got to be a road,” said Tahl. “This must be a side road, from another part of the Empire. Problem is, which way’s Goloroth? We’ve got to get there to reach the Grand Trunk Road.”

  “The other problem is, all four of us are young now,” said Alnor. “We’re supposed to be coming away.”

  “You and Meena could dress up old and hobble along,” suggested Tahl, teasing.

  “Don’t be stupid,” snapped Alnor. “We’ll travel at night. It can’t be that far.”

  “Isn’t that a couple of kids?” said Meena. “Look. There. And they’re going that way. So the other way must be to Goloroth.”

  There was a three-quarter moon, clear enough to show some distance along the empty road. Nobody in the Empire traveled by night, because who knew what other creatures might be about?

  “I think we should be all right,” said Tilja. “If anything like that comes, you’ll just have to hold on to me, and then it can’t touch you.”

  She felt completely confident about this. She had held Faheel’s ring in her hand and blanked out its magic. She didn’t believe that all the Watchers together could match that power. Along with that confidence came a feeling—more than a feeling, almost a certainty—that what she had seen and done in the last few days had given her strengths that she had not had on the journey south. As much as Meena and Alnor, though in very different ways, she had changed.

  Despite that, none of them was qu
ite ready for what happened almost as soon as they had set foot on the road. They were walking abreast through the silvery dark. Nothing stirred. There was barely a breath of wind, only a delicious waft of smells, dewy and earthy, drawn out by the night-cooled air. Tilja’s head was full of the knowledge that they were now going home, back to Woodbourne. She wanted to sing.

  She felt nothing, but Tahl was flung against her as if he’d been buffeted from the other side. She staggered and almost fell, but caught herself and grabbed his wrist as he fought with something she couldn’t see. He steadied. On her other side Meena and Alnor were sprawled in the road. Meena had her arms braced in front of her chest as if she was trying to push something away from her neck. Alnor was on his face, bucking to rise, but pinned down.

  Tilja bent and thrust her wrist into Meena’s grasp.

  “Hold on to me,” she yelled, kneeling and reaching across to touch the back of Alnor’s hand where it scrabbled at the dust.

  They rose gasping. The night was as peaceful and still as it had been only seconds before.

  “Loose magic,” muttered Alnor.

  “Bad as outside Goloroth,” said Meena.

  “This had things in it,” said Tahl. “No wonder people don’t like moving around in the dark.”

  “The power of the Watchers is broken,” said Alnor. “It will be worse now.”

  “And you didn’t feel anything?” said Tahl.

  “No,” said Tilja. “Not even that funny numb feeling I get. Wild magic must be different. It looks as if we’re going to have to hold hands all the way.”

  They adjusted their positions and walked on, tensely at first, but then more easily when nothing frightening happened, though all except Tilja could feel gusts of loose magic swirling around them with, as Tahl had said, things in it. The road wound down the hill they had climbed and ran for a while almost directly beside the marsh. Along the way two more roads joined it from the north, and as dawn was breaking it crossed the Great River on a bridge and joined the Grand Trunk Road. With sighs of relief they turned north.