When it was over Da rose and stretched.
“Bed now,” he said. “Who’s sleeping in the attic?”
“Just Tahl,” said Meena. “Alnor and me are going out to the barn. And there’s no need to look like that, Selly—tales I could tell about when you were my age, and you always thought I didn’t know. Anyway, like I said, it isn’t that. There’s something we’ve laid on us to do, and we might as well get it over. Right, love?”
“It is decided,” said Alnor quietly. “It is for the Valley. Do you think we would not do otherwise if we had the choice?”
“And we’ll need the makings of a fire,” said Meena.
They had all heard the story. Only Anja didn’t understand what was happening. Somberly they helped pack rugs and firewood into two loads, but Meena and Alnor refused any help with carrying them out to the barn. Tilja was fighting with tears by the time they opened the door.
“Oh, cheer up, everyone,” said Meena, waving the lantern she was carrying to and fro like a dancer at the midwinter fire feast, and laughing as if she meant it. “Look at it this way. Suppose someone had come to us four months back and told us just you can be young again till you get home, d’you think we wouldn’t’ve jumped at the chance? This time we’ve been having, we wouldn’t’ve missed it for anything in the world! Right, love?”
She turned and staggered through the door under her load. Alnor paused in the doorway, smiled an odd, teasing smile, so that for a moment he looked just like Tahl, and followed her out into the darkness.
Tired though she was, Tilja woke from ancient habit when Da got up shortly before dawn to go and see to the animals. The little finger of her left hand was throbbing uncomfortably, and she realized that the Ropemaker’s hair must still be wound round it. Perhaps it was that that had told her so clearly in her sleep that there was something unfinished. As she slid out of bed her movement woke Anja, who, instead of snuggling complainingly back under the covers, sat straight up.
“Where are you going?”
“Shhh. Go back to sleep. There’s something I’ve got to do.”
“Magic?”
“Sort of.”
“I’m coming too. Please. I’ve got to be there.”
Tilja was on the point of telling her to lie down again when she realized that what Anja was saying might possibly be true.
“All right. Put some clothes on. We’re going outside.”
When she opened the door it was still dark, but the first gray light in the east outlined the roofs across the yard. Through the gap beside the barn she could see, close beneath the dark edge of the forest, a single orange spark, the glow of a fire. It was too bright to have been burning all night—the firewood Meena and Alnor had carried wouldn’t have lasted. Sighing, she took Anja’s hand and led her to the stables, where she left her by the door. Groping in the pitch black, she found a pannikin on the shelf, scooped it into the bin that contained the yellownut, carried it out and gave it to Anja, then led her up to the barn.
“Wait here,” she said, and again by touch went in and found and untied Calico’s tethers and led her out. She waited while Calico stretched and eased her wings with a tremendous rattle of plumes and then folded them along her flanks.
“Aren’t they beautiful!” said Anja.
“Yes, but I’m afraid I’ve got to take them away.”
“Oh, you mustn’t! I want to fly, too!”
“So do I, but it’s like Ma said. Magic doesn’t belong in the Valley, only in the forest and the mountains. If we let Calico keep her wings it will spoil everything. I don’t know how, but somehow or other it will, in the end. No more talking to the cedars, no more unicorns, no more Urlasdaughters at Woodbourne . . .”
“I suppose so.”
“All right. Now you give Calico the yellownut, a little at a time, just to keep her mind off what I’m doing. That’s right . . .”
As Calico nosed forward for the yellownut Tilja ran her bare hand along the spine of the great wing. For an instant she could feel the hardness of a bone as broad as her wrist beneath the silky plumage, then the flicker of numbness, and then just air. One golden feather wavered toward the ground. She picked it up, went round to the far side and picked up the other feather. That wing had already vanished with the first. She unwound the Ropemaker’s hair from her finger and rewound it round the quills of the feathers.
Calico was nuzzling into the pannikin for the last crumbs of yellownut. Realizing she’d had it all, she raised her head and gave her shoulders an irritable shake, then looked round, so obviously puzzled that Tilja laughed aloud.
“What’s that about?” said Anja.
“She’s wondering what happened to her wings. She knows something’s changed, but she can’t think what. These are for you.”
“Oh . . . what are they?”
“Let’s put her in her own stall and I’ll tell you there.”
They settled onto a pile of hay, close together, not just for warmth, but because they were long-parted sisters, with feelings for each other no one else could have, ever.
“Those are roc feathers,” said Tilja. “The roc gave them to me, so that the Ropemaker could use them to help me. He couldn’t have if I’d just found them, or stolen them somehow. That’s because a roc is a magical creature in its own right, like a unicorn, or the merman who towed us away from Faheel’s island. They aren’t made magic like the ring, or Dorn’s whip.
“Now I’m giving them to you, because someday someone is going to need them again. Not you, I hope, nor your daughter who can hear what the cedars are saying, when her time comes, nor many daughters’ daughters after that. But one day one of them is going to need to go to the Ropemaker and ask him to help the Valley, just as we went to look for Faheel.
“So you’ve got to keep the feathers safe, and pass them on to your daughter when the time comes, and tell her the story we told you last night. I’ll tell it to you again, because you were asleep some of the time, and if I can I’ll come and tell your daughter when she’s old enough to understand.
“I saw what the Ropemaker did, but I’ve no idea how he did it, so I can’t tell you how she must use the feathers—that daughter’s daughter who’s going to need them. Perhaps her hands will know, because the feathers will tell them, and that hair round them. That’s one of his. It’s full of his magic. I think she’d better go into the forest, because that’s where the magic is, and the forest is our friend. There’ll have to be a horse, and a man or a boy from Northbeck. And then—I don’t know—perhaps she must do the exact opposite of what I do, taking all the magic that’s in her, and all she can suck out of the forest, and passing it out through her hands into the feathers and the horse. And at the same time she must say the Ropemaker’s name. Ramdatta.
“It is a secret name. None of you, not you or your daughter or any of the daughters after, must ever tell anyone that name, except the one who’s going to have Woodbourne after you.”
“Ramdatta?”
“That’s right. Do you understand?”
“Of course I do. It’s important. It’s for the Valley.”
“That’s right.”
They sat for a while in silence, Tilja vaguely but deeply content at the completion of things with this homecoming, Anja turning the feathers over, studying them, stroking them gently with her fingertips. When they rose and left the stables, day had broken.
Crossing the yard, Tilja turned and looked east through the gap between the stable and the barn. Two figures were coming slowly along the track, a rather stout old woman and a slighter man. The woman was limping, leaning heavily on the man’s arm. He seemed to be staring in front of him, but from the way he carried his head it was at once obvious that he was blind.
Anja shouted, raced to the gate and climbed it. Twisting round on the top bar, she cupped her hands round her mouth and yelled.
“Wake up! Wake up, everybody! Meena’s come home!”
She swung herself down on the other side and raced to we
lcome her grandmother.
Epilogue
A woman led a lame horse across an unpeopled landscape. For much of the way all seemed peaceful, but then she would come to an area where buildings were shattered or gutted with fire, field after field of standing crops burnt black, and bodies, both human and animal, sprawling in their blood and now rotting unburied. Ahead of her lay the heavy line of the forest, and close beneath it the remains of one last farm. So Saranja came home to Woodbourne.
Six years ago she had left, swearing to herself she would never return. For five of those years she had been the house slave of one of the warlords beyond the East Desert, until he and the two children she had borne him had died when his keep was stormed by his brother’s army. In the chaos she had escaped, and continued to stagger on through the darkness. When dawn had broken she had found herself already in the desert.
Six years ago she had almost died, crossing it, though then she had carried food and water. Now she had nothing. But she did not turn back. Death would be better than the life she had been living. This time, though, the desert seemed to let her through as if it had chosen to do so. It provided her with two freak thunder-storms and a water hole large enough to support a colony of birds which, having no predators, laid their eggs on the ground. With those, and things that she had learned from her first crossing to recognize as food, she had come through.
And then, seeing what had happened in the Valley, she had known that she must go and find out if anything was left of Woodbourne.
Not much. When a thatched and timbered building goes up in flames, very little remains but the central chimney stack, standing amid a pile of ashes and a few rafter ends.
No voice answered her call. She hadn’t expected one. Her brothers would be fighting the raiders, or dead, her mother and aunt hiding in the forest with the animals.
She scuffed with her feet among the fringes of the heap. It was a way of preventing herself from weeping, because she felt she had no right to. Of her own will she had cut every connection with Woodbourne, even grief. All that was over.
Something glinted in the ashes. She stooped and eased out a golden feather, perfect, looking as if it had been shed that very morning. She pulled it free, and another came with it, attached at the quill by a twist of golden hair. She laid them together and ran her fingertips along them. The idiot story flooded back into her mind, the story that she had never believed, thinking it just a mechanism by which her mother could bind her for all her life to Woodbourne, as she herself had been bound, because Saranja had once made the mistake of admitting that she sometimes imagined she could hear the cedars talking.
With a sigh she turned to the horse, a useless old gelding she had found yesterday—or rather he had found her, wandering out of nowhere and nosing up to her for food, and had then simply followed her. She hadn’t driven him off, because he was company of a kind, and also fresh meat that she didn’t have to carry. She had imagined till now that he followed her so persistently only because he didn’t want to be the only living creature in the landscape.
If it’s you, you’ll need a horse as well as the feathers.
“Waiting for me, weren’t you?” she said. “Now all we want is some fellow from Northbeck.”
She looked back along the way they had come. A man was limping up the road toward her, leaning heavily on his staff. Without thought her fingers caressed the golden feathers as she waited for him, until she realized that her hands were full of a peculiar glowing warmth. She looked down. Feathers and hair seemed to shine with their own light. There was no need to go up into the forest. If she could do it at all, she could do it here.
The man came into the yard. He was about forty, slight, dark, with a look of arrogant energy beneath his obvious weariness and pain. There was a bloodstained bandage round his left calf.
“Ribek Ortahlson,” he said.
“Well, I’m Saranja Urlasdaughter. Hold his head, will you.”
She moved round to the horse’s flank.
“I’ve no idea if this will work,” she said.
She whispered the name.
“Ramdatta.”
Her hands knew what to do.
About the Author
Peter Dickinson is the author of many books for adults and young readers and has won numerous awards, including the Carnegie Medal (twice), the Guardian Award and the Whitbread Award (also twice). His novel Eva was a Boston Globe–Horn Book Fiction Honor Book. Eva was also selected as an ALA Best Book for Young Adults, as were Dickinson’s novels AK and A Bone from a Dry Sea. His most recent book for Delacorte Press was The Lion Tamer’s Daughter and Other Stories, which was chosen by School Library Journal as a Best Book of the Year. Peter Dickinson has four grown children and lives in Hampshire, England, with his wife, the writer Robin McKinley.
By the Same Author
The Lion Tamer’s Daughter and Other Stories
The Kin Trilogy
Suth’s Story
Po’s Story
Mana’s Story
Chuck and Danielle
Shadow of a Hero
Time and the Clock Mice, Etcetera
A Bone from a Dry Sea
AK
Eva
Merlin Dreams
A Box of Nothing
Giant Cold
Healer
The Seventh Raven
City of Gold and Other Stories from the Old Testament
Tulku
Hepzibah
Annerton Pit
The Blue Hawk
The Dancing Bear
Emma Tupper’s Diary
The Changes Trilogy
The Weathermonger
Heartsease
The Devil’s Children
Published by
Delacorte Press
an imprint of
Random House Children’s Books
a division of Random House, Inc.
New York
Copyright © 2001 by Peter Dickinson
Illustrations copyright © 2001 by Ian Andrew
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dickinson, Peter.
The ropemaker / Peter Dickinson.
p. cm.
Summary: When the magic that protects their Valley starts to fail,
Tilja and her companions journey into the evil Empire to find the
ancient magician Faheel, who originally cast those spells.
[1. Magic—Fiction. 2. Fantasy.] I. Title.
PZ7.D562 Ro 2001
[Fic]—dc21
2001017422
October 2003
www.randomhouse.com
eISBN: 978-0-307-43399-2
v3.0
The Ropemaker Page 38