Benayu fetched the basket and then joined Fodaro, and crouched with him beside the lizard. They talked in low and worried voices. Ribek ate slowly while Maja worked away at his wound, which had clearly been troubling him more than he had let on. Then he hunkered away from the stream, stretched out in the sunlight and closed his eyes. By the time Saranja returned with a sheaf of twigs and leaves he was fast asleep, and Benayu had a small fire going beside the little circular pool, with a metal pot suspended over it.
Saranja eyed this, frowning.
“How did you know?” she said, instantly suspicious.
“Maja told me you’d need it, and Fodaro says we’d better lay off magic—even silly little things like lighting a fire—for the moment. So I did everything else your way, fetched the pot and the flint with my own hands, I mean. There’s good clean water in the pool. What have you got?”
“Nothing I was looking for. Most of this is only a bit better than nothing, but the bitter-bark’s fine, only it’s got to be an infusion.”
She picked out a bunch of twigs bound with a rag, and used this to handle them as she peeled the bronzy bark from the white wood. Maja reached to help.
“Watch it,” she said. “The raw sap is poisonous. You can use a couple of other sticks to put the bark in the pot. Keep it stirred, and just simmering if you can. Are we actually in a hurry, do you know?”
“There’s remarkably little we do know, these days,” said Fodaro, looking up. “Less than ever now, until Jex comes to himself. He exists simultaneously in two…places. That’s all it’s safe to tell you. But normally he can communicate through his other self with creatures of his kind elsewhere in the Empire and tell us what’s going on out there. In the meanwhile perhaps you could tell us this story which you’ve mentioned from time to time. It could very well be useful.”
Saranja sighed.
“I suppose I’ll have to,” she said. “Better get it over. We’ll let this cool now. Put me right, Maja, if I get it wrong. It’s been a long time.”
She lifted the pot from the fire with a stick and wedged it behind a boulder, then moved with the other three into the shade of the cedar, and they settled down close above the lizard.
“You’ll have to check with Ribek,” she said. “Everyone in the Valley tells it a bit differently, but his family and mine are the only ones it really matters to.”
“The Valley?” asked Fodaro.
“It’s over there,” she said, pointing west. “I don’t know how far. We came a bit roundabout, because first off we were escaping from some Sheep-faces in an airboat…. Forget about that—I’ll draw you a picture and explain later.”
She picked up a twig and started to scratch an outline in a patch of bare earth.
“Rocky flies incredibly fast,” she went on, “and that second day he kept going till it was too dark to see. Then we slept on a sort of ledge in the mountains and flew on all next day, with one short break by a river. We slept again halfway up a mountain and got here, when? A bit after midday, about?
“Anyway the Valley’s completely cut off from everywhere else, and has been for—oh, I suppose it’s got to be twenty generations, however long that is. But it wasn’t always. According to the story, we used to keep getting invaded by wild horsemen from the north and—just as bad, if not worse—the Emperor’s armies coming up from the south to drive them back. In the end things got so bad that we decided to send a sort of delegation to look for a powerful magician to stop this happening. She was called Asarta—”
“Asarta.”
Maja heard the stone whisper in her mind, coming, it seemed, from unbelievable distances away. Saranja must have heard it too. She shuddered.
“I don’t know if I can take much more of this,” she said. “I don’t mind giving Rocky his wings and taking them off again, for some reason, but otherwise…And I really hate it when it happens inside my head. In the story there’s an ancestor of ours—mine and Maja’s—called Tilja, who could undo magic. That was the only part I used to like.”
“Many people in the Empire feel the same,” said Fodaro. “There’ve been waves of lynchings of magicians over the years. Go on with the story. Your people went to this magician—I know her name, of course, but not much else. What did she do?”
“She didn’t. She’d finished her work and was just getting ready to leave, to ‘undo her days,’ according to the story, so she sent our people on to a magician called…Can I say his name?”
Fodaro shrugged.
“It will not have been his true name,” he said. “But it will still have resonance for Jex, as Asarta’s did. Try mouthing it only. You can tell us later.”
Maja watched the lizard as Saranja’s lips moved. It did not stir, but again she heard the whisper in her mind, no louder than before, but nearer, somehow, more resonant.
“Faheel.”
Then silence. Saranja hesitated a moment, sighed resignedly and went on.
“She gave them a ring to take to him, and in exchange he sealed the Valley off for another twenty generations. He summoned the Ice-dragon to block the northern passes with massive snowfalls, and—I’ve always thought this bit sounded particularly stupid—some unicorns into the southern forest who brought a kind of disease with them that made any men who tried to go in among the trees fall sick and die. Women were all right, though. See what I mean, stupid? There was always one woman in my family who could hear what the cedars were saying, and she had to go into the forest each year when the first snows fell and sing to the unicorns and then feed them through the winter. And there was always one man in Ribek’s family who could hear what the streams were saying, and each year he had to climb up to the snow line and sing to the snows to bring the Ice-dragon back for another winter.
“Well, that lasted another twenty generations, and then it broke down again, so four of us—Tilja and her gran from our family and a boy called Tahl and his grandpa from Ribek’s—went off to look for this Faheel person…Bother. No, it seems to be all right to call him that…Anyway, after a lot of tiresome magical adventures…I think I’m leaving out something important, Maja….”
“The Watchers?”
“Oh yes. Everything in the Empire was very tightly controlled. You couldn’t travel anywhere without having a way-leave. You couldn’t even die without a license from the Emperor. And magic—oh, gods! I suppose I’ve got to start believing in all this stuff—that was controlled by a bunch of super-magicians in Talak…am I saying that right?”
“The city is differently pronounced in different parts of the Empire,” said Fodaro. “Up here in the North we mostly call it Talagh. You were about to tell us what you know about the Watchers.”
“Oh yes. They were supposed to be controlling the magic in the Empire, only they were all at daggers drawn with each other but that didn’t stop them cracking down hard on anyone using magic without permission. Faheel had set the Watchers up to stop people doing that, but it went on in secret, and the system got out of hand, so everyone was scared stiff of the Watchers, who were meant to be there to look after them, and meanwhile Faheel had disappeared.
“But Tilja’s gran had—wait for it—a wooden spoon, of all things, carved from the wood of a peach tree that had grown from the stone of a peach out of Faheel’s garden, and the darned thing knew where he was and if you said his name over it would swivel round and point that way. The trouble was that sent out a magical signal which put the Watchers on to them whenever they tried. But they just managed to get away each time and in the end they found Faheel on an island out in the southern ocean, but of course he was incredibly old and tired and longing to give up, but he couldn’t until he’d found someone to pass the famous ring on to.”
“In what way famous?” said Fodaro.
“He could control time with it. I’ll come to that in a minute. Anyway, Tilja told him about a magician called the Ropemaker they’d met on their journey. Faheel decided he was the one he’d been waiting for, but they looked at a sort of magic
table he’d got and saw that the Ropemaker was in the palace at Talak and just about to be made into a Watcher. So to stop that Faheel used the ring to hold time still for the whole Empire while he and Tilja were carried up to Talak by this roc and he destroyed the Watchers. But before—”
“One moment,” said Fodaro. “‘He destroyed the Watchers.’ Does your story say anything about how he did that?”
“Yes, but it makes even less sense than anything else. Everything got bent out of shape. There were a lot of towers. They were all straight if you looked at just one of them, but they weren’t straight with each other. Something far off looked bigger than something nearer. Shapes didn’t fit together with themselves. In the end the sky came forward until it was inside out and swallowed the Watchers up. And if you know what any of that means you’re welcome to it.”
Fodaro was staring at her, oblivious to her outrage. Benayu in turn was staring at him with his mouth half open in astonishment.
“As it happens, I do know what it means,” said Fodaro slowly. “It is unbelievable, though not in the way you think. Anything else you can tell me about it…?”
“I don’t think so. Maja? No, we both know the same version, but Ribek’s is a bit different in places. You’ll have to ask him when he wakes up. Shall I go on?”
“Please. So, having destroyed the Watchers Faheel gave the Ropemaker the ring?”
“No, because before he could do that another magician who wanted the ring—he was one of the secret ones—Tilja called him Moonfist—he took Faheel by surprise and nearly killed him, but Tilja managed to use the ring to stop time again and get him back to his island. Then before he died he gave Tilja the ring to take to the Ropemaker.
“They had a lot more stu—I’ve got to stop saying that—they had a lot more adventures before they found him, of course, and he gave them the power to seal the Valley off again and sent them home. Tahl and Alnor couldn’t go through the forest because they were men and the sickness was back, but they had a tiresome old mare with them called Calico, and the Ropemaker put a couple of roc feathers—the ones I just showed you—onto her shoulders and turned them into wings, so that she could fly them home. And I think he actually managed to hide the Valley completely this time. I spent six years out on the other side of the desert among the warlords, and nobody had any idea it was there….”
“One moment,” said Fodaro. “There were magicians there, among these warlords? And magical objects?”
“Yes. Why? Magic didn’t work so well out there, but—”
He interrupted her with a gesture and glanced at Benayu, who nodded.
“Only a minor puzzle,” he said. “Later, perhaps. Please go on. Nobody among these warlords knew of the existence of the Valley….”
“That’s right. I don’t think anyone in the Empire does, either. In the old days, before the Ropemaker, the Emperors kept trying to send armies through the forest to recapture what they called their Lost Province—that’s in the story—so they must have known about it then, but I’ve never heard they’ve tried anything like that since.
“But the magic must have stopped working now because it was only supposed to last for twenty generations and they’re up. My family kept count, and my mother always told me I might be the one who had to go and look for the Ropemaker and ask him to renew the magic. I couldn’t stand it. Why me, for pity’s sake? I never wanted anything to do with any of it in the first place. I thought it had ruined my life. So I ran away, and that turned out even worse, so as soon as I got the chance I ran back. So there I was, looking at the ruins of my old home, when I found the feathers among the ashes, and I realized that all this had been planned somehow, long ago. I’d even picked up an old horse to put the wings on, and there was Ribek limping up the road. And at that point Sheep-faces turned up in their airboat looking for us. Ribek says that no one had ever seen anything like that in the Valley before. Which shows that the Sheep-faces had only just found out the Valley was there, and—”
“Sheep-faces?” said Benayu. “They’ve got to be the same as the Pirates, haven’t they?”
“It sounds like it,” said Fodaro. “I want to know more about this ring, as well as anything you can tell me about the destruction of the Watchers. I’ve heard rumors about that, as a matter of fact, but I’ve never heard about anything like the ring, not even a rumor. But you tell us about your Sheep-faces first. This may be more immediately important. What do these airboats look like?”
“I’ve drawn you one,” said Saranja.
She’d been scratching away at her picture all the time she’d been talking. They studied it while she told them about the Sheep-faces.
“Yes, they’re the Pirates all right,” said Benayu. “That explains a lot. I wonder if even the Watchers know all that.”
“Watchers!” said Maja. “But Faheel…”
“Destroyed the ones he had originally set up, just as Saranja has told us? Indeed he did. But magic is wild, dangerous stuff. All sorts of evils follow its uncontrolled use. The Ropemaker was forced to set up some kind of a system to replace the Watchers. He built in safeguards and for a while it worked well enough, but then he vanished, no one knows where, and over the centuries his system became perverted, just as Faheel’s had done, though in a different manner, and then people started to call them the Watchers again….”
“That’s what you were worried about,” said Saranja, “that they might have seen us arrive on Rocky?”
“Yes, but if they had they would have been here by now, I think. It depends how much of the magical impulse Jex managed to absorb. That’s one of the things he does.
“Where were we? The Pirates. Well, some of our coastal cities have been subjected to raids by a swarm of Pirates using airborne craft, Saranja. That’s all anyone has been officially told. We haven’t been told, for instance, how widespread these attacks have been, nor that as well as the usual destruction and looting that Pirates have historically gone in for, these ones seem also interested in suborning or kidnapping magicians for some purpose of their own. I needed Jex to tell me that. It’s been going on for thirty-odd years now, and emergency measures are in place. These include the central licensing and conscription of first-and second-level magicians, who have hitherto only required local licensing, in order to defend the Empire—in fact a complete crackdown on all unauthorized magic, which is something the Watchers have long been waiting to put in place, and will now have widespread popular backing in a national emergency. That’s why Benayu and I are here—not just to escape the conscription, but to find means to resist it, and in the end, perhaps to overturn the whole system of Watchers.
“Furthermore the Ropemaker has disappeared, just as Faheel did, and now here you come like your ancestor Tilja to find him, and help him to destroy the Watchers and find his successor and restore the world to its natural order for another twenty generations.”
He seemed to have relaxed enough to be amused by the notion, and Saranja’s uncooperative glare.
“Where do the Pirates fit in with all that?” said Benayu.
“I have no idea. Perhaps Jex will tell us when he wakes and is fully back here.”
“Your friend’s just coming round, Saranja,” said Benayu. “I’ll get you some clean bandages. There’s something nasty in that cut still, under a sort of flap near the top on the left.”
Maja looked across to where Ribek lay by the stream. As far as she could see he hadn’t moved but now he yawned and stretched contentedly and sat up.
“I’ll look,” said Saranja as she rose.
By the time Benayu returned with the bandages Ribek was on his back again, his eyes closed, his face gray-white and covered with sweat. Saranja was on her knees beside him gently using her thumbs to press the wound closed. Blood dribbled down his calf.
“Thanks,” she said, without looking up. “Cut me a few small squares for swabs, will you, Maja, then a soft pad, and then the longest strip you can make, about a handsbreadth wide, and slit the end
a foot or so down the middle. That was hell for Ribek, but worth it. I think I got all of the muck out, but the bitter-bark will take care of anything I’ve missed. He’d be in a fever without. Now, tip a bit of it onto the squares and squeeze them out and hand them to me one at a time. The same with the pad, and then while you’re waiting roll up the bandage, starting with the slit end.”
She settled to work. Benayu went back to Fodaro and they started talking earnestly together. Maja was holding the pad ready for Saranja to take when everything changed. She cried aloud and was almost knocked sideways as the familiar quiver trembled across the mountainside. Rocky neighed as if facing an enemy, the sheep scattered again, bleating, and the dog raced to bring them back. By the time she recovered Benayu and Fodaro were standing, their faces tense as they stared out toward the southeast. Almost at once they fell into what looked like a furious argument, all the fury on Benayu’s part, Fodaro grim and anxious.
“Any idea what this is about?” said Ribek. “Did they tell you anything while I was asleep, Saranja?”
“Lots, but not about this. But whatever it is, it’s urgent. These Watcher people are coming or something. Let’s get this done with. Bend your knee, if you can. Now put your hands where mine are. Right. Now…”
They had finished, and Ribek was standing shakily, leaning on Saranja’s shoulder, when Benayu came hurrying back. His face was working, and at first he could barely speak for grief and anger.
“You’ve…you’ve got to go,” he said. “Can’t explain. No time. Straight down. See that tall pine at the bottom? Bit to the right of that there’s a track. Down there till you come to the drove road. Right there. Three miles on, there’s a bridge with a village on the other side. Wait in the trees till you’re sure there’s no one about and then hide under the bridge. I’m bringing the sheep. When you hear the sheep bell coming, one of you come out and wait in the trees with Maja. I’ll tell you what to do next. If I don’t come, wait till it’s almost dark, then Maja must hold Jex in her hand and Saranja hold her feathers just in front of him and breathe gently across them into his face. With luck he’ll wake up. If he does, do whatever he says. If he doesn’t, don’t try to help by saying the name. Just do whatever you think best. Here, Maja. Hang him round your neck, and sleep with him under your pillow. He may be able to shield you a bit.”
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