The Ropemaker

by Peter Dickinson

  “Wait,” said Ellion. “You must be recorded as having started on that journey, but only your death-leaves are going home, for me to present to the census takers when they come. Since these will be in order, it is extremely unlikely that they will trouble to check with the records of way-leaves and see whether you in fact made the whole journey home.

  “But in fact, once you have crossed the river you will take the Grand Trunk Road south. . . .”

  “Meena and I will need way-leaves, surely,” said Alnor.

  “I dare not give you way-leaves. My name will be on them if you are discovered. Instead I will give you money, so that you can pay the necessary bribes to turn aside from the Grand Trunk Road. Southern officials are notoriously corrupt, so once you are well away from Talagh, you should be able to do that without trouble. But until that time comes, you are traveling to the City of Death. No records are kept of those who take that journey.”

  9

  The Grand Trunk Road

  At noon on the fifth day of their journey south, they were sitting in the shade at the edge of a pinewood on a hillside above the Grand Trunk Road. In the far distance they could see the Great River, which had run beside the road for a while, but had yesterday swung away east. Before they saw it again it would have plunged down cataracts, roared through foaming gorges, and almost lost itself in a chain of prodigious lakes, until at last it came back to the road at Ramram, far to the south.

  Everything was very still. Once or twice someone went past, people in too much of a hurry to rest out the hottest part of the day. Tilja could hear voices over to their left from where more travelers were also taking advantage of the shade. The only other noises seemed to be the ceaseless hum and click and buzz of insects.

  “Might as well get it over,” Meena muttered. “Come along, girl.”

  She heaved herself to her feet and started to hobble up the slope, leaning heavily on her cane. When they were well away from the road she stopped beside a mounded ants’ nest.

  “This’ll have to do,” she said. “We’re not going to find anywhere flatter. We’ll do it like we did on the wall, only we won’t try Axtrig straight off. Start with one of the other ones, and don’t let go of it until you’re good and ready, and grab it as soon as anything happens, supposing it does. I’ll go over there.”

  She fished the leather bag from under her skirt, took out the cloth and laid it over the anthill, and groped again in the bag for one of the nameless spoons. When Tilja took it, it felt like ordinary lifeless wood, no different from any other spoon she had ever handled, but the now familiar numbness seeped into the skin of her left forearm, where Axtrig was strapped against it, under the long sleeve of her blouse. She no longer found it an unpleasant feeling. It was simply something that happened. Not letting go of the spoon, she laid it on the cloth and looked toward Meena.

  “I’ll count to three,” said Meena. “Don’t look at me. Just watch the dratted spoon. One. Two. Three.”

  She saw Meena’s lips move as she whispered Faheel’s name. The numbness in her forearm exploded through her body. She gasped and staggered. Then it was gone. The spoon on the ant heap hadn’t stirred.

  “What’s up?” said Meena. “Nothing I could feel.”

  “It didn’t move,” said Tilja. “Only Axtrig . . . it must have been when you said the name . . . she really wanted to answer, but she couldn’t, because I was touching her.”

  Meena grunted, then sighed.

  “Nothing for it, seemingly,” she said. “We’re going to have to give her a go. Quick as you can, mind . . . no, wait . . . try holding your hand out flat with the cloth on it and laying her down on that—not letting go with your other hand, mind, till we’re ready, and seeing what happens. . . .”

  Forcing herself into calmness, Tilja rolled up her sleeve and untied the ancient spoon. Through her fingertips she could feel the difference from the other one, the sense of life still there in the grained wood. Holding Axtrig firmly in her right hand, she slid her left hand under the cloth, only to discover that its underside was now swarming with ants, mercifully not the biting kind. She gave the cloth a good shake and then used her teeth to arrange it over her open palm so that she could balance Axtrig there, still keeping her right hand in contact with the wood.

  “Ready,” she said.

  “Sure? Then I’ll count again. One. Two. Three.”

  Tilja let go of Axtrig, keeping her hand poised close above her, watching her, not Meena. For a moment nothing happened. Three or four baffled ants continued to scuttle around on the cloth. Then, all in an instant, they froze into stillness. This time it was different. The world remained the same and the spoon twitched round. Tilja actually saw it move. At once she closed her right hand down on it. As her palm touched the wood the ants resumed their scuttling. Down the hill, she heard Calico neighing in panic. She looked up.

  Meena was bent over her cane, steadying herself from falling. She let out a long breath and straightened.

  “Could’ve been worse,” she muttered. “Could’ve been a lot worse. Anything come of it, then?”

  “Yes, Axtrig moved. And she’s still pointing the way we’re going.”

  “Well, that’s something. Let’s get out of here, now. I don’t know if one of those Watchers or anyone would’ve picked it up but there’s no point hanging around to find out. Just listen to that stupid horse. If she felt it, there’ll be others. I’ll be starting off while you get yourself sorted out.”

  Trembling now with the relief that it was over, Tilja strapped Axtrig back against her arm, rolled the sleeve down and put the cloth away. All round her the woods seemed empty and silent. The other party of travelers, further along the hillside, seemed to have stopped their chatter, but as Tilja ran down the slope to catch up with Meena they started again. In their voices there was a note of alarm.

  Day after day they traveled on, unhindered and unquestioned. Since they were on their way to Goloroth nothing else needed to be known about them until they reached the city and gave their names to the officials at the entrance, who would then fill in certificates for Tilja and Tahl to take home, showing that their grandparents had indeed passed through those last gates. Not that they actually had any intention of going that far. All that concerned them was to travel south for as long as Axtrig told them. When at last the old spoon began to point in a new direction, then they would turn aside and start to bribe their way with the money that Ellion had given them. Meanwhile, for convenience, they continued to wear the uniforms of fourteenth graders, but used their own names if anyone asked.

  The Grand Trunk Road swarmed with travelers, merchants, messengers, officials with their retinues, troops of soldiers, drivers of loaded oxcarts, gangs of slaves being taken to market or to some big task of building or destruction, people of all ages and accents and manners, but always more going south than north. Old and young, pair by pair, made the long journey to the City of Death, but only the young came back.

  A section of every way station was set aside for those making that journey. Here free meals were provided, but plain stuff, so that the food stalls still did good business. The atmosphere inside these enclosures was strangely cheerful. Almost all the old people seemed completely to accept what was happening and to face the end of their lives with dignity and not with fear. Tahl, typically, got into talk with some of them and asked bluntly how they felt about what they were doing.

  “Much the best way of it,” one old woman told him. “Easy for me, mind. I started to get the shakes, which runs in the family, so I knew how long I’d got, and there was time to make all the arrangements and set up a nice funeral party and be gone, and I’m really making the most of it, seeing all these places and meeting all these people, when all my life I’ve never been more than nine miles from my own front door.”

  Not everyone felt like this. Some were already in the grip of their last illness, some made the journey with dread, and some with fierce resentment, but most seemed to be going south almost g
aily, and these helped to keep the doubters from gloom. When they had collected their evening meals they would settle in groups of twenty or more—people who had been strangers until only a few days earlier—and gossip and sing far into the night, songs of all kinds from all over the Empire, silly or sentimental or stirring, but not often sad.

  “Makes me feel a right fraud,” Meena said, “seeing them all so cheerful when what’s happening to them isn’t going to happen to me, ever, not once I’m home.”

  There was one thing, though, that cast a shadow over everyone. Sometimes in the early mornings a wail would go up from somewhere in the enclosure, announcing that one old traveler had failed to complete the journey and was dead, and the child with them would then be led away by the guards to be sold, while the body would be taken to a side gate to be collected and carried on to Goloroth by specialist carters who had no other trade. At times like that all grieved.

  Every few days as they rested for their midday meal, Meena and Tilja would find somewhere hidden from the road and once again put their question to Axtrig. Each time the answer was the same. South.

  Now that they knew it worked, the process became less alarming. But it was still a risk. Even damped down by Tilja’s two hands, one poised above the old spoon, the other only just below her on the other side of the cloth, the whisper of Faheel’s name produced the fierce pulse of magic. Meena needed to find somewhere to steady herself, or a boulder to sit on, while it lasted, and Alnor and Tahl, some distance away and out of sight, also felt the shock of it, and every time Calico neighed with alarm and tried to bolt.

  “It’s like when you stand up suddenly and bang your head on something,” said Tahl. “Except that it doesn’t hurt. But everything goes dark for a moment and you don’t know where you are.”

  But nothing else happened. Nobody came to investigate, or questioned them all afternoon as they plodded on to the next way station. The only change as the days went by was that the pause between Meena’s whisper and the spoon’s reaction seemed to grow longer. It was as if Axtrig, too, was becoming used to the process.

  Tilja, strangely, came to welcome these times. Or rather, she welcomed the feelings she had when they were over. The sense of immense, strange power controlled and leashed by her hands and then laid to sleep once more against her arm was something like the feeling she had after a good day on the farm, work that had gone well, in fine clear weather, with larks invisibly high above the fields, pouring out their song. On such evenings she would be tired, of course, but happy, cleansed, with even the mild aches and stiffnesses of toil somehow pleasurable.

  On their twenty-second night out of Talagh Tilja woke suddenly out of deep sleep. Something was wrong. There were stars overhead, but no moon. A few lanterns shone here and there around the way station, but otherwise it was almost pitch dark. And still. That was what was wrong. Silence. No noise at all, apart from the whisper of her own breath. Not a murmur or rustle from any of the several hundred travelers in the way station.

  Alnor wasn’t snoring. Nor was Meena, nor anybody else.

  Alnor always snored, gently, steadily, all night. Meena snuffled and snorted. A dozen other old people lying nearby should have been joining in, or muttering in their sleep, or turning over, or getting up to relieve themselves. But no one in the whole enclosure was moving a muscle. Were they even breathing? Were they alive?

  For a while Tilja herself lay still, not daring to stir, trying to hush her own breath, the betraying thud of her heart. She was filled with the same sense of nightmare that she had felt on the walls of Talagh. When she could bear it no longer she forced herself to sit up and reach across to where Tahl lay and shake his shoulder.

  He didn’t respond. She shook him harder. Nothing. She felt for his face, found his ear and pinched the lobe fiercely between fingernail and thumbnail. Still not a movement, not a whimper. She found his nose and laid two fingertips against his nostrils, almost blocking them. Yes, just, faintly, she felt the come and go of his breath.

  Still filled with dread, she straightened and looked around. Something had changed. There was a new light over toward the other side of the enclosure. It was paler and larger than the yellowish glow of the lanterns, like a patch of moonlit smoke. Tilja watched it glide slowly across to the edge of the enclosure and start back. As it turned, part of it blanked out for a moment as something dark came between it and where Tilja was sitting. This thing was also moving.

  The patch of light crossed the arena, nearer now, and turned again. Again part of it blanked out as it turned. Now Tilja realized what it was doing. It was systematically searching the arena for something. In her left arm the numbness was spreading from where Axtrig lay. That was what had woken her, and it was still there, steady, not flowing away. Now she knew what the light patch and the dark thing were looking for.

  Steadily they came nearer and nearer, the dark shape leading with a clumsy, unnatural waddle that told Tilja what it was, and from that she could make out Silena herself, gliding along in the misty patch of light. Now they were working their way directly toward her. As they passed close by the beast paused and turned. There had been no change in the feeling in her arm. It could not have known Axtrig was there. Perhaps it had sensed her wakefulness.

  Still she could not move. Her mouth and throat wanted to scream, but no sound would come. Only when the beast stood right over her and she could smell its sickly hot breath and see the gleam of starlight in its single eye as its muzzle snuffled toward her face did movement suddenly come. Desperately she raised her arms to shove it away.

  Her fingers locked into the coarse fur of its chest, and everything changed. There was a sudden convulsion, a sense of things being sucked violently to and fro, her whole self, body and soul, filling with the numbness, something inside her waking, knowing what to do, how to master the turmoil, channel it on, through her, out and away. . . .

  She was sitting up, trying to push herself free of the attentions of what seemed to be a small dog which only wanted to get at her face and give it a friendly lick. The voice of Lord Kzuva’s magician whispered in her mind, I think Silena’s beast could not have touched you.

  Quickly she drew the dog to her, hugged it against herself and looked up. The patch of light seemed to have changed. Before, it had been as calm and still as moonlight itself, and Silena had glided along inside it steady as a statue, but now the misty stuff of which it was made was covered with confused ripples, like the surface of a pond into which someone has tossed a handful of pebbles. This made Silena seem to ripple too, like a reflection in that pond. Her voice rippled as she spoke.

  “Give me the thing you are carrying. Put it in the mouth of my dog and let him go.”

  “No,” said Tilja, hugging the dog yet closer to her. Its whole body had gone rigid at Silena’s first word, except for the tip of its tail, wagging anxiously against Tilja’s thigh. The light seemed weaker now, but it was still enough for her to see the bodies of her sleeping companions beside her, and Calico standing with her head bowed in sleep just beyond. For herself she felt safe from Silena’s magic, but the others wouldn’t be. The only thing she could think of was to distract the magician somehow. Still clasping the dog, she rose to her feet and walked directly toward Silena.

  Silena was not expecting this. She actually backed away, and her light dimmed yet further. Then she stood her ground and straightened and the light grew strong again. When they were barely a pace apart she twitched the dog’s leash. Fire shot along it and reached the collar. The dog yelped as the blazing line ringed its neck, and squirmed so violently that Tilja could scarcely hold it. Desperately she grabbed at the fiery leash, but felt no heat or strangeness, only a tough everyday leather strap, because that was all there was now, reaching from her to Silena, who immediately dropped the leash as if it was she who had been burnt.

  She backed off another pace and drew herself up. Tilja could sense her summoning her powers. Her light grew stronger again and the ripples began to die away.
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  “A magician cannot afford to be overcome,” she said. “Unless you give me the thing you have against your arm, I must attempt to destroy you, or else be myself destroyed.”

  “No,” said Tilja.

  “Very well,” said Silena.

  She closed her eyes. Her lips began to move. For a short while nothing seemed to happen, except that the dog’s tail stopped wagging. Then Tilja began to hear—no, to feel, rather than hear—a deep, pulsing hum gathering all around her. Out of the corner of her eye she saw one of the distant lanterns starting to quiver, and realized that not only the lights but everything she could see, the black outline of the walls of the enclosure, the very stars in the sky, was shuddering to and fro. The only still things in the whole universe were Silena, and Tilja herself facing her, with the dog in her arms. And now she could feel something try to grasp her, an invisible fist that couldn’t quite touch her but had closed all round her, and was attempting to wrench her into that shuddering movement and shake her apart. An enormous energy was battering itself to and fro, stronger and stronger, against her stillness. Soon, soon, something had to give. She willed that stillness, gave it a place and name. Woodbourne—herself leaning on the farmyard gate in the stillness of a summer dawn, looking north across the Valley to the mountains. In that loved landscape she centered herself, gathered it round her. She could see Silena opposite her, pale with ferocious concentration, drawing out of herself all the powers that were in her and focusing them into Tilja’s destruction. The light blazed around her, bright as noon, but now shed no ray into the darkness beyond.

  Close by in that darkness a donkey brayed. Tilja’s heart bounced with the shock of the sudden harsh clamor, but she knew at once what it was, because there used to be a mischievous old donkey at Woodbourne that liked to bray suddenly in people’s ears. But Silena wasn’t ready for it. She thought she had put the whole courtyard to sleep. The unexpected bellow told her she was wrong. All her powers were focused on Tilja. She had nothing to spare. She faltered.