The Ropemaker Page 34

  “No.”

  “Very well.”

  He glanced at the leather bag and it became a transparent globe, lit from within. The three mannikins were awake now, alive, looking around, seeing her, staring at her with terrified, pleading eyes. Moonfist glanced at the fire. A white flame shot up at its center and steadied, gently roaring. He gripped his staff by its lower end and swung the globe toward the flame. The mannikins shrank away from the heat, covering their heads with their arms. He stopped the movement and looked at her.

  She put her hand into her blouse, drew out the box, opened it and took out the ring. Gripping it lightly between the forefingers and thumbs of both hands, like a priestess laying an offering on a shrine, she held it toward him. He reached out his cupped hand to accept it. At the last moment she let go with her left hand and snatched at a finger, while her right flung the ring into the darkness where the mouse had gone.

  “Ramdatta!” she cried.

  In the shadows something moved, began to explode. Then she was in darkness.

  Again, but hopelessly, she sought the lake. She was still holding Moonfist’s finger. He strode beside her in the darkness, untroubled. She had to take him to the lake. She couldn’t have let go, even if she had wanted, but she didn’t. To take him was the only hope. If he was with her, with all his powers, he was not by the fire, and the Ropemaker would have a few moments more to find the ring.

  They were there. In the starless blackness she could feel the icy wind sweeping down from the glaciers, hear the rattle of wavelets at her feet.

  He stretched out an arm and called. Four heavy syllables. Four blows on a great gong, echoing and reechoing from the mountains. Avalanches slid bellowing toward the lake, and with a vast, sucking roar the water started to drain away, down through the chasm that Moonfist’s cry had opened beneath it.

  It was happening to her. Everything that was in her, everything that made her Tilja, thoughts, memories, loves, hopes, dreams, terrors, was draining away through the hand that held Moonfist’s finger, into him, becoming part of him.

  No, I will not, she thought. I am Tilja, Tilja, Tilja, Tilja. There was nothing to hold to, nothing to stop the awful slither of herself into the man’s otherness. She had to have something to hold to. Her free hand clutched uselessly at her own body, as though that would do, and brushed against the roc feathers in the pocket of her blouse. Yes, there! Not the actual feathers, not the memory of the roc, but the place, Faheel’s island, where, while his unseen friends had danced their dance of farewell, she had discovered who and what she was, the innermost Tilja, her true self.

  She seized the moment and clung to it, as she might have clung to a rock in a raging torrent. The outflow faltered, ceased. Moonfist turned toward her. She felt him summoning up further powers and knew that this was the end.

  Everything changed. The finger she was grasping melted from her hand. With a shudder the chasm below the lake sealed itself shut. She felt warmth, heard the mutter of a human voice, opened her eyes and found herself swaying with exhaustion by the fire in front of the hut. Hands took her by the shoulders before she could fall and lowered her to the ground, where she crouched, shivering, her whole body bathed in sweat.

  “Near thing,” said the Ropemaker’s voice. “Did it between us, just.”

  He was standing beside her, much as she remembered him, a skinny, gawky figure topped by his immense turban. A body lay at his feet. The head was away from her but she recognized the silver links of the belt chain. The hand that protruded from the sleeve beside it was fleshless bone.

  Meena, she thought. Alnor. Tahl.

  She looked toward the fire. Moonfist’s staff lay half across it. The end to which the bag had been fastened was blackened embers.

  Numbly, through her sobs, she was aware of being lifted, carried, set down. A voice spoke. She didn’t take it in. She must stay where she was. He was going to do something. She was alone with her horror and grief, and the knowledge of failure. All useless. Alnor dead. Tahl dead. Meena, whom she loved more than anyone in the world, dead, horribly, horribly dead. Nothing else mattered. Nothing ever would.

  Something changed. She didn’t feel or hear or smell the change, but there was a sort of inward flicker, and the world was different, just as it had been when Alnor had spoken Faheel’s name in Lananeth’s warded room. She looked up. Through the gray blur of her tears she could see the entrance of the hut, but nothing beyond. She wiped her eyes. There was nothing beyond. The hut floated in grayness, lit by a vague light that came from nowhere. As she stared the grayness changed, becoming paler at the center and darker to either side. Faint shadows appeared in it, acquired dim shapes, five people standing in a group. The man on the left moved his arm and touched one of the others on the shoulder. That figure vanished. The man moved his hand and did something at the top of the staff he was carrying, then moved it back to touch the next figure. And the next. Now the girl on the right faced him alone, and Tilja understood that she was looking back out of one time into another, watching herself a little while ago confronting the magician she called Moonfist.

  They stayed motionless. Tilja knew what they were saying, but could not hear the murmur of their voices. As the time she was watching came nearer to the time in which she watched, the figures became clearer. She couldn’t breathe for the sudden intense hope and intense fear. Now, as Moonfist swung his staff toward the fire, she could see the transparent globe at its end. The movement paused. The girl moved her arms to draw something from under her clothing and offer it to the man. He reached to take it.

  She saw the spasm of violent action, her own grab at his hand, her other arm flinging the ring into the darkness; heard, like a far whisper, her own cry, Ramdatta!; saw the staff toppling into the flame . . .

  Now, Ropemaker! Now!

  At the edge of the darkness on the right the Ropemaker exploded into his shape. His arm moved, flicking something toward the fire. The staff was twitched clear. The Ropemaker was bending, picking the ring up, sliding it onto his finger . . .

  For a long moment he stood rigid, then turned and strode toward the motionless pair by the fire, locked in their desperate inward conflict. He seemed larger than he had been, no longer gawky and misshapen in his monstrous turban, but all of a piece, commanding, magnificent. Briefly he considered the magician, then raised his hands in a firm gesture and held them over the magician’s face. Something invisible grasped Moonfist’s body and battered him violently from side to side, like a terrier killing a rat. It let go. He collapsed and lay still.

  The Ropemaker turned to the girl and far more gently made the same gesture. The invisible hands caught her as she crumpled and lowered her to the ground, where she crouched, hiding her face in her hands.

  Tilja understood what she must now do. Sobbing with relief, she huddled down into the same posture as the girl. She heard the pad of the Ropemaker’s feet on the hut floor, felt herself lifted and carried. The Ropemaker waited for the exact instant at which the time that he was in caught up with the stilled moment from which Tilja had been watching. When the two times became one he lowered her into herself.

  She let her sobs die, rose and looked. The staff was lying beside the fire. The cord that the Ropemaker had used to twitch it clear was still wrapped round its shank. The globe lay well away from the embers. The three mannikins were standing up, waiting to be released.

  “Got that box?” said the Ropemaker.

  She drew it out and handed it to him. As he slid the ring off his finger and put it away he changed, shrinking to the odd, slightly clownish figure she was used to, but sagging with weariness. She looked at the globe.

  “What about the others?” she asked. “Can you . . . ?”

  “Your turn,” he muttered. “I’m done for.”

  Uncertainly, feeling that all her powers were exhausted, she bent to pick up the globe. It vanished at her touch. She held out her spread hand to the mannikins. Each reached and grasped a fingertip. Between instant and insta
nt they rose to their true size.

  “Don’t ask me to go through that again,” said Meena, with a shuddering half laugh. “I really thought we were down to be toast. My, was I cross about it!”

  18

  Roc Feathers

  Is there anything else out there?” said Alnor, peering into the darkness. Even he was unable to conceal the horror in his voice.

  “Nothing much left,” said the Ropemaker. “Just small stuff. Won’t bother us. Fellow there was the last.”

  He sounded just as exhausted as Tilja herself felt. The long, angular face was gray and lined.

  She turned and gazed at the figure of Moonfist lying beside the fire. A skeleton. Yes, she thought, that was his real body, dead already, dead long ago. He had been even older than Faheel, so his real body had died. But by magic he had made himself a seemingly living body, and waited for the moment when Faheel gave up the ring and he could take possession of it. Then he would use it to do for himself something like Faheel had done for Meena and Alnor, bring his own young body, living, into the present, and when that in its time wore out do the same again, and again, forever. That was what Faheel had said couldn’t bear thinking of. No wonder Moonfist had so wanted the ring.

  “Who was he?” she asked. “Faheel told me a little about him, but he didn’t know his name. I’ve been calling him Moonfist, because of the magic he used when he tried to get hold of Axtrig on the walls of Talagh. You saw it too, didn’t you? You were the cat.”

  She’d taken him by surprise. He stared at her. She saw the other three stiffen, and guessed that he was putting up some kind of magical defenses, but felt nothing herself. Then he made a rueful grimace and relaxed.

  “No use against you, anyway,” he said. “Talk about it later. Moonfist, you say? That’ll do. Don’t know that much about him. Spent my time keeping out of his way since he showed up. Glad to see him gone . . . Ah well, let’s get rid of him.”

  He drew a deep breath, squared his shoulders, gazed at the fallen body and muttered. The body crumbled to a pile of pale dust. He muttered again. A breeze sprang up, concentrated, became a swirling dust devil which danced across the clearing, picked up the ashes and swept them away in a swirl of dead leaves and other trash. The first huge drops of rain started to fall, laying the dust, cleansing the place with the sweet smell of damp earth, until the Ropemaker pointed out a circle around the fire and made a gesture of ending. Within the circle the rain stopped. He nodded and relaxed.

  “Any chestnuts left?” he asked.

  They settled round the fire in their own little patch of calm, while all around them the rain sluiced down and the wind battered to and fro. Tahl was bursting with questions, but none of the others felt like talking. Alnor sat with Meena, their arms round each other’s waists, using their free hands to hold and peel the nuts and taking turns who ate them. The Ropemaker sat cross-legged, lost in thought, though every now and then his long arm would snake out as if of its own accord to take another chestnut, which then peeled itself at his touch. However many they ate, there always seemed to be a few left waiting to be roasted.

  And Tilja relived her encounters by the lake, absorbing the horror of them and letting it go, until she could simply wonder at the strangeness of them, and her discovery of the size and power of the inward landscape that she had only just begun to explore. The lake must be the center of it, surely, but she felt that there were other places waiting for her to find, and creatures who lived in them, friends like Faheel’s friends, an inward world, a world of power, whose measures were not our measures, whose times were not our time, just as her long and battering struggle with Moonfist had been packed into a few of our instants, time for the Ropemaker to find the ring and come to her rescue.

  There were dangers too in that world, she realized. You could lose yourself there if you let it happen. Deliberately she pulled herself out of her half trance, peeled a handful of chestnuts and took them to Calico, who was standing still half-asleep, apparently unaware that anything strange had happened, or that there was now a wall of rain rattling down just beyond her. She ate the chestnuts grumpily and gave Tilja no thanks.

  “You must be the least magical horse in the world,” Tilja told her fondly, and went and fetched her rug, rolled herself up in it and lay down by the fire.

  She woke late next morning to the smell of roasting meat. The rain had cleared away and the whole world sparkled. The fire was glowing hot. Meena had spitted the body of a small animal on a stick and was twisting it to and fro over the embers. Alnor was skinning and gutting another. Tahl was looking for dry firewood. The Ropemaker had vanished, but almost at once a heavy wing beat broke the silence and a large orange bird settled into the clearing with the body of a hare grasped in its talons. It dropped its burden beside the fire, strutted to the hut and pecked at one of the coils of cord that lay by the entrance to the hut. Rapidly the cord wove itself into a string bag. The bird glanced at Tilja with a mocking eye and heaved itself clumsily into the air. When it next came back the bag was full of sweet yellow plums.

  “Couldn’t you just have made us a magic breakfast?” asked Tahl.

  The Ropemaker chewed for a while at the tough hare meat, and swallowed.

  “Enjoy hunting,” he explained. “You’re an animal, do what it does best. Good sport. Besides . . .”

  He glanced enquiringly at Tilja.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Find out?” he suggested, and held out his hand. An earthenware platter appeared between his fingers, piled with dark brown biscuits. He handed them round. The others crunched theirs up and reached for more, but the one Tilja tried to take vanished at her touch. No, she told herself. Not this time, please. It made no difference.

  “Do you think I could learn not to do that?” she asked.

  He shrugged, then smiled at her surprise.

  “Don’t know all that much about any of this,” he said ruefully. “Better explain.”

  Slowly, his jerky manner of speech still further interrupted while he chewed, he told them his story. He had been born in an isolated village far out on the eastern coast. The food was fish and edible seaweed, but very occasionally somebody found a pearl and became rich enough to leave. From the first he had hated the life, knowing he was different, though he didn’t yet know how. To get away, he had apprenticed himself to a traveling ropemaker. This man knew a few simple magics, bindfasts and so on, which the Ropemaker had learned—“Picked ’em up as if I knew ’em already,” he said. “Knew at once this was what I wanted, what I was for.”

  From there he’d simply gone on, talking to anyone he could. He’d met a young woman who knew about wards and could turn herself into a cat, and with her he’d experimented and started to piece things together until they’d attracted the attention of one of the eastern Watchers, who had then sent a horrifying sending to scare them off. It had worked with the woman, but it had merely excited the Ropemaker. He had managed to track it to its source, and so come to Talagh.

  Once there, he’d spent most of his time not getting picked up by the Watchers, but in the process he’d learned about the lost province to the north, and the magic forest that defended it against the most powerful magicians the Emperor could send. This, of course, had made him want to go and find out for himself, with the added notion that if he came up with an answer he could return to Talagh and win the Emperor’s favor, and so be admitted to the innermost magical secrets of the Empire.

  The forest had fascinated him. It was a different sort of magic from any that he’d come across before. For a long while it had simply baffled him, but he had refused to give up. Then, in a flash of intuition (“Don’t know how I do that,” he said. “Happened before. Things just come to me.”) he’d realized that the magic had something to do with unicorns, and had decided to try to turn himself into a unicorn in order to get into the forest.

  “Don’t tell me you were that dirty great unicorn!” Meena burst in. “What did you think you were up to, sc
aring our own little wretches that way? And doing what you did to my daughter Selly by the lake? What harm had either of them done you?”

  He spread his hands in apology.

  “Mistake,” he explained. “Made a lot of them in my time— bound to, doing it all on my own. Never tried that before, being a magical animal. Took a lot of doing. Then, once you’re there, different. Let’s say you’re a mouse, you think mouse and feel mouse—quick, scared, inquisitive—but you’re in control. Mouse does what you want, spite of the mouse bit. Magical animal— unicorn anyway—haven’t tried dragons—if you don’t watch out, it takes over. Happened to me. Knew what I wanted—to get your unicorns out—forgot why. Tried doing it unicorn fashion, scaring ’em out, stopping your daughter feeding ’em. Didn’t work with her, and I’d felt bad about it, under all the unicorn stuff. Didn’t try again. But I was still stuck there, being a unicorn, when you came by on your raft.

  “Saw you, but wasn’t interested. Only interested in the unicorns. Then Meena there started her singing. Wasn’t singing to me, of course, just to the little white fellows on the far side of the canyon, telling ’em what you were up to, going out into the Empire to find this man who’d make their forest right for ’em again. But it did the trick, reminded me what I was there for, just enough to get myself clear of the forest and stop being a unicorn—and was that a palaver!

  “Followed you down, of course. Meena’s song had told me you knew some of the stuff I was after. So I was hanging outside Lananeth’s window, just clear of her wards, minding my own business, being a bat and listening to what you were saying, when Meena there pops out with some fellow’s name—Faheel, right? Never heard of him before, but bang, I’d lost my shape and fallen into a rosebush. Cut me to ribbons—never noticed. Got to know about that, I was thinking.”

  His braying laugh shattered the morning silence.

  “So you followed us to Talagh,” said Alnor. “And on the way you arranged for the bandits to kidnap us in the Pirrim Hills, so that you could make our acquaintance.”