The Ropemaker Read online

  There was a buzz of agreement.

  “Told you so,” growled Meena, though she had done no such thing. “Wait and see, wait and see—only idea in their thick heads. Dolts! This time they’re going to wait, and see they’re too late.”

  “What do you think we should be doing then, ma’am?” asked the man who’d helped her.

  “Go and look . . . ,” she began, but somebody else was already speaking and she was shushed into silence. There was a rule that nobody could speak twice, so she didn’t get a chance to tell the assembly what she thought before the convenors closed the discussion. Since nobody had had any other suggestions than wait and see, that was put to the vote and carried on a show of hands. The drum beat three times to signal that it was over.

  Meena grabbed Tilja by the arm and dragged herself up.

  “All right,” she said, “if that’s how they want it. Go and find the blind gaffer—Alnor or something. I’ve got to talk to him.”

  Tilja hurried off, worming her way as best she could through the crowd as they drifted back toward the fires and the stalls. Halfway to the platform she was almost knocked off her feet by someone weaseling through in the other direction. He muttered an apology without looking, but she managed to grab his arm. It was the boy who’d been with old Alnor.

  “Hey! I’m in a hurry,” he said. “Leave off, will you?”

  “My grandmother—she’s Meena—wants to talk to Alnor,” she said.

  “That makes two of them,” he said. “And the old boy’s raging. Can you get her across to the platform?”

  “When it’s a bit clearer. Just don’t let him go away, or I’m in trouble.”

  “Uh-huh—she looks a right handful.”

  “No, she’s all right. She’s great.”

  “If you say so. See you in a bit.”

  And he was gone, leaving Tilja instantly furious. What right had he? And then not giving her a chance to show what she thought of him? Seething, she made her way back to Meena and found her on her hummock. Most of the others had gone and there was room to move.

  “Didn’t take you long,” said Meena.

  “I ran into the boy,” said Tilja. “Alnor wants to talk to you, too. He’s at the platform.”

  “All right, then. Let’s be going.”

  With Tilja’s help she picked her way down the slope and hobbled over to the platform. They found Alnor just in front of it, leaning on his staff with his blind eyes seeming to stare in fury at the retreating crowd. Everything about him, even his stillness, expressed his anger. He seemed unaware of their coming, and Meena stood and studied him in silence for a little. The boy, Tilja was glad to see, had disappeared.

  “So you’re Alnor Ortahlson,” said Meena abruptly. “I’ve heard of you. It was your son died rafting, right?”

  Slowly Alnor turned toward her.

  “That was my son,” he said harshly.

  “Hard on you, but that’s how it goes,” said Meena. “Well, I’m Meena Urlasdaughter, and we’ve one or two things to talk about. Might be warmer by the fires, but there’ll be too much chat.”

  “I have asked my grandson to fetch us two horns of hot cider.”

  “Just what I fancy. Run along, Tilja, and give the lad a hand. He’ll be spilling it all over the ground if I know boys. Get a couple of mugs out of the saddlebag if you want some for you two.”

  Tilja didn’t want anything to do with the boy, but reluctantly she hurried off, fetched the mugs, and found him at one of the cider stalls. He’d just been served, and sure enough was trying to find a way of carrying two large horns, brimfull of steaming cider, without disaster through the crowd. She took one of the horns and they tipped some of the cider into each of the mugs and carried them all back. They found their two grandparents sitting on a sort of turf bench, with their backs against the timbers that shored up the platform.

  “Just what the wise woman ordered,” said Meena. “That should put a morsel of warmth into old bones. Now we’ve got to talk, so you two can make yourselves scarce for a bit. No, first you can bring me my dinner, Tilja, and that rug. Off you go.”

  Cross with the whole world by now, Tilja moved off to do as she was told, sipping the heady, sweet drink as she went. The boy strolled nonchalantly beside her, seeming to take it for granted that that was what she wanted.

  “I’m Tahl,” he said. “Ortahl for long, but that’s confusing in our family. Who are you?”

  “Tilja,” she said. She managed to make the syllables sound as chilly as the day.

  “Tilja Urlasdaughter, of Woodbourne under the forest,” he said, making it sound like some grand title from a story about old heroes. “Go in there much?”

  “A bit.”

  “So what’s in there? Apart from trees. Cedars, your grandmother said. And that lake. And squirrels and birds and whatever. What else?”

  Tilja paused in her stride. It was as if her body had wanted to halt and confront him, but she’d managed to force it to walk on. She did so in silence, not looking at him. More than anything that had happened since Anja had found the hand ax, this was what had been eating into her heart. Meena knew the answer to Tahl’s question, and Ma, and even Anja. She wasn’t sure if Da knew. But she, Tilja, didn’t. It made her feel as if she didn’t really belong in her own family, didn’t belong at Woodbourne, not now, not ever.

  “You aren’t going to tell me, are you?” he said as they reached the horse lines. “I don’t see why not. Sure, you don’t talk about it outside the family. We don’t, either, about . . . about what we’ve got. But this is different. We’re Ortahlsons and you’re Urlasdaughters. We aren’t like anyone else. We can tell each other, can’t we?”

  Tilja was standing beside Tiddykin, unbuckling the strap that held the rolled rug in place behind the saddle. She stopped and stared at the hornbeam buckle, polished with wear, as if it could tell her what to do. There’d been something in Tahl’s voice, still the same teasing, unsettling tone at the surface, but underneath a kind of pleading, just as unsettling.

  “All right,” she said bitterly. “I’ll tell you. The answer is, I don’t know. I haven’t been told. Because I can’t hear what the cedars say. I don’t know the way to the lake. My little sister, Anja, does. You’ll have to ask her.”

  She glanced at him. He was staring at her. She couldn’t bear it and turned away before she started to weep.

  “That’s rough,” he said in a totally different voice, sensible, gentle, as if he meant every word. “That’s really rough. It isn’t fair.”

  She unbuckled the rug and got the dinner bag out of the saddlebag through a blur of tears, and they set off in silence for the far end of the arena. When they were about halfway there he said, “Look, we aren’t allowed to talk about it, either, but I’ve thought of a way. They won’t want us with them yet, so I’ll just get Alnor his dinner and then we’ll go over there on the slope where they can see us if they want us, and while we’re eating . . . right?”

  They settled on the hummock where Meena had sat for the meeting and shared their food between them. Tahl had some little pink fish, pickled in sweet vinegar with herbs, which Tilja had never eaten before and thought delicious. Below them a group of men were setting out a ring for the kick-fighting contest. This was a popular sport in the Valley, and the best fighters were heroes in their villages.

  “First,” he said, “you’d better tell me your story about Asarta and Reyel and Dirna. It sounds as if it’s different.”

  She did so, between mouthfuls. It took a while. Some of the time Tahl seemed to be more interested in the kick-fighting, but she plowed on. Now and then she glanced across at the platform to check if Meena wanted her, but the two old people were still deep in talk, sitting side by side on the turf bench, sharing Meena’s rug. At the river end of the bowl the far-dwellers were beginning to start on their way home.

  “That’s really interesting,” said Tahl when she finished. His eyes were sparkling with excitement.

  “I thought y
ou weren’t listening.”

  “I don’t listen with my eyes, you know. But fighting’s in our blood. Alnor was Valley Champion four years running.”

  “Can you do it?”

  “My da died before I was old enough to start, and Alnor’s blind, so there’s no one to teach me.”

  He tried to speak lightly, but Tilja could hear how much he minded.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “I’ll find someone. . . . But listen—I think I know what you’ve got in the forest—stuff in your story that isn’t in ours. It’s just a guess, but I’m pretty sure. Do you want me to tell you?”

  “If you’re allowed to,” Tilja said sourly.

  “All right, we’ll play a game. I’m going to ask you questions, and you’re going to guess the answers, only I’m not going to tell you if you’re right or wrong. You’re going to guess that, too. Try it that way?”

  The mocking note was back in his voice, but Tilja heard it differently now. It wasn’t her he was mocking, or anyone in particular. It was more like a screen, or a mask, behind which he could keep the real Tahl hidden. She’d had a glimpse of that Tahl just now, the glee of guessing the answer to the riddle, the sorrow of never being taught to kick-fight. She nodded.

  “First question,” he said. “Why isn’t there any real magic in the Valley? There used to be, when it was part of the Empire. There was magic everywhere then. Where’s it gone?”

  “I don’t know. Anyway, is magic like that? Isn’t it just something magicians do, like shoemakers make shoes? And there aren’t any magicians here, so we don’t get any magic.”

  Tahl shook his head.

  “No,” he said. “It’s a sort of stuff. It’s like the water that drives our mill. It has to be there to begin with, for the magician to do things with. If there wasn’t any leather, I suppose your magician could still make slippers and things out of something else, but they wouldn’t be as good as shoes. So people can still do silly little scraps of magic here, telling-fortunes spoons and so on, but it isn’t the real thing.”

  “How do you know?”

  He looked at her, but she knew the answer before he spoke.

  “The same way that Anja knows the way to the lake, I suppose,” she said. And then, after a pause, “All right. Go on.”

  “Same question another way round. You are a powerful magician. You want to close this whole Valley off. That’s going to take a lot of magic. Where do you get it from?”

  “I don’t . . . oh. Out of the Valley? So that’s why there isn’t any left here now?”

  “And where do you put it? You don’t need it in the Great Desert, of course. Nobody can cross that, anyway.”

  “In the forest. In the mountains.”

  “And supposing you’re right—I’m not saying you are, of course—what sort of things would you find living in a forest full of magic?”

  “Oh . . . very magical things. I suppose the cedars are magic.”

  “Yes, of course. But they don’t need sacks of barley fetched out to them as soon as the first snow falls, to keep them going through the winter. What else?”

  Everything Tilja had been refusing to think about clicked into place.

  “Unicorns,” she whispered.

  “Interesting guess. What do you know about unicorns?”

  “They’re supposed to be very difficult to catch. The only way you can do it is for the hunters to take a young woman with them and make her sit down somewhere while the men go and hide. Then the woman starts to sing and the unicorn comes and lays its head in her lap and the men can rush out and kill it. Oh, I see! They’re frightened of men and they don’t mind women! That’s why . . . But I think one of them did something to Ma . . . and later on Dusty wanted to fight it. . . . I didn’t see it but it sounded really big, only Meena called them ‘little wretches,’ and she said they’d been covering Ma up to stop her dying of cold. There can’t be two sorts of unicorn, can there?”

  He frowned, for the moment as puzzled as she was.

  “Let’s leave that,” he said. “You were just going to tell me, weren’t you, why women can go into the forest and men can’t.”

  “Because the unicorns are only afraid of the men, so they make a special sort of sickness. It fills the forest, so that men can’t come there. They’re magical, so they can do that. Oh, but they like to hear the women singing! Ma’s really singing to them! Singing to the cedars is just a way of talking about it, so as not to say anything about unicorns.”

  “She could be doing both—supposing you’re right,” he said dryly. “There’s not going to be only one kind of magic in a magical forest. Alnor sings to the snows, as well as . . .”

  He caught himself just in time, and glanced at her.

  “You can’t have unicorns in the mountains,” she said. “You must have something else.”

  “Sorry,” he said, shaking his head. “Too difficult. To guess, I mean. But it wasn’t there this year. I take him most of the way up. There’s a little cave where I wait for him and he goes on alone. He says his feet know the path. I think mine do too, but I haven’t tried. Anyway, this year I knew something was different already, while I was waiting, and then I saw him coming down the path, feeling his way with his staff, which he didn’t usually do, and I went to meet him, and he said, ‘Take me home. It is not there. It is gone.’

  “And there’s something else. Alnor says the magic is running out—getting weaker, or being sucked away—he isn’t sure. He says the waters have told him. We aren’t farmers. We’re right up in the hills, where it’s almost all woods. When the timber’s cut we raft it down the river. But we’ve got a small sawmill. It’s driven by one of the streams from the glacier, and since he’s been blind Alnor’s spent a lot of his time sitting out by the mill, listening to what the waters are saying. They talk all the time. I’m just beginning to hear what they say. It’s a kind of mutter, the same thing over and over, but changing a little bit each time, so if you listen long enough you’ve heard a whole word go by.”

  “Why didn’t he tell the meeting that?”

  “Because . . . Sorry, they want us. Who’s that talking to your grandmother?”

  “That’s Aunt Grayne. . . . All right, we’re coming!”

  She stood and waved to show Meena that she’d seen her signal and ran down the slope, feeling far happier than she had for days.

  It rained off and on all the way back to Woodbourne. In the worst of the weather they took what shelter they could find. They were about two-thirds of the way home, standing in a wayside barn watching yet another downpour being lashed to and fro by the wind, before Tilja finally forced herself to say what she wanted.

  “Meena, listen. This is important. It really matters. You’ve got to tell me. Please. I know about the unicorns, so I’m not asking you that. I know you’re not allowed to tell me. No, listen. What I want to know is why is it that kind of a secret, so that even someone like me can’t be told? Does Da know? He can’t hear the cedars either.”

  Meena glared out at the rain.

  “Not getting any better,” she grumbled. “Might as well be on our way.”

  “No!” yelled Tilja. “No, no, no! Can’t you see what you’re doing to me, keeping me out? Treating me as if I were a baby? Or some kind of animal?”

  “Stop chattering, girl, and let’s be going.”

  “You didn’t tell Aunt Grayne, did you? You kept her out. She decided to stop loving Woodbourne. She told me so. Did she stop loving you, too? I love you, Meena. I don’t want that to stop. . . . Please!”

  She was weeping, now more with grief than anger. Through the blur she saw Meena turn to her, but it took her a moment to realize that the glistening patches on the lined old cheeks were not rain.

  “I’m sorry,” she croaked. “I shouldn’t have said that. If you can’t tell me, I suppose you can’t. I’ll get used to it, I expect.”

  “Anything for peace and quiet,” said Meena, doing her best to turn her own croak into a
grumble.

  She paused, still staring out at the weather. Tilja could sense her grimly making up her mind to break a lifetime of silence.

  “All right,” she said at last. “We don’t go talking about the little wretches because that’s something the cedars tell us. But there’s more sense in it than you might think. There’s no magic in the Valley. It’s all been taken away, and used to keep us safe. No magic in people’s minds, either—you heard ’em yesterday— they’d no idea what Alnor and me were talking about, in spite of everything that had happened to bring so many of ’em in to the Gathering.

  “They don’t mind us saying we’ve been listening to the cedars, or singing to ’em, even—that’s just a bit crazy, fancying we can hear something in the noise the wind makes swishing through the branches—not that we go gossiping about that much, either. But unicorns—don’t be stupid! Supposing I’d talked about unicorns back there at the Gathering, what d’you think they’d all have done? Laughed, that’s what. Not listened to a word I’d got to say. The only place for stuff like unicorns is in stories, because stories aren’t true.

  “But we know they’re true, the ones of us that can hear the cedars, and the ones up at Northbeck who can tell what the waters are saying. I can’t give you that knowledge, any more than I could give it to Grayne. There’s no way I can make you certain sure, or certain sure you’re not allowed to talk about it. Suppose I’d told Grayne about the little wretches, and she’d gone off and married that husband of hers she’s so fond of—Lord knows why—do you think she wouldn’t have told him? Have that happen a few times, and after a while it’s all over the Valley, crazy folk at Woodbourne think they’ve got unicorns, and at Northbeck they go on about their ice dragon—”

  “An ice dragon! I’ve never heard of an ice dragon!”

  “Seeing you know one there’s no harm you knowing about the other, I suppose. A mighty great beast, Alnor’s da told him, and he’d seen it only the once. Wraps itself all round one of the mountain peaks and just by being there it brings our winters to keep the passes closed.”