The Ropemaker Read online

  It was nothing like the lissom white creature of Tilja’s imaginings. The long horn rose sharp against a dull sky. The beast was big boned, angular, almost clumsy looking, large as a heavy horse. It was a strange, fiery color, between yellow and orange, and when it neighed and shook its head sparks seemed to fly from its mane, though there was no sun to give that glint. Its challenge rang along the canyon, echoing from cliff to cliff, the same fearsome sound that Tilja had heard that day when she and Meena were bringing Ma unconscious home from the lake. The challenge was not to the raft below. It didn’t seem to have seen that, but to be staring across the canyon at something above the cliffs on the other side.

  It stamped its hoof, once. At the blow a vast boulder split from the cliff and plunged into the water, straight into the path of the raft. Tahl started to speak urgently to Alnor, but broke off, swayed, and slumped against him. Tilja saw Alnor struggling to raise his left arm, but then he too slumped forward. At the same moment Calico came out of her trancelike calm, squealed and started to wrestle against her tethers.

  No time for that.

  “Push, Meena, push!” Tilja shouted, shoving at the sweep. “Too much! Pull! . . . There! . . . No, push!”

  The raft edged across the current, slowly, slowly, away from the onrushing cliff. Meena’s side reached the slacker water. Tilja felt it catch, as if on a sandbank, as the shove of the current urged it forward. She yelled to Meena to push and flung herself against the sweep. For that one stroke they held it straight, but as they lifted the sweeps for the next stroke the raft slewed violently and went twirling helplessly on, like a leaf in a running ditch. Dimly Tilja heard the unicorn’s wild neigh echoing again between the cliffs, but she took no notice, lost in the futile effort of trying to slow that sickening gyration.

  “That’s enough of that,” called Meena behind her. “We’re not doing a ha’porth of good. I’ve got to go and see to old Alnor, and you’d better do something about that horse of yours.”

  She was right. Tilja laid her sweep down, hurried forward and grabbed Calico’s halter, wrestling to hold her head still and trying to calm her with her voice. No good. The horse was drowning deep in the bog of terror. Tilja’s heart began to thunder with the useless effort. Dimly she was aware of Meena groping her way past her, of the cracked old voice starting to sing. Calico gave two more violent heaves and stilled, shuddering.

  Tilja stayed where she was, gasping for breath. The raft turned steadily in the center of the stream. The left-hand cliff moved past, and then she was looking back down the canyon. The unicorn was still on its watchtower in the distance. It seemed to have noticed them at last, and to be watching them go. The next bend carried them out of sight.

  Meena had stopped singing and was calling for her.

  “Come and give us a hand, girl. Got myself stuck.”

  Tilja turned and saw her half kneeling with her bad leg bent awkwardly aside. She had heard the pain in her voice and rushed to help.

  “Just get me down, will you? Gently does it. Aaah . . . that’s better. Now, something to lean against . . . that’ll do. . . . See if you can roll him over, so his head’s in my lap. And I’ll have the boy along here. . . .”

  Tilja heaved and hauled at the limp bodies. Alnor was alive. Even above the mutter of the river she could hear the ugly rasp of his breath. His face was the color of old canvas. So was Tahl’s, but his breathing didn’t sound so awful. Bit by bit she levered and dragged them to where Meena wanted them, and stood, panting.

  “Little wretches,” said Meena, furiously. “Not that it was their fault, I suppose. They can’t help making the sickness, like husbands can’t help snoring. They don’t know we’re doing our best to help them. You can’t see ’em from down here, but I could tell they were up there, following us along. I’d been singing to them, keeping them quiet, telling them there wasn’t anything to be scared of. Alnor was a bit on the groggy side, and the boy, too, but they weren’t going to pass out. Then that ugly great brute . . . what’s it doing in our forest at all? It doesn’t belong here. And bellowing at our own little wretches like that, scaring them silly? Doing it on purpose, too. That’s what it wants. That’s what makes the sickness, them being scared. You didn’t feel it? It was like as if they’d just gone and poured a great waterfall of their fear right down on top of us. You saw how sudden Alnor and Tahl keeled over?

  “Now you’re going to have to manage on your own, best you can, while I see if I can get the little wretches sorted. Don’t you bother about that horse of yours. She’ll do. Knew they were up there before, didn’t she? She’ll be happy too, once I’ve got ’em quieted. So just go and see if you can stop this stupid thing making us dizzy, the way it’s doing, there’s a good girl, and I’ll get on with it.”

  She was already singing by the time Tilja reached the stall. Calico was getting ready to panic again, shuddering, tossing her head, and giving anxious little whickers, so Tilja stopped to pet and talk to her, and so actually saw the moment of change, when the shiverings stopped, and the ears pricked up, and the unfamiliar, interested look came into the large brown eyes.

  “I think it’s a bit much,” Tilja told her sourly. “Ma and Anja can hear what the cedars are saying, and Alnor and Tahl can listen to the waters, and Meena can sing to the unicorns, and now you’re wanting to make friends with them, and it’s just me who’s left out. D’you call that fair?”

  Calico turned her head away and whinnied toward the cliff top, and Tilja went back to her sweep.

  She found that the raft had drifted into slacker water. It was still turning, and still moving down the canyon, though much more slowly now that it wasn’t hurried along by the current. Already they were well down the reach, and Tilja could see the curve of the next bend. It looked a gentle one, with the current running close to the inner cliff and a lot of slack water out to the left. There might even be a back eddy there. Silon had told her about that danger yesterday, and told her what to do, while he was teaching her how to pick her course. Caught in a bad one, he said, a raft might circle for a full day. If she let that happen, she realized, Alnor and Tahl would certainly die. Even drifting along as they were now might be too slow. The sooner they were out from among the trees, the better. There wasn’t much hope of her stopping the raft from turning on her own, but she might be able to nudge it over closer to the main current.

  She heaved for a while and found that each time the raft came to the point where it was facing downstream it seemed to hesitate for one or two strokes of the sweep, hovering almost straight before it swung on. Time after time it turned, hesitated, turned, hesitated, neither better nor worse, and then, without her having done anything different she could think of, slowed before it was pointing directly ahead, and stopped there, no longer turning. Gingerly she continued to edge it back toward the current, watching, and trying to feel with her sweep for any sudden difference which might set it spinning again. As they reached the main flow she thought she’d lost it, but heaving with all her strength on the sweep just managed to hold it and drive it on, and now they were back in the current and she could relax, simply watching the water ahead for signs of change.

  Meena was still singing, but she had raised her head and was rocking herself gently from side to side with a faraway, dreamy look on her old face, so that Tilja felt that she could see how her grandmother might have looked when she was a lively young woman. She was mixing her strange, shapeless song to the unicorns in with words, and a tune that Tilja knew well. It was called “Cherry Pits,” an old, old song that mothers sang over cradles and children used for counting games, though the words, when they meant anything at all, were about two lovers sharing a bowl of cherries and kissing while they ate. Sometimes as Tilja worked at her sweep she found she was making her strokes to the rhythm of the song, but then it would waver and drift back into the wordless, rhythmless unicorn song and then somehow find its way back to the chorus of “Cherry Pits.”

  The day wore on. When Tilja felt hungry s
he chose a smooth stretch and left her sweep and fetched one of the small loaves Ma had baked for the journey, and a piece of cheese, and ate them one-handed. The cliffs dwindled and were gone. The river was far broader, its current less fierce but still easy to see, and they floated steadily on between wooded hills.

  There was something else different too. It took Tilja a little while to realize what it was. The trees here were already in young leaf. And the air was warmer, lusher, and at the same time, somehow, drier. They were not in the Valley anymore, not even in a place very like the Valley. They were floating toward a quite different country, different from anything Tilja knew. No one that she had ever heard of had done such a thing for nineteen generations. It was a strange thought.

  Late in the afternoon the raft rounded a great, sweeping bend and there this new country was. On either side of them the forest had ended and they were floating between low, rocky hills, dotted with patches of scrub, more waste even than the spare ground above Woodbourne. Meena stopped singing, but instead Calico started to whinny desolately, and Tilja realized that the unicorns must be following them no more.

  The new country continued just the same as they rounded each bend of the river, mile on mile of desolate hills, and no sign that anyone lived here at all. Meena stayed where she was all afternoon. It was almost dark before she eased Alnor off her lap and struggled to her feet. She hobbled aft, clutching Calico’s stall to stop herself falling, but this wasn’t only, Tilja realized, because of her hip. She looked dazed, half-awake, not sure where she was.

  “Did you see ’em?” she asked. “Little wretches.”

  “Unicorns? Oh, where? I was watching the river.”

  “In under the trees. Right down by the water, some of ’em, so I could see their reflections glimmering off it. Who’d’ve thought there were that many of ’em? Following us along, come to listen to my singing. All I’d been doing was trying to keep ’em quiet, so they weren’t afraid anymore of that great brute.”

  “With ‘Cherry Pits’?”

  “Well, it was and it wasn’t. It just came to me. I was thinking about old Alnor, and how he must’ve been a fetching lad once, and then I was thinking about a young man I used to be keen on. Met him at a Gathering, and we really hit it off, only it wasn’t that easy, him living right over at West End. I’d’ve married him too, only there was this farm he was going to come into when his uncle died—really beautiful, it was—still is, I daresay, though I’ve never had the heart to go back. And I couldn’t leave Woodbourne, could I? I mean, maybe I could’ve gone to live at West End with him for a bit, but I’d always have had to come back, wouldn’t I, soon as my own ma was past singing to the cedars? And the worst of it was I couldn’t tell him any of that—not that he’d’ve believed it, supposing I had—so it just came down to he wasn’t going to leave West End for me, and I wasn’t going to leave Woodbourne for him. Of course he couldn’t see rhyme or reason to it, Woodbourne being nothing much of a farm, really, while West End . . . ah, well . . . I don’t think he ever forgave me. . . . Be that as may be, we used to sing ‘Cherry Pits’ together, and that’s what started me off, thinking about Alnor when he was younger, and then about my own young man. . . .”

  She shook her head.

  “And the unicorns didn’t mind?” Tilja asked. “I mean, that wasn’t their song, was it?”

  “Not them,” said Meena. “I don’t know it really matters what I sing to them, provided I know I’m doing it for them, then they make it their song. I’ve never thought of that before—didn’t know I could do any of this, apart from singing to the cedars in the old days, when it was me going out to the lake all those years. Little wretches.”

  She seemed to have woken herself up by talking, and spoke the last couple of words in her usual grumbling tone. Tilja grinned at her.

  “And what do you think you’re laughing at, young woman? Nothing much to laugh at, far as I can see—we’re never going to get this thing in to the bank on our own, not without Alnor to give us a hand. And I’m all in and I dare say you are too, so here we are in the middle of this stupid great river, and it’ll be pitch dark soon and we won’t be able to see what’s coming and it wouldn’t do us much good if we could, either, for all we could do about it.”

  Tilja looked around. She could still just see the loom of the shore on either side, and the water stretching ahead of them, broad and smooth, reflecting the first few stars.

  “It doesn’t look as if anyone lives here,” she said, “so we may as well stay on the raft anyway. Calico won’t like it, but she’ll have to put up with it. Let’s have something to eat, and go to sleep, and just hope we don’t come to a waterfall or something in the night. I don’t see there’s anything else we can do, so we might as well make the best of it.”

  “I’ve seen better bests,” said Meena, relishing her grumble.

  In the last light Tilja did what she could for Calico. In spite of what she’d just said to Meena, her heart smote her when she heard the cross-grained beast’s long, weary sigh. Calico had no idea of what was happening to her, beyond its endless strangeness and discomfort. She was too dispirited even to try to bite or lean against Tilja as she scraped out the floor of the stall and washed it down with a couple of buckets of water. Tilja left her with a full manger and the bucket to drink from and went and groped among the stores for supper. Neither Tahl nor Alnor stirred.

  Tired though she was, she woke again and again in the night and raised her head and craned around. Unsteered, the raft was turning slowly in the current, but to Tilja, lying there, it felt as if she was at a center of stillness round which the whole world, and the starry sky, would wheel for ever. The effect made it hard to see how the stars were really moving, until the moon rose and she could judge the passing of time by that. It was long after midnight before true sleep settled on her, soft and warm, and she could settle into it like a hen returning to its nest.

  5

  The Camp

  Something jarred, scraped, lurched. Tilja shot awake and sat up. A light mist veiled the sky, glowing brighter where the moon shone through. That silvery patch was high overhead, so several hours had passed and it must be almost dawn. The mist hid the distances, but nearer the raft she could see open water on one side, and on the other a tangle of dead tree trunks and branches.

  “What’s up?” croaked Meena.

  “It looks as if we’ve stranded against a sandbank or something. There’s a lot of old stuff washed down from the forest.”

  “That’s not good.”

  “If it isn’t an island we might be able to scramble ashore.”

  “You might, and that boy, if he ever wakes up. Give ’em a shake, girl, see how they’re doing.”

  Tilja eased herself out of her rug and crawled across to Tahl. He was breathing steadily, but didn’t stir at her touch. Neither did Alnor. Since she was up, she crawled to the stern of the raft for a piss, and once there was struck by a difference in the look of the water. She picked up her sweep and probed down, and discovered that the river at this point was less than waist deep, with a firm bottom. Working her way forward, she found it steadily shallower, until she could actually reach down with her arm and pick up a handful of gravel from the riverbed. She went back to her bedding and waited for daylight.

  The mist turned golden as the sun rose, became a haze and cleared away. Now Tilja could see that the river had widened to a lake, blocked at its southern end by an enormous reed bed, but the current had drifted the raft side-on against a great sandspit projecting from the western bank. Wrack from many winters past had piled itself against these obstacles, an immense impenetrable tangle of sun-bleached timber, which the raft had now joined. The bank itself was not all that far away.

  She dressed and breakfasted and then experimentally took the pole and heaved against a tree trunk. Using all her strength, she managed to open a gap between the raft and the timber, but as soon as she rested the faint current floated it back. If only Alnor and Tahl had been awa
ke, they might have done it between them.

  “Supposing I was to give you a hand,” said Meena. “I’m all right, provided I don’t have to go skipping around.”

  “I’ll see if I can get Calico into the water,” said Tilja. “She’ll be a bit stiff, but she should be able to tow us ashore provided it doesn’t get much deeper. You’ll have to fasten the towlines. And I’ll need to borrow your cane.”

  She stripped off her shoes, stockings and skirt, fetched a handful of her precious hoard of yellownut, showed it to Calico and gave her a few morsels, then let the horse see her putting the rest into the pocket of her blouse. With that incentive Calico backed out of the stall with only a token refusal, and got a scrap more yellownut to keep her interested while Tilja rigged a towing harness of padded rope. Calico started readily enough toward the edge of the raft, but then scrabbled and jibbed as it began to tilt under her weight.

  “It’s all right,” said Tilja mildly. “It’s not that deep. Look, I’ll show you.”

  She waited for Meena to hobble into place and took a firm hold of the lead rope, then climbed down into the water, faced the raft, fished out half the remaining yellownut and, standing just out of reach, showed it to Calico. Calico edged forward and craned, bracing her feet against the tilt, but came no further. Tilja moved the nut toward her, closer, closer, and then, as Calico lowered her head to take it, at the last moment started to withdraw her hand. Calico reached the extra distance and floundered in, rearing and kicking, drenching them both. Tilja heard Meena’s raucous cackle as she backed clear.

  Keeping the lead rope taut, Tilja waited for Calico to steady herself, then let her have the rest of the yellownut, a little at a time, while Meena made the towlines fast to the raft.

  “Come on, then,” coaxed Tilja. “No, not back on the raft. Last thing you want. Look, we’re going ashore. Oh, come along.”