Peter Dickinson - The Ropemaker

“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.