Peter Dickinson - The Ropemaker

Calico was drowsy with hemp, but even in her stupor did her best to squeeze Tilja against the sides of the stall. By the time Tilja had her secure they were in among the trees, and she hurried back to her post at the stern sweep. The river had narrowed suddenly, and now ran between steeper banks, its whole current moving all together without eddies or still places, but sending continuous faint tremors through the timbers of the raft. The trailing sweep fidgeted in Tilja’s grip as if it were alive. She kept her eyes on Alnor, waiting for the moment when he lost control and she and Meena must take over. Beyond him she could see the river running dark with the reflection from the hills, and roughening here and there into foam. Nothing happened. All the way down that reach the raft stayed steady in midstream, held there by the waters doing Alnor’s bidding.

Until they reached the woods she had barely heard his muttered song, but he was singing more loudly now, so that his voice carried to her above the whispering hiss of the raft, a steady, rippling drone, repetitive, endless, shapeless, but full of intricate little changes, like the surface of a flowing stream. She thought about what Silon had told her, that Alnor had been a wild young man. Yes, she could understand that, wild as a waterfall, where a young river hurls itself down a hillside. She guessed that that waterfall was still there, inside him, but his quiet, slow, formal speech and manner were ways of controlling it.

Now he flung up his right arm.

“Pull,” she called, and heaved on her sweep. As she did so, though she had seen nothing different in the rush of the current, she felt the whole raft suddenly trying to writhe sideways against the blade of her sweep. Alnor’s arm was still up.

“Again!” she called, raising her own blade clear and stretching forward for another heave.

The raft steadied and swept on. Alnor lowered his arm. In those few moments the hills seemed to have risen more steeply round them, crowding them in with trees. The raft tilted, and plunged down a dark green slope, the surface creased into straining lines, down which they rushed toward a wild pother of foam at the bottom. Then they were rocking and tossing in a roaring jumble of white water, tilting up, steep as a shed roof, with the foam creaming round Tilja’s ankles, swooping down into more foam and out into the untroubled reach beyond.

Alnor’s left arm was up.

“Push!” she shouted.

Together the three of them caught and straightened the raft as it tried to slew, and they floated into calmer water. At once Tilja hauled her sweep clear, laid it down, untied her safety cord and hurried forward to the stall. Calico was fully awake and on the verge of panic, with her ears flat back and the muscles of her neck bulging stiff as she strained against her head collar. Tilja stayed with her, patting her neck, teasing her mane and talking gently to her until she saw the hemp stupor seep back into her eyes. By then her own heartbeat had steadied, and the great gulp of terror she had felt at the top of the slope was no more than a memory.

Meena caught her eye and cackled with laughter.

“Never fancied dying in bed,” she called.

Tilja grinned and went back to her post.

There were cliffs on either side of them now, black, but streaked here and there with falling streams. Time passed. Alnor and Tahl seemed to be all right, the old man sitting erect, as if his blind eyes were staring along the gorge, and Tahl kneeling beside him to tell him what was coming. Alnor was still singing his strange song, though Tilja caught only faint snatches of it through the splatter and rustle of the current. After a while Meena joined quietly in, not the same song, though it had the same kind of strangeness, slow, wavering, wordless, wonderfully peaceful. Turning, Tilja saw a dreamy look on the lined old face.

“Are you singing to the cedars?” she asked.

Meena smiled teasingly, a child with a secret, and went back to her song.

The gorge twisted to and fro. At almost every bend they had to fight to hold their course in the rushing current. Twice more they swooped down roaring slopes into the welter of foam below, but each time Alnor had set the raft dead right at the start so that it came safely through. And something very odd was happening to Calico. Though the effect of the hemp must surely be wearing off, she seemed barely to notice these upheavals. When Tilja went to check her, as soon as they were through the tumbling flurries, she found her with her ears pricked, and with a bright, interested look in her eye, and every now and then she would raise her head and give a whinny of greeting and inquiry, as if she’d spotted another horse somewhere up on the left-hand cliffs.

“Calico seems to think she’s got a friend up there,” said Tilja, as she came back to her sweep.

Meena produced something between a sneer and a grin.

“Can’t see there’s any trouble coming, this next bit,” she said. “Manage by yourself for a while?”

“I think so.”

“Right. I’ll just go and see how the old fellow’s doing.”

There were gruntings and mutterings as Meena untied her safety cord, and then she came into Tilja’s line of sight, steadying herself on Calico’s stall as she hobbled forward. Tilja saw her stop beside Alnor and say something, and put her hand on his forehead, but at that point she felt the raft wavering from its course as Alnor was distracted from his task, and she had to hold it steady without his help until Meena left him and came hobbling back.

“Says he’s not too bad,” she said. “He’s feeling it, mind, and so’s that boy—they’ve got a nasty color, both of them, but Alnor thinks they’ll do. How we’re ever going to get them home again I can’t imagine.”

That reach ended in a wild bend, another reach, and another, easier curve. All Tilja’s attention was concentrated on Alnor, and the rush of water beyond him, so she mightn’t have noticed what they were coming to but for Tahl’s sudden, astonished gesture. He flung up an arm and pointed ahead, and at the same time called aloud. Tilja looked, and saw.

The cliff on the outer side of the coming turn rose sheer from the water, like a natural watchtower. On its summit, almost at the brink, stood a unicorn.

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.