Peter Dickinson - The Ropemaker

She shook her head.

“Ask me and tell me no more. Tomorrow I will take you to Ellion. You must talk to him and he will decide. My name is Salata.”

Alnor told her theirs, and she led them back to the trees and found water for Calico, and then made them sit down and brought them cheese and goat’s milk and pieces of hard, flat, biscuity bread, but when they tried to offer her some of their food in exchange, she became offended and insisted it was not the custom.

“Well,” said Meena. “It’s not my custom to take something for nothing, but at least there’s something I might do for you. You said the soldiers had taken your husband. Would you like me to have a go at telling you how he might be getting on?”

Salata’s face, her whole attitude, changed completely. She stared at Meena, hesitating, both eager and afraid.

“Oh . . . oh, please!” she whispered. “Anything . . . anything!”

Tilja fetched Meena’s baggage roll and Meena opened it and took out the leather bag in which she carried her spoons and the things that went with them. She laid the blue cloth out on the ground, put the spoons on it and told Salata to choose one. Salata chose one of the darker two. Meena poured a drop of oil onto the back of its bowl, gave her a piece of cloth and the spoon and told her to rub the oil well in and put the spoon back between the others. She bent forward until her face was only a few inches from the cloth, and concentrated, wheezing heavily.

“Ah,” she whispered. “Here it comes . . . here it comes . . . beautiful . . . my, that’s clear. Maybe you can see it for yourself, Salata—this line here—look close, and you’ll see it’s two lines, really, running side by side, that’s you and your husband, I’ll be bound, and these little lines branching off and running alongside, that’ll be your two little girls getting born. . . . But now, here this one, twisting away all of a sudden and going off into this muddle of stuff over here, that’s got to be him getting taken off by the soldiers, and this is you, going straight on but running a bit thin, and no wonder, things being difficult for you without him. . . .

But see, here, this one running back out of that mess, straight as an arrow to where yours is, and fitting in alongside it again as if it’s the one place in the world it wanted to be . . . that’s got to be him coming back to you. . . .”

“When? When?” croaked Salata.

“Can’t say for sure,” said Meena, pushing herself upright. “Doesn’t look that long, if you measure it off, but that’s not really how it works. There’s most of a lifetime in a space not as big as half your hand, so it just fits in what’s important, best it can. But I tell you it’s all clearer than I’ve ever seen, so that’s how things are going to work out, or my name’s not Meena Urlasdaughter.”

Hesitantly Salata reached out and took the spoon, as if she thought its touch might burn her.

“It’s going,” she said, peering at it. “Fading . . . I can’t see it anymore.”

“That’s right,” said Meena. “And if you asked them again they wouldn’t tell you anything special. But you saw it like I showed you, didn’t you? It was all there.”

Salata nodded, at first unable to speak. “Oh, you have given me a rich gift in exchange for your poor meal,” she said at last. “You have given me hope.”

She was crying now, holding the spoon and stroking it between her fingers as if its touch still spoke to her of her husband’s return.

“There, there,” said Meena. “Don’t you take on so. It’ll all come right in the end, and you won’t help nor hinder, making a song and dance.”

She managed to sound irritated by Salata’s burst of emotion, but Tilja knew her well enough to see that really she was very moved herself, and didn’t want to show it.

Salata pulled herself together.

“Since you are strangers in this place, I will say this to you,” she whispered. “That is a great power you have. Such things are very dangerous. Even here, so far from people, they are dangerous. Among people you must be very careful.”

“What do you mean, careful?” said Meena.

But Salata would say no more.

The elder daughter brought the goats home at sunset to be herded into a corral under the trees and milked, while the younger daughter stirred the pile of ashes in front of the tent and got a fire going. They sat round it and ate again, and talked; that’s to say Tahl asked endless questions and Salata answered. She now seemed happy to do so, but still asked none herself. It was clear that she positively didn’t want to know anything about the forest, or what lay beyond it.

She told them that her goats and all the land around there, as far as the eye could see, belonged to an official in the court of the Emperor. She made cheese from the milk, and once she had made a certain weight could keep what was left. She could also keep one in twenty of the male kids to fatten and eat, when the rest were driven off to market. Her husband was a trapper, hunting a kind of rock squirrel that lived among the hills to the north, whose fur was prized. Then, two years ago, soldiers had come to look for a way through the forest. Some of them had died of the sickness, and they had made up their numbers by seizing any able-bodied men they could lay their hands on, including Salata’s husband. Now she and her daughters had to live on her allowance from the goats and whatever they could glean from the land.

“A bad season, and we will all three die,” she said.

“So you’re some kind of slave?” said Tahl, in his usual pert way.

“If I were a slave I would be better off,” she said, and explained that all land belonged to the Emperor, who then gave the use of it to his nobles, and the officials who ran the Empire for him, to pay them for their services. These were the Landholders, and long ago everyone who lived on the land, including Salata’s ancestors, had had to buy the right to do so from them. Since they’d not had the money to pay the price outright, they had borrowed the money from the Landholders themselves. The cheese Salata made and the kids she reared to send to market were the interest she was still paying on that debt, fixed so that it could never be paid off. And under that ancient contract neither she nor her descendants could leave the land until it was.

Salata told them this without anger, just accepting that that was how things were, but Meena became very indignant.

“Well, I say it’s a scandal and a shame,” she said. “I’d not put up with it, and I’d give this Landholder of yours a piece of my mind, and the Emperor too, if I was to run into him.”

Salata, who had been reaching to stir the fire, dropped the branch she was using, stared at Meena for a moment, drawing herself away, then rose and moved round to the far side of the fire, where she knelt and scooped up a handful of ashes and poured them over her bowed head. Her two daughters copied her. All three stayed like that while Salata muttered rapidly, under her breath, what sounded like some kind of charm or prayer.

They rose. At a gesture from Salata the children went into the tent, but she stayed and stared at Meena across the embers.

“Do you wish to bring more misfortune on me and my tent?” she said.

“I’m very sorry, I’m sure,” said Meena. “It’s just my way of speaking. I didn’t mean to offend. Besides, who’s to know, apart from us here? There’s no one else, miles around.”

“A bird may fly to Talagh with your saying. A wind may carry it there. The Emperor keeps great magicians at his court, who listen for all such whispers. If your words come to his ears, you who spoke them, and your friends and I and my daughters who heard them, will be thrown into the furnaces. If you were not my guests I would set my dog on you and turn you from my tent.”