Peter Dickinson - The Ropemaker

She spoke with such hissing vehemence that even Meena was grudgingly impressed.

“Well, I’m sorry,” she said. “I see I’d best watch my tongue— it runs away with me sometimes.”

Salata nodded, but didn’t relax.

“I accept that you spoke in ignorance,” she said. “When you came to my tent you foretold good fortune for me and mine. Now, perhaps, you have undone it. How can I feel the friendship for you that I did only a moment ago?”

Meena heaved herself to her feet, hobbled round the fire and took Salata by the hands.

“You’ve done right by us, and more than right,” she said, “and I’m not laying my head down tonight with this kind of feeling between us. Even just now, telling me to my face what a fool I’d been, why, that was a help, or who knows what I might’ve come out with somewhere, with a pack of strangers listening? Now, listen. You read the spoons just now. You saw what they said was coming to you. It was clear as clear, and there wasn’t anything there of the sort of bad luck you’re talking about. If there’d been something like that on its way to you, you’d’ve seen it, just as clear—I promise you that. But if there’s anything I can do to make you feel better about it, just tell me, and I’ll do it.”

Salata gave a stiff half smile and shook her head.

“It is done,” she said. “We will do as you say, and lay our heads down in friendship. And tomorrow I will take you to the house of Ellion. He is our Landholder’s steward, a good man, who does what he can to protect us. He will advise you.”

“That is Ellion’s house,” said Salata, pointing.

They had started soon after sunrise and walked steadily all morning. Alnor and Tahl had almost recovered from the forest sickness, but Calico was so stiff that she was nearly lame, and in an even worse mood than usual. Now it was early afternoon and they were standing at the edge of the open, half-wild country where Salata and the other herdspeople grazed their animals. In front of them lay mile on mile of farmland, small fields, every inch tilled and sown, and the first crops already green and reaching for the sun. Tilja couldn’t see anything that looked like a real farmhouse, though, only a scatter of shabby little huts among the fields, each no more than four windowless mud walls and a straw roof, with a rolled mat above the entrance to act as a door. Three or four miles ahead a mound—you couldn’t have called it a hill— rose above the rest of the plain. On it stood what looked like a village, a tight cluster of buildings with whitewashed walls and orange-tiled roofs.

The path picked its way between the fields. In some of them several people were working together, two or three adults and some children, just as you might have seen in the Valley at this time of year. The women were dressed like Salata, though their long scarves were of different colors and patterns. The men wore little conical hats with upturned brims and a tassel, loose brown jackets and baggy knee-breeches without stockings or shoes. They looked up, called their greetings to Salata, stared for a moment at the strangers, and went back to their tasks.

Slowly the village came nearer, and now Tilja could see that it was nothing like the villages in the Valley, where the houses all stood separate from each other with their own garden plots around them. Here, beneath the jumble of roofs, the walls of one building mostly joined straight on to the next, with only a few gaps between them. Perhaps, she realized, it wasn’t a village after all. The whole thing was Ellion’s house.

Salata led the way to one of these gaps. A man stood there, wearing a loose pale cloak and a red floppy cap with several tassels, and carrying a long staff with a sort of badge at the top. Salata spoke to him. He frowned at the strangers and looked as if he wanted to refuse them entry, but Salata argued urgently with him and he gave way. The gap was the start of a steep alley, so narrow that Calico’s saddlebags scraped against either wall. It led into a central courtyard, almost as large as some of the fields they’d passed, with many doors opening onto it, and more onto a sort of balcony that ran almost the whole way round the upper story. Toward one end of the courtyard there was a roofed-over area where three men sat at a table piled with hundreds of scrolls and ledgers. (Coarse paper was made in the Valley and bound into handwritten books. Ma had two, a recipe book and a collection of herb remedies, from which she’d taught her daughters to read and write, but Tilja had never seen anything as huge as those ledgers.)

One or two people stood opposite each of the men at the tables, discussing whatever had brought them there, while thirty or forty others waited their turn in groups around the courtyard. As Tahl and Tilja were helping Meena down from Calico’s back a man dressed like the guard at the entrance came over and spoke to Salata. He too frowned at the strangers, cut Salata short, and beckoned brusquely to them. They started to follow, but stopped when they realized Salata wasn’t coming with them and turned to thank her and say goodbye. Before they could do so, the guard took Alnor by the shoulder and pulled him away.

“Hey! This won’t do—” Meena began, but Salata at once cut in.

“No, you must go with him,” she said urgently. “Do as he tells you. Make no trouble. Ellion is not here. His wife is Lananeth. She is a good woman. Tell her all you told me. I will look after your horse. Good fortune go with you.”

“And with you,” said Meena. “Come on, then. We’ll do as we’re told, this once.”

Without a word the guard led them through one of the doorways, along a dark passage and into a much smaller courtyard, where he told them to wait, and left them. After some while he came back and led them on through several more archways and courtyards, until they reached one where he opened a heavy door and motioned to them to go through. He closed the door behind them. They heard the bolts rasp to.

There was nothing in the room apart from a low table with two unlit lamps on it. A little light came through a barred window high in one wall. All their food and belongings were in the saddlebags.

6

Ellion’s House

They sat down with their backs against the chill walls. Time passed. Alnor seemed to go to sleep. Meena muttered to herself. Tahl fidgeted. Tilja thought about Woodbourne, trying to imagine, detail by detail, what her family might be doing at each moment. She wondered if they were missing her. Did it feel very strange without her? Were the cedars telling Ma and Anja what was happening to her? Oh, why didn’t she have anything that could tell her about them?

The old bitterness was welling up inside her when Alnor spoke.

“I have a strange feeling,” he said. “Now I think of it, I believe I have had it ever since we landed from the raft, but then I put it down to the sickness. Now the sickness is gone and my mind is clear, yet the feeling is still there, like the pressure one feels before a thunderstorm breaks. I dreamed dreams of water all night. . . .”

“So did I,” said Tahl. “I often do, but these weren’t the usual ones. The water was sort of alive. I was part of it.”

“Me, I dreamed I was a tree,” said Meena. “There’s a lot more to being a tree than you’d think, too. I thought maybe it was reading the spoons so clear for Salata put it into my head.”

“What about you, Til?” said Tahl. “What did you dream about?”

“Nothing,” she answered crossly. “I must have dreamed, I suppose, but I can’t remember what.”

“There’s no need to sound like that, girl,” said Meena. “What’s up with you?”

“Nothing,” said Tilja, almost weeping now, and furious with herself for the unreasonableness of it, as if not having dreams like the others was the same sort of being-left-out as not being able to hear what the cedars were saying or listen to the waters. And then . . . she didn’t know where the idea came from . . .