Peter Dickinson - The Ropemaker

“So you see, I cannot simply send you away from here. You must have a reason to travel, so that I can give you way-leaves, and a story to tell, so that you will not be questioned too closely.”

“My, what a pickle,” said Meena. “Who’d’ve thought we’d be causing this much trouble? Look, why don’t we just go back to the river, and then somehow get our raft off from where it’s stuck, and carry on that way, and all of you can forget you’ve ever seen us?”

Lananeth shook her head, smiling.

“Wherever you landed you would have the same problem,” she said.

“And further from the forest, people wouldn’t have any reason not to send us straight on to Talak,” said Tahl. “And it wouldn’t stop the Emperor sending his armies here again, either.”

“I’m afraid not,” said Lananeth. “But I’ve a third reason why we should all do as I suggest. This is where you can help me. First, you have to understand something that may seem strange to you. I have already told you that we may travel only by the permission of the Emperor, but that is not all. We eat, sleep, breathe by the permission of our Lord the Emperor. We live or die at his will. Those are no mere words. When he reaches the highest step of the Opal Stair each new Emperor places his foot upon the Sapphire Stool and recites his final decree, that all who live in his Empire live by his permission and die by his choice, and for any man or woman to do otherwise is treason, for which the penalty is death. At the start of each reign there is a strict census, and all names missing from the previous census must be accounted for.”

“Am I hearing you right?” said Meena. “Suppose I lived here and I fell out of my apple tree and broke my neck—might happen to anyone—you’re saying I’d be a traitor?”

“Yes, and since you’d be already dead, your heir would either have to pay the penalty in your stead or renounce his inheritance, in which case all your goods would be forfeited to the Emperor. So as soon as they become men or women all who can afford it journey to Talagh and pay the fees and obtain the Emperor’s permission to die, renewable by sending a further fee to Talagh each year. If they can, they take with them on that first journey a child of their household, as a kind of insurance, to be sold into slavery and thus pay the penalty in case they should die on the road. Those who can less afford it often delay, sometimes until they feel their end is almost on them, and so at some risk to their heirs save the permission fees. Those who cannot afford any fees travel to Goloroth in the far south when they feel it is time for them to go, but that need not concern you. You are going to Talagh.

“I can see from your faces that you think what I have told you appalling, and you are right. I am sorry to say that we have lived so long with it that we no longer think it even strange.

“Now, we had two old servants, very dear to us, who when they retired from our service went to live with one of their daughters who is married to a substeward of the estate on an outlying parcel of land. They planned, when their time came, to go to Goloroth, but they seemed well and cheerful, so we did not worry. But then the old man died, suddenly and without warning, and the woman, distraught with grief and the fret about the penalty, and the journey to Goloroth without him, climbed a steep hill nearby and threw herself off a cliff. This was no accidental death, but a deliberate flouting of the Imperial decree, entailing a tenfold penalty, and disgrace for all who might have prevented it.

“Worse yet, the daughter and her husband concealed the deaths for a while, thus involving my husband and with him all his household, since the man had been appointed on my husband’s recommendation and he had not discovered the crime. Everything we possess, including our own lives, would not be enough to pay the various penalties. When we found what had happened we had no recourse but to continue the concealment.

“Yet worse again. As I told you, the Emperor climbed the Opal Stair barely three years ago. The census on his accession has not yet reached this outlying district, but will do so before the year is out. At that point, further concealment will become impossible. My husband has gone to Talagh on our Landholder’s business. While there he hopes to explore what possibilities there are for the purchase of false death permits for the old couple and the insertion of their names in the ledgers. This will be both expensive and dangerous, for he will put our very lives into the hands of unknown officials, who will be in a position to blackmail us for the rest of our days.

“He and I have, of course, often talked the thing through and round and about, and more than once sighed and wished that there were two old people on the estate who had somehow been missed from the last census, who could take the names of Qualif and Qualifa. Now, wonderfully, it is so. You are here.

“It seems to me that neither you nor I have any other choice. What do you think?”

Each waited for the others. Alnor spoke first.

“For me, it is a good offer, and as I told you, the waters of our millstream have said that my grandson should help me.”

“Me too,” said Meena. “There’s got to be two of us, it seems to me, one from Northbeck and one from Woodbourne, like there was when it all started. I don’t know about Tilja. It’s a lot more than she bargained for, and her parents too, seeing what sort of a place this Empire of yours sounds like. It’s all right, girl—you don’t have to come. I daresay Lananeth can find a youngster to go along with me to Talak—Talagh I suppose we ought to be calling it now. You ought to be able to find your way back through the forest, just following up along the river. I can’t see it’s going to be any more dangerous than coming along with Alnor and me, after what Lananeth’s told us.”

Home, thought Tilja. My own bed by the stove. The kitchen I can find my way across in the dark. She pushed the thought away. It wasn’t her home any longer. It was Anja’s.

“No,” she said. “The cedars told me to come. And anyway, I’m the only one who can cope with Calico.”

“Good,” said Lananeth. “Now you must eat, and then I will teach you as much as I can of what you will need to know if you aren’t to betray yourselves on your journey.”

So far, though she had nibbled a couple of morsels, Tilja had barely been aware of the unfamiliar tastes in her mouth. Food in the Valley was always straightforward, however rich the feast. The tenderest, juiciest chicken was still nothing but chicken, with perhaps a few herbs, and though the gravy might be the best gravy in the Valley, it was still just that—gravy, with bread to mop it up and a couple of vegetables on the side. Here there were twenty little dishes and no main dish. Almost the only food she recognized was a bowl of dried fruit, but when she tried a slice of apple it wasn’t only apple; there was a whole mouthful of other tastes mixed in.

Lananeth showed them how the custom was to heap a plate with five or six little piles from the different dishes, and eat a bit of each in turn, trying the different tastes, hot or sweet or acid or meaty, against each other in different combinations. Two of them were so strong that they seemed to burn the tongue, but there was a jug of a wonderful pale rose drink that fizzed in the mouth and cleaned the hotness away, leaving only a pleasant prickling. Lananeth ate companionably with them and told them the names of the dishes and what was in them, and the names of simpler things to ask for on the journey.

“Well, we must get on,” she said at last. “We have only this evening, as I want you to reach Talagh as soon as possible after my husband, so that he can hear of my plan before he risks anything himself. Your task will not be as hard as you might think. There are about four thousand people on this estate, but I doubt if more than twenty of them have ever left it. Your journey will be little stranger to you than it would have been to the real Qualif and Qualifa. Those are your names from now on, Qualif and Qualifa Jaddo, but there’ll be no harm in your calling Meena Meena . Most women stick to their childhood names after they marry. I am Elliona on the census forms. Your grandchildren too can keep their own names, as they wouldn’t have been born at the last census.