Peter Dickinson - The Ropemaker

“How are we going to find the person we’re looking for if we aren’t allowed to say his name?” asked Tahl.

“There I can’t help you,” said Lananeth.

“You had not heard that name before Meena spoke it?” said Alnor.

“No. I know for sure of no one but myself who practices, but as Meena says, many people must have the gift. If I go up into the hills and look out across the plain I can sometimes feel . . . it’s hard to describe. It’s something like one of the dust devils that we see in the hot season, fierce little eddies of air that suck up loose stuff from the ground and whirl it around as they go. I can feel the loose magic being sucked toward one place and woven into a shape, a shape that has power and purpose, and I’ll know that there is someone there—a child, perhaps, who hasn’t yet been warned of the dangers or else shown how to hide what she’s doing—who is practicing magic in some small way. Sometimes I have sensed something more formidable. When the army was here, some of the Emperor’s magicians came with them. I felt them testing the magical defenses of the forest, and being defeated by it. I didn’t need to go up into the hills to be aware of it. I could feel it from here. But I wouldn’t dare risk making myself known to any of these people, or learning their names, or letting them know mine. What I do is all concerned with the estate, helping the crops to grow, scaring away the wild animals that might eat them, caring for our own beasts. My mother-in-law told me that most of those who practice find that their gift is with one particular aspect of the world. . . .”

“Like mine is with trees, far as I can make out,” said Meena, “and Alnor’s is with water and rivers and such.”

“Our river only, perhaps,” said Alnor. “I do not know.”

“That may well be the case,” said Lananeth. “When I travel beyond the boundaries of this estate I feel my powers diminish. I could do nothing in Talagh, if I were fool enough to risk trying.”

“Perhaps in our case that is just as well,” said Alnor. “We shall not need to be so much on our guard all the time, though I was hoping that we would be able to use the river to travel further.”

“No,” said Lananeth. “All across the North West Plain, right to the Pirrim Hills, it is barred with reed beds. Tomorrow I will set you on your way by road. You have three days to reach Songisu, where you will have to join a convoy, as there are bandits in the hills. There will not be another convoy for nine days, and every day you delay is danger for my husband. So now we must get on. I have much more to tell you, and it’s already late. These are the clothes you will wear. . . .”

To her shame, Tilja was already asleep before Lananeth left. She dreamed not of the dangers of the coming journey, nor of the lost comforts of home, but of a shore where she stood, and an island far out at sea (never before in dreams, and never with her waking eyes, had she seen the sea) and a voice in her head telling her that everything depended on her reaching that island. It must have been sunset in her dream because the whole sky above the island was filled with a glowing cloud that seemed, when she wasn’t looking at it directly, to be forming itself into a great fiery shape, but as soon as she turned to see became shapeless again. Only as she woke did she realize that the shape had been that of a unicorn.

7

The Pirrim Hills

Four evenings after leaving Ellion’s house they reached Songisu. The way station was an enclosed square with a pillared arcade running round three sides, divided into separate booths for the travelers. It was larger than the ones they’d stopped at before, but everything else was the same. Lananeth had warned them what would happen. The clerk took their money—four drin for the fee, two for the bribe and one for the unofficial bribe—and stamped their way-leaves, and then demanded a surcharge before he’d hand them back. Alnor answered with a blast of barely controlled anger and a threat to report him to Steward Ellion, and he shrugged and gave in.

Tilja rubbed Calico down while the other three settled into one of the booths, then joined Tahl to go and haggle for food and fodder at the stalls. All this already seemed easy and familiar.

Waiting for Tahl to finish bargaining, she fiddled with her hair. From the first day of their journey, she had had trouble with it. Ma had always cut it just above shoulder length and tied it in two bunches at the back, but Lananeth said she was too old to wear it like that in the Empire, and she must braid it, secure it with a little beaded tie, and then coil it up at the back of her head and fasten it in place with a pin, with the blue pinhead at the center and the two blue beads below to show that she came from a fourteenth-grade household. Her scarf then went over the top of her head, once round under her chin and over the top again, with the ends hanging down in front of her shoulders. There were two small blue beads and a larger one on the tassels each side. All these beads meant that way-travelers from lower grades could see that they must be careful not to jostle her as they passed.

Unfortunately girls in the Empire wore their hair longer than Tilja’s. She could just about braid it, but there was almost nothing to coil, especially as she couldn’t see what she was doing, so someone else had to do that and pin it in place, and even then it started to come undone almost as soon as she moved. By the time each day ended her neck was stiff with trying to hold her head as still as possible so that she didn’t have to stop every half mile and ask Tahl to coil her up yet again. He did this neatly and without fuss, teasing only a little, but it was a nuisance and made her feel a fool.

Worse, it made her sure that she was giving them all away. Sooner or later some nosy stranger was going to ask about her hair. Tahl had already come up with a story about it getting full of tar and needing to be cut short, but Tilja was certain that as she stammered with the lie the stranger would notice everything else that was wrong about her, her curious accent, and how she kept getting tangled in the ends of her scarf, and didn’t look comfortable in her long skirt, and didn’t seem to know stuff that even small children knew. The other three looked fine to her. Tahl wore his little blue-beaded hat at a jaunty tilt, and laughed, and smiled, and was interested in everything; Alnor’s own natural dignity suited his grander uniform; and Meena would have looked like Meena whatever she was wearing. No, Tilja was the one who was going to let them down.

In fact there was far more danger from one of the other three. For instance, yesterday morning they had passed an area of sparse scrub, with goats grazing for what they could find, and then suddenly they were walking between small fields full of young crops, beautifully clean and tidy, with little one-room huts scattered about, and every now and then a water-filled ditch running as straight as a ruled line on either side of the road as far as the eye could see.

They had come to a bridge over a fair-sized stream. Here Alnor, who had been striding steadily along beside Calico with his left hand on the saddle flap for guidance, halted abruptly. Calico plodded sullenly on until Tilja dragged her to an equally sullen standstill. Tahl took Alnor’s hand and led him to the bridge rail, where they stood side by side, leaning on the rail, as if they were gazing into the distance. There wasn’t anything special about the place that Tilja could see, only the slow-moving stream, wriggling away between the fields, and every so often someone working an endless rope that dipped below the surface and drew bucket after bucket up the steep bank and tipped them into the ditch at the top. That was how the ditches were filled, she realized, and that was why the fields ended as suddenly they did, because it was as far as the water could be made to flow. Without those hoists, and the hundreds of peasants toiling at them all day long, this great, rich area would have been as barren as the parched plain beyond it.