Peter Dickinson - The Ropemaker

“Be careful. You know the rope that tripped Calico? It felt like the ropes in the cave—alive, I mean, until I’d got it loose. Then it went dead.”

“Because you were touching it?”

“No, I don’t think so. I think it was because it had finished what it was there for.”

“Are you sure of this, Tahl?” said Alnor.

“Not dead sure. I think it was like that, but it was only a moment or two. I just thought . . . Tell you later. Here he comes.”

Tilja dropped back and to the side to let the stranger come striding past.

Night and the journey seemed unending, unchanging, the darkness, the dripping trees, the fog. Tired beyond tiredness, Tilja plodded on. For the first few miles fear of pursuit had kept her going, but by now she had used up all those reserves of energy and knew she couldn’t travel much further without rest. Then the path dipped, they came out of the fog as suddenly as they’d walked into it, and she saw a vast plain stretching in front of her, with the first pale wash of dawn showing along the eastern horizon. At the foot of the hills a few spots of light pricked the darkness. The stranger halted and they stopped on either side of him.

“Way station,” he said. “Be there by sunrise.”

“We owe you our thanks, sir,” said Alnor. “Without you we would still be prisoners. And yet we do not know your name.”

The stranger laughed.

“No name,” he said. “Don’t use one. Just Ropemaker.”

“You must’ve got one, though,” said Meena. “Just you’re not saying.”

He laughed again.

“Well,” said Meena. “Like Alnor says, we owe you a bit, but I’ve a question to ask you all the same. I know it’s dangerous to talk about this kind of thing, but it strikes me we’re all in this together. That was a lot of powerful stuff you were doing with your ropes back there up the hill, and none of us felt a thing, not like we’d expect to, Alnor and Tahl and me. When something like that’s going on, we get this kind of a feeling . . . doesn’t happen where we come from, so we’re not used to it, but there’s no mistaking . . . you get what I’m asking you?”

He didn’t answer at once but turned, not to her but to Tilja.

“You felt nothing, girl?” he asked quietly.

“No. I don’t. I can’t . . . it doesn’t matter.”

Perhaps it was just that she was so exhausted, so far from home, so shaken by their adventure, but she could hear the bitterness and sadness in her own voice and knew she was lying, and knew the others knew. It was as though she had been standing under the cedars with Anja all over again. Her inability to feel the presence of magic, in the same way that the others felt it, truly did matter, for reasons she was quite unable to grasp.

The Ropemaker’s huge head was a dark mass against the paling stars. She couldn’t see his eyes, but he seemed to be staring at her. Then he gave a brief, yapping laugh and turned to Meena.

“Not warded, ma’am?” he asked her.

“Don’t know how,” she told him. “Like I say, it doesn’t happen where we come from.”

“Spoon of yours—that’s warded.”

“Lananeth did that for us. She said it would be safer.”

“Right. Won’t get it into Talagh with you, though. Need more than that. Might meet someone on the way, too. . . . Only country stuff, those wards. . . . Give it to the girl, ma’am. There’s something about her—don’t understand it myself. New to me. Don’t know if it’ll stand up to the wards they’ve got at Talagh, but it’s the best you can do. Strap it against her skin, under her sleeve. May be safe like that. All right? Got to be getting on now, heading north, convoy to catch. No hurry for you—yours goes tomorrow. Day’s rest for the old ’uns. And you take that horse, sir. Be more than a day or two before you can walk on that leg of yours. Sell it when you’re done with it. Been a pleasure to meet you. Luck be with you, then.”

Meena’s mouth had barely opened to protest before he had turned and was striding down the slope, waving a spidery arm in acknowledgment as they called their farewells after him.

8

The Walls of the City

Talagh. There was no grasping it, no way Tilja could imagine it as just a particular place in the world. It wouldn’t fit into her mind. It was like the Empire itself, too huge, too strange, too, somehow, vague.

By the time they reached it even its name had become uncertain. In the Valley it had been Talak; north of the Pirrim Hills Talagh; but in the twenty-seven days of travel since then she had heard it called Talarg and Dalarg and Dhawak and Tallak-Tallak, and Ndalag and several other names, by travelers who had joined the traffic on the Grand Northwest Road by one of the scores of roads that fed into it from north and south.

And the speakers had been just as different as the names they’d used for the city. Tahl, who could make friends with anyone, had hit it off with a boy his own age whom he’d met while he was haggling with a dealer over a price for Alnor’s horse at one of the way stations. These were huge by now, with booths for a thousand travelers, more or less grand according to their grade. Tahl’s friend, Cinoquo, had a clear, coppery skin, thick lips, a snub, spread nose, and high, prominent cheekbones, just like his parents, who were on their way to a provincial capital to be witnesses in a legal dispute between their Landholder and a rival which had already dragged on through five generations. They were nomadic cattle herders and drove a creaking oxcart—they had no other home—and spoke in an accent so strange that until she was used to it Tilja could understand only one word in three.

But some things didn’t vary at all. Cinoquo’s father was a chief in his tribe, so he was a fourteenth grader and wore a cap like Alnor’s, and Cinoquo’s little sister had just started to put her hair up, braided and coiled and fastened with two blue beads and a blue-headed pin showing, and she was having just the same trouble keeping them in place that Tilja used to have until the Ropemaker had done his trick with her hair tie. These were the people who called the city Tallak-Tallak.

Tilja saw it first as a dirty smudge spreading along the south-eastern horizon. The Grand Northwest Road truly lived up to its name by now. For the past nine days it had been fifty paces broad, well paved from ditch to ditch and marked off into separate lanes for travelers of different status and speeds, the ordinary traffic plodding along at the outer edges, while imperial messengers, high officials and their like sped through in the middle. (When the Emperor traveled, Tahl had heard someone say, the road was closed to all traffic for a day’s march before and behind him, and it took his retinue a morning to pass by.)

For most of the time they had journeyed across plains or among gentle hills; for the last day and a half they had wound up through precipitous valleys, beneath cliffs, over passes, and down by thundering streams until, abruptly, they came round a spur, and there lay Talagh.

Tilja didn’t at first notice it, because her eye was inevitably caught by the river. The one by which they had left the Valley would have been a trickle beside it. Nevertheless those waters were here, one of the hundreds of tributaries that mingled into this mile-wide gleaming flood, snaking down from the north, close below the hills, and swinging away east across the plain.

“Talagh,” said someone, and pointed. Tilja peered into the distance and saw the smudge spreading along the horizon, a smudge in the clear spring air from the dust and fume of several million lives, a smudge on the patient earth from centuries of such lives building their houses and workplaces and temples and palaces and towers of fortification, and then rebuilding and rebuilding on the rubble of them. A smudge on time itself. From where she stood she began to feel its power.