Peter Dickinson - The Ropemaker

That was at noon. In midafternoon they crossed the river on one of a pair of wooden bridges built upon massive piles. (What forest of giants must have been felled to provide such timber!) They slept at the last, thronged way station with the city still a few miles distant. From here they could see the low hill at its center, where the twenty spindling towers of the Watchers rose above the haze of dust and smoke, marking the heart of the Empire, the Emperor’s palace. Here too, as Lananeth had warned them, they were pestered by touts offering to guide them through the bureaucratic maze of entry and the dangers of the streets to wondrous places of pleasure and profit within the walls of Talagh.

Next morning for a while they saw no sign of any such walls. They walked past fields of vegetables, clusters of shabby houses and barns, more fields, more buildings, and then they were trudging along a tree-lined avenue with pompous statues and fountains, but still with dingy and ramshackle warehouses and yards on either side. Some kind of building blocked the road in the distance.

Nearer, this turned out to be an immense triple archway built of dark red brick. Beyond it they came to an empty space, two hundred paces across and stretching out of sight on either side. Ahead, in the same dark brick, heavy as a thundercloud at sunset, rose the gates and towered walls of Talagh.

They passed under the arch around noon, and joined the lines for entry. Many of their fellow travelers would still be waiting by dusk, and have to camp in their places all night and wait for the clerks to start work again next morning, but Alnor was wearing the uniform of a fourteenth grader, so one of the officials controlling the lines (two drin before he would even look at them) told them to join the shorter line at the left-hand gate. Nobody questioned their identities. The fees and bribes seemed to be all that mattered. Even so Tilja found herself sighing with relief when at last, late in the day, they stepped under the massive arch of the great gate of Talagh.

At once the whole of her left arm went numb. It wasn’t ordinary numbness such as she might have got from sleeping on it too long. She flexed her hand and her fingers moved, but it didn’t seem to be her, Tilja, moving them. She had two left arms, this strange, new, different arm, full of a kind of glowing chill which blanked out all other feelings, and inside that her own everyday arm, helpless, a sort of ghost. The feeling spread through her whole body, filling it, taking it over, more and more intense. In a moment it was going to come shrieking out—

No! she thought. This is me! Tilja Urlasdaughter of Woodbourne Farm. No!

Deliberately she shaped the picture in her mind, herself in the kitchen at home, just having climbed out of bed and now leaning against the stove as she repeated the fire charm and listened to the crackle of twigs and the swelling roar of flames into the flue. Blindly she clung to that image as she forced her feeble Tilja legs to shuffle the alien body forward and out on the other side of the arch, where she halted, sweating and gasping as the numbness flowed back the way it had come, out of her body into her left arm and then down from the shoulder to the place where Axtrig lay against her skin. It swirled into the old wooden spoon and was gone.

Magic, she thought. Yes, Talagh, the warded city. Wards of immense power, built into its walls by the greatest magicians in the Empire. And she, Tilja, had just carried Axtrig through them. The Ropemaker had said he didn’t know if she could do it, but she had. The wards had tried to stop her, to break through her own mysterious defenses, and they had failed. Though she was still shuddering with the remembered strain and terror, beneath them she began to feel a strange sort of dazed exhilaration at the understanding of what she had done.

“Get a move on, girl! No time for daydreaming!”

Meena’s snarl from above her head yanked her back into the everyday world, and she led Calico on.

Again they had to force their way past a mass of touts, keeping close together, knowing what easy prey a blind old man, a lame old woman and two children might seem to these street jackals. Tilja had anything she valued beneath her skirt, and the others had taken similar precautions. Besides, the jackals had misjudged Meena, perched above them, watchful as a house dog. Twice Tilja heard the swish of her cane, followed by a yelp and guffaws from the other jackals, as a hand had reached for one of the saddlebags.

On Lananeth’s instructions they pushed through into a courtyard beside the main gate and lined up at yet another booth, where Alnor hired one of the official guides, a silent, unsmiling young man. He seemed quite unimpressed when Alnor asked him to take them to the house of Lord Kzuva, one of the great nobles of the Empire. He took the fee and bribe and extra without a word of thanks, told them to keep up, and strode off, using his staff of office to lever a path though the mob. They would never have found their way without him.

In one sense Talagh was roughly what Tilja had expected from the account of it in the story of Asarta. They had entered through one of the twelve great gates and were now on a broad avenue that led, gently rising, up to the Emperor’s palace at the center. On either side of her, just as in the story, she could see crooked lanes and alleys running off into the maze of streets that lay between this and the next avenues. She was even prepared, she’d thought, for the crowds and the noise and the smells.

But she wasn’t. In her mind, perhaps, but not in her imagination. Not for the overwhelming pressure of it all, all those hurrying people, the mass of different lives and purposes, the bellowing vendors, the infants—jackals in the making—wheedling pitifully for a quarter drin but with eyes sharp for anything they could snatch, so street skilled that when some bigwig was borne through, shoulder-high on a chair, with baton-wielding attendants thwacking a pathway, these urchins ducked under the blows without even turning to look. And the rattle of drums and the high bleat of bagpipes calling the scurriers’ attention to a troupe of five near-naked contortionists who’d tied themselves into a knot so intricate that no one could tell which arm or head belonged to which body. As Tilja passed, this knot began to dance, rolling itself from foot to foot that stuck out at random from the mass. And just beyond that another raucous ensemble advertised a woman whose gross body was so covered with different-colored scorpions that not a scrap of her flesh could be seen, and every one of them deadly poisonous, so the hawker beside her yelled. And another such sight, and another, and another, every few paces, and the lamplit stalls glittering with trinkets, or great mounds of unknown fruit, or wicked knives and daggers, or sickly-scented salves. . . . Oh, the reeks and odors of Talagh, familiar and strange, honest leather mingling with cloying spices, rots with roses, heady smokes, bitter, cleansing acids, furs and furnaces, people and creatures and stuffs and objects, the very bricks and plaster of the buildings seeming to pour out their own bricky and plastery essences into the dusty, pungent air.

Along its whole length the avenue was thronged from side to side, and at first the going seemed no easier when their guide turned off along one of the broader side lanes. They threaded their way on, crossed two of the main avenues, and came as night was falling to an area of much grander houses than they had so far seen. Here the side streets were almost empty, many of them guarded at either end by men with the tasseled caps and staffs that showed they were the servants of some great lord. At one of these places their guide halted.