Peter Dickinson - The Ropemaker

She backed off another pace and drew herself up. Tilja could sense her summoning her powers. Her light grew stronger again and the ripples began to die away.

“A magician cannot afford to be overcome,” she said. “Unless you give me the thing you have against your arm, I must attempt to destroy you, or else be myself destroyed.”

“No,” said Tilja.

“Very well,” said Silena.

She closed her eyes. Her lips began to move. For a short while nothing seemed to happen, except that the dog’s tail stopped wagging. Then Tilja began to hear—no, to feel, rather than hear—a deep, pulsing hum gathering all around her. Out of the corner of her eye she saw one of the distant lanterns starting to quiver, and realized that not only the lights but everything she could see, the black outline of the walls of the enclosure, the very stars in the sky, was shuddering to and fro. The only still things in the whole universe were Silena, and Tilja herself facing her, with the dog in her arms. And now she could feel something try to grasp her, an invisible fist that couldn’t quite touch her but had closed all round her, and was attempting to wrench her into that shuddering movement and shake her apart. An enormous energy was battering itself to and fro, stronger and stronger, against her stillness. Soon, soon, something had to give. She willed that stillness, gave it a place and name. Woodbourne—herself leaning on the farmyard gate in the stillness of a summer dawn, looking north across the Valley to the mountains. In that loved landscape she centered herself, gathered it round her. She could see Silena opposite her, pale with ferocious concentration, drawing out of herself all the powers that were in her and focusing them into Tilja’s destruction. The light blazed around her, bright as noon, but now shed no ray into the darkness beyond.

Close by in that darkness a donkey brayed. Tilja’s heart bounced with the shock of the sudden harsh clamor, but she knew at once what it was, because there used to be a mischievous old donkey at Woodbourne that liked to bray suddenly in people’s ears. But Silena wasn’t ready for it. She thought she had put the whole courtyard to sleep. The unexpected bellow told her she was wrong. All her powers were focused on Tilja. She had nothing to spare. She faltered.

The pulse behind the humming lost its implacable beat and dwindled away. The lamps and skyline and stars steadied, and the light around Silena herself died out.

Before it faded completely Tilja saw the proud figure of the magician stoop. Lines creased the emotionless dead face and made it human, the face of an ordinary woman, extremely old, but alive.

Around them sleepers stirred and muttered. There were cries of alarm here and there, as if some had woken from nightmares.

Silena’s voice came out of the dark.

“Well, it is I who am destroyed,” she said quietly. “The Emperor must find another Watcher. Give me back my dog and I will go. You need not be afraid. It is too late for me to start again.”

Tilja didn’t need to ask herself if she could trust her. She had both seen and felt what had happened. She set the dog down. Silena called it and it ran to her. Tilja could hear it fawning happily, as any dog might do on a mistress just come home.

“Do you know if anyone else is looking for us?” she said.

“I cannot say,” said Silena wearily. “But the Trunk Road lies in the sector that it was my task to watch. I could tell whenever you used the thing that you carry. It shone in my mind like a meteor each time. I could not come before—we watch each other constantly—but this evening I took my chance. None of the others would have had cause to be watching so steadily this way. But tomorrow they will find my tower empty, and their interest will be aroused. That is all I can tell you.”

“What about the magician outside the walls—the one whose monster you and Dorn drove away? I think he really wanted . . . the thing I’m carrying.”

“You know all this, child?”

“I was there, hiding in one of the towers. You almost found me.”

“Ah . . . no, we know nothing of this other man. We searched all the Empire, but he hides himself too well. He has great power. You should be wary of him still, I think.”

“Thank you,” said Tilja. She felt no fear or hatred of Silena now, this tired old woman who still had her dignity when everything else was gone.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“It was not all your doing, child,” said Silena, and moved away into the darkness.

Immediately the whole enclosure was in an uproar. Calico woke with a squeal, answered by a chorus of squeals from around the courtyard. Knowing her nature, Tilja had tethered her securely, but at least two of the other horses broke loose and went charging around in the darkness.

Tahl had woken with a shout, Meena was muttering incoherently, and Alnor rose groaning to his feet and started to stumble away through the dark. Tilja ran and grabbed his arm, but he shook her off, and then blundered into a stranger who came rushing in panic toward him and knocked him aside. Tilja managed to catch him and stop him falling, and then he let her lead him back to the others. By the time she had him settled down Meena and Tahl seemed to be coming to their senses. All three had had much the same nightmare about being hurtled to and fro inside a dark swirling cloud full of explosions of light and faces with monstrous gaping mouths and screaming shapes that swirled by in the storm. (“Only it was and it wasn’t a dream,” Tahl explained. “It was something else, too.”)

From the snatches of talk she could hear around them Tilja could tell that it was the same with everyone else in the enclosure, but they were still all too taken up with their own nightmares to eavesdrop on their neighbors.

“I know what happened,” she said in a low voice. “Silena was here. And her beast. They’d come to look for Axtrig. She’s gone now.”

She told them what she’d seen and done. By the time she’d finished all her fear and excitement were gone. There was nothing left but utter exhaustion.

“A donkey?” said Tahl. “It was still light when they closed the gates, and there wasn’t a donkey anywhere around then.”

“It was a donkey,” said Tilja, yawning and scrabbling for her rug. “Nothing else makes a noise like that. We used to have one at Woodbourne.”

She found the rug, wrapped it around her, lay down and was asleep before he’d finished asking his next question.

Usually the first light woke her, but she slept late that morning, and by the time she sat up and looked around most of the other travelers were already getting ready to leave. She couldn’t see a donkey anywhere in the enclosure, but it might already have gone.

She was still tired as they traveled on, tired all through, but it was an odd sort of tiredness. What had happened in the enclosure had been extremely frightening and dangerous, and she wasn’t at all sure that Silena mightn’t have broken through her defenses if the donkey hadn’t brayed at exactly the right time. Would she be able to do it again if the need arose? Do what? She didn’t even know that. She had broken Silena’s power, yes. She had chosen to do it rather than just have it happen to her, but she couldn’t describe, even to herself, how. Suppose she were to wake at the next way station and see, say, Dorn, or the unknown magician, stalking toward her through the sleeping wayfarers, she knew she would be just as terrified, just as deep in the nightmare, as she’d been when Silena came.

But that didn’t alter the fact that she’d done it, alone and without help, and done it by discovering something totally new about herself. That discovery filled her with a sort of peaceful exhilaration. She didn’t want to sing, or dance, or talk to the others about it, only to walk in silence, relishing the feel of it. It was like the new-risen sun on night-chilled limbs, like the smell of rain on parched earth, like the morning, years ago, when she’d gone out before breakfast to look at the little patch of garden that she’d hoed and raked and planted all on her own, and seen that the first bean seedlings had come through in the night, shouldering the crumbs of earth aside and spreading their first two leaves to catch the sun. Hers.