Peter Dickinson - The Ropemaker

Cautiously she raised her other hand an inch above the cleft, ready to grab again, but Axtrig lay content. Even so, careful to keep the spoon in contact with the raft all the time, she managed to shift her along the cleft and wedge the shaft tight under one of the cords that bound the logs together, then knelt up and looked around.

The sun was down and night looming ahead. Ahead. No longer directly into the waves, but slanting across their northward march, slanting in a rush of foam down the back of each one, across the hollow, and up the slope of the next one to its crest, and then slowly down again.

In the last light she made the others as comfortable as she could, drawing their clothes around them and wedging the garments in place, trying to see that no flesh came into contact with the magic-infected timber. When she lay down herself she did the same for herself, but for the opposite reason—to keep the magic active in the timber, and so carry them all wherever it was that Axtrig was determined to go.

Light woke her, stiff and cold. The sky in the east was pale with dawn. Dark against it rose an island, ringed with cliffs.

The other three lay as she had left them, but when she tried to wake them they didn’t stir. She couldn’t find their pulses, or hear their breathing above the sound of the waves. And yet their bodies were still as warm as hers beneath their clothes, so she tried to hope they weren’t dead. She was too worried to eat, but simply sat, watching the island draw nearer. There was nothing to see but the cliffs and a rocky shore, with waves breaking gently against it. The top was hidden.

Slowly her fear for Meena and the others left her, and she began to feel strangely calm, confident that whatever had brought them so far would see them safe to the end. A kindness was in the air. She seemed to smell it in each breath she drew, and to sense that even in their tranced sleep the other three were blessed by the same faint sweetness. There was peace in their faces. So as the dangerous-seeming shore drew nearer, with the long ocean swell being tumbled and shredded by jagged rocks, she felt no tension, but rose and watched, ready.

The raft headed for a sloping shingle beach lying in a fold of the cliffs. It was moving—Tilja could now see, with the motionless island for comparison—as fast as a cantering horse. At the last moment a wave added to that speed, lifting the whole raft up, laying it with a heavy crunch far up the beach, and withdrawing down the shingle in a pother of foam.

Tilja knelt and worked Axtrig out from beneath the lashing and tied her to her forearm. Faint numbness flowed into her flesh, but the spoon now felt peaceful, with the calm of a cat sleeping by its own hearth. When she laid her hand on the timber of the raft she could tell that the magic was gone from there. Hopeful, she waited for the others to wake, but they slept on and neither her voice nor touch would wake them. Still with that strange sense that all was well she left them and looked for a way up the cliffs.

She had been half expecting to find a stair, so easily had the last few hours gone for her, but there seemed to be only one possible place in the sheer rock, where a thin dribble of water trickled down a kind of slot, with a few juts and crannies on either side for handholds and toeholds.

She started up it, and soon found herself wondering whether there wasn’t a stair because it was not in the nature of the cliff to carve itself so, but it was doing what it could to help, all the same. There was always something to climb, provided she trusted it. When she looked down she could see the plain rectangle of the raft below her, with her three companions lying asleep on it. Rest after weary days—on this island it could be nothing else. She smiled and climbed on.

It was midmorning before she dragged herself out onto smooth turf. Three rabbits glanced up, then went back to nibbling, unperturbed. Ahead of her stood a low stone wall, with what looked like a garden beyond it. She walked to her left and found a gate, opened it and went through, closing it carefully behind her because she could see that wall and gate were there to keep the rabbits out.

This vaguely surprised her. The man they had been looking for surely had no need of such things. He could point out a line with his finger, and no creature—except perhaps an even more powerful magician, and the rabbits didn’t look that—could come beyond it. But now she thought of it she sensed that, apart from Axtrig, whom she carried sleeping against her arm, the only magic on the island was its own magical calm. And . . . and . . . a curious faint buzzing close beside her right thigh. Not an audible buzz, a buzz of feeling. But otherwise just like some tiresome insect.

Automatically her hand had moved, brushing her skirt to get rid of it. The buzzing shifted but continued. She patted around. It was coming from inside her pocket. She felt and found her hair tie, and the buzzing stopped.

Her first thought was that the two things had nothing to do with each other—her movement had driven the buzzing thing away and her touch had emptied the hair tie of its magic, but it hadn’t. Not quite. A trickle of numbness seeped out of the hair tie into her palm. She stood and stared at the trivial little object, and for the first time realized how strange it was that her hair had stayed in place, without one strand drifting free, ever since Tahl had last put it up for her while they were waiting for darkness before they could find their way into Goloroth. It had stayed in place in the heart of the warded city, and through the turmoil of the breaking of those wards, and again through the long journey out across the magicless ocean, until she had woken that morning and found her hair tumbling down to her shoulders and the hair tie wedged between two of the timbers of the raft. Tahl had been deep in his tranced sleep and there’d been no point in her trying to tie it herself, so she’d slipped it into her pocket.

She gazed at it, puzzled. Morning after morning she had held it, ready for Tahl to finish braiding and coiling her hair, so that he could then tie it into place, but had felt nothing in it but the feel of any other hair tie. Now, though, as it lay cupped in her hand, the unmistakable numbness in her palm told her that it was very, very different, a tiny magic object, even smaller, even more everyday-seeming, than a wooden spoon. But still full of its magic, on this island where no magic came.

Close ahead of her a voice spoke, softly creaking, and seeming to share something of her own bewilderment.

“So who are you . . . ? And what brought you here?”

She looked up, unalarmed, still sure that nothing bad could happen to her in this place. A grassy path stretched in front of her, and a short way down it an old man had emerged from between two rows of vines. He wasn’t dressed in any of the fashions of the Empire, but wore a broad-brimmed straw hat, a plain unbleached-linen garment that fell from his shoulders to below his knees, sandals, and a brown apron with pockets for garden tools. He might once have been tall but was now stooped. His face was lined with innumerable wrinkles, but his white beard was combed and clean and his pale, yellowish eyes were much clearer than they should have been at his age and barely blinked at all.

“I’m looking for a man,” she said.

“You must answer my questions first,” he reproved her.

“I’m sorry. My name’s Tilja Urlasdaughter and I came here on a raft from Goloroth.”

“Alone?”

“No, but my friends—the magic was too strong for them, and—”

“What magic is this? There is no magic here but mine.”

“It happened yesterday evening. It was something to do with Axtrig.”

“Axtrig?”

“She’s just a wooden spoon, but—”