Peter Dickinson - The Ropemaker

“Well,” he said, “you bring me both news I had long been hoping for and news I had long feared. I will explain later, but let me for the moment be sure about this. Apart from when your grandmother used the spoon to point the way, the only time any of you spoke my name, once you were in the Empire, was when your grandmother named me in Lananeth’s warded room?”

“Yes.”

“And you had not then met or seen this Ropemaker?”

“No.”

“You saw him only between the time when you were in the robbers’ cave and when he left you at the end of the road through the hills?”

“Yes. And we’d have spotted him at once if he’d been there— he looked so odd.”

Faheel took a cloth and carefully wiped his lips and beard.

“Still, I think you may be mistaken,” he said, rising. “We have work to do. You say it is not your mere presence that is destructive of magic? Your physical touch is needed?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Good. Then come with me. Bring the hair tie, and keep good hold of it.”

He led the way into the next room and with some difficulty, making Tilja even more aware of his great age, climbed a fixed ladder into the attic. This had one large window facing out over the sea, and was full of light. The light showed up the dust, covering everything in a fine, even layer, undisturbed for months, perhaps for years. Faheel stood and looked round while Tilja climbed up beside him. He shook his head, ruefully.

“Well, it is time,” he sighed. “You have been disappointed in me, I think, Tilja. I was not what you expected. As you see, I have had to lay my powers aside. The powers themselves are no less. They do not age. It is I myself, in the end, who am mortal. I could not afford to wear this body out any further, if I was to accomplish what I must before I go. I did not even dare use my powers to find out how long I must wait. Instead I withdrew to this island and nursed my strength, using little more than ordinary country magics to support my needs.

“But now, unmistakably, this is the moment. As I say, you bring me bad news as well as good. The whole of the next age is poised in the balance. So if you are not the one I have hoped for, then all is lost. Now, stand where you are, and do not move.”

He went to a shelf, opened a small black box and took out a ring. As he carried it between fingertip and thumbtip to the center of the room Tilja saw it clearly—a simple gold circle engraved to look like fine cord. When he stopped, the dust around his sandaled feet slid gently away and she saw that the floor was polished wood, dark green, inlaid with a pattern of red and black. Faheel stood exactly at the center of the pattern, with two twined serpents, one red, one black, ringing his feet.

He turned toward the window and bowed his head. Tilja could feel his concentration. With a slow, ritual movement he slid the ring onto the middle finger of his right hand, and Tilja sensed the pulse of magic around her, instant and immense, drawn from great distances into the silent room. It didn’t touch her, didn’t swirl round her in a storming chaos, but spiraled smoothly into the center where Faheel stood waiting to receive it. For a moment everything vanished in a blinding whiteness, then returned, changed.

The window was the same, with the same sea beyond it, but the room itself seemed larger, and the dust was gone, and every surface shone or glittered with jewels or glowed with intense color. It wasn’t, Tilja realized, that everything had been magically swept and dusted in that dazzling instant—no, the space between these four walls was now ageless, outside time. No dust would settle in this room, ever.

And in the middle of it stood a man wearing a dark blue robe of some rich fabric with a lacy golden collar sewn with seed pearls. His hair must once have been jet black but was now streaked with gray. He had his back to her, but his arms were raised as if in blessing, so that she could see a dozen great rings on his left hand, but on his right, on the middle finger, only a plain circle etched to look like fine cord. With a slow movement, like a dancer’s, he drew it off, then turned toward her.

She gasped.

“Fa—”

He stopped her with a gesture. She stared. She had seen but not felt the room shudder.

The eyes were Faheel’s, and the strong black beard was what Faheel’s might well have been when he was younger. Faheel’s wrinkled old face, too, could have become what it was from a face with this shape and these features. Except that these all belonged to a different order of being, not human, ageless, living stone. Like Silena on the walls of Talagh.

He fetched the box from the shelf, put the ring in it and dropped it into a pocket.

“Yes,” he said. “I am the one you would have named. You should not have been able even to begin to do so in this place. Now, first, I will see to your friends, so that you do not distract yourself with worrying for them.”

He closed his eyes briefly. His lips moved.

“Good,” he said. “They sleep in the room below. Nothing can harm them under this roof. Now, look at your hair tie. You see the gold hair? Tease it out.”

Tilja peered at the little object and spotted a golden glimmer among the interwoven colored threads. What Faheel asked looked impossible without unraveling the whole tie, but she took one of her hairpins and picked at a strand. A loop of gold hair freed itself, and when she pulled with her fingers the whole strand slid smoothly loose.

“Remarkable,” said Faheel. “The magic that bound that in place was far more than a village charm. Now give me the tie and bring the hair to the table. . . . Wait.”

The table seemed to be made from a single block of polished black marble, an ornate stem supporting a round top, smooth as a mirror, so that Tilja could see the brightly decorated ceiling reflected in its dark depths. As Faheel leaned over the table the reflections faded and the darkness seemed to become bottomless, until up from those depths there floated a curious irregular shape. At first Tilja couldn’t make out what it was, but when it reached the surface it became a delicate inlay of colored marbles, making a map with rivers and roads and mountains, and minuscule pictures of cities, and in a blink she realized it was a map of the Empire, from Goloroth in the far south to the tremendous mountains in the north. Yes, and there, ringed in between the forest and the snow peaks, was the Valley. Screwing her eyes up, she even persuaded herself that she could see a tiny dot close in against the forest edge. She pointed at it, careful not to touch the magical surface.

“That’s where I live,” she whispered. “That’s home!”

The map changed. The pictured mountains and trees grew larger and moved apart. The trees reached the edge of the map and the mountains disappeared on the other side, and the dot itself was more than a dot, growing and still growing, until she could see Woodbourne with its fields around it, and Ma and Da side by side hoeing beans in the Home Field and Anja trying to coax an escaped cockerel back into the safety of the run. She stared until her eyes were too misty to see and she had to wipe them with the end of her head scarf. When she looked again the table once more showed the map of the Empire.

“Now,” said Faheel, “without touching the table lay the hair somewhere on the map.”

Tilja chose an empty-looking area northeast of Goloroth. The hair, when she dropped it, curled itself together into a neat spiral, as if it had been trying to regain the shape it had held in the hair tie, but then lay still.

“A curious color,” said Faheel. “I have seen nothing like it. Have you, Tilja?”

She peered. A single hair doesn’t usually declare its full color. You need at least a ringlet for that. But this one fine strand seemed to shine not only with the reflected brightness of the room, but with an inner fire of its own, shining through the gold. Yes, indeed strange, but . . .