Peter Dickinson - The Ropemaker

She woke, and automatically looked to see how far the sun had sunk west, so that she might guess how long she’d slept. It hadn’t, of course, moved. The tearing wind was no less, so she constructed a sort of tunnel from which she could spy out eastward while still lying in shelter. Almost at once a soaring vulture swung past, woke into time, saw the roc, jerked itself into a spasm of escape, and stilled again, motionless wings wrenching at the motionless air.

Most of what slid by below was too far off for Tilja to see any sign of its changelessness, but once they skirted a mountain range over which a thunderstorm was raging. Time must have stopped in the instant of a lightning stroke, which stood there, a blazing vein of light, branching into twenty side veins between the dark sagging cloud layer and the darker crags below. She had to screw up her eyes against its brightness and even so couldn’t look at it for long.

After a little she eased herself out of her nest and crawled forward to see how Faheel was doing. He was awake, and looked rested. She fetched him bread and fruit and cheese and a little flask of wine, and then crawled back, found what she wanted for herself and took it in under the rugs and nibbled peacefully. The litter was very comfortable, so when she’d had enough she let the weariness of all those days of travel overcome her, and slept again, and was only woken by the mild bump of landing, and the stilling of the sounds of flight. She looked out and saw that they were in the cleared space before the gates of Talagh.

12

The Palace

Faheel had slept too. He was standing straighter and looked much stronger. He took what looked like a hand-ful of rubies from his pouch and offered them to the roc, which neatly nibbled them one by one out of his palm with the point of its huge beak, swallowed them in a single gulp, closed its eyes with an expression of total bliss, and belched. It then settled down, ruffled its feathers and fell asleep.

“Won’t one of the Watchers see it?” asked Tilja. “It’s magical, isn’t it?”

“To perceive something takes time, however short. They are all fixed in the instant when time stopped for them, a little while after you saw the parade in my table. Now, bring the box that holds the ring and keep it in your hand. Good. Over here.”

The roc had landed in a space to one side of the entrance gate, with nobody near enough to be affected by the flow of time that enclosed Tilja wherever she went but was frozen still for the rest of the universe. Now as they picked their way between the citizens who had been coming and going until the moment that the ring did its work, some of them woke into movement and took a pace or two as Tilja went by, then returned to their stillness. When they reached the throng by the gate Faheel halted.

“We cannot go through the city like this,” he said. “The streets are too crowded. People will wake round you and push us apart. Will you open the box? The egg of the phoenix is the catch. Good. Hold it in front of me and keep it steady. When I have touched the ring, lay your hand on my wrist.”

The inside of the box seemed to have no bottom. It was a pure blackness, like the table in Faheel’s room. The ring simply floated in that blackness, resting on nothing. Taking a firm grip on Tilja’s shoulder, he put out his other hand and lightly touched the ring for a moment with the tip of his middle finger. She felt a shudder run through him. His hand rose a fraction and he stiffened into stillness. With a gulp of fear she realized that she was now alone, the only moving thing in a timeless world, but the moment she touched his wrist he relaxed and sighed.

“Once it would all have been so easy,” he murmured. “Now I cannot spare the strength to exempt myself from the power of the ring. Well, from here on only you and what touches you is not locked into the moment. Let me just move my hold so that you have both hands free. If something causes me to let go of you, you must take me by the hand again. Close the box and keep hold of it. When I tell you, take the ring out and grasp it in your bare hand, and its effect will cease. Now we must find this Ropemaker.”

So, slowly, with Faheel leaning heavily on Tilja’s shoulder, with his hand firmly against the bare skin of her neck, they made their way past the motionless lines waiting for entry to the city, and under the archway. Again she felt the force of the wards that guarded the city, powerful still in the instant into which time was locked, but it was very different from when she had first come through. There was no numbness, but an intense, strange feeling, as if the hand that enclosed the ring box had been a wine glass round whose rim somebody was rubbing a moistened fingertip, setting up a note that in a moment would shatter the glass.

No , she told it, and raised her fist in defiance. The finger withdrew and the note stilled.

“Well done,” murmured Faheel as she led him into the crowded street beyond the archway.

Remembering what that had been like when she had first come to Talagh, Tilja was worried about how she was going to pick a path through the scrum without waking anybody into life. Fortunately some great lord had been just about to leave the city when time had stopped, and his servants had already cleared a way for him to the gate. She came to the lord himself a little way up the street, riding a beautiful spirited horse which must have been frightened by the tumult and was shying aside, with its rider fighting to control it, when the instant had come, fastening them into the same unchanging, impossible pose. As she edged past, Tilja was tempted to lay her hand on the glossy flank and wake the horse into life, just to see what happened. With a shock she realized that she was experiencing something she had never imagined, a sense of absolute power. All these people, even a great lord of the Empire, even the Emperor himself, were under her control. They could move, or not, as she chose. The thought was oddly frightening. If you had that power you wanted to use it. This must be what magicians were like, all the time. This was why some of them had tried so hard to get hold of Axtrig.

They passed the ball of contortionists, poised on one foot, the woman smothered in motionless scorpions, jugglers with arcs of flaming torches or daggers hanging in stillness above them, barkers and stallholders with their mouths gaping in the shout they had started and never finished, sneak thieves with purses half cut, the smoke from roasting grills fixed in the windless air, all the bustle and frenzy of Talagh halted, as if forever.

It was slow going, but Faheel could not have gone much faster if the avenue had been empty. Three times he needed to rest, and each time he rose his face seemed grimmer and grayer, like Meena’s when the weather changed and her hip was hurting her worse than usual.

“Are you all right?” said Tilja, anxiously.

“I will manage because I must,” he said. “It is the last chance. Foolishly I thought too much of the magical effort I must make, and forgot the ordinary physical cost of walking from one place to another.”

“Couldn’t we have got the roc to take us the whole way?”

“Perhaps, but it is a powerful center of magic in itself. It will wake with everything else when you take the ring out of the box and hold it in your hand, and there will then be more than enough magical forces around us for me to contend with.”

At last the slope became steeper as the avenue rose to the palace gate. On either side the fantastic building stretched away, walls of white and pink marble carved with the wars and triumphs of forgotten Emperors; balconies and arcades dangling with huge-flowered vines; pinnacles and towers, banners and emblems; all the work of generations of master craftsmen toiling to please rulers who expected a fancy dreamed up over supper to have become fact by breakfast time.