Peter Dickinson - The Ropemaker

While she was choosing her stores the room darkened, as if in a thunderstorm, though the sun had been only halfway down a cloudless sky when she had left the garden. Through the window she could see nothing but swirling colored mist, brownish but flecked with purple shapes that seemed to be made of a solider kind of mist and flickered as they swept by. She saw the walls of the house judder, though the floor on which she stood stayed steady. A moment later a booming voice called from outside and Faheel’s voice, loud and firm, answered from above with a name and a greeting. Other voices followed, not human or animal, the voices of mountains, perhaps, of forests and of stars. Once it sounded as if the whole sea were singing. The mist came and went outside the window. Sometimes it was dark night, with shimmerings and bolts of brilliance, sometimes day so bright and shadowless that there might have been several suns in the sky. All these beings, forces, spirits, or whatever else they might be, Faheel welcomed into his attic room by name. When they were gathered the window cleared and there was silence.

Tilja stood and waited. She could sense around her a continuous flow of movement through it, into and out of the room above her, as though Faheel’s house had become a great fire in a dark forest, a fire from which flames and sparks and lit smoke swirled endlessly upward, but not in random eddies—in shapes, shapes that had meaning, shapes that somehow held the balance of the world in place. Faheel was at the heart of the uprush, giving back to his friends the powers they had loaned him, as they blazed round him. And so was she too, Tilja. For the powers weren’t only here to say farewell to Faheel. They had come to welcome her. It was as if her gift had hidden her from them, and now they could rejoice in her finding. Though she didn’t yet know what use they had for her, she felt that there was such a use, and that one day she would learn it. For the first time since she had become aware of her strange gift she felt that she wasn’t having to use it to fight against the forces around her, but to accept them, just as they were accepting her, and accept that they and she were part of something larger, all of which belonged together and needed all its parts, balancing each other, to make it what it was.

Time had no meaning, but it must have continued to move because there was a change, and she knew that the rite was ending. The visitors gathered themselves into the attic room, and then one by one withdrew, calling their farewells as they left. When the last had gone the windows cleared and the garden lay outside, the sunlight already golden with evening, and the shadows long across the grass.

“You there, girl?”

“Meena!”

Tilja swung round. Meena had struggled up onto her elbow and was staring round the room, for once too astonished to pretend to be angry, or to push Tilja away when she rushed to hug her.

“Expecting someone else, were you?” she said. “Where’s this, then?”

“Faheel’s house. On his island.”

“Be careful how you say his name,” Alnor said sharply.

“I don’t think it matters anymore,” said Tilja. “He said it wasn’t safe for you to wake up because there was going to be too much magic here, but it’s all right now. It’s almost all gone.”

“Gone! I hope you told him what we came for before he let that happen.”

“Yes, but I don’t know . . . there’s been other things going on. Now he wants me and Tahl to go up and help him down the ladder. Then we’re going home. Are you awake, Tahl?”

“Sort of,” said Tahl’s voice, sounding much more dazed than Meena’s. “We were on the raft, and then . . . I’ve been talking to the ice dragon. It told me all sorts of stuff. Funny. It didn’t feel like a dream. It doesn’t come from this world, you know. There’s a world made of ice somewhere else in the sky . . .”

“Its name is Manzal,” said Alnor. “I too spoke with the ice dragon. With my blind eyes I saw his face, that I had never hoped to see.”

“And there’s a Queen of the Unicorns,” said Meena. “I never knew that! Maybe I’ll tell you someday. For now, I just want to think about it. . . . Well, girl, don’t just stand there! Tell us what’s going on.”

“I don’t think there’s time,” said Tilja. “We’ve got to get away from the island by nightfall, Faheel said, and it’s almost sunset now. Ready, Tahl?”

She led the way up the ladder and pushed the trapdoor open. When she poked her head through she saw that the attic was empty and bare. Faheel lay facedown at its center. She scrambled through and with Tahl’s help turned him gently over. His body seemed to weigh so little that she could almost have lifted it on her own. His lips moved. She bent her head to listen.

“Take me down,” he whispered. “Come back and fetch the things on the shelf.”

Tahl ran Tilja’s long head scarf under Faheel’s arms so that she could take some of his weight from above while he took most of it on his shoulders, and they eased Faheel down the ladder and made him comfortable on a pile of cushions. Tilja went back upstairs to find what he’d left on the shelf—the ring box and the bunch of grapes she’d brought in from the garden. The ring box had a cord attached, which she slid over her head, and then tucked the box down inside her blouse. She took the grapes and climbed down the ladder. This time, when she stepped off the last rung, the whole thing vanished, and the trapdoor too, leaving nothing but a plain, bare ceiling.

“It is over,” said Faheel, still speaking with effort. “Now we must go. First . . . First I must ask you to help me down to the shore. Once there, I will explain to you what you will need to do to return to your Valley.”

With Tilja and Tahl on each side of him carrying the two baskets of stores, and his arms around their shoulders, he led them slowly toward the western cliffs and down a series of steps to a sandy beach. Meena hobbled along behind, leaning on Alnor’s arm. In his other hand he carried the roses. The raft on which the four travelers had come from Goloroth floated in the shallows, and beside it a strange boat that seemed to be made out of seashell, with a broad stern and a high, curving prow. Faheel asked them to help him sit, and they lowered him onto the sand.

“Now,” he said, “listen carefully. I have given back all my powers . . . given them back to those who first loaned them to me, and should any enemy come I could not defend us. . . . But I still have friends, some of whom will tow me out westward into the current of the Great River, so that I may make my last journey by the common way, like my parents before me. . . . Others will take you back to the southern shore of the Empire. Once there . . . Tilja, you have the grapes from the shelf?”

“They’re in the basket.”

He nodded and straightened his back. Tilja sensed him gathering his last energies for what he now had to say.

“Set them apart and do not touch them until you are safely ashore tomorrow. Then Meena and Alnor must eat them, one at a time, turn and turn about. Eat nothing else until they are gone. But keep the stem carefully and take it with you. When you are safely home you must build a fire and burn it, to undo the magic the grapes did for you. This is most important. Fail to do it and your whole journey fails. Now we must go. Will you help me stand?”

“Is that all?” Meena burst in. “I’m sorry, sir, seeing how tired you are, but I can’t help asking. I mean, isn’t there anything else we’ve got to do? Here we’ve been sowing our barley field all these years, and trudging out winter after winter and singing to the cedars, and Alnor’s lot have been doing the same sort of thing up at Northbeck . . . and I’ve brought a loaf I baked from my field, and Alnor’s got a flask of water from his stream. . . .”