Peter Dickinson - The Ropemaker

“Ah, yes,” murmured Faheel, smiling and shaking his head, as if he’d forgotten all about it. “Of course. Show me.”

With trembling fingers he broke a few crumbs from the loaf and ate them, and sipped from the flask.

“Honest bread,” he whispered. “Sweet mountain water. I bless them both, but that is all I can do. Asarta’s powers are still there, my friends. Somewhere on your journey you will find another to wake them. Or rather, he will find you—it would be dangerous for you to seek him out. . . .”

His voice trailed away in weakness. He closed his eyes, as if he were about to die where he lay. Meena clicked her tongue in frustration. Alnor was frowning and shaking his head. Part of Tilja felt like laughing aloud. The cunning old man, waiting till now, pretending he’d forgotten, making it seem a little thing. But even as she suppressed her smile it struck her that this was the start of something very uncomfortable. From now on, day after day after day, she would be keeping the secret of the ring from her friends. So far, they had all trusted each other, absolutely. But from now on, day after day after day, she was going to be lying to them.

Faheel’s lips moved.

“Now, if you will help me onto the raft . . . ,” he whispered.

“You’re not going in the boat?” said Meena in astonishment.

“That is for you. It is safe from Tilja’s touch. I go the common way.”

They lifted him to his feet and he raised his head and spoke rather more loudly, apparently calling to the empty sea.

“Friends, we are ready.”

By now the sun had touched the horizon, and the water stretched its reflected light into a rippling golden highway across a great reach of fiery ocean. Out of that brightness, just beyond the raft and the boat, rose two dark figures, man-shaped as far as Tilja, screwing up her eyes, could see, but twice the size of any human. They called a deep-voiced greeting to Faheel and then, in a flurry of foam, started to wrestle with something just below the surface. Having so often needed to back the unwilling Calico between the shafts of a cart, Tilja recognized at once what they were up to, and soon she could see at times the gleaming dark backs of the creatures they were struggling to harness to the boat and the raft.

When they were ready they backed off and waited with only their heads above the surface. Tahl and Tilja helped Faheel onto the raft, where he lay down.

“My roses,” he whispered.

All four of them stood round the raft with the wavelets lapping up to their knees and strewed the roses around him. He smiled and closed his eyes. He looked so peaceful that Tilja found herself weeping, though still not with sadness.

He beckoned, and she bent to catch his words.

“. . . the Ropemaker’s name . . . I broke his inner wards to call to him . . . Ramdatta . . .”

Ramdatta

14

A Bunch of Grapes

Faheel’s raft was a small dark shape dwindling toward the sunset. By the time the last sliver of the sun slid below the horizon it was no more than a dot, which disappeared in the brief dusk, and then there was night, with innumerable stars. None of them spoke for a long while as their seashell boat skimmed away north from the island, towed by the unseen team beneath the surface.

“Well, so we’re going home,” said Alnor at last.

“And somewhere along the way we’re going to find a magician who’ll tell us what to do about the Valley,” said Meena. “Fat lot of sense it makes to me, I must say.”

“Nothing’s going to make much sense unless Til tells us what’s been going on while we’ve been asleep,” said Tahl. “It’s bad enough missing it all, but not even knowing . . .”

“I’m starving,” said Meena. “May as well eat while she’s telling us.”

All Tilja wanted to think about was the beauty and sadness of Faheel’s going, so she started reluctantly, but then found it somehow comforting to relive the day and a night and less than a day more that she had spent in his company. By the time she had finished, the moon had moved halfway across the sky, and she lay down to sleep still full of the peacefulness of the island.

When they rose and looked around them in the morning the island was out of sight astern and the dark shore of the Empire lay ahead. Alnor woke in a bad mood and sat hunched and sullen, but gave no sign of what was troubling him. Tahl on the other hand was full of chat, still thrilled and fascinated by everything Tilja had told them the night before, especially what might happen to the machinery of the Empire with the Watchers gone from their towers and the Emperor himself dead.

“You may not even need way-leaves,” he said as they breakfasted. “Perhaps the whole system’s broken down. If it hasn’t, we’re in trouble. You two can’t go anywhere without them, except back to Goloroth.”

“How’m I going anywhere without a horse, if it comes to that?” said Meena. “All this sleeping on rafts and boats. My hip wasn’t that bad yesterday, but it is now.”

“We can buy a horse, can’t we?” said Tahl. “We’ve got Faheel’s purse. You can get a good enough horse and still have change from a gold coin. There’s horse merchants at Goloroth— we sold Calico to one of them—though perhaps that’s not happening anymore, either.”

“I’ll tell you one thing it’ll mean,” said Meena, with relish, “it’ll mean robbers on the roads, and the rascals in charge of way stations grabbing what they can squeeze out of us with nothing to stop them.”

They argued it to and fro. Tilja listened without much interest and said nothing. All her real attention was elsewhere, inward. When, last night, she had told the others about her adventures, she had described in detail their arrival at the island, her meeting with Faheel, the journey to Talagh and back, and everything she had seen and done there, but had said only that after they had come back Faheel had gone up to his attic and given up his magic while she waited with them in the room below. She had said nothing about what she had then seen and felt. One day, perhaps, she might tell Meena, but not yet. She wasn’t ready. She still needed to understand and come to terms with her own discovery —deliberately shown to her, she now felt, by the spirits that had come—that her lack of magic was not in fact a lack, not an emptiness, but a power, a gift—a gift which, if she nurtured it, practiced it, learned all she could about it, might one day be as powerful in its own way as the gifts of a great magician like Faheel. A gift which was a kind of magic in its own right, a flow of power, but in the reverse direction. A gift she must, one day, use. Faheel had said there were two kinds of magician, those who worked with made magic, and those like himself who had discovered natural magic. Perhaps there was also a third kind. Herself. Though who was to say if she was the only one?

Thinking about it as their seashell boat whispered across the empty ocean, thinking about how she did whatever it was she did, she discovered in herself a need to find a place where it belonged. Not Woodbourne, to whose remembered image she had clung as she had fought her way into Talagh, and again when she had faced Silena. She couldn’t cling to Woodbourne any longer. She had changed. Now she needed a new place, somewhere that would always be hers, which she could explore and learn to know, as she knew her way round Woodbourne, every cranny in the house and outbuildings, every yard of the fields and meadows.