Peter Dickinson - The Ropemaker

She closed her eyes and an image filled her mind, so strongly seen that it was hard to believe that it hadn’t been there already, waiting for her to find it. A lake, calm and clear, and deep beyond sounding. Nothing like the cedar-ringed lake in the forest, but set high among mountains, whose white unreachable peaks were reflected from its still surface. Cataracts poured down their slopes in roaring foam and plunged into the lake and became part of its stillness. Perhaps the image meant that she was like that lake. Her gift was to take the raging, demonic forces of made magic and channel them down into a central calm where they would be unbound from their making and loosed into their simple elements, and then perhaps breathed back into the world, rather as the lake on warm days breathed its water back to join the clouds.

But the lake was more than that, more than a way of thinking about what she did. It was real, as much part of her as her heartbeat or her breathing. She would have it until she died. With closed eyes she gazed at it, seeing it in detail. It wasn’t like a dream image, shifting, unreliable. Shoreline and cataract and peak remained firm. Only the clouds and their reflections moved.

But everything else was changed, all Tilja’s hopes and fears and expectations, all her life to come. Yes, she was going home with the others, if she could. She was going back to Woodbourne. But she wasn’t staying there. There was no magic in the Valley. Her gift was no use there.

The shore of the Empire neared. From time to time now the sea-human controlling the unseen creatures that hauled the boat would rise from the surface as far as his waist and stare around and plunge below. When a cluster of fishing boats appeared almost directly ahead of them he changed course to avoid it. Now they could see fields and a small harbor as he skirted the shore, and then a range of barren-looking hills, and then a stretch of marshland. Where the hills met the marsh he turned shoreward, unharnessing his team before they reached the shallows and himself gripping the stern post and driving the boat up onto a muddy beach with powerful thrusts of his tail. Seeing him full length, Tilja discovered that he was at least as much fish as man, with dark green scales almost up to his shoulders and a ridged fin running the length of his spine. They rescued their packs, climbed ashore and turned and thanked him. He nodded briefly in acknowledgment, then scooped up a handful of mud from the seabed and tossed it into the boat. Instantly the hull split apart, shrinking as it did so. In the space of a couple of heartbeats all that was left of it was several fragments of gleaming seashell lying on the dark mud. He waved farewell, turned and slid out of sight.

They plodded up the beach with Tahl guiding Alnor, and Meena leaning heavily on Tilja’s shoulder and wincing at every step. As soon as they were beyond the tide line she halted.

“That’s enough for me,” she said. “I’m giving my leg a rest.”

“We cannot stay here,” said Alnor, without any scrap of sympathy for the pain in her voice.

“Then you’ll just have to leave me here,” she snapped.

Even Alnor had to see that this wasn’t possible.

“Well, we can rest while we eat the grapes, Meena and I,” he said.

“I don’t know I’m that hungry,” said Meena, arguing for arguing’s sake, because of her hip.

“We must do as he said, exactly,” snapped Alnor. Something in his tone gave Tilja a clue to the reason for his foul mood. He resented not being in control of things, in the way that he could control a raft on the river; he resented having set out on this difficult journey, by his own independent decision, despite everyone else’s advice, and then . . . Yes, against all the odds they had actually found Faheel, but once they had left Talagh hardly any of that had been Alnor’s doing. He had been swept along, helpless in the rush of the current, and finally lain asleep on Faheel’s island while far away in Talagh the whole Empire was shaken apart. Now he was determined to take control again.

So they found a clean patch of ground and settled down. Alnor and Meena passed the bunch of grapes to and fro between them, and Tahl and Tilja each ate a nectarine to keep them company.

“Now, that’s what I call a grape!” said Meena as she swallowed her first one.

“A grape is a grape,” said Alnor.

“That all you can say?” said Meena. “You tell me when you’ve eaten a better grape! Go on. Tell me.”

They continued to squabble about the grapes as they ate them. Tilja, still thinking about what had happened to her on the island, paid no attention; they were just two old people, tired and anxious and disgruntled, arguing like children in the way old people often do. The first thing she noticed was that Tahl had stopped eating. She glanced up and saw that he was sitting stock-still with his mouth open, ready to take another bite at his nectarine.

She looked to see what he was staring at, and stared too.

Alnor and Meena were still sitting side by side, engrossed in their squabble as they passed the half-eaten bunch back and forth. But they themselves had changed. Alnor’s snow-white hair was flecked with dark streaks. His lined old face had fleshed out, and his slight body seemed sturdier. While Meena . . . when they’d settled her down she’d made herself as comfortable as she could, half lying against a tussock of reedlike grasses, but now she’d straightened up and drawn her knees sideways under her. . . .

There was no way, even on one of her best days, that Meena could sit like that!

And lean and reach across to take the grapes!

And her face and hair!

She leaned further to snatch the grapes as Alnor withdrew them.

“Now, then, turn and turn . . . What’s up?”

“I can see,” said Alnor in a wholly different voice, soft and full of wonder. “Shapes in a mist, only, but . . . it was like this when my blindness began.”

“How’s your hip, Meena?” said Tahl.

“Not as bad as it might be. Matter of fact . . .”

She twisted herself up, stood and felt at the joint. Gingerly she lifted her foot clear of the ground, balanced and moved the leg around. She put it down and blew her breath out.

“Now, there’s something I never thought I’d do again,” she said. “What about it, you old fool? Now try and tell me these aren’t good grapes!”

Alnor actually smiled.

“I may be a fool,” he said, “but I think I am not as old as I was.”

“Nor me,” said Meena. “My, I’m sorry I didn’t get to know your Faheel a bit better. He’s a really thoughtful old gentleman— unlike some I could name. Now I’ll be walking back to the Valley, after all.”

“And I, perhaps, shall be seeing my way,” said Alnor.

“Hey! Me first,” said Meena, as he started to pull another grape from the bunch. “Turn and turn about, he told us.”

Even in the wonder of what was happening to their grandparents, Tahl couldn’t help thinking of the practical uses of it.

“It’s better than that,” he said, as Alnor grudgingly handed the grapes over. “You’ve got to eat the whole bunch, Faheel said. At the rate you’re going, you won’t be much older than us by the time you’ve finished. So you won’t need way-leaves going north.”

Meena had a grape halfway to her mouth. She paused and stared at it.

“Perhaps you’ll be younger,” said Tilja with relish. “Then I’ll be able to tell you what’s what, for a change.”

“May I live to see the day,” said Meena, and popped the grape into her mouth and gave the bunch back across to Alnor.

“They tell me you were a handsome young fellow once,” she said. “Let’s have a look at you then.”

For a while they almost gobbled in their excitement, while their grandchildren stood and watched them shed the corrupting years. The wrinkles vanished from their faces, apart from the laughter lines at the corners of Meena’s eyes. Her hair grew and thickened, losing all its gray until it was a soft, light chestnut, with a slight wave in it, reaching down to her shoulders. Her figure changed with almost ridiculous speed, swelling to serious stoutness and then shrinking again to comfortable plump curves. Alnor on the other hand stayed much the same, a slim, wiry, muscular man with almost jet black, short, curly hair and a look of fiery pride.