Peter Dickinson - The Ropemaker

Meena glanced at him as she started to hand the grapes across, and jumped to her feet.

“Tell you what,” she said. “It’s frustrating watching you getting so likely looking. Let’s see if we can’t find a pool I can see myself in.”

They picked up their packs, but Alnor didn’t at once move off to explore along the edge of the marsh. Instead he closed his eyes and slowly turned his head, as if listening for a distant call. Tahl copied him. They opened their eyes at the same moment and side by side led the way slantwise up across the dry and dreary hillside, halting at last in a place as barren seeming as everywhere else. But when Meena and Tilja came up beside them they found at their feet a rocky ravine, which here widened into a steep-sided basin with a waterfall tumbling down at its upper end. Below the fall was a pool.

They scrambled down and settled on the rocks beside it for Meena and Alnor to finish the grapes. The water was creased with ripples below the fall, but smooth enough where they sat for Meena to make out her own wavering reflection as she shed the years. She finished as a plump-faced, smiling, lively girl, a year or two older than Tilja, with a mass of glossy chestnut hair that Tilja would have given her soul for. Alnor might have been a year or so older, unmistakably an Ortahlson, absurdly handsome, much more so than Tahl, though they could easily have been brothers. Unlike Meena, who had studied her reflection in the pool every time she ate another grape, he had refused even to glance at his, but from the way he stood and moved Tilja was quite sure that he knew how good he looked.

Meena ate her last grape kneeling by the water, watching her rippled image, then rose to her feet and took Tilja’s hands and drew her to her and hugged her, cheek to cheek, laughing with pleasure. It was such a natural gesture that Tilja hugged her back, laughing too. Then she stiffened and pushed away and stared at her.

“What’s up?” said Meena.

“You didn’t feel anything? No, nor did I, but I was afraid of undoing the magic, like I did with Silena’s dog. You can’t be that kind of magical.”

“I’m not magical at all, thank you very much. He may have used magic to get me here, but I’m me. Guess what day it is?”

“What day it is?”

“It’s my fourteenth birthday,” crowed Meena, laughing at Tilja’s bewilderment. “Look.”

She held out her left arm and showed Tilja an angry blistered patch on the inside of the wrist.

“I got that just yesterday,” she said. “Helping Ma with the baking for my birthday tea.”

They picked up their packs again and climbed the hill. The stream ran out of a boggy plateau that stretched away north. On its further side, two or three miles away, they could see a group of low buildings, and knew at once what they were, having seen so many on their way south.

“Where there’s a way station there’s got to be a road,” said Tahl. “This must be a side road, from another part of the Empire. Problem is, which way’s Goloroth? We’ve got to get there to reach the Grand Trunk Road.”

“The other problem is, all four of us are young now,” said Alnor. “We’re supposed to be coming away.”

“You and Meena could dress up old and hobble along,” suggested Tahl, teasing.

“Don’t be stupid,” snapped Alnor. “We’ll travel at night. It can’t be that far.”

“Isn’t that a couple of kids?” said Meena. “Look. There. And they’re going that way. So the other way must be to Goloroth.”

There was a three-quarter moon, clear enough to show some distance along the empty road. Nobody in the Empire traveled by night, because who knew what other creatures might be about?

“I think we should be all right,” said Tilja. “If anything like that comes, you’ll just have to hold on to me, and then it can’t touch you.”

She felt completely confident about this. She had held Faheel’s ring in her hand and blanked out its magic. She didn’t believe that all the Watchers together could match that power. Along with that confidence came a feeling—more than a feeling, almost a certainty—that what she had seen and done in the last few days had given her strengths that she had not had on the journey south. As much as Meena and Alnor, though in very different ways, she had changed.

Despite that, none of them was quite ready for what happened almost as soon as they had set foot on the road. They were walking abreast through the silvery dark. Nothing stirred. There was barely a breath of wind, only a delicious waft of smells, dewy and earthy, drawn out by the night-cooled air. Tilja’s head was full of the knowledge that they were now going home, back to Woodbourne. She wanted to sing.

She felt nothing, but Tahl was flung against her as if he’d been buffeted from the other side. She staggered and almost fell, but caught herself and grabbed his wrist as he fought with something she couldn’t see. He steadied. On her other side Meena and Alnor were sprawled in the road. Meena had her arms braced in front of her chest as if she was trying to push something away from her neck. Alnor was on his face, bucking to rise, but pinned down.

Tilja bent and thrust her wrist into Meena’s grasp.

“Hold on to me,” she yelled, kneeling and reaching across to touch the back of Alnor’s hand where it scrabbled at the dust.

They rose gasping. The night was as peaceful and still as it had been only seconds before.

“Loose magic,” muttered Alnor.

“Bad as outside Goloroth,” said Meena.

“This had things in it,” said Tahl. “No wonder people don’t like moving around in the dark.”

“The power of the Watchers is broken,” said Alnor. “It will be worse now.”

“And you didn’t feel anything?” said Tahl.

“No,” said Tilja. “Not even that funny numb feeling I get. Wild magic must be different. It looks as if we’re going to have to hold hands all the way.”

They adjusted their positions and walked on, tensely at first, but then more easily when nothing frightening happened, though all except Tilja could feel gusts of loose magic swirling around them with, as Tahl had said, things in it. The road wound down the hill they had climbed and ran for a while almost directly beside the marsh. Along the way two more roads joined it from the north, and as dawn was breaking it crossed the Great River on a bridge and joined the Grand Trunk Road. With sighs of relief they turned north.

It was strange for Tilja, making friends with a girl her own age who was also her grandmother, an old woman with a bad hip and a dodgy temper. But Meena didn’t seem to find it anything like as strange when Tilja asked her about it.

“Mostly I don’t think about it,” she said. “I suppose it’s like remembering a dream, except it doesn’t go shifting around the way dreams do.”

She paused for a moment, thinking.

“There, now,” she went on. “I can remember what it’s like, my hip hurting, and I can remember what Faheel told us, and going back a bit I can remember things like speaking my mind to your da about buying that stupid great horse . . .”

Another pause.

“. . . but mostly, like I say, I shut it away. No. It shuts itself away, more like. It’s a different room from the one I’m in, and the door’s closed. I can get up and go through, but the door’s the sort that shuts itself soon as you let go. And, anyway, I like this room.”

She laughed. Her laugh hadn’t changed at all, but Tilja heard it a lot more often now. And she could be sharp as ever still, mostly just teasing, but also speaking her mind with vigor when anything annoyed her. It was all part of the sheer gusto with which she lived, so brimfull of the pleasure of the moment that the surplus spilled over. That made the change easy for Tilja. Anybody would have wanted to be Meena’s friend.