Peter Dickinson - The Ropemaker

“Any chestnuts left?” he asked.

They settled round the fire in their own little patch of calm, while all around them the rain sluiced down and the wind battered to and fro. Tahl was bursting with questions, but none of the others felt like talking. Alnor sat with Meena, their arms round each other’s waists, using their free hands to hold and peel the nuts and taking turns who ate them. The Ropemaker sat cross-legged, lost in thought, though every now and then his long arm would snake out as if of its own accord to take another chestnut, which then peeled itself at his touch. However many they ate, there always seemed to be a few left waiting to be roasted.

And Tilja relived her encounters by the lake, absorbing the horror of them and letting it go, until she could simply wonder at the strangeness of them, and her discovery of the size and power of the inward landscape that she had only just begun to explore. The lake must be the center of it, surely, but she felt that there were other places waiting for her to find, and creatures who lived in them, friends like Faheel’s friends, an inward world, a world of power, whose measures were not our measures, whose times were not our time, just as her long and battering struggle with Moonfist had been packed into a few of our instants, time for the Ropemaker to find the ring and come to her rescue.

There were dangers too in that world, she realized. You could lose yourself there if you let it happen. Deliberately she pulled herself out of her half trance, peeled a handful of chestnuts and took them to Calico, who was standing still half-asleep, apparently unaware that anything strange had happened, or that there was now a wall of rain rattling down just beyond her. She ate the chestnuts grumpily and gave Tilja no thanks.

“You must be the least magical horse in the world,” Tilja told her fondly, and went and fetched her rug, rolled herself up in it and lay down by the fire.

She woke late next morning to the smell of roasting meat. The rain had cleared away and the whole world sparkled. The fire was glowing hot. Meena had spitted the body of a small animal on a stick and was twisting it to and fro over the embers. Alnor was skinning and gutting another. Tahl was looking for dry firewood. The Ropemaker had vanished, but almost at once a heavy wing beat broke the silence and a large orange bird settled into the clearing with the body of a hare grasped in its talons. It dropped its burden beside the fire, strutted to the hut and pecked at one of the coils of cord that lay by the entrance to the hut. Rapidly the cord wove itself into a string bag. The bird glanced at Tilja with a mocking eye and heaved itself clumsily into the air. When it next came back the bag was full of sweet yellow plums.

“Couldn’t you just have made us a magic breakfast?” asked Tahl.

The Ropemaker chewed for a while at the tough hare meat, and swallowed.

“Enjoy hunting,” he explained. “You’re an animal, do what it does best. Good sport. Besides . . .”

He glanced enquiringly at Tilja.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Find out?” he suggested, and held out his hand. An earthenware platter appeared between his fingers, piled with dark brown biscuits. He handed them round. The others crunched theirs up and reached for more, but the one Tilja tried to take vanished at her touch. No, she told herself. Not this time, please. It made no difference.

“Do you think I could learn not to do that?” she asked.

He shrugged, then smiled at her surprise.

“Don’t know all that much about any of this,” he said ruefully. “Better explain.”

Slowly, his jerky manner of speech still further interrupted while he chewed, he told them his story. He had been born in an isolated village far out on the eastern coast. The food was fish and edible seaweed, but very occasionally somebody found a pearl and became rich enough to leave. From the first he had hated the life, knowing he was different, though he didn’t yet know how. To get away, he had apprenticed himself to a traveling ropemaker. This man knew a few simple magics, bindfasts and so on, which the Ropemaker had learned—“Picked ’em up as if I knew ’em already,” he said. “Knew at once this was what I wanted, what I was for. ”

From there he’d simply gone on, talking to anyone he could. He’d met a young woman who knew about wards and could turn herself into a cat, and with her he’d experimented and started to piece things together until they’d attracted the attention of one of the eastern Watchers, who had then sent a horrifying sending to scare them off. It had worked with the woman, but it had merely excited the Ropemaker. He had managed to track it to its source, and so come to Talagh.

Once there, he’d spent most of his time not getting picked up by the Watchers, but in the process he’d learned about the lost province to the north, and the magic forest that defended it against the most powerful magicians the Emperor could send. This, of course, had made him want to go and find out for himself, with the added notion that if he came up with an answer he could return to Talagh and win the Emperor’s favor, and so be admitted to the innermost magical secrets of the Empire.

The forest had fascinated him. It was a different sort of magic from any that he’d come across before. For a long while it had simply baffled him, but he had refused to give up. Then, in a flash of intuition (“Don’t know how I do that,” he said. “Happened before. Things just come to me.”) he’d realized that the magic had something to do with unicorns, and had decided to try to turn himself into a unicorn in order to get into the forest.

“Don’t tell me you were that dirty great unicorn!” Meena burst in. “What did you think you were up to, scaring our own little wretches that way? And doing what you did to my daughter Selly by the lake? What harm had either of them done you?”

He spread his hands in apology.

“Mistake,” he explained. “Made a lot of them in my time— bound to, doing it all on my own. Never tried that before, being a magical animal. Took a lot of doing. Then, once you’re there, different. Let’s say you’re a mouse, you think mouse and feel mouse—quick, scared, inquisitive—but you’re in control. Mouse does what you want, spite of the mouse bit. Magical animal— unicorn anyway—haven’t tried dragons—if you don’t watch out, it takes over. Happened to me. Knew what I wanted—to get your unicorns out—forgot why. Tried doing it unicorn fashion, scaring ’em out, stopping your daughter feeding ’em. Didn’t work with her, and I’d felt bad about it, under all the unicorn stuff. Didn’t try again. But I was still stuck there, being a unicorn, when you came by on your raft.

“Saw you, but wasn’t interested. Only interested in the unicorns. Then Meena there started her singing. Wasn’t singing to me, of course, just to the little white fellows on the far side of the canyon, telling ’em what you were up to, going out into the Empire to find this man who’d make their forest right for ’em again. But it did the trick, reminded me what I was there for, just enough to get myself clear of the forest and stop being a unicorn—and was that a palaver!

“Followed you down, of course. Meena’s song had told me you knew some of the stuff I was after. So I was hanging outside Lananeth’s window, just clear of her wards, minding my own business, being a bat and listening to what you were saying, when Meena there pops out with some fellow’s name—Faheel, right? Never heard of him before, but bang, I’d lost my shape and fallen into a rosebush. Cut me to ribbons—never noticed. Got to know about that, I was thinking.”

His braying laugh shattered the morning silence.