Peter Dickinson - The Ropemaker

“I suppose I’ve got a third daughter now,” said Ma.

“If you like,” said Meena, laughing. And then, still laughing, but with a note of the old sharpness beneath the words, “You’ll have to make the most of it, Ma . Soon as Alnor comes back and we’ve done what we’ve got to, I’ll be telling you what’s what again, like always.”

20

Home

It was sunset when they came out of the forest, a fiery sky to the west, and a soft pink light glinting off the northern snow peaks. Tilja stopped and gazed down at the long-loved farmstead. It looked shuttered and dark and still. All the way from the lake she had been twanging with worry about Da. According to Ma, the boys had arrived two days back in the last light, told her their news, and at dawn flown off to the army. Ma didn’t think there could be much that two boys, even on a flying horse, could do against a horde of mounted warriors, but Tilja was confident in the Ropemaker’s magic. That wasn’t enough, though. Da had left ten days earlier, taking Dusty with him. Neither of them knew anything about war, and there must have been fighting already. Anything could have happened to Da, and she knew it and Ma and Meena knew it, and all the while they had trudged between the trees it had been impossible to think about anything else.

But now, as she stood and looked out over the darkening Valley, she found she could put that aside as her whole being brimmed with happiness to be home. No, she could not stay here forever. Yes, everything could still go agonizingly wrong. But this was the place she belonged, at least for now, as a fox belongs in its lair. Home.

Anja, perched on Tiddykin’s back, pointed northwest.

“Look! Look!” she cried.

They looked. Black against the flaming sky, already far too large for any bird, wide wings spread into a long glide, Calico too was coming home. Now Tilja could see the riders on her back, and how in flight she tucked her legs up beneath her, as if she were jumping a hedge—something that, as far as Tilja knew, she’d never attempted in her life. She circled twice, the second time so low that they could hear the whistle of her plumes. Tiddykin looked up and whinnied, apparently recognizing her despite her strange behavior. She answered with a ringing neigh and settled into the farmyard with a mighty battering of wings that sent all the loose straw litter swirling up in a flurry that caught the last rays of the sun and glinted gold as it rose above the shed roofs.

Tilja and Meena picked up their skirts and ran down the spare ground and across the meadow. Anja slid down and scampered after them. They reached the farmyard to find Calico stuck in the stable door, unable to go any further because her wings wouldn’t go through. She was starting to flap them with all the panicky indignation of a hen being stuffed into a coop. A glancing blow sent Tahl crashing into the water butt. Alnor shouted. Calico heaved and flapped and squealed. A little more of this and she’d have the stables down.

Tilja was over the gate before she knew it and running for the far door. She grabbed a handful of yellownut and thrust it under Calico’s nose. Calico paused and sniffed at it, unbelieving—yellownut after all these months. She lowered her head, but Tilja had moved her hand and she had to take a pace back to reach it. Then another, and another, until she was out.

Tilja gave her the yellownut and heaved the door shut while the horse chewed it. Anja was already pestering Tahl.

“What happened?” she was saying. “Where’ve you been? Why are they kissing like that? That’s my grandma! Grandmas don’t kiss people! Not like that!”

“I know how you feel,” said Tahl. “That’s my grandpa.”

“Did you see my da? Did he kill a lot of people?”

“Tell you later. Is there anything to eat? We’re starving. There was food at the camp, but Calico had got it into her head she was coming home.”

“Barn rat with wings,” said Tilja. “Da’s all right, then?”

She put it like that because his face hadn’t changed when Anja had asked him.

“Fine,” he said cheerfully. “I told him you were on your way home, so he started back yesterday as soon as the fighting was over. We got him on one of the rafts. The river’s in spate, so he could be back tonight.”

“Fighting?” said Anja. “Tell me! Tell me!”

“Food,” said Tahl, “or I’ll eat you !”

Despite his obvious weariness he seemed in tearing high spirits. Ma took Anja off to start getting a meal together while Tilja rubbed Calico down, wearing gloves so that she didn’t touch the magical wings with her bare hands. There was a strange mark, like a burn, on Calico’s right flank. When she’d finished she coaxed Calico into the barn, which had much bigger doors than the stable, bribing her shamelessly with yellownut to get her to behave, and then tethering her as close as she safely could in front of a full manger. Tiddykin got a good share of yellownut too, because she’d waited so patiently and then done whatever was asked of her without it. By the time Tilja reached the kitchen the others were sitting down to eat.

Home felt like a shoe that didn’t quite fit, a shoe the right size and shape, but with odd little bumps and hardnesses that the foot isn’t used to, a shoe that needs wearing in. Nothing in the kitchen had changed, that she could see. It was the people—Anja cocky and bossy as ever, especially now that she was so excited at their homecoming, but different. When Tilja had given her the mother-of-pearl hair comb she had bought for her in the market at Ramram, and somehow ferried home unbroken, through all her adventures, Anja had been delighted with it, but instead of rushing off and looking for something she could see her reflection in and then flaunting it in front of everyone and pestering them for admiration, she had first thanked Tilja rather gravely, almost as a grown-up might have done, and actually said it must have been a nuisance to carry it all that far. Yes, Anja had changed, because for several months now she had been the elder daughter, and one day Woodbourne was going to be hers, and she had begun to understand in her bones what that meant.

That hurt. Tilja didn’t want it to, but it did. She had accepted with her mind, and believed that she had accepted with her heart, that her own life was going to be elsewhere, but it wasn’t wholly true. Not yet.

The change in Ma was different, subtler, harder to pin down and then understand. Tilja first noticed it when Anja was prattling on about going up to the forest “every, every day” to see if the cedars had woken up. Ma made the usual gesture with her hand to tell her that that was enough, started to say something herself, and stopped. That would never have happened in the old days. Either she wouldn’t have spoken or else she would have known before she started exactly what she intended to say, and said it. She seemed to have lost some of that confidence.

Once she noticed, Tilja saw other tiny signs of this change, slight hesitations in familiar actions, an odd, quick smile that didn’t seem to mean anything at all, fiddlings with loose wisps of hair. Perhaps, she thought, it was something to do with the magic dying out of the forest. Once that had happened, what was the point of Ma being at Woodbourne at all, instead of Grayne? What was the point of all those Urlasdaughters before her, trudging out year after year through the winter snows to sing to the unicorns? Twenty generations of certainty, gone. Oh, the cedars were talking again. Only that afternoon Meena had sat by the lake with the unicorns spread round her, singing to tell them she was home, and was reweaving the magic for another twenty generations. But nothing would ever bring back the old certainties into Ma’s own mind. So she fiddled with her hair.