The Ropemaker

11

The Island

Tilja woke, already screwing her eyes up against the blaze of light. She was lying on a hard, slanting surface that was tilting slowly, becoming level, beginning to tilt the other way so that her head was lower than her feet and she seemed to be slipping down, down, steeper now, with a rushing sound in her ears. . . . And then light spray whipped across her, drenching her face—drenching it again, for it was already wet, and so were her clothes on her upper side, and still she couldn’t force her eyes open against the glare and look around and see where she was.

All she could remember was staring back at an enormous lion, black against a rising moon. In her mind’s eye she could see the moon sparkling on its mane. Odd. Fur didn’t sparkle like that—not ordinary fur. Except . . . yes, the cat on the walls of Talagh . . . magical cat . . . magical lion . . . She was too tired to think about it.

But there was something else odd about the way she remembered that lion, not magical weird, like its hugeness and its suddenness and the way it seemed to be watching her, just homely odd. Yes, it was odd in the same way as the old plow horse at Shotover, the next-door farm to Woodbourne, which never looked as if it had been put together quite right; legs and body and head seemed to belong to different horses. Or lions.

The combined memory of horse and lion pieced everything together. The lion was of course the same one that had appeared suddenly at the end of the shattered shed and roared at Dorn, and it must then have followed them down to the pier—yes, Alnor had said that he sensed something following them—but it didn’t seem to have tried to catch or stop them, it had just been standing watching them go.

And then something had happened to Tilja herself. She was tired and she had fallen asleep, but it hadn’t been just that. The tiredness was like nothing she had ever felt before. It came as if she had been fighting, all alone, for hours and days and months and years, against an enormous invisible something, keeping it out, or sometimes, if it became too strong for that, letting it in and channeling it through and away, away, to an unknowable somewhere, and she was the only one who could do this, so she’d had to keep on doing it, hours, days, months, years, but now it was over and she could allow the great calm wave of tiredness that had built up all the time she had been fighting to pick her up and carry her along in its softness and darkness and forgetting. . . .

But something had woken her, or she might have slept on forever.

More fighting.

She wasn’t ready.

Groaning, she tried to sit up, but couldn’t. She was being held down.

“Hello. Do you want to wake up?”

Tahl’s voice.

“No . . . where . . . ? what . . . ?”

“Hold it. I’ll untie you. We didn’t want you rolling overboard in your sleep.”

Hands moved. The pressure against her chest eased. That was what had woken her. . . .

No, it wasn’t, but it had been there, against her chest. A pulse of numbness. Axtrig. She clutched at the place through her blouse and lifted the spoon clear of her chest. The moment the wood lost contact with her skin she felt the handle trying to twist itself round, until she let it fall back against her chest.

The pulse of numbness came and went.

“Meena was trying to use her?” she muttered.

“We were just talking about it. Meena’s not feeling too well. Some people get sick even on the river, if it’s a bit rough. You can sit up if you want. You’ve got a safety cord round you.”

Barely able to see for the dazzle, Tilja sat and stared around. Meena was lying by her side. Her eyes were closed and her face was a nasty yellowish color. Her lips were moving in silent, angry mutters. There was a dribble of fresh vomit from the corner of her mouth. Tilja forgot everything else and crawled to the edge of the raft so that she could dip the end of her head scarf in the rush of water, then crawled back and wiped the old face clean.

“Thanks, girl,” came the sick whisper. “I’ll live. Better had, after all this to-do. What about the spoon, then? Not doing much out here?”

Before she could answer, Tilja became aware of what was happening inside her blouse, unnoticed by her in the urgency of tending to Meena. As she had crawled to and fro the spoon had fallen into the fold of her blouse and now seemed to be trying to nudge and nuzzle, blindly but insistently, against the fabric, like a newborn pup searching helplessly for the unknown thing it wants, until its mother noses it toward her teats.

“She’s not just turning,” Tilja whispered in astonishment. “She wants to go somewhere. Over there. Is that south, Tahl?”

“Hard to tell. The sun came up over there, if the line of the waves hasn’t shifted, so where you’re pointing is a bit east of south, maybe.”

“We are still in the flow of the Great River,” said Alnor. “The water is almost fresh. Let me listen. Tahl, come and help.”

So Tahl joined him and they sat side by side in silence, with bowed heads. After a little while they started to sing, the same sort of quiet, wavering, almost tuneless chant Alnor had used to control that other raft when they had left the Valley. Tilja strapped Axtrig safely onto her arm, crawled back to the side and scooped water into her mouth. There were old stories in the Valley, going back to the times before it had been closed off, and some of them were about the sea. They all said that seawater was too salty to drink, but this had only a faint refreshing tang to it. She got a mug from her bedroll and gave Meena a drink, then she ate one of the flat cakes Tahl had bought on the sandspit outside Goloroth.

After that she lay down, pulled her head scarf over her eyes, and for a short while listened to the song as it mingled with the rippling whisper of the waves brushing along the timbers of the raft. The sound filled her with a sort of vague amazement. They were so far from home, out in the blank ocean, where there was no magic at all and all waters are lost in the end, but Alnor and Tahl could still persuade the current to carry them where they wanted to go. Then the great wave of tiredness took her again.

This time she woke and knew where she was as soon as Tahl shook her shoulder.

“We’re moving out of the current,” he said. “We may have been doing a bit of good, but we can’t keep it up now. Can we have another fix?”

With a groan Tilja sat up, crawled to the edge of the raft and rinsed her face. The water was now too salty to drink. To judge by the sun, it seemed to be about midafternoon.

She untied Axtrig and wrapped her in a fold of her skirt so that she could keep her grip on her without touching her when she let go with her other hand. When she did so, the shock of the spoon’s attraction to her unseen target was so strong that it felt that if Tilja had let her she would have slithered across the raft and gone swimming off sidelong across the slow, rolling swell. The direction was unmistakable. So was the need, and the power behind the need.

“There,” she said, pointing.

“Not too good,” said Tahl. “We’re still in some kind of current, but far as I can make out we’re heading well south of that. Not much we can do about it, either.”

They tried twice more as the afternoon wore on. Each time the line Axtrig longed for slanted slightly more across that of the waves, so that they all could tell that if the current carried them on as they were going they wouldn’t ever come to the place they had journeyed so far to reach.

By the time the sky was red in the west the waves had eased, and Meena was feeling better and sitting up.

“We’re not doing much good so far,” she said. “We’re going to go sailing right past unless we try something else. What about if I say the man’s name? Then maybe he’ll hear us and give us a hand or something.”

So Tilja knelt with her back to the sunset, facing the way Axtrig seemed to want to go. Her left arm was already numb to the shoulder, as if the spoon understood what was happening and was readying herself for the moment, and when Tilja took her in her hand she was like a living force. Tilja shifted her grip so that the bowl was toward her, and with her other hand wound the end of her shawl round the handle as Meena counted, “One. Two. Three . . .”

Tilja let go of the bowl of the spoon and grabbed for the handle, so that she had it in both hands. She heard the whispered name begin. A violent jerk pulled her flat on her face against the timbers of the raft, almost jarring the spoon free, but she managed to wedge the handle down into the cleft between two of the logs and pin it there. The whole raft seemed to be shuddering. She realized that she had heard cries from the other three, and looked round.

Both Meena and Alnor had tumbled onto their sides, and Tahl was on his hands and knees, shaking his head like a sick dog.

“What happened?” she gasped.

“Magic . . . the raft . . .”

He collapsed on his face.

Tilja stared around. Nothing else had changed in the huge emptiness of ocean. Behind her the fuzzy orange disk of the sun seemed to rest on flame-streaked wave tops, and ahead lay the darkness of night. She was helpless, trapped by the need to keep Axtrig pinned in place. It took her a while to discover that that need was gone.

The first inkling came from the feel of the raft when she tried to shift her position. She had been kneeling on her skirt, but now her left shin touched timber. For a moment the familiar numbness spread along it, and she realized that every timber of the raft, infected with Axtrig’s desperate need, had been faintly quivering with eager life, until her touch had stilled it. When she tucked her skirt back under her knee she felt the life reawaken.

Cautiously she raised her other hand an inch above the cleft, ready to grab again, but Axtrig lay content. Even so, careful to keep the spoon in contact with the raft all the time, she managed to shift her along the cleft and wedge the shaft tight under one of the cords that bound the logs together, then knelt up and looked around.

The sun was down and night looming ahead. Ahead. No longer directly into the waves, but slanting across their northward march, slanting in a rush of foam down the back of each one, across the hollow, and up the slope of the next one to its crest, and then slowly down again.

In the last light she made the others as comfortable as she could, drawing their clothes around them and wedging the garments in place, trying to see that no flesh came into contact with the magic-infected timber. When she lay down herself she did the same for herself, but for the opposite reason—to keep the magic active in the timber, and so carry them all wherever it was that Axtrig was determined to go.

Light woke her, stiff and cold. The sky in the east was pale with dawn. Dark against it rose an island, ringed with cliffs.

The other three lay as she had left them, but when she tried to wake them they didn’t stir. She couldn’t find their pulses, or hear their breathing above the sound of the waves. And yet their bodies were still as warm as hers beneath their clothes, so she tried to hope they weren’t dead. She was too worried to eat, but simply sat, watching the island draw nearer. There was nothing to see but the cliffs and a rocky shore, with waves breaking gently against it. The top was hidden.

Slowly her fear for Meena and the others left her, and she began to feel strangely calm, confident that whatever had brought them so far would see them safe to the end. A kindness was in the air. She seemed to smell it in each breath she drew, and to sense that even in their tranced sleep the other three were blessed by the same faint sweetness. There was peace in their faces. So as the dangerous-seeming shore drew nearer, with the long ocean swell being tumbled and shredded by jagged rocks, she felt no tension, but rose and watched, ready.

The raft headed for a sloping shingle beach lying in a fold of the cliffs. It was moving—Tilja could now see, with the motionless island for comparison—as fast as a cantering horse. At the last moment a wave added to that speed, lifting the whole raft up, laying it with a heavy crunch far up the beach, and withdrawing down the shingle in a pother of foam.

Tilja knelt and worked Axtrig out from beneath the lashing and tied her to her forearm. Faint numbness flowed into her flesh, but the spoon now felt peaceful, with the calm of a cat sleeping by its own hearth. When she laid her hand on the timber of the raft she could tell that the magic was gone from there. Hopeful, she waited for the others to wake, but they slept on and neither her voice nor touch would wake them. Still with that strange sense that all was well she left them and looked for a way up the cliffs.

She had been half expecting to find a stair, so easily had the last few hours gone for her, but there seemed to be only one possible place in the sheer rock, where a thin dribble of water trickled down a kind of slot, with a few juts and crannies on either side for handholds and toeholds.

She started up it, and soon found herself wondering whether there wasn’t a stair because it was not in the nature of the cliff to carve itself so, but it was doing what it could to help, all the same. There was always something to climb, provided she trusted it. When she looked down she could see the plain rectangle of the raft below her, with her three companions lying asleep on it. Rest after weary days—on this island it could be nothing else. She smiled and climbed on.

It was midmorning before she dragged herself out onto smooth turf. Three rabbits glanced up, then went back to nibbling, unperturbed. Ahead of her stood a low stone wall, with what looked like a garden beyond it. She walked to her left and found a gate, opened it and went through, closing it carefully behind her because she could see that wall and gate were there to keep the rabbits out.

This vaguely surprised her. The man they had been looking for surely had no need of such things. He could point out a line with his finger, and no creature—except perhaps an even more powerful magician, and the rabbits didn’t look that—could come beyond it. But now she thought of it she sensed that, apart from Axtrig, whom she carried sleeping against her arm, the only magic on the island was its own magical calm. And . . . and . . . a curious faint buzzing close beside her right thigh. Not an audible buzz, a buzz of feeling. But otherwise just like some tiresome insect.

Automatically her hand had moved, brushing her skirt to get rid of it. The buzzing shifted but continued. She patted around. It was coming from inside her pocket. She felt and found her hair tie, and the buzzing stopped.

Her first thought was that the two things had nothing to do with each other—her movement had driven the buzzing thing away and her touch had emptied the hair tie of its magic, but it hadn’t. Not quite. A trickle of numbness seeped out of the hair tie into her palm. She stood and stared at the trivial little object, and for the first time realized how strange it was that her hair had stayed in place, without one strand drifting free, ever since Tahl had last put it up for her while they were waiting for darkness before they could find their way into Goloroth. It had stayed in place in the heart of the warded city, and through the turmoil of the breaking of those wards, and again through the long journey out across the magicless ocean, until she had woken that morning and found her hair tumbling down to her shoulders and the hair tie wedged between two of the timbers of the raft. Tahl had been deep in his tranced sleep and there’d been no point in her trying to tie it herself, so she’d slipped it into her pocket.

She gazed at it, puzzled. Morning after morning she had held it, ready for Tahl to finish braiding and coiling her hair, so that he could then tie it into place, but had felt nothing in it but the feel of any other hair tie. Now, though, as it lay cupped in her hand, the unmistakable numbness in her palm told her that it was very, very different, a tiny magic object, even smaller, even more everyday-seeming, than a wooden spoon. But still full of its magic, on this island where no magic came.

Close ahead of her a voice spoke, softly creaking, and seeming to share something of her own bewilderment.

“So who are you . . . ? And what brought you here?”

She looked up, unalarmed, still sure that nothing bad could happen to her in this place. A grassy path stretched in front of her, and a short way down it an old man had emerged from between two rows of vines. He wasn’t dressed in any of the fashions of the Empire, but wore a broad-brimmed straw hat, a plain unbleached-linen garment that fell from his shoulders to below his knees, sandals, and a brown apron with pockets for garden tools. He might once have been tall but was now stooped. His face was lined with innumerable wrinkles, but his white beard was combed and clean and his pale, yellowish eyes were much clearer than they should have been at his age and barely blinked at all.

“I’m looking for a man,” she said.

“You must answer my questions first,” he reproved her.

“I’m sorry. My name’s Tilja Urlasdaughter and I came here on a raft from Goloroth.”

“Alone?”

“No, but my friends—the magic was too strong for them, and—”

“What magic is this? There is no magic here but mine.”

“It happened yesterday evening. It was something to do with Axtrig.”

“Axtrig?”

“She’s just a wooden spoon, but—”

“You have it? Show me.”

Tilja rolled her sleeve up, untied Axtrig and held her out toward him. He peered at her.

“Just a wooden spoon,” he said, nodding his head, as if amused by a puzzle. “I have been wondering . . . from time to time, you see, something that I made long ago still finds its way home to me. Last evening I felt this thing coming, but did not know what it was, and now I see it I still do not remember it. Indeed, it seems to me to have no magic in it.”

“That’s because I’m touching it.”

He peered at her with sudden intensity, his face unreadable.

“You had better tell me about it,” he said quietly. “Where did it come from?”

“From the Valley, in the far North. I’m afraid it’s a long story, but ages ago two people came from the Valley to get help from a magician. He did what they asked, and gave them peaches from his garden. When they got back the woman planted the stone from hers at the farm where I live, and it grew into a tree, and years later when it blew down they used the wood to carve things from. Axtrig is one of them. We didn’t know how magical she was, because there isn’t any real magic in the Valley. She just told fortunes.”

“Yes, I see. The Northern Valley. The Lost Province, beyond the forest . . . And now, what you said about yourself. The spoon has no magic when you are touching it. That is why you had it tied to your arm?”

“We met a magician who told us it was a good idea, because otherwise people might sense we’d got her, and we’d be in trouble. I don’t really understand, but magic doesn’t seem to do anything to me—in fact I sort of undo it some of the time. Mostly I don’t do that on purpose—it just happens—it’s something about me. I didn’t even realize how tiring it was until we were out in the middle of the sea, where there isn’t any magic.”

He stood looking at her for what seemed a long while, but perhaps not really seeing her. Then he sighed.

“Yes,” he said. “Tiring. Tiring beyond belief . . . Will you please let me hold the spoon for a little?”

The numbness shot up Tilja’s arm as he reached forward. Axtrig seemed to leap from her hand into his. For some while he stood silent, holding the shaft between his clasped palms with his head bowed over them and his lips lightly touching the bowl. Then he straightened and handed the spoon back to Tilja. The moment she took it Tilja knew that the magic was gone. The shaft was still wonderfully carved, the grain of the bowl still intricately beautiful, but it was all just dead wood. Axtrig was “her” no longer, only “it.” With a pang of loss she slid it into her pocket and without thought dropped the hair tie in beside it.

She stared at the man. He seemed to be standing a little taller now, and when he spoke his voice was stronger than it had been before.

“I have taken back some of my powers from your spoon,” he said, smiling at her surprise. “It is remarkable how they have grown over the years. . . . Well, I think I am the man you are looking for. My name is Faheel.”

Already, with a sinking heart, Tilja had guessed this was so. So old, so feeble and unsure of himself. So quiet and peaceful too. How could he wield powers enough to hold back the might of the Empire from the Valley for twenty more generations? Was all their long and dangerous journey for nothing?

“Th-that’s wonderful,” she managed to stammer. “We hoped you’d let us find you, somehow. . . . Can you do anything about the others? They’re asleep on the raft on the beach. I couldn’t wake them up. Strong magic does that to them, but I’ve taken Axtrig away and it feels as if there isn’t any other magic here. Anyway, Meena and Alnor are the ones who want to talk to you. Tahl and I just came to help them.”

He shook his head, smiling as if he knew her thoughts.

“Best let them sleep,” he said. “Nothing will harm them. And you are both right and wrong. There is no magic here, except one, and that prevents all the others. And it is very strong. Your friends could not endure it, waking. In spite of what you say, it is still astonishing to me that you are able to. Well, you must come in and tell me the rest of your story, and then we can decide what to do.”

He turned and started to lead the way along the path, but then stopped and turned back, frowning.

“I think you are carrying something else besides the spoon,” he said. “The force of the spoon hid it earlier. What is it?”

In the astonishment, relief and dismay of meeting Faheel, Tilja had forgotten about the hair tie, though it was still producing that faint, insectlike buzz beside her right thigh. She fished it out of her pocket and showed it to him.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “It’s just something a traveling magician gave me to keep my hair up. Somebody else had to do that for me. If I touched it the magic didn’t work. But since I came here something seems to have woken up, and it’s much stronger than the plain hair-tie magic. I can feel it even when it’s me holding it.”

He took a pair of spectacles from one of his pockets, put them on and bent over her hand, peering at the hair tie. He straightened. There was a different kind of interest in his voice when he spoke.

“I shall need to know about this magician. What is his name?”

“I don’t know. He told us to call him the Ropemaker.”

“Ah . . . time is a great rope,” he whispered.

He removed his spectacles and smiled at her.

“Indeed you must tell me your story,” he said. “You may have brought me more than you had thought.”

Again he turned and led the way through the garden. Tilja looked around her with surprise as she walked beside him. Like Faheel himself, this was not at all what she had expected. A magician’s garden should have been extraordinary, surely—extraordinarily beautiful, extraordinarily neat, every plant not only wonderfully strange but doing precisely what it was supposed to. Instead, Faheel’s garden, though certainly beautiful, was beautiful only with a kind of heightened ordinariness. There were gardens almost like this in the Valley, despite the harsher climate, gardens crammed with all the various plants their fanatical owners could fit in. Here were fruit trees and vegetables in straight rows, healthy and strong, though some of the rows needed hoeing, and there were masses of different flowers, and marvelous wafts of their scent floating in the mild, warm breeze, but often they sprawled among each other and some could have done with deadheading, and a few weeds poked up among them, and there were even patches that seemed to have been let go wild.

They came to a sheep, cunningly tethered so that it could nibble the grass on the path without getting into the beds. Faheel patted it as they passed.

“My garden has become rather more than I can now manage,” he said, pausing to wipe greenfly from a rose shoot with his thumb. “But I do what I can.”

His house, when they came to it, was like the garden, ordinary. Tilja had seen dozens just like it on the journey south, larger and better built than the hovels of the peasants, but very far from grand. A low white building with a vine-shaded terrace; small square windows with green shutters, mostly closed; large, curved, loose-looking orange red tiles; beyond it, the empty sea.

The door was covered with a bead hanging to keep out the flies. Inside was a low, tiled room, cool and dark, with a few coarse wooden cupboards and chests, a low table with two unlit lamps on it, and a pile of large cushions in one corner.

“You will be hungry and thirsty,” said Faheel, “and I may as well eat with you.”

Out of cupboards he fetched common pottery mugs and platters, dark bread, sheep cheese, oil, honey, fruits both dried and fresh, and a pitcher of water from a corner. Cross-legged on one of the cushions, Tilja told her story, pausing to collect her thoughts while she chewed or drank. Faheel, half lying on one elbow on the other side of the table, ate slowly and didn’t interrupt at all. When she finished he shook his head and sighed.

“Well,” he said, “you bring me both news I had long been hoping for and news I had long feared. I will explain later, but let me for the moment be sure about this. Apart from when your grandmother used the spoon to point the way, the only time any of you spoke my name, once you were in the Empire, was when your grandmother named me in Lananeth’s warded room?”

“Yes.”

“And you had not then met or seen this Ropemaker?”

“No.”

“You saw him only between the time when you were in the robbers’ cave and when he left you at the end of the road through the hills?”

“Yes. And we’d have spotted him at once if he’d been there— he looked so odd.”

Faheel took a cloth and carefully wiped his lips and beard.

“Still, I think you may be mistaken,” he said, rising. “We have work to do. You say it is not your mere presence that is destructive of magic? Your physical touch is needed?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Good. Then come with me. Bring the hair tie, and keep good hold of it.”

He led the way into the next room and with some difficulty, making Tilja even more aware of his great age, climbed a fixed ladder into the attic. This had one large window facing out over the sea, and was full of light. The light showed up the dust, covering everything in a fine, even layer, undisturbed for months, perhaps for years. Faheel stood and looked round while Tilja climbed up beside him. He shook his head, ruefully.

“Well, it is time,” he sighed. “You have been disappointed in me, I think, Tilja. I was not what you expected. As you see, I have had to lay my powers aside. The powers themselves are no less. They do not age. It is I myself, in the end, who am mortal. I could not afford to wear this body out any further, if I was to accomplish what I must before I go. I did not even dare use my powers to find out how long I must wait. Instead I withdrew to this island and nursed my strength, using little more than ordinary country magics to support my needs.

“But now, unmistakably, this is the moment. As I say, you bring me bad news as well as good. The whole of the next age is poised in the balance. So if you are not the one I have hoped for, then all is lost. Now, stand where you are, and do not move.”

He went to a shelf, opened a small black box and took out a ring. As he carried it between fingertip and thumbtip to the center of the room Tilja saw it clearly—a simple gold circle engraved to look like fine cord. When he stopped, the dust around his sandaled feet slid gently away and she saw that the floor was polished wood, dark green, inlaid with a pattern of red and black. Faheel stood exactly at the center of the pattern, with two twined serpents, one red, one black, ringing his feet.

He turned toward the window and bowed his head. Tilja could feel his concentration. With a slow, ritual movement he slid the ring onto the middle finger of his right hand, and Tilja sensed the pulse of magic around her, instant and immense, drawn from great distances into the silent room. It didn’t touch her, didn’t swirl round her in a storming chaos, but spiraled smoothly into the center where Faheel stood waiting to receive it. For a moment everything vanished in a blinding whiteness, then returned, changed.

The window was the same, with the same sea beyond it, but the room itself seemed larger, and the dust was gone, and every surface shone or glittered with jewels or glowed with intense color. It wasn’t, Tilja realized, that everything had been magically swept and dusted in that dazzling instant—no, the space between these four walls was now ageless, outside time. No dust would settle in this room, ever.

And in the middle of it stood a man wearing a dark blue robe of some rich fabric with a lacy golden collar sewn with seed pearls. His hair must once have been jet black but was now streaked with gray. He had his back to her, but his arms were raised as if in blessing, so that she could see a dozen great rings on his left hand, but on his right, on the middle finger, only a plain circle etched to look like fine cord. With a slow movement, like a dancer’s, he drew it off, then turned toward her.

She gasped.

“Fa—”

He stopped her with a gesture. She stared. She had seen but not felt the room shudder.

The eyes were Faheel’s, and the strong black beard was what Faheel’s might well have been when he was younger. Faheel’s wrinkled old face, too, could have become what it was from a face with this shape and these features. Except that these all belonged to a different order of being, not human, ageless, living stone. Like Silena on the walls of Talagh.

He fetched the box from the shelf, put the ring in it and dropped it into a pocket.

“Yes,” he said. “I am the one you would have named. You should not have been able even to begin to do so in this place. Now, first, I will see to your friends, so that you do not distract yourself with worrying for them.”

He closed his eyes briefly. His lips moved.

“Good,” he said. “They sleep in the room below. Nothing can harm them under this roof. Now, look at your hair tie. You see the gold hair? Tease it out.”

Tilja peered at the little object and spotted a golden glimmer among the interwoven colored threads. What Faheel asked looked impossible without unraveling the whole tie, but she took one of her hairpins and picked at a strand. A loop of gold hair freed itself, and when she pulled with her fingers the whole strand slid smoothly loose.

“Remarkable,” said Faheel. “The magic that bound that in place was far more than a village charm. Now give me the tie and bring the hair to the table. . . . Wait.”

The table seemed to be made from a single block of polished black marble, an ornate stem supporting a round top, smooth as a mirror, so that Tilja could see the brightly decorated ceiling reflected in its dark depths. As Faheel leaned over the table the reflections faded and the darkness seemed to become bottomless, until up from those depths there floated a curious irregular shape. At first Tilja couldn’t make out what it was, but when it reached the surface it became a delicate inlay of colored marbles, making a map with rivers and roads and mountains, and minuscule pictures of cities, and in a blink she realized it was a map of the Empire, from Goloroth in the far south to the tremendous mountains in the north. Yes, and there, ringed in between the forest and the snow peaks, was the Valley. Screwing her eyes up, she even persuaded herself that she could see a tiny dot close in against the forest edge. She pointed at it, careful not to touch the magical surface.

“That’s where I live,” she whispered. “That’s home!”

The map changed. The pictured mountains and trees grew larger and moved apart. The trees reached the edge of the map and the mountains disappeared on the other side, and the dot itself was more than a dot, growing and still growing, until she could see Woodbourne with its fields around it, and Ma and Da side by side hoeing beans in the Home Field and Anja trying to coax an escaped cockerel back into the safety of the run. She stared until her eyes were too misty to see and she had to wipe them with the end of her head scarf. When she looked again the table once more showed the map of the Empire.

“Now,” said Faheel, “without touching the table lay the hair somewhere on the map.”

Tilja chose an empty-looking area northeast of Goloroth. The hair, when she dropped it, curled itself together into a neat spiral, as if it had been trying to regain the shape it had held in the hair tie, but then lay still.

“A curious color,” said Faheel. “I have seen nothing like it. Have you, Tilja?”

She peered. A single hair doesn’t usually declare its full color. You need at least a ringlet for that. But this one fine strand seemed to shine not only with the reflected brightness of the room, but with an inner fire of its own, shining through the gold. Yes, indeed strange, but . . .

“The unicorn!” she whispered. “And the dog! When we landed from the raft! They shone like that! And the lion at Goloroth! I didn’t see its color, but the way its fur sparkled in the moonlight . . . and that means the cat—the one that helped me on the walls of Talagh . . . do you think the donkey . . . when Silena came to the way station? She said something about it not being only my doing.”

Faheel nodded, as if she had confirmed something he’d already guessed.

He stretched his hand for a moment above the map, and it began to move once more, enlarging itself at the same time, flowing away off the edges of the table, but mainly toward the south, so that the coil of hair appeared to float rapidly north over it, straight as a rule, with the Great River and the Grand Trunk Road streaming past to the west, then across the river where it curved away east at Ramram, and on, north between road and river, all the way Tilja and the others had tramped those ninety-three days, to Talagh itself, at first no larger than a drin coin, but growing and growing until it filled the tabletop and then stilled, with the coil of hair floating over the forecourt of the pinnacled palace at the center of the city.

Faheel grunted, as if with mild surprise, and picked up the hair, wound it round the hair tie and put them into a small purse. The map started to grow again, until it showed only the palace. Minuscule people began to appear, as they had at Woodbourne, but stopped growing before Tilja could make out more than that they were human figures arranged in a pattern of rectangles. Other figures ringed the courtyard. A parade of soldiers, with spectators, she guessed, the sort of thing that Emperors did in courtyards. Faheel grunted again.

“We can come no closer,” he said quietly. “The place is well warded. I could overcome the wards, of course, but at more cost than I can afford. This will take thought. . . .”

As he turned away from the table the map vanished. For some while he stood at the window, gazing out over the sea. He sighed and returned to the table. He took the box from his pocket, removed the ring and placed it on the gleaming surface, then stood back.

“Hold your finger above the ring,” he said. “Do you feel anything? Move closer. Stop as soon as you feel anything. Closer. Still nothing? Touch it and withdraw. . . . Still nothing? Touch it again and hold your finger there. . . . Pick it up. . . . Put it in your palm and close your fingers round it. . . .”

“Oh, I can feel something now,” she said. “It isn’t the usual sort of feeling I get when I touch something magical. It’s a sort of hum. Like a noise when it gets so deep that you can’t hear it anymore, but you still know it’s there. It’s as if everything else was humming with the ring. Except me.”

Faheel spread his hands and held them a little apart on either side of Tilja’s clenched fist.

“Astonishing,” he said. “I sense nothing at all of its presence. I do not know how you do this—it is something I have never before encountered. Give it back to me now. Thank you.”

Tilja put the ring into his cupped hand, where he weighed it for a moment or two, then put it away and sighed.

“Well, we must take the risk,” he said. “The thing that you have come for will have to wait. My problem is this. I would prefer not to make use of a power I do not understand, but I have lived too far beyond my time, and I cannot hold back my death much longer. Before I die, I must destroy the power of the Watchers. I brought them into being in the first place, at the Emperor’s behest, to help me control the chaos of magic flooding through the Empire, but my cure turned out in the end to be worse than the disease. So now I must undo what I did.

“But I cannot afford to do that until I have passed the ring to a new keeper, or chaos will come again. Twice over the years I have chosen one. Both became Watchers, and both then failed me, corrupted by their own power. Now you come with news of another, this Ropemaker. From things you have told me, and from the single hair you brought me, I believe that he has great natural powers, so far uncorrupted. But what the map showed us tells us that he is at this moment present at a grand parade in the courtyard of the Emperor’s Palace, and this almost certainly means that he has been chosen to take Dorn’s place as a Watcher, and will be installed in the course of the ceremony. Then it will be too late for me to pass the ring on to him.”

“That’s the bad news, I suppose,” said Tilja. “You said I’d brought you bad news as well as good. . . . Oh, no, that was before you’d used your map to find where the Ropemaker was, so you didn’t know then.”

“No, that is not what I meant,” said Faheel. “It is in fact part of the good news. It means that everything is coming together to my advantage. Many of the Watchers will be present at the ceremony, and not in their towers, so they will be more vulnerable to the attack I have long prepared. The Ropemaker will also be there, so when I have done I will be able to give him the ring and go, for my task will be over.

“The bad news . . . no, I have no time now, and if all goes well it will no longer be my problem. What matters now is that I must go instantly to Talagh. I do not dare wait, or the chance will be lost. The Ropemaker will be lost. He is in far more danger than he can understand. But there is a difficulty. I could go to Talagh between a breath and a breath, but I must take the ring for what I may have to do, past the warded walls of Goloroth, and stand, unnoticed, with twenty Watchers around me, whose task it is to detect the existence of such things as the ring in the presence of the Emperor.

“I still have power to do all this, but that would leave me no strength for what else I have to do. Moreover, if I were detected and it came to a magical battle, the power I would need to defeat twenty Watchers would destroy me also. You understand?”

“I think so. Would it help if I came with you and held the ring? I got Axtrig past the wards, and I think I’m stronger now.”

“That is what I was about to suggest, but there is a further difficulty. Because you are what you are I cannot take you instantaneously to Talagh, as I could take myself. You must be carried there, physically, mile by mile, minute by minute. By the swiftest means I can devise this will take too long. So what I must do is ask the ring to hold all time still for everything but you and your immediate surroundings while you are carried to Talagh. There will be a sort of bubble of moving time inside an unmoving universe. The bubble will be centered on you. Our journey will seem to us to take several hours, but when we reach the palace at Talagh the parading soldiers will not have moved a step. Asking the ring to do this will take strength from me, but it is in the nature of the ring, once asked, to deal directly with time of its own un-mediated power, and I will then be able to rest while we are carried to Talagh. Will you do this?”

Tilja was too astonished and overawed to do more than nod her head. Faheel smiled at her.

“Good,” he said. “Now you had better go back downstairs while I do what I have to. Your friends are there. Do not try to wake them.”

Tilja climbed down the ladder and found Meena, Alnor and Tahl each asleep on a separate pile of cushions, but still in the exact attitudes in which they had lain when she had last seen them, far below her, from halfway up the cliff. All three faces had the same look, Meena not sharp and touchy, Alnor not proud and angry, Tahl not eager and inquisitive, but all of them full of deep, quiet content. Tilja smiled at them and went and leaned on the windowsill, gazing out over the garden and the sea to where she guessed the Empire must lie.

Her mind was full of a jumble of thoughts about the Ropemaker. They didn’t seem quite to fit together, in the same way that the Ropemaker’s own gawky body didn’t . . . and the animals he’d been didn’t either, if Faheel was right, the lion, the donkey perhaps, the cat on the walls of Talagh, the dog by the river, the unicorn on the crag, guarding them, helping them all the way south. . . .

Except for the unicorn. The unicorn was one of the things that didn’t fit. It had been different, menacing, dangerous, almost an enemy, nothing like the Ropemaker himself, strange but friendly, not frightening at all—until she remembered what Tahl had said about the bit of rope that had wrapped itself round Calico’s legs in the pine forest . . . and . . .

And—she really didn’t want to think about this—Ma’s dream. It touched me with its horn. What else could she have been talking about . . . ?

Tilja was jolted out of her wonderings by the appearance of the bird. A little to her right, beyond the nearest flower bed, was a small meadow cropped by a pair of sheep, each tethered to a single peg so that they mowed a series of circles. The bird appeared in what must have been one of yesterday’s circles. At one moment there was just a patch of short-cropped grass; the next it was filled by an enormous brown bird, far larger than the elephants Tilja had sometimes seen hauling loads of timber on the journey south. It had a fiery red crest and a black, hooked beak, which looked as if it had been designed for tearing at meat, but the two sheep merely glanced up at it and went back to grazing. The bird put up an immense, taloned foot and started to scratch itself under the chin, like a farmyard hen. A moment later a large, cushioned litter appeared on the grass beside it. There were poles at each corner with a striped canopy stretched between them and what looked like a sort of carrying handle lying loose on the cloth.

Before the bird had finished scratching, time stopped. Tilja both saw and heard it happen. The bird stuck, motionless, with its claw against its chin and a look of idiot absorption on its face. The sheep stuck with their mouths against the turf. The gulls wheeling above the cliffs stuck in midglide on slanting wings. All over the garden the birdsong stilled in an instant, and in the same instant the endless faint rustle of leaves and hush and shush of waves against the cliffs became a silence so intense that Tilja could hear not only her own breath but, at last, that of the three sleepers in the room.

She frowned. Time ought to have stopped for them. They shouldn’t still be breathing. Then wood creaked on wood behind her and she turned and saw Faheel, now back in the shape of an old man, climbing shakily down the ladder.

“Ready?” he said. “We will need food and drink, if you will carry the basket.”

With trembling hands he fetched stores out of a cupboard and she stowed them neatly away.

“Why hasn’t time stopped in here?” she asked.

“Because you are here. Your friends will stop breathing as soon as you are out of the room, and when you are close to the roc it will wake and carry us to Talagh. Now, if you will let me lean on your shoulder . . . I shall be stronger after a rest.”

As they passed the nearer sheep it began grazing again as if nothing had happened. A few paces further on, the bird woke and went on with its scratching. When they reached the litter Tilja put the basket down and helped Faheel settle onto the cushions, where he lay back with his eyes closed while she found a place for the basket and made herself comfortable at the other end. The bird—a roc he had called it—seemed to know what was expected of it. It rose and settled its feathers into place with a thunderous rattle, so huge, standing, that that she could see only its scaly, yellow lower legs beneath the canopy of the litter, and then only one as it reached out with the other to grasp the handle above the canopy. With a deep thud of its enormous wings it drove itself into the air.

The litter lurched across the grass, almost spilling the passengers before the flight had begun, then swung wildly forward and round as they rushed into the air. Tilja grabbed one of the corner posts and clung to it. Faheel spread his arms wide but stayed where he was, still with his eyes shut. By the time their flight steadied they were already far into the air, and Faheel’s island was dwindling below and behind them. The spume against its rocks neither rose nor fell, but stayed poised in the instant when time had stopped for it.

And still they rose, and the air shrieked past them, fiercer than any winter gale. Now Tilja could see a change in the northern horizon, a darker, grayer, fuzzier line than the blue curve of ocean to east and west, and knew she was looking at the shore of the Empire. The sky was mottled with small clouds that came nearer and nearer as the roc continued to climb. The steady pulse of its wings boomed in Tilja’s ears like strokes upon a monstrous gong. When she tried to shut the sound out with her fingers the bones of her body still rang with it.

Faheel’s eyes were open, looking at her. She saw him beckon and crawled forward against the clawing wind. He put a hand into the fold of his overshirt and drew out the black box in which he kept the ring. Careful not to touch his flesh with hers, she put her ear close to his mouth so that she could hear what he was saying above the wind-shriek and the thud of the wings.

“We go high. It will be cold. Cover me, and then yourself. But first, take this and put it in safety. I must sleep.”

So Tilja took the box and stowed it in the bottom of the basket, and wedged that well with cushions. Then she chose furs and rugs from a pile and spread them over Faheel, and did the same for herself, but sat up for a while and watched the Empire draw nearer. By the time they crossed the coastline they were above the clouds. Between them, over to their left, she could see the innumerable channels of the Great River delta, and so was just able to make out Goloroth, but only its largest details, the wall, the big sheds, and the launching pier. As it slid away behind them she realized how fast they must be going.

It grew colder, and her eyes were watering too much to see, so she coiled herself down into her bedding and pulled a cushion over her head to muffle both wing thunder and wind wail, and closed her eyes. She didn’t expect to sleep, but lay for a while wondering at the strangeness of what was happening—far stranger, she thought, than anything else in her adventure, from the unicorns in the forest to the roc in Faheel’s paddock, stranger even than her gradual discovery of the power that lay in her own lack of any magical power—this business with time. Suppose in the wild hurtle of the start of their flight she had fallen out of the litter, but landed unhurt, what would have happened? Would the roc have stuck in its flight between wing beat and wing beat? Or would Faheel have found the strength to wear his ring again? And if neither of them had been able to do that, what then? Would she have been stuck, moving and breathing, in a world forever still?

She need not have been alone. She could have gone to Faheel’s lower room and Meena and the others would have started to breathe again and she could have waited for them to wake, but they would have needed to stay in her presence in order not to be stilled once more. They could have walked in Faheel’s garden and picked grapes from his vines and eaten them, but fresh grapes would not ripen, ever, unless she stayed near enough to draw them back into time. . . .

But of course, Tahl would have worked out a way of getting her back up to the roc.

Smiling at the thought, she fell asleep and dreamed of Woodbourne in a winter storm, with a gale shrieking through the thatch and a strange, deep booming in the chimney.

She woke, and automatically looked to see how far the sun had sunk west, so that she might guess how long she’d slept. It hadn’t, of course, moved. The tearing wind was no less, so she constructed a sort of tunnel from which she could spy out eastward while still lying in shelter. Almost at once a soaring vulture swung past, woke into time, saw the roc, jerked itself into a spasm of escape, and stilled again, motionless wings wrenching at the motionless air.

Most of what slid by below was too far off for Tilja to see any sign of its changelessness, but once they skirted a mountain range over which a thunderstorm was raging. Time must have stopped in the instant of a lightning stroke, which stood there, a blazing vein of light, branching into twenty side veins between the dark sagging cloud layer and the darker crags below. She had to screw up her eyes against its brightness and even so couldn’t look at it for long.

After a little she eased herself out of her nest and crawled forward to see how Faheel was doing. He was awake, and looked rested. She fetched him bread and fruit and cheese and a little flask of wine, and then crawled back, found what she wanted for herself and took it in under the rugs and nibbled peacefully. The litter was very comfortable, so when she’d had enough she let the weariness of all those days of travel overcome her, and slept again, and was only woken by the mild bump of landing, and the stilling of the sounds of flight. She looked out and saw that they were in the cleared space before the gates of Talagh.