The Ropemaker

13

The Common Way

Tilja woke in the same unchanging daylight, as the roc, with three last booming flaps, settled in front of Faheel’s house and folded its wings. Almost the whole way from Talagh she had slept too deep for dreams, the same ocean-deep sleep she had slept on the raft on the way to the island. Once again, without her realizing, her strength had been drained from her by her own power to channel and control magic, this time the enormous magic of the ring.

Her right arm was numb with Faheel’s weight. He was still asleep, but the movement of his breath seemed steadier and stronger. She hesitated whether to leave him. She felt it must be better for him to keep breathing the magical air of the island, but if she went more than a few paces from him his time would stop, and even his breath and his heartbeat would be stilled until she returned, or time resumed its course.

When? A day and a night, he had said. And then . . .

The power of the Watchers was broken, but there was still an enemy, whoever or whatever it was that had sent the darkness to the tower. Had one or more of the Watchers, instead of fleeing into hiding, returned and taken Faheel by surprise, and almost destroyed him in the moment of his triumph? Or was it someone or something else? Tilja had no idea, but she was sure of one thing—such an enemy would not give up. As soon as the ring withdrew its influence, he, or it, would come to the island.

A day and a night. How long had their two flights taken, to Talagh and back, since the ring had cast its spell? She had slept both ways and could only guess. It was a long way. The roc was a magical creature, but it had flown in real time, pounding the real air with its huge wings. There couldn’t be much of that day and night remaining before the sun started to move again.

The roc by now was standing beside the litter, preening the thick-laid golden feathers just above its scaly leg, but as soon as Tilja started to ease free of Faheel and straightened the rugs over him it looked up, with an eager gleam in its eye.

“I don’t know if it will work for me,” she said, and using the ends of her scarf as gloves, pulled out Faheel’s pouch. It felt completely empty, but when, awkwardly, she managed to undo the tie and tilted it toward her other palm, out fell a handful of jewels. They were a wonderful deep wine red, more beautiful than any that the women had worn in the tower from which she and Faheel had watched the parade. She tipped half of them back into the purse and offered the rest to the roc, which pecked them delicately off the scarf, swallowed them one by one, and then stared pointedly at the purse.

“In a minute,” she said. “When you’ve carried the litter to the door, please.”

The roc tilted its head, puzzled. Tilja reached up and grasped the loop of the carrying harness, which was dangling over the edge of the canopy. When she held it out the roc took it obediently in its beak and straightened up, so that the litter rose clear of the grass. Steadying it with one hand, she led the way to the door of the house and swung it round so that the end was in the doorway, where the roc lowered it to the ground. The roc must have been a lot brighter than it looked, because when Tilja released the catches that fastened the canopy poles and started trying to haul the litter into the house it bowed its head and carefully butted it in through the door.

“Good bird,” said Tilja, as if she’d been talking to a dog. She gave the roc the rest of the rubies and it turned and settled down, blocking the doorway. But instead of going to sleep it just sat there gazing fixedly north toward the Empire.

Comforted by that powerful presence she moved further into the room and found Meena, Alnor and Tahl sleeping as she had left them. Then, realizing how hungry she was, she got out a meal for herself and for Faheel when he woke. Everything in the storage bins seemed fresh, and the bread still smelled of the oven. From time to time she glanced out of the window at a swirl of gulls that had been frozen into stillness by the power of the ring, but she was washing her plate and mug when she heard their first cries, startlingly loud and sudden in the enormous silence. So the day and the night were over.

The sound seemed to wake Faheel. He stirred and opened his eyes for a moment, then closed them. His old face seemed more peaceful even than it had looked in sleep.

“Tilja?” he whispered.

“I’m here. I got a soldier to carry you out of the city and the roc brought us home. I’ve still got your ring.”

“Well done.”

He spoke the words so quietly that Tilja could barely hear them. She thought he had gone back to sleep but then he whispered again. A question. She didn’t catch the words but guessed his meaning.

“The roc’s guarding the door,” she said. “But . . . whatever it was happened at the end . . . that darkness . . .”

He didn’t answer for a while, but then spoke more firmly.

“I will tell you what happened. You remember, before we went to Talagh, I told you that you had brought me both good news and bad?”

“Yes, but you didn’t have time to tell me that bad news.”

“It lay in your description of the contest on the walls after your grandmother had spoken my name and the spoon had moved. The magician who came from the outer city . . .”

“Zara told us he was very powerful—she’s the Lord Kzuva’s magician. She said that in the end it took four Watchers to drive him off. And then they were all trying to find him.”

“They did not succeed. He was there, in that darkness. He came for the ring, and now that he has woken he will try to come again. If he did so, not even the roc could hold him back. Nor could I, as I am now. You yourself might withstand him—I do not know. But I have even more powerful friends, who will protect us until I have said my farewells to them, and for a little while longer. By nightfall I shall be gone, and so will you and your friends. I will rest now, and then eat. And then we must work. I will tell you more later.”

“Can we wake my friends up?”

“Not yet. But before we go. Now, while I rest, go to the upstairs room, put the box with the ring back on the shelf from which I took it and open the silver box beside it. Take out the jewel it contains and give that to the roc, with my blessing and my thanks.”

Tilja did as she was told. The room at the top of the ladder was as she had first seen it. She could tell exactly where the ring box belonged by the circular patch in the dust on the shelf. The jewel in the silver box was an egg-shaped ruby as big as her two clenched fists. It was warm to the touch, and there was something inside it that seemed to be moving in sudden little spasms that changed the way the light shone into it. As she carried it down the ladder she could sense, faintly against her palm, the same tiny movements. She had felt something like that so often at Woodbourne that she understood at once what the jewel must be. She forgot all about the enemy who might come, all about Faheel, all about Meena and Alnor and Tahl and her own adventures. For the moment this mattered more than anything else in the world.

She edged out past the roc, laid the jewel between the immense yellow, black-taloned feet, and stood back and waited. The ruby doubled in size, and doubled again, and again. With a bubbling, crooning sound far down its throat, the roc bowed its head and pecked at the glowing surface, precisely but firmly, studying the movements inside the jewel each time before it pecked again. At the seventh peck the jewel cracked. The thing inside gave a convulsive heave, the ruby fell apart and the fledgling roc struggled to its feet with shreds of crimson yolk sac patterning its fluffy golden feathers. It cheeped, just like any new-hatched chick at Woodbourne.

The roc crooned over it, delicately picked the yolk sac away, and then lifted the chick, twisted its own head round and settled it into the hollow between its shoulders. It turned back and stared at Tilja. There was a question in its eyes.

“Faheel sends you his blessing and his thanks, and says you can go,” she said. “And I’d like to say thank you too.”

Perhaps it understood her tone, for it bent its huge head and nibbled gently at her ear, and in unthinking response she reached up and teased her fingers among the soft plumage beneath its neck.

Her hand froze. This great magical animal, and she, Tilja . . .

But no, nothing had happened, no flow or pulse of power out of that fullness into her emptiness. The roc was different. Its magic was of another kind. She must ask Faheel.

It raised its head and she stood aside to let it pass. It walked a few paces, glanced back at her, then hurled itself into the air. Two small golden feathers came floating down as the wings pounded out their rhythm and it sped away. Tilja picked them up and went back indoors.

Faheel was up and sitting by the table, sipping the orange juice she had found in his store cupboard. He had peeled an apple and cut a slice of bread and was eating slowly.

“Yes, you are right,” he said when she asked him about the roc. “There are different kinds of magic. Almost all human magic is made magic, made like a clay pot or a wooden chair. The wood and the clay are not chair and pot until the carpenter and the potter make them so. The air is full of wild magic, gusting around, so that a magician can gather it into himself or herself and give it shape and purpose. That is made magic. Your power appears to be to unmake that making. It is as if you could put your hand on a chair and return it to the tree from which it was shaped. The roc is not of that kind. It is natural magic, magical of its own nature. If you put your hand on a tree it would not change. It is itself already.”

“You made the roc do what you wanted.”

“No, I asked it. It owed me a favor. Many great magicians would risk everything they have won to possess the egg of a roc, but as well as there being two kinds of magic there are two kinds of magician. Once, like all who have held the ring, I was of the first sort, using made magic. But the ring is of both sorts, magic both made and natural. That is why it is so powerful. From it I learned to be of the second sort, and thus made friends with the creatures of natural magic, and was given new powers by them. So it was safe for the roc to give her egg into my keeping until it was due to hatch.”

“Look, I’ve got two of its feathers.”

“Keep them well hidden, or they will betray you. Tie them to your arm, as you did with the spoon. They have power—and purpose, for all I know.”

“This island—what makes it so peaceful—is that natural magic? Is that why I could feel it?”

“Yes, it is inherent in the island. It was here before I came and will remain when I am gone. I could live here not because I have magical powers, but because I have the friendship of the island.”

“Are unicorns natural magic too?”

“Indeed, yes. That was what finally persuaded me that I must prevent your friend the Ropemaker from becoming a Watcher. To transform oneself into an animal is not very difficult, though it has its perils. But to transform oneself into a magical animal, and even more to return to one’s human form, requires immense power and is still very dangerous. Even when I had all my strength I would never have tried it except for the greatest cause. But he did. He cannot have understood what he was risking. That was why my hope was that his powers were both untaught and uncorrupted, and why part of my reason for going to Talagh was to give him the ring. I failed. So now I must ask you to take it to him. Will you do that?”

Tilja stared at him. The Ropemaker?

“I . . . I’m not sure he is my friend,” she whispered. “He . . . he almost killed my mother, if he was the unicorn.”

“Yes. I told you it was dangerous to transform oneself into a magical animal. That is the main danger. One may take on too much of the nature of that animal. A unicorn such as you saw would not have ordinary human sympathies. But remember, your mother went to sing to the cedars again, and he did not try to stop her.”

“I . . . I’ll have to talk to the others when they wake up,” she said.

He shook his head.

“I’m afraid not,” he said. “If you do, the knowledge will be in their minds, unprotected. While the ring is in its box and the box is against your flesh, and you alone know that, not even the man we fear will find it. If your friends know, then he may well be able to use that knowledge. I think I know who this man is, Tilja. Like myself, long ago, he was one of those who tried to take possession of the ring while Asarta still held it. He was much older than I was, and I was certain that he was dead, but somehow he is not. Or perhaps he is, but . . . No, that does not bear thinking about. Tilja, I tell you, he must not have the ring. With it he could live forever. I dare not let you tell your companions.”

“But . . . but if I’ve got to go looking for the Ropemaker . . . I’ll have to tell them what’s been happening.”

“Yes, you can tell them that, apart from what has happened to the ring. I will give them reason for looking for the Ropemaker themselves, though I shall not tell them that is what they will be doing. No doubt he took the shape of a lion and fled from the palace because he recognized that our enemy was too powerful for him. He now knows of the ring’s existence, and of your connection with it. He tracked you on your journey south, so he will know which way you will return. All he need do is watch the road. He will choose a place you must pass and be waiting for you there. That is our best hope. It is not perfect—I had not planned for this, but I have neither power nor time to make other arrangements.”

“But suppose he doesn’t find us . . .”

Faheel felt in his pocket and fished out the little purse into which he had put the hair tie, took it and unwound the Ropemaker’s hair from it, and gave them both to Tilja.

“Then I’m afraid you must risk sending for him,” he said. “Wind the hair round the roc feathers before you fasten them to your arm. When the time comes, lay the hair down on a firm surface, take the ring out of its box and put it beside the hair. That is all, and it need only be for a moment. But wait until the last possible moment before you do this. The Ropemaker will be compelled to come. If our enemy is on the watch he will do so too, but until that moment, provided that no one but you knows that you have the ring, I think you have nothing to fear from him. He will not believe that I have not taken it with me.

“Now we must work, or we will not be gone by nightfall. First, will you go out into the garden and pick a bunch of grapes and bring it to me? You will find a sharp knife in one of the baskets by the door. If you want grapes for yourself, take them from another bunch. The small dark ones to the left of the central path are best at this season.”

Tilja went out into the garden in a daze, trying to understand what Faheel had told her. She ought to have been afraid—unable to think for fear—but she wasn’t. She guessed this was something to do with the island. Fear would come later, perhaps. But now— perhaps it was the island again that caused this, trying to help her—in her mind’s eye she saw a great brass balance, like the cunning wooden scales Ma used to measure ingredients when she was baking. There was a bowl at either end of a bar. The bar tilted at the center, one way or the other, depending on which bowl held more weight. But the bowls Tilja saw in her mind weren’t polished wood, like Ma’s. Each of them was half of the world. A small figure stood beside each bowl, waiting for the bar to tilt his way. One of them Tilja couldn’t see clearly. He was darkness in the shape of a man. The unknown magician, the enemy. His bowl was full of the same darkness. The other one was the Ropemaker, unmistakable, that gawky figure, topped by the monstrous headdress. There was nothing to tell her what was in the Ropemaker’s bowl, but whatever it was it had to be better than the darkness.

At the center of the bar was a small golden ant. The bar hid it from the two magicians. As she watched, the ant started to crawl along the beam toward the Ropemaker’s end, and she realized that when it reached the bowl its tiny weight would be just enough to tilt the balance that way—provided the other magician didn’t realize what was happening, and reach out with a magical hand, pick up the ant, and drop it into his own bowl. Then the darkness it held would spill out and smother everything.

The ant, she realized, was herself, Tilja.

When the vision cleared she found herself standing in front of the vines Faheel had told her to look for. She cut herself a small cluster to try. They had an intense, sweet, wild taste that seemed to linger in her mouth long after she’d swallowed. She chose the best bunch she could see and carried it back to the house. Faheel was just finishing his meal.

“Good,” he said picking up a small green purse from his pocket. “First, give this to one of the others when they wake—it is no use in your hands. It is just a convenient toy. Open it, and you will find it holds two gold coins. Take one out and close it, and when you open it next day you will find it again holds two gold coins, and you may again take one out. But take both out in one day and the magic is gone, and it will thenceforth be just an empty purse.

“Now I may need you to help me up the ladder to my room. Bring the grapes with you, but do not come through the trapdoor. Hand them through to me and I will close it. Then take two of the baskets, fill one with all the roses you can find and the other with whatever fruits you and your friends will need for the start of your journey home. Do not overburden yourself. There is no magic in the garden, so its fruits last no longer than those in any other garden. When you hear a bell come indoors. Stay in this room with your friends so that what is about to happen will cause them no harm. Fill another basket with stores for your journey. When your friends wake, you and the boy must come up the ladder and find me.”

“I’m sorry. Just one more thing . . . when my friends wake up . . . we came here to ask you . . . Oh, I see. That’s going to be their reason for looking for the Ropemaker.”

He smiled.

“Yes, of course,” he said. “There is more to the magic that protects your Valley than you imagine. While Asarta held the ring, I and others did our best to wrest it from her, and she had to use some of her strength to keep it from us. When my turn came, I decided to do as your two ancestors asked me to, and by doing so to seal all knowledge of the ring away in your Valley. I then sought out everyone who knew of the ring and either took the memory of it from their minds, or if they resisted, destroyed them, all but the one I have told you about. Tell the Ropemaker this when you give him the ring, and he will see the use of it and do the same for you. But when your friends wake and ask me . . . Wait. You will see. Now I must go.”

As it turned out he climbed the ladder without help, though with several pauses for rest. Tilja passed the grapes up to him and took the weight of the trapdoor as he lowered it into place, then wandered round the garden filling the baskets. She did the roses first. It wasn’t a sad task, though Faheel had talked of making an ending and she guessed that they might be part of that ending. He had been so calm about it, so ready and accepting, that she was sure of its rightness. There might have been no magic in the garden, but the roses by their own nature were magic enough, wonderfully shaped and colored and, as the basket filled, scenting the air around her with a richness so intense that it should have been cloying, but wasn’t.

That done, she chose her fruit carefully, grapes, peaches, nectarines and apricots, and a spicy yellow berry she had never seen before. She didn’t think it could be poisonous if it grew in such a garden. She also found a row of carrots and pulled a good bunch. The bell rang just as she was finishing and she went back indoors. None of her three companions seemed to have stirred.

While she was choosing her stores the room darkened, as if in a thunderstorm, though the sun had been only halfway down a cloudless sky when she had left the garden. Through the window she could see nothing but swirling colored mist, brownish but flecked with purple shapes that seemed to be made of a solider kind of mist and flickered as they swept by. She saw the walls of the house judder, though the floor on which she stood stayed steady. A moment later a booming voice called from outside and Faheel’s voice, loud and firm, answered from above with a name and a greeting. Other voices followed, not human or animal, the voices of mountains, perhaps, of forests and of stars. Once it sounded as if the whole sea were singing. The mist came and went outside the window. Sometimes it was dark night, with shimmerings and bolts of brilliance, sometimes day so bright and shadowless that there might have been several suns in the sky. All these beings, forces, spirits, or whatever else they might be, Faheel welcomed into his attic room by name. When they were gathered the window cleared and there was silence.

Tilja stood and waited. She could sense around her a continuous flow of movement through it, into and out of the room above her, as though Faheel’s house had become a great fire in a dark forest, a fire from which flames and sparks and lit smoke swirled endlessly upward, but not in random eddies—in shapes, shapes that had meaning, shapes that somehow held the balance of the world in place. Faheel was at the heart of the uprush, giving back to his friends the powers they had loaned him, as they blazed round him. And so was she too, Tilja. For the powers weren’t only here to say farewell to Faheel. They had come to welcome her. It was as if her gift had hidden her from them, and now they could rejoice in her finding. Though she didn’t yet know what use they had for her, she felt that there was such a use, and that one day she would learn it. For the first time since she had become aware of her strange gift she felt that she wasn’t having to use it to fight against the forces around her, but to accept them, just as they were accepting her, and accept that they and she were part of something larger, all of which belonged together and needed all its parts, balancing each other, to make it what it was.

Time had no meaning, but it must have continued to move because there was a change, and she knew that the rite was ending. The visitors gathered themselves into the attic room, and then one by one withdrew, calling their farewells as they left. When the last had gone the windows cleared and the garden lay outside, the sunlight already golden with evening, and the shadows long across the grass.

“You there, girl?”

“Meena!”

Tilja swung round. Meena had struggled up onto her elbow and was staring round the room, for once too astonished to pretend to be angry, or to push Tilja away when she rushed to hug her.

“Expecting someone else, were you?” she said. “Where’s this, then?”

“Faheel’s house. On his island.”

“Be careful how you say his name,” Alnor said sharply.

“I don’t think it matters anymore,” said Tilja. “He said it wasn’t safe for you to wake up because there was going to be too much magic here, but it’s all right now. It’s almost all gone.”

“Gone! I hope you told him what we came for before he let that happen.”

“Yes, but I don’t know . . . there’s been other things going on. Now he wants me and Tahl to go up and help him down the ladder. Then we’re going home. Are you awake, Tahl?”

“Sort of,” said Tahl’s voice, sounding much more dazed than Meena’s. “We were on the raft, and then . . . I’ve been talking to the ice dragon. It told me all sorts of stuff. Funny. It didn’t feel like a dream. It doesn’t come from this world, you know. There’s a world made of ice somewhere else in the sky . . .”

“Its name is Manzal,” said Alnor. “I too spoke with the ice dragon. With my blind eyes I saw his face, that I had never hoped to see.”

“And there’s a Queen of the Unicorns,” said Meena. “I never knew that! Maybe I’ll tell you someday. For now, I just want to think about it. . . . Well, girl, don’t just stand there! Tell us what’s going on.”

“I don’t think there’s time,” said Tilja. “We’ve got to get away from the island by nightfall, Faheel said, and it’s almost sunset now. Ready, Tahl?”

She led the way up the ladder and pushed the trapdoor open. When she poked her head through she saw that the attic was empty and bare. Faheel lay facedown at its center. She scrambled through and with Tahl’s help turned him gently over. His body seemed to weigh so little that she could almost have lifted it on her own. His lips moved. She bent her head to listen.

“Take me down,” he whispered. “Come back and fetch the things on the shelf.”

Tahl ran Tilja’s long head scarf under Faheel’s arms so that she could take some of his weight from above while he took most of it on his shoulders, and they eased Faheel down the ladder and made him comfortable on a pile of cushions. Tilja went back upstairs to find what he’d left on the shelf—the ring box and the bunch of grapes she’d brought in from the garden. The ring box had a cord attached, which she slid over her head, and then tucked the box down inside her blouse. She took the grapes and climbed down the ladder. This time, when she stepped off the last rung, the whole thing vanished, and the trapdoor too, leaving nothing but a plain, bare ceiling.

“It is over,” said Faheel, still speaking with effort. “Now we must go. First . . . First I must ask you to help me down to the shore. Once there, I will explain to you what you will need to do to return to your Valley.”

With Tilja and Tahl on each side of him carrying the two baskets of stores, and his arms around their shoulders, he led them slowly toward the western cliffs and down a series of steps to a sandy beach. Meena hobbled along behind, leaning on Alnor’s arm. In his other hand he carried the roses. The raft on which the four travelers had come from Goloroth floated in the shallows, and beside it a strange boat that seemed to be made out of seashell, with a broad stern and a high, curving prow. Faheel asked them to help him sit, and they lowered him onto the sand.

“Now,” he said, “listen carefully. I have given back all my powers . . . given them back to those who first loaned them to me, and should any enemy come I could not defend us. . . . But I still have friends, some of whom will tow me out westward into the current of the Great River, so that I may make my last journey by the common way, like my parents before me. . . . Others will take you back to the southern shore of the Empire. Once there . . . Tilja, you have the grapes from the shelf?”

“They’re in the basket.”

He nodded and straightened his back. Tilja sensed him gathering his last energies for what he now had to say.

“Set them apart and do not touch them until you are safely ashore tomorrow. Then Meena and Alnor must eat them, one at a time, turn and turn about. Eat nothing else until they are gone. But keep the stem carefully and take it with you. When you are safely home you must build a fire and burn it, to undo the magic the grapes did for you. This is most important. Fail to do it and your whole journey fails. Now we must go. Will you help me stand?”

“Is that all?” Meena burst in. “I’m sorry, sir, seeing how tired you are, but I can’t help asking. I mean, isn’t there anything else we’ve got to do? Here we’ve been sowing our barley field all these years, and trudging out winter after winter and singing to the cedars, and Alnor’s lot have been doing the same sort of thing up at Northbeck . . . and I’ve brought a loaf I baked from my field, and Alnor’s got a flask of water from his stream. . . .”

“Ah, yes,” murmured Faheel, smiling and shaking his head, as if he’d forgotten all about it. “Of course. Show me.”

With trembling fingers he broke a few crumbs from the loaf and ate them, and sipped from the flask.

“Honest bread,” he whispered. “Sweet mountain water. I bless them both, but that is all I can do. Asarta’s powers are still there, my friends. Somewhere on your journey you will find another to wake them. Or rather, he will find you—it would be dangerous for you to seek him out. . . .”

His voice trailed away in weakness. He closed his eyes, as if he were about to die where he lay. Meena clicked her tongue in frustration. Alnor was frowning and shaking his head. Part of Tilja felt like laughing aloud. The cunning old man, waiting till now, pretending he’d forgotten, making it seem a little thing. But even as she suppressed her smile it struck her that this was the start of something very uncomfortable. From now on, day after day after day, she would be keeping the secret of the ring from her friends. So far, they had all trusted each other, absolutely. But from now on, day after day after day, she was going to be lying to them.

Faheel’s lips moved.

“Now, if you will help me onto the raft . . . ,” he whispered.

“You’re not going in the boat?” said Meena in astonishment.

“That is for you. It is safe from Tilja’s touch. I go the common way.”

They lifted him to his feet and he raised his head and spoke rather more loudly, apparently calling to the empty sea.

“Friends, we are ready.”

By now the sun had touched the horizon, and the water stretched its reflected light into a rippling golden highway across a great reach of fiery ocean. Out of that brightness, just beyond the raft and the boat, rose two dark figures, man-shaped as far as Tilja, screwing up her eyes, could see, but twice the size of any human. They called a deep-voiced greeting to Faheel and then, in a flurry of foam, started to wrestle with something just below the surface. Having so often needed to back the unwilling Calico between the shafts of a cart, Tilja recognized at once what they were up to, and soon she could see at times the gleaming dark backs of the creatures they were struggling to harness to the boat and the raft.

When they were ready they backed off and waited with only their heads above the surface. Tahl and Tilja helped Faheel onto the raft, where he lay down.

“My roses,” he whispered.

All four of them stood round the raft with the wavelets lapping up to their knees and strewed the roses around him. He smiled and closed his eyes. He looked so peaceful that Tilja found herself weeping, though still not with sadness.

He beckoned, and she bent to catch his words.

“. . . the Ropemaker’s name . . . I broke his inner wards to call to him . . . Ramdatta . . .”