The Ropemaker

19

The Lake

Men get to ride, women have to walk, then?” said Meena, pretending to sulk about it. “Looks like it,” said the Ropemaker. “Start in the morning, sleep in a tree, home for supper tomorrow. Get yourselves an appetite for it.”

“What are you going to do?” asked Tilja.

“Have to think. Don’t like the look of any of this. Not my sort of thing. Stuck with it, though. This woman you told me about— said she’d help . . .”

“That’s right, Aileth,” said Meena.

“Have a word with her, for a start. Going to take a while . . .”

He fell silent, gloomily rubbing his long chin.

“Suppose I came back one day—” Tilja began, hesitantly.

“You want to?” he interrupted.

“I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about it. I want to go and stay with Meena for a bit, but . . .”

“Go on—say it,” said Meena brutally. “I’m not going to last forever in that old carcass.”

She managed somehow to speak in the exact fierce tone she might have used before she had eaten Faheel’s grapes. It sounded appalling coming from those young lips. Tilja put her arm round her and hugged her and held her close, more for her own comfort than for Meena’s. She could hardly speak.

“I’m going to stay with you, I promise,” she croaked.

“No, you’re not—not if you’re needed here, soon as you’re old enough. I’ve been watching you changing, Til, more than you realize, I daresay. It’s like he was saying about his magic when he started—it was what he was for. It’ll be a waste of you, having something like what you’ve got in the Valley, where there’s nothing for you to do with it. It’ll eat into your heart, knowing what you could be doing. Right, aren’t I—like it would be for you, mister, not being able to do your magic?”

Through her tears Tilja could see the lean face of the Ropemaker watching her. He nodded slowly.

“And you’d like her back, wouldn’t you?” Meena insisted. “She’d be a bit of use to you?”

He nodded again.

“Mind you, if you could do something about this leg of mine I’m going to have when I get home,” she suggested. “And if Alnor could see right . . .”

Oh, yes! Tilja thought. Why hadn’t she . . . but the Ropemaker was shaking his head sadly.

“Not up to it,” he said. “Like to help, but . . . mean messing around with time again. Don’t know enough, not yet. You two, you’re young now—don’t know how he did that—tweaked something, somehow, way beyond me. Be in the rope somewhere— daren’t touch it, not till it’s finished. Tricky, don’t you see?”

“I suppose so,” said Meena with a sigh. “Well, we’ll just have to make the most of what we’ve got, as usual. You’re leaving us, then.”

“Better. Stuff happening in the Pirrim Hills. Pines aren’t holding it—not since what you did at Lord Kzuva’s palace. Gets through, those three ladies are going to have their work cut out. Give ’em a hand, maybe. Got to start somewhere, eh? This bit’s under control—try and keep it that way, then move on. Just do a spot of hunting for you first, right. Back soon.”

With a twist of his wrist he unloosed his turban. His amazing hair shot out round him in a swirling cloud that shrank, thickened, became beast-shaped and solidified into a gaunt angular creature, somewhere between a fox and a wolf, but with a fiery orange hide. It grinned at them, its long tongue lolling from between savage jaws, and loped into the dusk.

While they waited they fetched water from the old cistern and rebuilt the fire. By the time it was truly blazing the creature was back, dragging the body of a small deer over its shoulder. It laid it down, shook itself like a dog shaking water out of itself, but instead of a spatter of droplets it shook out the same swirling cloud as before, which then gathered itself back into the shape of the Ropemaker. He took out a hunting knife and deftly gutted, skinned and jointed his prey, then sliced the liver for Meena and Tilja to roast on pointed sticks while he lashed a spit together so that they could turn the larger pieces over the heat.

When they had eaten, the Ropemaker rose, belched and stood looking down at them. The firelight flickered off his bony features. For once he looked like what he really was, a man with immense, strange powers.

“Needn’t keep watch,” he said. “Put a fence round you. Don’t you touch it, Tilja—won’t stand that. Sleep well. Good luck.”

He vanished.

“And the same to you,” said Meena to the space where he had been.

They woke at first light. Meena rose and groped her way blearily toward the nearest bushes, but stopped in midstride. Tilja saw her push with her hands against empty space.

“Wait a moment,” Tilja said, and walked up beside her, and on, feeling only the slight, indescribable flicker of a piece of structured magic falling apart. Meena, still pressing against the unseen obstacle, almost fell over.

“Might’ve warned me,” she grumbled, and stumbled on. In the early mornings she was always most like old Meena, sulky and hazed with sleep.

The sun had barely risen when they made their way into the forest by the same route as before, and then walked and scrambled and walked all morning. At first it was worryingly slow going. Though Meena could sense the general direction, she didn’t of course know any exact route, in the way that she had known the route from Woodbourne to the lake. Sometimes they could walk side by side over almost level ground, between majestic old trees that soared up, branchless for thirty feet or more, with a leaf canopy above dense enough to inhibit undergrowth. Here they could talk, or sing for the pleasure of it. But then they would reach a place where a patch of even older trees had been struck down by some winter gale, knocking their neighbors over in their fall, leaving an impenetrable barrier of tangled trunks and branches. Or else the ground would become more broken and they would find themselves trapped at the bottom of a narrowing valley ending in crags too steep to climb, and they would have to turn back and look for another route.

Around midday they had just made their way dispiritedly out of such a place when Meena halted and peered at the ground, moved to her left, peered again and knelt.

“See there?” she said, pointing at a patch of bare earth.

Tilja knelt beside her to look. The print was very faint. It was extraordinary that Meena should have noticed it at all. Not slotted, like a deer’s. Too small for a horse. Anyway, a horse here? . . . No.

“A unicorn,” she whispered. “How did you . . . ?”

“Felt something,” said Meena. “They’ve been here—not just once, neither, or I wouldn’t’ve noticed. It’s one of their paths. Must go somewhere. Let’s hope.”

She rose and walked on, slowly at first, but then more confidently. After a while she started to sing, not any known song, such as they had been singing together earlier, but the same almost shapeless, wavering, quiet chant that Tilja had last heard her singing when the raft had been floating down the canyon and Meena had sat with Alnor’s head in her lap and sung to the unseen unicorns among the trees. The invisible path wound to and fro, weaving past the obstacles that had so held them up that morning, but steadily—Meena said—heading toward the lake.

Nothing else happened all day. Tilja found it very wearisome—not the hours of walking—she was used to that after all these weeks—but the endless, dull sameness of trees, the shadowy stillness, with never an open vista, never a glimpse of sky, and besides that an even vaguer oppression which after a while she guessed must be coming from the forest itself. She had never felt it at Woodbourne, but there she had only twice gone deep in among the trees, and both times she had been too taken up with surface events to think about her own feelings. Moreover, since then she herself had changed, grown, become aware of what she was and what she could do, and with that had come a greater awareness of things she might not have noticed before. So, now, just as in the pinewoods in the Pirrim Hills, she knew that she was sensing the magic of the forest itself. This time, though, it was not trying to overwhelm her. It was simply there, pressing in against her, a different kind of magic from any that she could deal with, diffuse and huge.

One of Faheel’s friends, she wondered? She didn’t think so. It didn’t feel like anybody’s friend, and didn’t respond when she tried, in her mind, to tell it about Faheel. It was itself.

She would have liked to talk to Meena about this, but Meena didn’t want to talk. She wanted to sing. She actually said as much when Tilja spoke to her during one of their rests.

“No, leave me be, love. I’m just about getting through to them, maybe.”

She was talking about the unicorns, Tilja guessed, or perhaps the cedars. There was no way she could help with that, except by not interrupting. All she could do was trudge wearily on.

Sleep in a tree, the Ropemaker had suggested. The trees were not of the sort you could climb, but they managed it in another way. Toward dusk they came to a cedar grove where something, lightning, perhaps, had riven one of the old giants apart all down one side but left it standing. The crack was wider and deeper at the base, leaving a small cave in the heart of the trunk. Beasts must have laired in there from time to time. There were a few bears in the forest, and solitary wolves, and other hunters, but none, by the smell, had been there recently. They broke and dragged fallen branches to the place and built a crude barrier across the entrance—nothing that would keep a hungry bear out but enough at least to make it wake them as it demolished the obstacle.

The floor inside was soft and dry, and Tilja was tired enough to fall into deep and friendly sleep as soon as she lay down. She was dragged out of her dream by Meena squeezing her arm.

It was pitch dark, but she knew at once where she was. Meena squeezed again, gently, and Tilja moved her other hand and touched Meena’s to show that she was awake, and then lay still, listening. She wasn’t afraid—there had been nothing alarmed or urgent about the way Meena had woken her—but something was moving around close outside. Then a completely familiar noise, somewhere between a snort and a snore—a horse. Out here in the depths of the forest? Calico come back to take them home? A likely tale—and anyway Calico’s snort would have been much deeper and more disgruntled. This was light, interested, inquisitive . . . and now, staring out at the darkness above the barrier, Tilja began to imagine she could see a faint change in the color of the night, like moonlight—only there could be no moon. It had been rising, fingernail-thin in the east, when they had woken that morning.

The noises moved away. Meena gave a sigh of pleasure.

“Lovely,” she whispered.

“Do they really shine in the dark?”

“You saw it too? I thought I was imagining it. And the cedars are waking up, too. I can hear them beginning to mumble.”

They slept again and woke in the dim forest daylight, cleaned themselves up and ate the last of their food to save carrying it, and then set out with lighter hearts. They walked steadily all morning, without feeling the need to rest. Meena sang almost all the way, more loudly than the day before, and mixing in bits of ordinary song, just as she had done on the raft, so that Tilja could now join in and carry on to the end of the song while Meena’s voice, after a line or two, went floating away into the cedar song, weaving in and out through Tilja’s tune.

She was halfway through “Cherry Pits” when she saw her first unicorn.

Still singing, Meena nudged her elbow and glanced to the right, a gesture and look that said, Over that way, but don’t stare. Cautiously Tilja half turned her head and out of the corner of her eyes caught a flicker of whiteness in the shadows. It vanished and came back and this time for a moment she saw it clearly, moon-white against the dark depths of the forest, small as a child’s pony, with a flowing mane and tail, but straight-backed and light-boned as a deer, the arched neck carrying the head high, to balance the weight of the ivory horn. Then it seemed to sense her astonished gaze and twitched itself out of sight among the tree trunks.

Soon another appeared on the left, and this time she was careful only to glance and glance away, and it stayed there, moving along with them, coming and going among the tree trunks. The first one reappeared, and a mare and foal joined it, and then more, so that after a while there was a troop of them on either side, a line of that unearthly whiteness threading its way through the forest.

For a long while Tilja was so absorbed in wonder that she was barely listening to Meena’s singing. At last she heard it, one particular note like a cry of pain, except that it was a pure sung note, wild as birdsong, throbbing with joy. She turned and stared. Meena’s cheeks were streaming with tears. She couldn’t possibly see the faint tracks they had so far been following, but her feet seemed to know the way.

The forest ahead grew darker and became a solid wall of cedars, much younger than the giants they had been passing, with interlacing branches sweeping to the ground, impenetrable except at one narrow opening that became a winding path barely wide enough for the two of them to walk side by side. Now Tilja guessed where she was, though the path seemed different from the one along which she and Dusty had wrestled with the logging sledge almost a year ago. Glancing over her shoulder, she could see no sign of the unicorns, but Meena hadn’t faltered in her song so she knew they must still be there, following, out of sight beyond the last bend. Round yet another corner lay the lake, still as a sheet of steel. The grassy clearing where they had found Ma was a short way off to their right.

Still singing, Meena stopped and turned, holding her spread hands in front of her as if she was asking for some special favor. Tilja understood the gesture at once. This was not for her—she was an intruder. This was for Meena. But she could stay and watch, or Meena wouldn’t have let her come as far as the lake. She turned and scrambled away beneath the branches beside the water, found a comfortable place with a good view of the clearing, and sat down.

Meena had almost reached the arena. The air was so still that whispers of her song came floating across the water, and when she halted and turned to face the lake Tilja could hear it clearly.

This seemed to be what the unicorns had been waiting for. One after another they emerged from the opening and paced solemnly along beside the lake, moving not like ordinary animals, tame or wild, but like a team of dancers entering to begin some stately dance. There were twenty-three of them, and the single foal. Their reflections gleamed, perfect, in the unruffled surface.

They gathered in a wide circle around Meena and stood and waited. Her voice had dropped so low that Tilja could no longer hear it as Meena sank to the ground and spread her arms in a gesture of welcome. The unicorns came right up to her and lay down, without any jostling, but arranging themselves in two exact rings, their bodies spreading out like the petals of an open flower. Tilja understood that she was watching something wholly magical, not the man-magic of Talagh, or of the ring, but the kind of magic by which Faheel had made friends with mountains and with oceans. She was filled with delighted amazement that she, Tilja, whose touch could undo powerfully woven charms and destroy great magicians, was allowed to watch this happen.

After a long while the song ended. Meena bowed her head. The unicorns backed away into their circle and returned to her, one at a time. Each lowered its horn and touched her above the heart. She in her turn laid her fingers on each muzzle, both gestures clearly blessings of farewell. The foal came with its mother, seeming to know exactly what to do. Its horn was about as long as Tilja’s middle finger.

When they had finished they turned and came just as solemnly back along the lake, but before they reached the opening something seemed to startle them. They bolted and were gone. Meena hadn’t moved. She was sitting as before, with her head bowed, deep in her trance. She didn’t look up when Anja appeared running along the far side of the lake, shouting excitedly. A moment later Ma came out of the trees, leading Tiddikin by the bridle. Tilja ran, and met them on the other side of the clearing.

“The cedars told us!” cried Anja, gasping for breath every few words. “They’ve woken up! I heard them talking. So did Ma! They said we’d find you by the lake, and we did! Are you all right? Da’s gone to fight the horse people! Calico came back! She’s got wings! She’s gone too! And those boys! Where’s Meena? What’s that girl doing by our lake?”

Tilja didn’t answer, but gave her a hug and kiss and ran to meet Ma. Ma knelt and held her tight, both of them sobbing quietly. Her hug was as awkward as ever.

“Oh, I’m so happy to see you!” Tilja said as soon as she could speak. “Is Da all right? The river told us the pass was open and there’d been fighting in the Valley.”

Ma let go, rose and dried her face on her skirt. “Horsemen came through the passes, just like we said they would. People always start to believe you when it’s too late. Da’s gone to help try and fight them back, of course. That was ten days ago. We’ve been coming up to the forest every day to see if the cedars had anything to tell us, but they’ve been asleep, oh, almost since you left. And then this morning they started to wake up, just mutters and mumbles at first, but—Anja can hear them better than I can, and she swore they were saying you and Meena were coming back through the forest.”

“Nothing about the fighting?”

“No, but . . . I suppose that’s Meena, over there?”

She asked the question so matter-of-factly that Tilja blinked. Then she remembered what Anja had said and realized that if you’ve seen what you know to be a cantankerous brute of a horse come flying into your farmyard, ridden by two boys, one of whom you last saw as a blind old man, then it mightn’t be hard to believe anything, let alone work out what had happened to Meena. Anja must have made the connection too, she now saw. She was kneeling beside Meena, bombarding her with questions, giving her no time to answer, and Meena had her arm round her and was laughing aloud.

Tilja had no idea how Ma’s meeting with Meena would go. It must be very strange for both of them, she guessed, even stranger than it had been for Tilja herself, finding her grandmother had become a sort of elder sister. They stood and looked at each other for a while; then Meena stretched out her hands and Ma took them and they kissed each other gently.

“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.”