The Ropemaker

Epilogue

A woman led a lame horse across an unpeopled landscape. For much of the way all seemed peaceful, but then she would come to an area where buildings were shattered or gutted with fire, field after field of standing crops burnt black, and bodies, both human and animal, sprawling in their blood and now rotting unburied. Ahead of her lay the heavy line of the forest, and close beneath it the remains of one last farm. So Saranja came home to Woodbourne.

Six years ago she had left, swearing to herself she would never return. For five of those years she had been the house slave of one of the warlords beyond the East Desert, until he and the two children she had borne him had died when his keep was stormed by his brother’s army. In the chaos she had escaped, and continued to stagger on through the darkness. When dawn had broken she had found herself already in the desert.

Six years ago she had almost died, crossing it, though then she had carried food and water. Now she had nothing. But she did not turn back. Death would be better than the life she had been living. This time, though, the desert seemed to let her through as if it had chosen to do so. It provided her with two freak thunder-storms and a water hole large enough to support a colony of birds which, having no predators, laid their eggs on the ground. With those, and things that she had learned from her first crossing to recognize as food, she had come through.

And then, seeing what had happened in the Valley, she had known that she must go and find out if anything was left of Woodbourne.

Not much. When a thatched and timbered building goes up in flames, very little remains but the central chimney stack, standing amid a pile of ashes and a few rafter ends.

No voice answered her call. She hadn’t expected one. Her brothers would be fighting the raiders, or dead, her mother and aunt hiding in the forest with the animals.

She scuffed with her feet among the fringes of the heap. It was a way of preventing herself from weeping, because she felt she had no right to. Of her own will she had cut every connection with Woodbourne, even grief. All that was over.

Something glinted in the ashes. She stooped and eased out a golden feather, perfect, looking as if it had been shed that very morning. She pulled it free, and another came with it, attached at the quill by a twist of golden hair. She laid them together and ran her fingertips along them. The idiot story flooded back into her mind, the story that she had never believed, thinking it just a mechanism by which her mother could bind her for all her life to Woodbourne, as she herself had been bound, because Saranja had once made the mistake of admitting that she sometimes imagined she could hear the cedars talking.

With a sigh she turned to the horse, a useless old gelding she had found yesterday—or rather he had found her, wandering out of nowhere and nosing up to her for food, and had then simply followed her. She hadn’t driven him off, because he was company of a kind, and also fresh meat that she didn’t have to carry. She had imagined till now that he followed her so persistently only because he didn’t want to be the only living creature in the landscape.

If it’s you, you’ll need a horse as well as the feathers.

“Waiting for me, weren’t you?” she said. “Now all we want is some fellow from Northbeck.”

She looked back along the way they had come. A man was limping up the road toward her, leaning heavily on his staff. Without thought her fingers caressed the golden feathers as she waited for him, until she realized that her hands were full of a peculiar glowing warmth. She looked down. Feathers and hair seemed to shine with their own light. There was no need to go up into the forest. If she could do it at all, she could do it here.

The man came into the yard. He was about forty, slight, dark, with a look of arrogant energy beneath his obvious weariness and pain. There was a bloodstained bandage round his left calf.

“Ribek Ortahlson,” he said.

“Well, I’m Saranja Urlasdaughter. Hold his head, will you.”

She moved round to the horse’s flank.

“I’ve no idea if this will work,” she said.

She whispered the name.

“Ramdatta.”

Her hands knew what to do.