The Ropemaker

2

The Story

There was time in the Valley, of course—how could there not be? But there was no history. In all the rich farmland between the northern mountains and the forest there were no wars, or reports of wars, only days, seasons, generations. No kings or other rulers, only parents, grandparents, ancestors. For eighteen generations nothing had happened in the Valley that anyone would have thought worth putting in a book, or setting up a memorial stone to record. So, no history. Only time.

And the story of Asarta.

The story was full of grand magical nonsense, and there was none of that kind of magic in the Valley, any more than there was history. Such magic as there was was petty and everyday, love posies and wart charms and such, which many people said were mere superstition and worked no better than random chance. So very few people believed that there was any truth in the story. Some of them might add that it had been invented long ago to explain why the snow lay year-round upon the mountains so thick that nobody could pass them, and why there was a sickness in the forest that closed off the Valley to the south. It was, admittedly, a strange sickness, affecting only men, first making them dazed and feverish almost as soon as they went in under the trees, and, if they stayed there any length of time, casting them into a stupor from which they did not recover. But that didn’t mean that there had to be anything magical about it.

This was the story.

Once there had been nothing but history, and far too much of it. To the south, beyond the forest, stretched a huge, rich Empire. To the north, beyond the mountains, lay endless upland plains, across which tribes of fierce horsemen marauded, fighting each other when they couldn’t find outsiders to fight and pillage. The best way between the two realms lay through the Valley, because there was one good pass across the mountains, open all summer. The Emperors, when they remembered, maintained a broad road through the forest so that they could control and tax the Valley and guard the pass beyond. The Valley was large, seven long days’ march from east to west and five from north to south. It had fertile soil, which the people farmed well, so the taxes they were able to pay made it worth the Emperor’s attention. But every now and then an Emperor would allow the garrisons to weaken, and then the tribes would come swarming through the pass and the Valley, burning and looting and murdering, and sweep on to raid the riches of the Empire.

Slowly the Empire would gather its armies and drive them back, across the Valley, up through the pass, and out into their native plains, where it would attempt to harry and punish them for their impertinence, to no good effect. The Valley made a natural base for these operations, so the armies would quarter there, perhaps for several years, burning and murdering less than the tribes had done, but raping and looting almost as effectively, while the Emperor’s tax collectors demanded all the normal taxes again, plus what had not been paid while the tribesmen had controlled the Valley, plus extra sums to pay for the increased level of protection that the Valley now enjoyed. The people of the Valley would have been hard put to it to tell you which state of affairs they liked less.

And then a civil war would break out somewhere else in the immensity of the Empire, or a new Emperor would forget to pay the garrisons, or some other matter of state would intervene, and the soldiers would march south, taking with them whatever and whomever they fancied, and the Valley people would try to piece their lives together again, knowing even as they reaped their scant harvest and stored it in their patched barns that soon the tribes would learn that the pass was once more unguarded.

Nineteen generations before Tilja’s time such a period had just ended, with the barns empty, the cattle driven away, houses smashed by soldiers looking for hidden treasures to make up for their unpaid wages, children snatched into slavery. Some people chose to go south with the soldiers, to make new lives for themselves in the Empire, but most stayed where they were. However difficult and dangerous life might be in the Valley, this was where they belonged.

A year passed, and things were better. Another year, and they were better again, and still the tribes did not come. (There was a horse plague raging across the plains.) The barns had new roofs on them, doors were sound and tables laden, and markets began again, with stuff in the stalls worth bargaining for. After market people would sit around, drinking the harsh local cider, and wondering how long the good times would last. On one such evening somebody sighed and said, “If only there were a way of closing the pass.”

“Fugon the Magnificent tried that,” said someone else. “In our grandfathers’ grandfathers’ time, wasn’t it?”

“No, before that,” said someone else. “Fugon the Fourth, he was the Magnificent. It was Fugon the Second tried to close the pass.”

They argued about dates and Emperors until somebody said, “Anyway, whoever it was, he didn’t manage it. And if the Emperor couldn’t do it, who can? No one’s stronger than the Emperor.”

“Asarta is stronger than the Emperor,” said a man. “She could close the pass if she chose.”

This man’s name was Sonnam, which is not a Valley name, because he had not been born in the Valley, and spoke with a southern accent. He was in fact a deserter from the Emperor’s army who had fallen in love with a girl from one of the farms by the river. She and her mother had hidden him for three whole years, but now the garrisons were gone and he was married to her and lived openly.

Because he was not a Valley man they did not take him seriously, and laughed when he spoke. But his wife said, “You are fools. Sonnam has lived in the Empire, and you have not.”

“Very well,” they said. “Tell us about this Asarta. One story is as good as another at the end of a long day.”

“Only what Asarta chooses to be known is known about her,” said Sonnam. “But my family are mostly soldiers, and my father’s uncle was a corporal in the Emperor’s guard. In those days there were pirates raiding along the western coast, and when the Emperor built navies to punish them they banded together and sank his ships before his eyes. Twice they did this, but the third time the Emperor, on the advice of his courtiers, sent to Asarta for help. She agreed on a great price and came. So the navies met once more and the Emperor sat on the cliff to watch the encounter, with Asarta beside him, a small old woman in a gray gown. As the navies bore down against each other she called aloud, and serpents came out of the ocean, six of them, and smashed the pirate ships in their coils and tossed them about and snatched the pirates out of the air as they fell, and ate them.

“Then the Emperor clapped his hands and his servants brought three strong chests and laid them before Asarta, and she looked at them and pointed her finger and they fell apart, so that everyone could see that only the top layer in each was gold, and the rest was lead. The Emperor told her that it was his treasurer who had done this, hoping to keep the gold for himself, and again he clapped his hands and the treasurer was seized and strangled before he could speak. Then Asarta looked the Emperor in the eye and pointed her finger once more, and the Emperor shrank until he was no bigger than my thumb, and Asarta picked him up and put him in a gold cage which she brought out of the air, and hung it on a golden pole.

“At that the Emperor’s guard, my father’s uncle among them, rushed to the rescue of their lord, but they too dwindled as they came nearer to Asarta, to the size of mice and then of ants, so that they were afraid to come closer lest they should vanish altogether. Next Asarta spoke, a cry so loud that those around her fell to the ground, but the body of the treasurer rose to its feet and walked toward her with its head dangling aside, and she placed her hands round his neck and spoke quietly to him, so that his head straightened and the life came back into him. He gave orders, and more gold was brought, up to the price that had been agreed. Then Asarta vanished, taking the gold and the treasurer with her.

“The Emperor’s guards, my father’s uncle among them, grew slowly in size, until by evening they were the height that they had been that morning. But the Emperor himself never grew to more than half his proper stature, and spoke always in a thin, high voice, like that of a bird, so that he should not forget that Asarta was more powerful than he was.

“All this my father’s uncle saw with his own eyes, but being a prudent man he at once changed his name and his regiment, for few of those that were known to have seen the Emperor dangling in his cage lived many days after.”

“Not a bad story,” said someone.

“So Asarta is stronger than the Emperor,” said Sonnam’s wife.

“If she’s still alive,” said someone else.

“And if the story’s true,” said another.

“Can’t be,” said yet another. “All that magic and stuff.”

Most of the listeners grunted in agreement. That was how Valley people thought about magic, even then, though there was magic in the Valley in those days, just as there was magic everywhere else in the Empire. Only no powerful magician had bothered to come to so remote a province for many, many years.

More peaceful seasons came and went, as the horse plague continued to ravage the plains, and the problems of the Empire boiled up elsewhere. Indeed, there was such turmoil south of the forest that the Emperor’s clerks forgot that the Valley even existed, and for long years nobody came to collect the taxes. It was a full generation before shepherds came running into market one evening with the news. They had been with their flocks in the high pastures and had seen a party of wild-looking horsemen beneath them, at the lip of the pass, looking down at the Valley, and pointing and laughing. It had been clear from both stance and gesture what had been in their minds, before they had turned and trotted away north.

By now those sitting around over their cider were the children of those who had listened to Sonnam telling the story of Asarta. Indeed, there were two of his sons among them, in one of whom the old soldiering blood still ran strong. It was he who said, after they had listened with dismay to the shepherds, “There is nothing for it. We must arm ourselves and fight.”

This, with much misgiving, they did. They caught the raiders in an ambush beside the river, but they had no experience of battle, while the raiders were hardened to it, so it was a desperately close affair, but in the end the raiders broke and fled. When it was over they met in council. Some said, “We have beaten them once. We can do so again.” Others said, “Next time they will be more, and warier. We must send to the Emperor for help.” Yet others said, “The Emperor’s help will destroy us as surely as the horsemen.” At last somebody said, “We might as well send to Asarta.”

This was, or was meant to be, a joke. By now “sending to Asarta” had become a sort of proverb in the Valley, something one said when one was in a fix and couldn’t think which way to turn. Then someone said, still joking, “At least it would be better than sending to the Emperor.” And someone, joking rather less, said, “Indeed it would.” So, gradually, without their noticing how it happened, the joke became a proposal, and the proposal became a decision, and they were discussing how it should be done.

Sonnam was no help. He was an old man now, with his memory half gone, and all he could tell them was, “Asarta? Yes, yes. She demanded a great price.”

The thought was dismaying. The Valley was prosperous, but mainly in goods. People had full barns and byres, but little by way of money or jewels, or what counted as wealth in the Empire. But they gathered what they had and chose a delegation to go and see if Asarta would help them. Since half the farms in the Valley were inherited through the female line, they sent five men and five women.

From the first they met with misfortune. One was murdered, and three were seized on false claims of debt and sold into slavery. The rest were cheated and robbed. Moreover, they heard not one word of Asarta, for all their asking. There seemed to be neither tale nor memory of her.

When they had lost almost all that they had brought, four decided to give up and go home, but one man and one woman said that they would continue the search, penniless and hopeless though they were. Their names were Reyel Ortahlson and Dirna Urlasdaughter. These two journeyed on, choosing their roads at random, until they came to a city on the very edge of the immense desert that marked the eastern boundary of the Empire.

It was here one morning, sitting in the shadow of a gateway, they saw two women walking out of the desert. As they passed under the arch, one said to the other, “So that is the end of Asarta. I never thought I should live to see her go. It will be a strange world without her.”

The two from the Valley jumped up and caught the women by their cloaks and said, “Asarta? You have news of Asarta? We have journeyed from the furthest north to find her.”

The women shook their heads and said, kindly enough, “You come too late. She is gone into the desert to undo her days. An hour after moonrise she will be no more.”

“There is still time to find her,” said the two from the Valley. “Which way did she go?”

“She went east,” said the women. “But you will not find her, not unless she chooses to be found.”

Reyel and Dirna filled their flasks from a reeking tank by the gate and set out east across the burning sands. There was no path and no shade. The water was too foul to drink, so they wetted themselves with it and trudged on. A time came when they knew in their hearts that if they did not turn back they would die in the desert, but they plodded on east, and as the sun went down and their shadows stretched far in front of them they came to a rocky hollow with a carved stone slab at its center. Sitting by the slab with her head bowed was an old woman in a gray cloak.

The two went quietly down and stood a few paces to one side, afraid to speak, knowing the place was holy. But the woman looked up and said in a mild voice, “You come on an errand. You have something to ask. Tell me your trouble.”

They told her, and she nodded, and said, “You have brought me a fee?”

“We have nothing,” they said. “We started our journey with friends and money and jewels, but we were cheated and robbed all the way, and now we have only the clothes we wear.”

“Nothing?” said Asarta. “You are asking a great work to be done for nothing?”

“I have half of a stale barley loaf I begged in the city,” said Dirna.

“There is a little water left in my flask,” said Reyel.

“Give them to me,” said Asarta.

They did so, and she moistened her lips from the flask and broke a corner from the loaf and ate it, and then handed them back.

“Very well,” she said. “I cannot in any case do what you ask. I have put all that aside. But I can tell you what you must do. First, you must wait here and watch what happens until I am gone, and then you must journey to the city of Talak and find a man called Faheel and ask him to help you. He will demand a fee and you will give him this ring. Keep it safe, and do not attempt to wear it. I trust you with it, because you have shown that you have the will to carry a task through.”

She took a gold ring from her finger and put it on the slab beside her. With a twist of her hand she broke off a corner of rock and blew on it and it became fine sand. This she rubbed out between her thumb and forefinger, spinning it into a braided cord which she threaded through the ring, rubbing the ends together so that they joined without a knot. She gave it to Dirna, who slid the cord over her head and tucked the ring down inside her blouse. The cord assumed the color of her skin, so that you would not have known it was there.

Asarta nodded to show that she had finished and sat as they had first seen her. The two climbed to the lip of the hollow and settled to watch. While they waited they ate some of the loaf and drank from the flask, and found that the bread was soft and fresh, and smelled as if it had just now come from the oven, while the water was as sweet and clean and cool as a snowmelt stream in the Valley.

The sky darkened and the stars came out. The moon rose, shining bright across the desert, but the hollow by which they sat was still in dense shade, from which now they heard the whisper of Asarta’s voice, old and thin, like dead leaves trapped in a wind eddy. As the moon climbed and began to shine into the hollow the voice became stronger, harsher, like a queen’s commanding her armies, or the chant of a priestess with the knife raised for the sacrifice. By the time it shone full down into the bowl there was a tall woman standing beside the carved slab, wearing the same gray robe that Asarta had worn, but with long dark hair flowing around it, so that it could hardly be seen. Her voice was a ringing chant that made the boulder on which they sat tingle and quiver, while flecks of light like crumbled star-stuff darted to and fro across the bowl. Then the stance eased and the voice softened and the chant became a song, while the flecks of light whirled closer around the young woman who stood by the slab so that she was lit by their light as well as by the moon’s. The song ended, and she stood in silence, waiting.

Time also waited. The two from the Valley had watched, not understanding what they saw. But they remembered what the women by the gateway had said, and guessed that if they took any step down into the hollow they would be trapped in the backward eddy of the years, sucked into the vortex where Asarta sang. Now that the song was over the eddy stilled.

Asarta threw back her cloak and with her bare arms made a slow ritual gesture, as if offering an invisible vessel to the starlit sky. The shimmering flecks that had whirled around her gathered between her palms, making a shape like the drop that is left at the center of a ribbed leaf after a shower, lit with its own light, paler and brighter than the moon’s.

She gazed at it for a while, unblinking. Then, continuing the interrupted movement of her arms, she raised it above her head and it floated away, widening and widening until it seemed to disperse itself into moonlight. Reyel and Dirna watched it disappear. When they looked down into the hollow Asarta was also gone.

The two from the Valley trudged back to the city and asked directions to Talak. It was a long and dangerous journey, but they made it without trouble apart from the ordinary weariness of endless walking. The barley loaf and the flask of water sustained them, not merely staying fresh but renewing themselves, so there seemed always as much of them left when they next needed them as there had been the time before. When armed bandits raided a resting place for travelers and stripped all who were there naked so that they could better search them, they seemed not to notice the two from the Valley where they sat quietly under the wall.

And again, when they came to Talak itself they found lines of travelers at the gateways, where guards questioned and searched each one, demanding monstrous fees before they let them pass. But when the two reached the front of their line the guard was interrupted with the news that his wife had just borne him a son, and in his delight he just waved the pair through.

But once inside the city their troubles began. Talak is very ancient, with the Emperor’s palace at its heart, and broad streets leading to it from the twelve great gates. Between these open ways it is all twisting lanes and alleys. People who have lived in Talak all their lives can lose themselves in a strange quarter and take a day or more to find their way home. Furthermore the people of Talak are a suspicious, scurrying lot, and when the two from the Valley asked where they could find Faheel they were met with blank faces or shrugs or, sometimes, a quick, sharp stare, as if the question were dangerous, or mad.

So the two gave up asking and wandered this way and that, loster than they had seemed in the desert, but hoping they might hear a snatch of conversation in which Faheel’s name was mentioned, which was how they had found Asarta. Again and again they crisscrossed the city, but however many of the radiating avenues they passed they seemed always each evening to fetch up, by accident, in the same dim street, with only a single door in it, and that bricked up, and no window below the second story. After a while they came to regard this as their temporary home. It was very quiet—indeed not once did they see another person using it—and the arch of the blocked doorway was a convenient place to sleep.

One morning, as they were breakfasting, a small yellow bird flew down to look for crumbs. The two were normally sparing with their water and bread, as if they must not take their magic for granted, but without thinking Dirna broke off a corner of crust and held it out and the bird flew fearlessly up and perched on her finger to peck. The man laughed, startling the bird, which flew off, brushing against the pillar of the archway as it passed. For a moment, brief as an eye blink, the brickwork wavered and was a door. Then it was brick again.

Reyel rose and found the place and laid his hand on it. The door appeared, but it had no handle or knocker.

A voice said, “Whom do you seek?”

“Faheel,” they answered.

“What do you want of him?”

“Peace for our Valley.”

“You have brought an appropriate fee?”

“Yes.”

“Enter.”

The door opened, and they went through into a dark, cool hallway. There was no one about. Several arches led toward other rooms, but as they stood wondering which to take, all but one seemed to mist over, so they could see only vaguely what lay beyond the rest. They went through the one clear arch into another such room, where the same thing happened, and the same again. But this third time they saw sunlight beyond the archway, and on reaching it they found themselves in a garden at the center of the house. Here were roses, and lilies, and flowers they had never seen, and also peach trees, apricots and nectarines, with their laden branches neatly tied into place. Clear water whispered through channels in the paving. Birds trilled. Rounding a corner, they found a man intent on his task of lashing a grafted slip into place on a pear tree. He seemed aware of their presence, but unhurriedly finished what he was doing before he turned.

He was a stout, smooth-faced man with a neat black beard. He wore a plain green turban and a brown jacket with pockets for his gardening tools. He raised his eyebrows, as if he had not expected to see them.

“We are looking for Faheel,” they said.

“Well, the door knows its business,” said the man. “I am Faheel.”

“May we tell you our troubles?” they said. He nodded, so they told him about the wild horsemen from the north, and the Emperor’s armies from the south, and how all the Valley longed to be rid of both and live in peace.

When they had finished, the man said, “This is a considerable thing you ask. Why should it be worth my while?”

Dirna lifted the cord from round her neck and handed him the ring. At his touch the cord crumbled into the sand that it had been. The ring seemed to move a little and change on his palm, but before they could see quite how, he closed his fingers round it.

“How did you come by this?” he said.

They told him what they had seen happen with Asarta, and what she had told them to do, and to prove that what they said was true they showed him the half of barley loaf that never grew stale or less, and the flask of water that never ran dry.

He listened, and looked for a while at his closed fist.

“I do not know what this means,” he said. “For a hundred years I have sought ways to take this from her, and now she sends it to me. Very well. We will use her powers to do what you ask. Take the water and the bread with you and go home. Your house, I think, is close under the mountains. A stream runs past its door.”

“That is so,” said Reyel.

“Two full moons after the nights become longer than the days, climb to the place where the snow becomes water. Pour the last of your flask into the source of the stream, and as you do so, sing to the snows.”

“What shall I sing?” said Reyel.

“Listen to the stream. It will tell you. And your farm, I think, lies next to the forest. A little way off is a small field with a stone barn at its corner.”

“That is so,” said Dirna.

“As soon as the field is plowed after harvest, take what is left of the loaf and crumble it finely along the furrows. Next spring let the field then be harrowed and sown with barley. Set the harvest aside in the barn. When the first snows fall, take two sacks of the barley and leave them in piles beside the lake nearest your farm in the forest. As you do so, sing to the cedar trees.”

“What shall I sing?” said Dirna.

“The cedars themselves will tell you. Do the same each full moon after, until the barley is finished and the snows are gone. And again next year, at the same seasons, both of you must sing, and Dirna must set the field aside for barley to leave by the lake in the forest. And so on, year after year. You, Reyel, will have sons, and you, Dirna, daughters, and one of each will hear the voices in the mountain stream, and in the cedars. They in their turn must sing the songs and grow the barley and take it into the forest, and one of their sons or daughters after them, for twenty generations. No power, not even Asarta’s, can hold time still forever, but during those generations your Valley will have peace.

“And now, since you have asked for nothing for yourselves, take these.” He chose two peaches, which he gave to them. They thanked him and left. They ate the fruit for their midday meal, wondering what would happen, but they felt no magical effects. So when they had finished, Reyel threw the stone of his away, thinking that it would never bear fruit as far north as he lived, but Dirna kept hers and planted it at Woodbourne when they returned home, which they did after many more days, but without danger or trouble.

They found the Valley in turmoil. There had been two more raids by the horsemen, in greater force, and though the men of the Valley had fought them off in the end, it had been at the cost of many lives. And then the four who had been on the search for Asarta had come home and told of their failure. In desperation, knowing that the horsemen would come again, and yet again, the people of the Valley had sent to the Emperor for help. So when Reyel and Dirna returned and told their story, nobody was greatly impressed.

Nevertheless the two did as they had been told. Two moons after the nights became longer than the days, Reyel climbed up by the stream that ran by his father’s farm and poured the last of his flask into the place where the water dribbled from the snow line. As he did so he listened to the rustle of the infant stream as it tumbled over the boulders. Threaded through the sound he heard a song, one he seemed already to know in his heart, so he straightened and joined in the singing, full voice, and the wind carried the words away and the cliffs echoed them back to him. By the time he had finished, the wind itself had risen almost to a gale, and before he was safely home the first flakes of snow were whirling round him.

For five days the snow fell on the Valley. Never had there been such snows, with houses often buried to their eaves. Throughout a difficult winter it snowed again and again, so when at last the spring came, the little river that had always run from the mountains to the forest had grown to a wide torrent. Shepherds climbing to the upper pastures discovered why. If the snowfall in the Valley had been heavy, that in the mountains had been monstrous. Where the Emperor’s road used to climb to the col there was now an immense glacier, from whose melting forefront the waters of the river thundered down.

Meanwhile Dirna had also done as she was told. When the plowing began at Woodbourne she had crumbled her barley loaf into fine pieces, filling a small sack, and with this she had walked along the furrows of the field beside the barn, broadcasting the crumbs like seed. She harrowed the ground and sowed it with the best barley seed she could buy, and waited for harvest.

Now men came through the forest, officials of the Emperor, to choose billets for the soldiers he would send to protect the Valley from the horsemen. While they were at it they taxed the people severely, since no taxes had been raised for many years. When people told them about the glacier, and explained that because of it they needed no protection this year, the officials laughed and started to raise further taxes, on the pretext that since the people were now spared the cost of billeting troops they could afford to pay more. This second round of exactions was savage, with torture for those who could not or would not pay, and children taken to be sold into slavery in lieu of money. But the people of the Valley were now used to their independence. They rose and fought the officials’ guards and hanged the officials and threw their bodies in the river.

When the news of this came to far-off Talak it threw the Emperor into a rage. He gave orders for an army to be sent to punish the Valley, every house burnt and razed, every man killed, every woman and child enslaved. But by now it was almost winter in those northern hills, so it was decided to hold back the punishment until spring.

Dirna reaped a good crop of barley from the field, better than anything else on the farm, and stored it separately in the stone barn. When the first snows fell she loaded two sacks of the seed onto a sledge, harnessed a pony to it, and hauled it out to a long, narrow lake, deep in the forest. Here she doled the barley out into piles beneath the branches of the cedar trees that grew all around the lake. As she did so she found that she was already singing. Words and notes, soft and lulling, seemed to reach her, not through her ears, but from somewhere beneath the soft whisper of the wind among the cedars. When she had finished she looked around, but saw and felt no change, so she led her pony home.

A short time after this Dirna’s brother went into the forest one morning to set traps, and did not return for his midday meal. Worried, she followed his footprints in the snow and found him only a few hundred paces in, lying facedown and breathing harshly through his mouth. Unable to wake him, she fetched the pony and dragged him home, where she warmed his body and put him to bed, but it was three more days before he opened his eyes, and then he could remember nothing since leaving the farm.

Much the same happened to other men who went into the forest, to hunt or trap or gather firewood. If they turned back soon enough they merely staggered and felt stupid and sick, but if they went too far they fell down and lost consciousness, and unless they were found within a morning or so they died. Women, strangely, felt no such effects, so before the winter was over it was they who were doing the hunting and trapping and wood gathering, while the men stayed home to tend the animals.

At each full moon throughout that winter Dirna took fresh barley out to the lake, but thanks to the continuing snowfalls she could not tell whether the earlier piles had been eaten, or see the tracks of what might have taken it. When the snows finally melted the barn was empty.

By then, everyone was afraid because of what they had done to the Emperor’s officials. They looked for hiding places in the mountains for the men, and they got ready to send the women and girls into the forest, because the sickness there might prevent the soldiers from following them, though they did not truly believe that either of these measures would prevail against the might of the Emperor.

They were wrong. In early summer horses began to come up the road through the forest, in harness, but mostly riderless. In a few cases armored men sprawled in the saddles because they had been lashed there, but all but one of these were dead. This one man was unconscious, and his horse was lathered with hard riding. When he woke some days later, he could remember nothing of his ride, but he told that the army had indeed marched north in the spring to punish the Valley and the advance scouts had discovered the sickness, some dying, some turning back in time. Magicians were sent for, who tried their different powers against the enchantment, for all agreed that the sickness was indeed of magical origin. The wiser ones withdrew almost at once. Those who persisted lost what powers they had had, and some went mad.

Finally, some of the cavalry had tied themselves into their saddles and set their horses to a full gallop, hoping to pass clean through the forest before they were overcome. This man had been one of those. His horse was a headstrong mare, and, he swore, the swiftest horse in the army. He alone had come through, though he had been unconscious for much of the way. Since there was no way back he stayed in the Valley, but unlike the deserter Sonnam he did not prosper or marry, and died in a brawl that he had provoked.

This, then, is the story that is told in the Valley. Or rather it is the version of it that has been passed down in Dirna’s family, the Urlasdaughters, who still farm the same land at Woodbourne that Dirna and her brother farmed. Though different versions of the story are told elsewhere in the Valley, with different names for some of the people involved, and different adventures—the tellers feeling free to add or alter as they choose—what does it matter, since it is only a story?—the Urlasdaughters do not change theirs at all, and do not talk about theirs outside the family, because to them it is true, and they don’t care to be mocked for their beliefs, and their insistence, year upon year, on setting one small field aside to be sown with barley, which is then harvested and stored in a particular barn, and in winter carried deep into the forest and left for the wild animals to eat.

The Ortahlsons, up in the mountains, still sing to the snows year after year, and take much the same line, keeping their version of the story to themselves. For everyone else, yes, of course there is a strange sickness in the forest, affecting only men, but there is presumably a natural explanation for that. And yes, there is a glacier in the mountains, where there used to be a road, but all that shows is that winters were once milder than they now are. Is that anything to be surprised about? And besides, the story didn’t say anything about the great desert that closed the Valley off to the east, just as it always had done, since long before the time of Asarta. (Though perhaps, if the story had all been lies, somebody might have invented a reason for that.)

One other thing. When the Valley had settled into peace again, Dirna planted the stone of the peach that Faheel had given her. A tree grew, and stood for many years against the south wall of a barn at Woodbourne. There seemed to be nothing magical about it, but it thrived despite the climate and bore delicious peaches, so that other families begged grafts, which grew well. When, eight generations after Dirna’s time, the barn blew down in a gale, taking the tree with it, the timber of the trunk was seasoned and used for carving small objects, particularly the elaborate wooden spoons which the men liked to whittle on winter evenings, while the women were at their spinning wheels. A tradition grew up that spoons from the original tree could be used for fortune-telling, by studying the grain of the wood, with its innumerable knots and whorls from all those years of training and pruning. The best of these spoons became heirlooms, with their own names, like the swords of heroes, but that didn’t mean that anyone actually believed in the fortunes they told, any more than they believed in the story about Asarta.