The Ropemaker

4

The River

Tiddykin went dead lame the day before they left. “There’s nothing for it,” said Da. “No chance of find-ing a decent horse at any price, this time of year. Meena will have to make do with Calico. I’ll fix the horse seat to fit her better, and take a look at her harness. Tilja can give me a hand.”

Together they went over the worn old gear, buckle by buckle, strap by strap, stitch by stitch, cleaning, oiling, replacing, making good. They worked for a while in silence, but then, without looking up from what he was doing, Da said in a low voice, as if speaking to himself, “I’d give my right arm for this not to be happening. All my married life I’ve had to accept this stuff. I don’t understand it, I don’t feel it in my bones, it means nothing to me, but I’m forced to believe in it. It isn’t just your mother and Meena saying it’s so—Anja too, now. It’s because it works. Time and again. You found that when you lost the hand ax. Even when it seems pure nonsense—how can Faheel still be alive, for pity’s sake? But the cedars say you’ve got to go and look for him, so you have to go, and I have to accept it. Accept it, though it means I may never see you again.”

Tilja sat blindly picking at a stretch of frayed stitching on the girth. Her thoughts, if you could call them thoughts, were a muddle of astonishment and grief. Why had he never once said anything like this before, never let her glimpse, even, what his feelings for her might be? No, they were secret, those feelings, like the unicorns, yes, private unicorns, deep in the pathless forest inside himself. But to Tilja they mattered more than anything else.

Since that evening when Tilja and Anja had come back from the forest and told the others what the cedars had said, he hadn’t spoken a word about her going, apart from the practicalities of it. His only response, on hearing the news, had been to look across the room at Ma, who had silently put on her cloak and boots and gone out into the dusk. When she had come back they had turned to look at her where she stood in the doorway, but she had simply nodded once to him, telling him that what Anja had said was true, and gone back to the stove. From that point on they all had taken it for granted that Tilja was going with Meena, not just to see Alnor and Tahl safe through the forest, but to join them in their search for Faheel.

“I’m coming back,” she said now. “Whatever happens, I’m coming back.”

“If you can.”

“But I was going to have to go one day, wasn’t I? Anja will have the farm, because she can hear the cedars. Like Ma did, instead of Aunt Grayne.”

“One day. But not yet. You’re not ready. And nor am I.”

“Anyway, I’m coming back. And that’s that.”

He grunted, and Tilja realized that though she might have used exactly the same words half an hour ago, on their way out to the tack shed, she wouldn’t have meant them in the way she did now.

There was another long pause while they got on with their work in silence. Then, without having to screw herself up to it, but asking the question easily, naturally, she said, “Do you know about the unicorns?”

“Know?” he said musingly. “Well, I’ve guessed. . . . You know?”

“I guessed too. But then I made Meena tell me.”

“Made Meena tell you? That’s as miraculous as any unicorn. In that case . . . maybe you should ask your mother to tell you her dream. All right, got all those stitches out? Then see what you can do with this while I sew ’em back.”

Ma told her about the dream reluctantly, with long pauses during which she seemed to be forcing herself to go on. She didn’t know when she had had it. It could have been while she was still lying by the lake, or in her six-day coma at the farm, or even later, in an ordinary night’s sleep. She’d only remembered it after the next full moon, when she’d gone out with another load of barley to spread beneath the trees.

“I didn’t want to go,” she said. “I was filled with fear, a numb, black, griping horror in my chest and stomach. . . . But I went. I made myself . . . and I got there and tipped the barley out and went down to the lake to sing, and . . . and I remembered the dream. I was standing like that in it, just getting ready to sing, when I heard something moving toward me, crashing its way through under the trees. Then it crossed a bit of rock and I heard its hooves. It sounded like a horse, and I thought somehow Calico must have got out and followed us, though she’s never . . . and then it came out into the open and I saw it wasn’t Calico, or Dusty either—it was as big as Dusty but even through the snow it seemed to be a funny sort of reddy chestnut . . . and then it lifted up its head and I saw the horn. . . .”

There was a longer pause. Eventually Tilja said quietly, “You mean it wasn’t one of ours. It’s all right, I know about ours. Meena told me.”

Ma shuddered and dragged herself out of the pit of remembered dread.

“No,” she said. “Ours are white, smaller than Tiddykin. I gather Meena saw them that day. I never have, but I’ve seen their hoofprints in the snow . . . anyway this—this thing . . . it came toward me . . . I was stuck . . . you know, in nightmares . . . and then it stopped and lowered its horn and . . . touched me. . . .”

She raised her hand and felt the place on her forehead where the strange mark had been.

“That’s all,” she said, forcing a kind of briskness into her voice.

“Are you sure it was a dream?” said Tilja. “You don’t think it was what really happened, before you went to sleep, that time we found you by the lake?”

Ma shook her head, but doubtfully. Tilja guessed that though she knew it could have been so, she really wanted it to have been only a dream. But she herself remembered the creature in the forest that had bellowed so terrifyingly at them when they were bringing Ma back from the lake. She remembered how Dusty had wheeled to meet its challenge. There had been something there—something real.

“But what happened the second time?” she said. “I mean when you went to the lake and remembered?”

Ma barely relaxed.

“It started all right,” she said. “I realized I could feel them there, in under the trees, waiting for me to sing. So I sang, and they heard, but it wasn’t right. I mean, it wasn’t the way it’s supposed to be—like this stupid weather—they could hear me, but they weren’t really listening. And I wasn’t sure about the song, either, the way I usually am. I had to do it from memory. And it’s been like that since then. . . . Anyway, spring’s here now and I won’t have to do it again this year.”

Spring had come suddenly, a normal-seeming spring, though with far less slush and mire than a true snowfall would have left. The wind swung south and smelled of sap and growth, and the swelling leaf buds tinged the gray forest with smoky purples and browns and yellows. Aconites and wild irises sprang open under the mild sun, and within two days the family was out in the fields from dawn to dusk, Da and Dusty with the heavy harrow; Ma behind them with the seed basket on her left hip, broadcasting the seed with a steady sweep of her right arm; then Anja and Tiddykin with the light harrow, burying the seed before the birds could grab it (Tiddykin could pretty well have done the job un-led) ; and Tilja last of all, with Calico and the roller, watching the repetitive pattern of golden grains arcing out from Ma’s hand and falling in a graceful curve, like the ghost of a huge, slowly beating wing.

Tilja was filled with a kind of happy grief that she should be seeing Woodbourne at its most loved season, and family and horses working all together, expressing that love, and their love for each other, in their work, expressing it in a way that her parents could not have put into words, this last time, when she might never see it again.

Last of all they sowed the little barley field by the stone barn. That evening they ate their Seed-in Feast, as if this were a year like any other year, but all knowing that it was not. And next morning Da came in to breakfast to tell them that Tiddykin was lame, and they would have to take Calico after all.

They spent the rest of that day packing and readying. Anja went down to Meena’s with the last of the old barley from the little field, so that Meena could bake a loaf to give to Faheel. Alnor was bringing a flask of water from the snowmelt above the sawmill. They had no idea if this was what they were supposed to do, but it felt right.

The six of them left next day, four travelers, Ma and Anja. Da stayed to look after the animals. He said goodbye to Tilja as if she’d be home next week. She set her jaw and didn’t look back as Woodbourne went out of sight.

“The river is in our blood,” Alnor had said. “It is not in yours. You will need time on the river to learn to work the raft.” So they journeyed upstream and spent the first night at Aunt Grayne’s.

The raft was already waiting for them, and Alnor and Tahl, and Tahl’s two cousins, Derril and Silon, who had built it. Aunt Grayne had beds for them all, so they slept under her roof and went aboard in the morning.

Word had gone round of what was happening, and various rumors of why, so a small crowd had come to see them off. Most thought they were mad, and some said so, but Tilja sensed even so a kind of friendliness and sympathy among the watchers. Anyway, it was just as well that they’d helpers at hand, because it took six strong men to get Calico aboard the raft and into her stall, even heavily doped with the blue hemp mixture that horse copers used to quieten fractious animals.

Ma made no more fuss over their parting than if Tilja had just been staying on a few days with Aunt Grayne. She kissed her and with barely a shake in her voice wished her luck and told her to come back safe. Anja had a good blubber, of course, but Tilja guessed she meant it.

“I really am coming back,” she told her. “I promise. And I’ll bring you something special from the Empire.”

She stepped aboard and found a place for her pack. Derril and Silon poled the raft from the shore and as the current took it away she waved to her family until the bend of the river hid them.

As soon as they were out of sight she looked for something practical to do, to dull the grief of that parting. This raft wasn’t like the ones she’d seen before. Those had been just several tree trunks lashed side by side, being floated down the river to where they were wanted, with a post at the stern to hold the sweep that the raftman used to guide his clumsy craft. This one was made of straight poles a couple of handbreadths thick, fitted close together to form a rough deck. There was a slot down either side, into which inflated goatskins had been lashed for extra buoyancy. At the stern were two sweeps, wide apart, with a rail beside each for the sweepmen to steady themselves against. At the bows there was space for the passengers, and their small pile of baggage, and fodder for Calico. In the middle was Calico’s stall.

Tilja was really worried about the stall. The Ortahlsons might have had the river in their blood, but they obviously didn’t know much about horses. She found Calico already jerking her head resentfully against the short lead, though for the moment the hemp, and her own strong sense of self-preservation, seemed to be keeping her quiet.

Tilja heaped an armful of hay into her manger and turned to see Derril watching her.

“All right?” he said.

“If she doesn’t panic or throw one of her tantrums. She’d have the stall to bits, and maybe hurt herself badly, or fall in the river. She might even have us all in.”

“They told us she was the quietest horse in the Valley.”

“That was Tiddykin. She went lame. This is Calico. Look out!”

Too late. Derril had incautiously reached out to pat Calico’s cheek, and Calico had taken her chance to show him her feelings. He swore, and sucked at his hand. Tilja heard Silon laugh from his post at the stern sweep.

“See what you mean,” Derril muttered. “Come along aft now, and we’ll show you and your gran how to handle a raft. Lay off for the moment, will you, Alnor, so we can give the ladies a bit of practice.”

Tilja didn’t understand what he was talking about. As far as she could see, Alnor had been sitting on his pack near the front of the raft, with his head bowed, while Tahl squatted beside him gazing ahead and once or twice making some brief remark. But now Alnor raised a hand to show he’d understood, and Tahl turned and grinned to Tilja and then made himself comfortable among the baggage.

By the time she was back at the stern the raft, which had been riding true in the center of the current, had begun to turn its prow toward the left bank.

“See there,” said Derril, as the cousins pulled gently on their sweeps to straighten it. “You didn’t think she’d been staying straight of her own, did you? She’s a lovely little job, this raft, easy as easy, though I say it myself, but left to herself she’ll want to slew, one way or t’other. So far Alnor’s been keeping her right for us, chatting away to the current, telling it what he wants of it.”

Tilja stared, at Derril, at Alnor, at the quietly moving river. Magic! she thought. Real magic, here in the Valley! It didn’t seem the same as Anja and Ma listening to the cedars, or Alnor and Tahl to their mill stream. That seemed almost ordinary by comparison. But now Alnor had actually been using his strange power to make something happen in the real world. It was amazing.

“Can you do that too?” asked Tilja.

“Wish I could, but there never seems to be more than just one up at Northbeck has the knack of it. I daresay young Tahl will be doing it when he starts rafting, but the rest of us have to steer the hard way. And looks like that’s what you’ll be doing, once you’re into the forest.

“Now, which of you’s going to watch ahead and do the steering? How’s your eyes, ma’am, if you’ll pardon my asking?”

“You’ll be lucky if yours are half as good, my age,” snapped Meena. “You see what you make of it, girl.”

“Right, ma’am, if you take that sweep there, and the lassie takes this one . . .”

Tilja took the sweep two-handed and put her back against the rail, the way Derril had. She was now facing the right bank, but looking to her left, she could see past Calico’s stall, all the way down the river to the next bend. Meena was behind her, facing the same way, so that she could watch what Tilja was up to and do the same. Derril stood beside Tilja with one hand on the end of her sweep, gradually letting her take over as she got the hang of it.

She’d never tried anything like this before, but almost at once her hands, wrists and arms seemed to know exactly what they were supposed to do. It was very much easier than managing Calico in traces. The trick was to keep making constant little adjustments so that the raft stayed straight, and then it actually seemed to want to keep in the center of the current, even on the bends. It wasn’t very hard work, but it meant paying constant attention, mile after mile after mile.

When he thought she and Meena had done enough Derril let her rest, and Alnor took over, while Silon led her up to the front of the raft and showed her, as they rounded each bend, what to watch out for ahead. And then back to the sweeps for another lesson. So they floated on all day, Meena and Tilja taking turn and turn about with Alnor. At one point when she was resting, the main current narrowed to round a bend, running close in beside the right-hand bank. Alnor took them through so near it that she could have reached out and touched the red mud. Silon, the other cousin, was lolling beside her. She heard his sigh of admiration.

“Beautiful,” he muttered. “Clean as a whistle. Just look at him sitting there, muttering away. You wouldn’t think, to look at him now, that that’s the best kick-fighter there’s ever been in the Valley. And a wild lad he was too, those days, with the devil of a temper on him, my da told me.”

“He looked really furious at the Gathering,” said Tilja, “when he thought people weren’t taking him seriously.”

Toward evening they came ashore to spend the night at a farm. The effect of the hemp had worn off and Calico made a typical fuss about landing, and didn’t seem remotely grateful to be loosed into a paddock with real green grass to browse, and friendly horses the other side of the fence. Next morning, at first light, Tilja fed her a double dose of hemp, the farmer sent for extra help from his neighbor farm, and with a great deal of hauling and shoving they manhandled her back onto the raft and into her stall.

“You’d better get used to it,” Tilja told her. “I’m not letting you ashore again until we’re through the forest.”

The cousins came with them as far as the last landing place, in the shallows of the outer bank on the curve that took the river south into the trees. While they were wading ashore with their own kit Alnor turned to the other three.

“From now on I will need your help,” he said. “We know that rafts were floated down to the Empire before the Valley was closed, so the journey can be done. But we also know, from memories passed down in my family, that once it enters the forest the river flows in a canyon. And with the snowmelt from the mountains it runs more strongly than it did in those days. In such a place the water will not be quiet. You must tether the horse firm, so that it cannot be thrown about. Then you must take the cords which you’ll find coiled by the sweep rails and tie them round your waists, in case you lose your footing.

“Then, Tilja, you must watch me. If the sickness does not affect me—as it may not, out on the water—I will for the most part be able to take us through without help, apart from that of the waters themselves. But at times that may not be enough, and you will need to use your sweeps. If I raise my left arm, you must work to turn the raft that way, and the same if I raise my right arm. If the sickness overcomes me it will also overcome Tahl, and you must do what you can.”

Calico was drowsy with hemp, but even in her stupor did her best to squeeze Tilja against the sides of the stall. By the time Tilja had her secure they were in among the trees, and she hurried back to her post at the stern sweep. The river had narrowed suddenly, and now ran between steeper banks, its whole current moving all together without eddies or still places, but sending continuous faint tremors through the timbers of the raft. The trailing sweep fidgeted in Tilja’s grip as if it were alive. She kept her eyes on Alnor, waiting for the moment when he lost control and she and Meena must take over. Beyond him she could see the river running dark with the reflection from the hills, and roughening here and there into foam. Nothing happened. All the way down that reach the raft stayed steady in midstream, held there by the waters doing Alnor’s bidding.

Until they reached the woods she had barely heard his muttered song, but he was singing more loudly now, so that his voice carried to her above the whispering hiss of the raft, a steady, rippling drone, repetitive, endless, shapeless, but full of intricate little changes, like the surface of a flowing stream. She thought about what Silon had told her, that Alnor had been a wild young man. Yes, she could understand that, wild as a waterfall, where a young river hurls itself down a hillside. She guessed that that waterfall was still there, inside him, but his quiet, slow, formal speech and manner were ways of controlling it.

Now he flung up his right arm.

“Pull,” she called, and heaved on her sweep. As she did so, though she had seen nothing different in the rush of the current, she felt the whole raft suddenly trying to writhe sideways against the blade of her sweep. Alnor’s arm was still up.

“Again!” she called, raising her own blade clear and stretching forward for another heave.

The raft steadied and swept on. Alnor lowered his arm. In those few moments the hills seemed to have risen more steeply round them, crowding them in with trees. The raft tilted, and plunged down a dark green slope, the surface creased into straining lines, down which they rushed toward a wild pother of foam at the bottom. Then they were rocking and tossing in a roaring jumble of white water, tilting up, steep as a shed roof, with the foam creaming round Tilja’s ankles, swooping down into more foam and out into the untroubled reach beyond.

Alnor’s left arm was up.

“Push!” she shouted.

Together the three of them caught and straightened the raft as it tried to slew, and they floated into calmer water. At once Tilja hauled her sweep clear, laid it down, untied her safety cord and hurried forward to the stall. Calico was fully awake and on the verge of panic, with her ears flat back and the muscles of her neck bulging stiff as she strained against her head collar. Tilja stayed with her, patting her neck, teasing her mane and talking gently to her until she saw the hemp stupor seep back into her eyes. By then her own heartbeat had steadied, and the great gulp of terror she had felt at the top of the slope was no more than a memory.

Meena caught her eye and cackled with laughter.

“Never fancied dying in bed,” she called.

Tilja grinned and went back to her post.

There were cliffs on either side of them now, black, but streaked here and there with falling streams. Time passed. Alnor and Tahl seemed to be all right, the old man sitting erect, as if his blind eyes were staring along the gorge, and Tahl kneeling beside him to tell him what was coming. Alnor was still singing his strange song, though Tilja caught only faint snatches of it through the splatter and rustle of the current. After a while Meena joined quietly in, not the same song, though it had the same kind of strangeness, slow, wavering, wordless, wonderfully peaceful. Turning, Tilja saw a dreamy look on the lined old face.

“Are you singing to the cedars?” she asked.

Meena smiled teasingly, a child with a secret, and went back to her song.

The gorge twisted to and fro. At almost every bend they had to fight to hold their course in the rushing current. Twice more they swooped down roaring slopes into the welter of foam below, but each time Alnor had set the raft dead right at the start so that it came safely through. And something very odd was happening to Calico. Though the effect of the hemp must surely be wearing off, she seemed barely to notice these upheavals. When Tilja went to check her, as soon as they were through the tumbling flurries, she found her with her ears pricked, and with a bright, interested look in her eye, and every now and then she would raise her head and give a whinny of greeting and inquiry, as if she’d spotted another horse somewhere up on the left-hand cliffs.

“Calico seems to think she’s got a friend up there,” said Tilja, as she came back to her sweep.

Meena produced something between a sneer and a grin.

“Can’t see there’s any trouble coming, this next bit,” she said. “Manage by yourself for a while?”

“I think so.”

“Right. I’ll just go and see how the old fellow’s doing.”

There were gruntings and mutterings as Meena untied her safety cord, and then she came into Tilja’s line of sight, steadying herself on Calico’s stall as she hobbled forward. Tilja saw her stop beside Alnor and say something, and put her hand on his forehead, but at that point she felt the raft wavering from its course as Alnor was distracted from his task, and she had to hold it steady without his help until Meena left him and came hobbling back.

“Says he’s not too bad,” she said. “He’s feeling it, mind, and so’s that boy—they’ve got a nasty color, both of them, but Alnor thinks they’ll do. How we’re ever going to get them home again I can’t imagine.”

That reach ended in a wild bend, another reach, and another, easier curve. All Tilja’s attention was concentrated on Alnor, and the rush of water beyond him, so she mightn’t have noticed what they were coming to but for Tahl’s sudden, astonished gesture. He flung up an arm and pointed ahead, and at the same time called aloud. Tilja looked, and saw.

The cliff on the outer side of the coming turn rose sheer from the water, like a natural watchtower. On its summit, almost at the brink, stood a unicorn.

It was nothing like the lissom white creature of Tilja’s imaginings. The long horn rose sharp against a dull sky. The beast was big boned, angular, almost clumsy looking, large as a heavy horse. It was a strange, fiery color, between yellow and orange, and when it neighed and shook its head sparks seemed to fly from its mane, though there was no sun to give that glint. Its challenge rang along the canyon, echoing from cliff to cliff, the same fearsome sound that Tilja had heard that day when she and Meena were bringing Ma unconscious home from the lake. The challenge was not to the raft below. It didn’t seem to have seen that, but to be staring across the canyon at something above the cliffs on the other side.

It stamped its hoof, once. At the blow a vast boulder split from the cliff and plunged into the water, straight into the path of the raft. Tahl started to speak urgently to Alnor, but broke off, swayed, and slumped against him. Tilja saw Alnor struggling to raise his left arm, but then he too slumped forward. At the same moment Calico came out of her trancelike calm, squealed and started to wrestle against her tethers.

No time for that.

“Push, Meena, push!” Tilja shouted, shoving at the sweep. “Too much! Pull! . . . There! . . . No, push!”

The raft edged across the current, slowly, slowly, away from the onrushing cliff. Meena’s side reached the slacker water. Tilja felt it catch, as if on a sandbank, as the shove of the current urged it forward. She yelled to Meena to push and flung herself against the sweep. For that one stroke they held it straight, but as they lifted the sweeps for the next stroke the raft slewed violently and went twirling helplessly on, like a leaf in a running ditch. Dimly Tilja heard the unicorn’s wild neigh echoing again between the cliffs, but she took no notice, lost in the futile effort of trying to slow that sickening gyration.

“That’s enough of that,” called Meena behind her. “We’re not doing a ha’porth of good. I’ve got to go and see to old Alnor, and you’d better do something about that horse of yours.”

She was right. Tilja laid her sweep down, hurried forward and grabbed Calico’s halter, wrestling to hold her head still and trying to calm her with her voice. No good. The horse was drowning deep in the bog of terror. Tilja’s heart began to thunder with the useless effort. Dimly she was aware of Meena groping her way past her, of the cracked old voice starting to sing. Calico gave two more violent heaves and stilled, shuddering.

Tilja stayed where she was, gasping for breath. The raft turned steadily in the center of the stream. The left-hand cliff moved past, and then she was looking back down the canyon. The unicorn was still on its watchtower in the distance. It seemed to have noticed them at last, and to be watching them go. The next bend carried them out of sight.

Meena had stopped singing and was calling for her.

“Come and give us a hand, girl. Got myself stuck.”

Tilja turned and saw her half kneeling with her bad leg bent awkwardly aside. She had heard the pain in her voice and rushed to help.

“Just get me down, will you? Gently does it. Aaah . . . that’s better. Now, something to lean against . . . that’ll do. . . . See if you can roll him over, so his head’s in my lap. And I’ll have the boy along here. . . .”

Tilja heaved and hauled at the limp bodies. Alnor was alive. Even above the mutter of the river she could hear the ugly rasp of his breath. His face was the color of old canvas. So was Tahl’s, but his breathing didn’t sound so awful. Bit by bit she levered and dragged them to where Meena wanted them, and stood, panting.

“Little wretches,” said Meena, furiously. “Not that it was their fault, I suppose. They can’t help making the sickness, like husbands can’t help snoring. They don’t know we’re doing our best to help them. You can’t see ’em from down here, but I could tell they were up there, following us along. I’d been singing to them, keeping them quiet, telling them there wasn’t anything to be scared of. Alnor was a bit on the groggy side, and the boy, too, but they weren’t going to pass out. Then that ugly great brute . . . what’s it doing in our forest at all? It doesn’t belong here. And bellowing at our own little wretches like that, scaring them silly? Doing it on purpose, too. That’s what it wants. That’s what makes the sickness, them being scared. You didn’t feel it? It was like as if they’d just gone and poured a great waterfall of their fear right down on top of us. You saw how sudden Alnor and Tahl keeled over?

“Now you’re going to have to manage on your own, best you can, while I see if I can get the little wretches sorted. Don’t you bother about that horse of yours. She’ll do. Knew they were up there before, didn’t she? She’ll be happy too, once I’ve got ’em quieted. So just go and see if you can stop this stupid thing making us dizzy, the way it’s doing, there’s a good girl, and I’ll get on with it.”

She was already singing by the time Tilja reached the stall. Calico was getting ready to panic again, shuddering, tossing her head, and giving anxious little whickers, so Tilja stopped to pet and talk to her, and so actually saw the moment of change, when the shiverings stopped, and the ears pricked up, and the unfamiliar, interested look came into the large brown eyes.

“I think it’s a bit much,” Tilja told her sourly. “Ma and Anja can hear what the cedars are saying, and Alnor and Tahl can listen to the waters, and Meena can sing to the unicorns, and now you’re wanting to make friends with them, and it’s just me who’s left out. D’you call that fair?”

Calico turned her head away and whinnied toward the cliff top, and Tilja went back to her sweep.

She found that the raft had drifted into slacker water. It was still turning, and still moving down the canyon, though much more slowly now that it wasn’t hurried along by the current. Already they were well down the reach, and Tilja could see the curve of the next bend. It looked a gentle one, with the current running close to the inner cliff and a lot of slack water out to the left. There might even be a back eddy there. Silon had told her about that danger yesterday, and told her what to do, while he was teaching her how to pick her course. Caught in a bad one, he said, a raft might circle for a full day. If she let that happen, she realized, Alnor and Tahl would certainly die. Even drifting along as they were now might be too slow. The sooner they were out from among the trees, the better. There wasn’t much hope of her stopping the raft from turning on her own, but she might be able to nudge it over closer to the main current.

She heaved for a while and found that each time the raft came to the point where it was facing downstream it seemed to hesitate for one or two strokes of the sweep, hovering almost straight before it swung on. Time after time it turned, hesitated, turned, hesitated, neither better nor worse, and then, without her having done anything different she could think of, slowed before it was pointing directly ahead, and stopped there, no longer turning. Gingerly she continued to edge it back toward the current, watching, and trying to feel with her sweep for any sudden difference which might set it spinning again. As they reached the main flow she thought she’d lost it, but heaving with all her strength on the sweep just managed to hold it and drive it on, and now they were back in the current and she could relax, simply watching the water ahead for signs of change.

Meena was still singing, but she had raised her head and was rocking herself gently from side to side with a faraway, dreamy look on her old face, so that Tilja felt that she could see how her grandmother might have looked when she was a lively young woman. She was mixing her strange, shapeless song to the unicorns in with words, and a tune that Tilja knew well. It was called “Cherry Pits,” an old, old song that mothers sang over cradles and children used for counting games, though the words, when they meant anything at all, were about two lovers sharing a bowl of cherries and kissing while they ate. Sometimes as Tilja worked at her sweep she found she was making her strokes to the rhythm of the song, but then it would waver and drift back into the wordless, rhythmless unicorn song and then somehow find its way back to the chorus of “Cherry Pits.”

The day wore on. When Tilja felt hungry she chose a smooth stretch and left her sweep and fetched one of the small loaves Ma had baked for the journey, and a piece of cheese, and ate them one-handed. The cliffs dwindled and were gone. The river was far broader, its current less fierce but still easy to see, and they floated steadily on between wooded hills.

There was something else different too. It took Tilja a little while to realize what it was. The trees here were already in young leaf. And the air was warmer, lusher, and at the same time, somehow, drier. They were not in the Valley anymore, not even in a place very like the Valley. They were floating toward a quite different country, different from anything Tilja knew. No one that she had ever heard of had done such a thing for nineteen generations. It was a strange thought.

Late in the afternoon the raft rounded a great, sweeping bend and there this new country was. On either side of them the forest had ended and they were floating between low, rocky hills, dotted with patches of scrub, more waste even than the spare ground above Woodbourne. Meena stopped singing, but instead Calico started to whinny desolately, and Tilja realized that the unicorns must be following them no more.

The new country continued just the same as they rounded each bend of the river, mile on mile of desolate hills, and no sign that anyone lived here at all. Meena stayed where she was all afternoon. It was almost dark before she eased Alnor off her lap and struggled to her feet. She hobbled aft, clutching Calico’s stall to stop herself falling, but this wasn’t only, Tilja realized, because of her hip. She looked dazed, half-awake, not sure where she was.

“Did you see ’em?” she asked. “Little wretches.”

“Unicorns? Oh, where? I was watching the river.”

“In under the trees. Right down by the water, some of ’em, so I could see their reflections glimmering off it. Who’d’ve thought there were that many of ’em? Following us along, come to listen to my singing. All I’d been doing was trying to keep ’em quiet, so they weren’t afraid anymore of that great brute.”

“With ‘Cherry Pits’?”

“Well, it was and it wasn’t. It just came to me. I was thinking about old Alnor, and how he must’ve been a fetching lad once, and then I was thinking about a young man I used to be keen on. Met him at a Gathering, and we really hit it off, only it wasn’t that easy, him living right over at West End. I’d’ve married him too, only there was this farm he was going to come into when his uncle died—really beautiful, it was—still is, I daresay, though I’ve never had the heart to go back. And I couldn’t leave Woodbourne, could I? I mean, maybe I could’ve gone to live at West End with him for a bit, but I’d always have had to come back, wouldn’t I, soon as my own ma was past singing to the cedars? And the worst of it was I couldn’t tell him any of that—not that he’d’ve believed it, supposing I had—so it just came down to he wasn’t going to leave West End for me, and I wasn’t going to leave Woodbourne for him. Of course he couldn’t see rhyme or reason to it, Woodbourne being nothing much of a farm, really, while West End . . . ah, well . . . I don’t think he ever forgave me. . . . Be that as may be, we used to sing ‘Cherry Pits’ together, and that’s what started me off, thinking about Alnor when he was younger, and then about my own young man. . . .”

She shook her head.

“And the unicorns didn’t mind?” Tilja asked. “I mean, that wasn’t their song, was it?”

“Not them,” said Meena. “I don’t know it really matters what I sing to them, provided I know I’m doing it for them, then they make it their song. I’ve never thought of that before—didn’t know I could do any of this, apart from singing to the cedars in the old days, when it was me going out to the lake all those years. Little wretches.”

She seemed to have woken herself up by talking, and spoke the last couple of words in her usual grumbling tone. Tilja grinned at her.

“And what do you think you’re laughing at, young woman? Nothing much to laugh at, far as I can see—we’re never going to get this thing in to the bank on our own, not without Alnor to give us a hand. And I’m all in and I dare say you are too, so here we are in the middle of this stupid great river, and it’ll be pitch dark soon and we won’t be able to see what’s coming and it wouldn’t do us much good if we could, either, for all we could do about it.”

Tilja looked around. She could still just see the loom of the shore on either side, and the water stretching ahead of them, broad and smooth, reflecting the first few stars.

“It doesn’t look as if anyone lives here,” she said, “so we may as well stay on the raft anyway. Calico won’t like it, but she’ll have to put up with it. Let’s have something to eat, and go to sleep, and just hope we don’t come to a waterfall or something in the night. I don’t see there’s anything else we can do, so we might as well make the best of it.”

“I’ve seen better bests,” said Meena, relishing her grumble.

In the last light Tilja did what she could for Calico. In spite of what she’d just said to Meena, her heart smote her when she heard the cross-grained beast’s long, weary sigh. Calico had no idea of what was happening to her, beyond its endless strangeness and discomfort. She was too dispirited even to try to bite or lean against Tilja as she scraped out the floor of the stall and washed it down with a couple of buckets of water. Tilja left her with a full manger and the bucket to drink from and went and groped among the stores for supper. Neither Tahl nor Alnor stirred.

Tired though she was, she woke again and again in the night and raised her head and craned around. Unsteered, the raft was turning slowly in the current, but to Tilja, lying there, it felt as if she was at a center of stillness round which the whole world, and the starry sky, would wheel for ever. The effect made it hard to see how the stars were really moving, until the moon rose and she could judge the passing of time by that. It was long after midnight before true sleep settled on her, soft and warm, and she could settle into it like a hen returning to its nest.