The Ropemaker (10 page)

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.

5

The Camp

Something jarred, scraped, lurched. Tilja shot awake and sat up. A light mist veiled the sky, glowing brighter where the moon shone through. That silvery patch was high overhead, so several hours had passed and it must be almost dawn. The mist hid the distances, but nearer the raft she could see open water on one side, and on the other a tangle of dead tree trunks and branches.

“What’s up?” croaked Meena.

“It looks as if we’ve stranded against a sandbank or something. There’s a lot of old stuff washed down from the forest.”

“That’s not good.”

“If it isn’t an island we might be able to scramble ashore.”

“
You
might, and that boy, if he ever wakes up. Give ’em a shake, girl, see how they’re doing.”

Tilja eased herself out of her rug and crawled across to Tahl. He was breathing steadily, but didn’t stir at her touch. Neither did Alnor. Since she was up, she crawled to the stern of the raft for a piss, and once there was struck by a difference in the look of the water. She picked up her sweep and probed down, and discovered that the river at this point was less than waist deep, with a firm bottom. Working her way forward, she found it steadily shallower, until she could actually reach down with her arm and pick up a handful of gravel from the riverbed. She went back to her bedding and waited for daylight.

The mist turned golden as the sun rose, became a haze and cleared away. Now Tilja could see that the river had widened to a lake, blocked at its southern end by an enormous reed bed, but the current had drifted the raft side-on against a great sandspit projecting from the western bank. Wrack from many winters past had piled itself against these obstacles, an immense impenetrable tangle of sun-bleached timber, which the raft had now joined. The bank itself was not all that far away.

She dressed and breakfasted and then experimentally took the pole and heaved against a tree trunk. Using all her strength, she managed to open a gap between the raft and the timber, but as soon as she rested the faint current floated it back. If only Alnor and Tahl had been awake, they might have done it between them.

“Supposing I was to give you a hand,” said Meena. “I’m all right, provided I don’t have to go skipping around.”

“I’ll see if I can get Calico into the water,” said Tilja. “She’ll be a bit stiff, but she should be able to tow us ashore provided it doesn’t get much deeper. You’ll have to fasten the towlines. And I’ll need to borrow your cane.”

She stripped off her shoes, stockings and skirt, fetched a handful of her precious hoard of yellownut, showed it to Calico and gave her a few morsels, then let the horse see her putting the rest into the pocket of her blouse. With that incentive Calico backed out of the stall with only a token refusal, and got a scrap more yellownut to keep her interested while Tilja rigged a towing harness of padded rope. Calico started readily enough toward the edge of the raft, but then scrabbled and jibbed as it began to tilt under her weight.

“It’s all right,” said Tilja mildly. “It’s not that deep. Look, I’ll show you.”

She waited for Meena to hobble into place and took a firm hold of the lead rope, then climbed down into the water, faced the raft, fished out half the remaining yellownut and, standing just out of reach, showed it to Calico. Calico edged forward and craned, bracing her feet against the tilt, but came no further. Tilja moved the nut toward her, closer, closer, and then, as Calico lowered her head to take it, at the last moment started to withdraw her hand. Calico reached the extra distance and floundered in, rearing and kicking, drenching them both. Tilja heard Meena’s raucous cackle as she backed clear.

Keeping the lead rope taut, Tilja waited for Calico to steady herself, then let her have the rest of the yellownut, a little at a time, while Meena made the towlines fast to the raft.

“Come on, then,” coaxed Tilja. “No, not back on the raft. Last thing you want. Look, we’re going ashore. Oh, come along.”

For a moment it was touch and go, but then Calico took the strain and heaved, and they were moving upstream with Tilja probing the way ahead with Meena’s cane. As soon as they were clear of the timber wrack she turned toward the shore. Once the raft was under way it came easily. The water varied in depth, but by now Calico had seen that dry land lay ahead and made for it with a will, so it wasn’t long before they were trudging up the gentle slope of the bank, until the raft grounded in the shallows behind them. Tilja turned to unhitch the towlines.

“Behind you, girl,” Meena called from the raft. “I don’t like the look of him.”

Tilja turned again and saw a large yellow-orange dog watching them from the top of the bank. It was a shaggy, gawky beast, but despite what Meena had said didn’t look dangerous, and she stood her ground when it came trotting down toward her, with its long, plumed tail waving gently. It sniffed at her, as dogs do with strangers, but backed away as soon as she reached to scratch between its ears.

“I think it’s friendly,” she called.

“Better had be,” Meena answered. “Hey! Get off! Shoo! You’re not wanted!”

The dog paid no attention, but splashed through the shallows and up onto the raft, where it sniffed much more thoroughly at Meena than it had at Tilja, then turned to the sleeping bodies of Alnor and Tahl.

“Meena! Quick! The food bags!” Tilja called, and ran down the bank.

“Where’s my dratted cane? Beat it! There, that’s for you!”

Before she’d loosed Calico, Tilja had removed her water bucket and set it down by the side of the stall. Now Meena had snatched it up and flung its contents over the intruder. The dog didn’t mind. It backed away, grinning. Then, very deliberately, it shook itself.

The drops sprayed out all round it, drenching the raft. It was hard to believe that a half-full bucket could ever have held so much water. Tilja saw the arcing spray against the light of the rising sun, which made the whole shower seem to glitter with golden fire, with the golden dog glowing at the center of it. Meena was yelling, trying to get at the animal and belabor it with the bucket. Tilja was laughing till she could hardly stand. In the middle of all this Tahl, and then Alnor, sat up. The dog gave one last, tremendous shake, splashed ashore, loped up the bank past Tilja and disappeared.

“Just think,” said Meena. “We’d have saved ourselves a lot of bother if we’d thought to throw a bucket of water over the pair of you.”

“Perhaps,” said Alnor. “I am not sure. For myself, I felt that something came to me in my sleep and made me ready to wake.”

“Well, all I can say is you’re both of you looking a sight better than you did last evening,” said Meena.

They were sitting at the top of the bank eating a midday meal. The dog had come back and was watching them from a little distance away, but made no further attempt to be friends.

It was Tilja who had put her foot down about moving on as soon as they were ashore. It wasn’t fair on Calico, she insisted, after what she’d been through. So she gave her a good rubdown and then hobbled her and let her ramble around and browse what she could while the four humans talked. As soon as he’d eaten, Tahl, restless as ever despite the remains of the forest sickness, rose and unlashed pieces of the raft and started to build a frame to help Meena climb onto Calico’s back.

“It is time we were on our way,” said Alnor. “We will need to buy food tomorrow, and for myself I am still somewhat shaky, and cannot walk far or fast. I propose that we should follow the river. Then at least we will have water.”

They rose and gathered their baggage together. Tilja caught Calico and bribed her with a nose bag while Meena, voicing her distrust at every move, climbed the creaking structure Tahl had made and settled herself into the horse seat. Tilja was buckling the last bedding roll into place when Meena said, “At least we’re rid of that dratted dog. Where’s he got to, now?”

“There,” said Tahl. “I think he knows where he’s going.”

Tilja straightened and looked. The dog was already some distance away, moving at an angle to the river, trotting purposefully toward a low ridge. There it stopped and gazed back at them for a short while before disappearing over the far side.

“The boy’s right,” said Meena. “He’s going somewhere. And inviting us along, by the look of it. Let’s go up there, and see what we can see.”

Beyond the ridge stretched a plain, visible for an immense distance in the dry, clear air. To the left the reedy lake continued far out of sight. The plain itself seemed almost as barren and rocky as the hills behind them, but at least there were trees there, in scattered clumps, with more and greener trees in the distance. A mile or so away on the right something was moving, slowly, like a small patch of cloud shadow. Sheep? Goats? Too far to be sure, but yes, somebody was walking behind them, herding them along . . . and there, much further off, under the trees, something darker, more solid than shadow. A hut or a tent of some kind.

They watched for a while. The hut thing under the trees was about two miles away. The herd drifted slowly across the plain. Nothing else stirred.

A tied dog yelped, not the one they had seen. A child came out of the low, dark tent, stared at the strangers and ran back in. A woman emerged, told the dog to be quiet and strode to meet them. She was square and sturdy and very differently dressed from the women of the Valley, with a skirt that reached to her bare feet and a long scarf that wound twice round over her head, framing her face, and its tasseled ends dangling at her waist. She held herself like someone used to carrying loads on her head. Halfway to meet them she stopped and waited for them to reach her, her face expressionless.

“Health and good fortune,” she said, with a strange, twangy accent.

Alnor was at the head of the party, with his hand on Tahl’s shoulder.

“Long life and good fortune,” he answered, using the normal Valley greeting for strangers.

“You have come far?” said the woman.

“From beyond the forest,” he said.

The woman’s face became blanker still.

“All men die in the forest,” she said.

“We came quickly, on a raft down the river,” said Alnor. “But indeed I and my grandson nearly died.”

She nodded, frowning.

“This is not good news,” she said. “But you are a stranger and I must welcome you. It is our custom, here in the outlands, though I have little to offer a guest since the soldiers took my husband.”

“We would be more than grateful,” said Alnor. “We have food, but we are still not well, and need to rest. And perhaps you will tell us some of the customs of this country, for as you see we are strangers here.”

She shook her head.

“Ask me and tell me no more. Tomorrow I will take you to Ellion. You must talk to him and he will decide. My name is Salata.”

Alnor told her theirs, and she led them back to the trees and found water for Calico, and then made them sit down and brought them cheese and goat’s milk and pieces of hard, flat, biscuity bread, but when they tried to offer her some of their food in exchange, she became offended and insisted it was not the custom.

“Well,” said Meena. “It’s not my custom to take something for nothing, but at least there’s something I might do for you. You said the soldiers had taken your husband. Would you like me to have a go at telling you how he might be getting on?”

Salata’s face, her whole attitude, changed completely. She stared at Meena, hesitating, both eager and afraid.

“Oh . . . oh, please!” she whispered. “Anything . . . anything!”

Tilja fetched Meena’s baggage roll and Meena opened it and took out the leather bag in which she carried her spoons and the things that went with them. She laid the blue cloth out on the ground, put the spoons on it and told Salata to choose one. Salata chose one of the darker two. Meena poured a drop of oil onto the back of its bowl, gave her a piece of cloth and the spoon and told her to rub the oil well in and put the spoon back between the others. She bent forward until her face was only a few inches from the cloth, and concentrated, wheezing heavily.

“Ah,” she whispered. “Here it comes . . . here it comes . . . beautiful . . . my, that’s clear. Maybe you can see it for yourself, Salata—this line here—look close, and you’ll see it’s two lines, really, running side by side, that’s you and your husband, I’ll be bound, and these little lines branching off and running alongside, that’ll be your two little girls getting born. . . . But now, here this one, twisting away all of a sudden and going off into this muddle of stuff over here, that’s got to be him getting taken off by the soldiers, and this is you, going straight on but running a bit thin, and no wonder, things being difficult for you without him. . . .

But see, here, this one running back out of that mess, straight as an arrow to where yours is, and fitting in alongside it again as if it’s the one place in the world it wanted to be . . . that’s got to be him coming back to you. . . .”

“When? When?” croaked Salata.

“Can’t say for sure,” said Meena, pushing herself upright. “Doesn’t look that long, if you measure it off, but that’s not really how it works. There’s most of a lifetime in a space not as big as half your hand, so it just fits in what’s important, best it can. But I tell you it’s all clearer than I’ve ever seen, so that’s how things are going to work out, or my name’s not Meena Urlasdaughter.”

Hesitantly Salata reached out and took the spoon, as if she thought its touch might burn her.

“It’s going,” she said, peering at it. “Fading . . . I can’t see it anymore.”

“That’s right,” said Meena. “And if you asked them again they wouldn’t tell you anything special. But you saw it like I showed you, didn’t you? It was all there.”

Salata nodded, at first unable to speak. “Oh, you have given me a rich gift in exchange for your poor meal,” she said at last. “You have given me hope.”

She was crying now, holding the spoon and stroking it between her fingers as if its touch still spoke to her of her husband’s return.

“There, there,” said Meena. “Don’t you take on so. It’ll all come right in the end, and you won’t help nor hinder, making a song and dance.”