The Ropemaker (22 page)

For a moment she too had frozen, but with shock, not the compulsion of magic. So soon! Far back in Talagh Dorn had sensed the explosion of magic and come, almost in an instant. Now, as he began to turn slowly, studying the crowd and lightly shaking his whip for guidance toward the source of power he was seeking, Tilja came to herself. He had his back to her for the moment, but soon he would be facing her, see her, and realize that she was different. What then?

The obvious thing was to pretend to freeze like everyone else, but she knew in her heart it wouldn’t work. It was his magic that bound everyone but her. Like Silena’s beast, he would be able to sense the difference. Perhaps, as Lord Kzuva’s magician had said, he couldn’t hurt her directly with his magic, but he didn’t have to use it to get what he wanted. He was far stronger than she was. . . . No, because to use his strength he would need to touch her, and then . . . if she dared . . . No, better, suppose she tried now, when his back was still turned, when he wasn’t ready . . .

She was still nerving herself to step forward when an enormous throaty roar shattered the stillness. Instantly the thongs of Dorn’s whip rose and streamed toward the further end of the shed. By their light Tilja saw a huge lion standing on the pile of rubble from the fallen roof and wall. Its mane stood stiffly out around its head as its mouth gaped for another roar. At the sound the thongs of Dorn’s whip seemed to hesitate, but he shook it fiercely and they surged on, writhing as if they were fighting their way against a gale.

Move now, while all the Watcher’s powers are concentrated on the
lion!
Tilja let go of the others, crouched down and managed to wriggle her way through the trance-held throng until Dorn was immediately in front of her. Still crouching, she reached up and laid both hands on his naked back.

Again, for the third time, but far more intensely than before, body and mind filled with the numbness. She felt that to-and-fro rush of powers being channeled through her. This time they almost overwhelmed her. For a moment she was blind. Her head was full of a strange, drumming darkness. She seemed to be in some other place entirely, or rather a sort of nonplace, an endless emptiness which was draining everything out of her. She willed herself to control it, to cling on to all that was Tilja, while the swirling energies sluiced past. Somewhere in that tumult she sensed Dorn himself being dissolved and carried away into nothingness. Then it was over, and she was back in the shed and scrambling to her feet, and though she still couldn’t see, this was because the light from Dorn’s whip had gone out and everything was in darkness again.

But the door was open, and the people in the shed were no longer gripped into stillness by Dorn’s magic. Like sheep bursting from a pen they surged out into the open and staggered away. Tilja was simply shoved out ahead of them, but managed to twist aside and wait for the others by the doorpost.

They came soon enough, Meena instantly recognizable among the stream of dark shapes by her grunts and mutters. Tilja grabbed her and pulled her aside and Tahl and Alnor followed.

“That’s better,” Meena gasped. “You do that, girl? I could see a bit of it, but I stuck where I was standing. Don’t let go of me again, or I shan’t know if I’m on my head or my heels.”

“We have to get away from here,” said Alnor. “There will be more of them coming, besides the man who came through the door.”

“That lion’s one of them,” said Tahl.

“Where can we go?” said Meena. “There isn’t anywhere else.”

“Wait,” said Tilja. “Over here, where we can see more stars.”

They moved down to a wider space between the sheds.

“There’s the Fisherman,” said Tahl. “I can’t see the Axle-pin, but it must be about there, behind that roof.”

Tilja looked back and checked the lie of the shattered shed.

“Then Axtrig was still pointing south when I found her,” she said.

Alnor grunted, as if this was something he had been half expecting. Tilja remembered him talking about it outside the gates of Goloroth. And she herself felt strangely unsurprised. She knew nothing about Faheel beyond what could be learned from the story of Asarta, but of one thing she was certain. Now that she had seen it, she knew that the City of Death was no place for him.

The others seemed to share her thoughts.

“That man told us they weren’t too busy just now,” said Tahl. “They should have finished with the coffins—there weren’t that many. There mightn’t be anyone there. We saw them pushing the rafts out this afternoon, Alnor. It’s this way.”

For a moment none of the others spoke.

“Well,” said Alnor. “It would be good to be on the water again.”

The spaces between the sheds were full of old and frightened people stumbling about in the darkness and the eddying magic. There seemed to be nobody trying to take control, or to shepherd them back inside, let alone stop and question anyone who seemed to know where they were going. So they made their way eastward, awkwardly, with Tahl and Alnor leading, each with an arm reaching back to grasp Tilja by hand and wrist, and then Tilja with the fingers of her other hand twined into Meena’s as she helped her hobble along. So protected, they could proceed erratically through the tumult, except when part of the panicking throng blundered against them and forced them apart, and whoever had been knocked loose had to stand and fight not to be swept into the same panic until Tilja could make contact again.

Twice from all around them, and from as far as they could hear across the stricken city, fresh wails of terror rose and died away.

“I suppose that means another Watcher’s showed up at the shed where we found you,” said Tahl.

“Doesn’t need to be a Watcher,” said Meena. “There’s others, remember, looking for Axtrig. Just have to hope they’ve no way of finding her, long as Tilja’s got her safe.”

“I think one of them may be following us,” said Alnor. “I am not certain, but last time I was separated from Tilja—”

“It’s getting lighter,” Tahl interrupted. “There’ll be a moon soon. And look, that’ll be the channel they send the rafts down.”

He was right. They had reached a strip of water, embanked with masonry. A paved walkway ran beside it. Beyond the channel, faintly visible, lay the dark expanse of the Great River. To her left Tilja could see the outline of the walls of Goloroth, and the archway through which they had entered the city. The workers who had been unloading the cargoes earlier in the night were gone. There were no lights moving on the jetty.

They turned south and hurried along the pathway as fast as Meena could manage. When Tilja glanced back she could see nothing following. Nobody else seemed to have thought of leaving the city by water. All the tumult lay behind them.

Now there were rafts in the channel, ready for use next day, a long line, jostling against each other, kept together by the current. At the head of the line the stone jetty reached out into the river. Seen close to, the system was very simple. The current in the channel ran out through sluices beneath the jetty, and thus kept the line of rafts in place, but the masonry was so shaped that the front raft was nudged round the corner to the foot of a shallow ramp and held there. The passengers boarded it down the ramp, the workers on the jetty poled it away and the next raft was automatically pushed into place.

Tahl picked up a coil of loose cord and tossed it aboard the first raft, then chose a pole from the dozen or so leaning against the jetty.

“We’ll manage from the raft,” he said. “If Tilja gets us all aboard Alnor and Meena can sit down and then she can just hang on to me while I shove us along. The river will do most of the work.”

He was right. Again, the jetty had been carefully shaped to turn some of the current outward, and all he needed to do was to use his pole to keep the raft from scraping against it. Soon they were sweeping along beside the dark stonework, and shore and city were sliding away behind them, sharply outlined now against the pallor of moonrise.

“Hold fast,” called Tahl. “We’re going to bucket about a bit round the end.”

But in fact the raft barely tilted as the side current they had been using met the force of the main stream. The jetty rushed away. Ahead lay the open sea.

“Look at that!” cried Meena.

She was staring back along the way they had come. Tilja turned. The first sliver of moon was showing above the horizon beyond the walls of Goloroth. Right at the end of the jetty, black against that brightness, stood an enormous lion. Its shaggy mane was rimmed with sparkles of moonlight. It did not move. Its head was turned toward them. It seemed to be watching them go.

11

The Island

Tilja woke, already screwing her eyes up against the blaze of light. She was lying on a hard, slanting surface that was tilting slowly, becoming level, beginning to tilt the other way so that her head was lower than her feet and she seemed to be slipping down, down, steeper now, with a rushing sound in her ears. . . . And then light spray whipped across her, drenching her face—drenching it again, for it was already wet, and so were her clothes on her upper side, and still she couldn’t force her eyes open against the glare and look around and see where she was.

All she could remember was staring back at an enormous lion, black against a rising moon. In her mind’s eye she could see the moon sparkling on its mane. Odd. Fur didn’t sparkle like that—not ordinary fur. Except . . . yes, the cat on the walls of Talagh . . . magical cat . . . magical lion . . . She was too tired to think about it.

But there was something else odd about the way she remembered that lion, not magical weird, like its hugeness and its suddenness and the way it seemed to be watching her, just homely odd. Yes, it was odd in the same way as the old plow horse at Shotover, the next-door farm to Woodbourne, which never looked as if it had been put together quite right; legs and body and head seemed to belong to different horses. Or lions.

The combined memory of horse and lion pieced everything together. The lion was of course the same one that had appeared suddenly at the end of the shattered shed and roared at Dorn, and it must then have followed them down to the pier—yes, Alnor had said that he sensed something following them—but it didn’t seem to have tried to catch or stop them, it had just been standing watching them go.

And then something had happened to Tilja herself. She was tired and she had fallen asleep, but it hadn’t been just that. The tiredness was like nothing she had ever felt before. It came as if she had been fighting, all alone, for hours and days and months and years, against an enormous invisible something, keeping it out, or sometimes, if it became too strong for that, letting it in and channeling it through and away, away, to an unknowable somewhere, and she was the only one who could do this, so she’d had to keep on doing it, hours, days, months, years, but now it was over and she could allow the great calm wave of tiredness that had built up all the time she had been fighting to pick her up and carry her along in its softness and darkness and forgetting. . . .

But something had woken her, or she might have slept on forever.

More fighting.

She wasn’t ready.

Groaning, she tried to sit up, but couldn’t. She was being held down.

“Hello. Do you want to wake up?”

Tahl’s voice.

“No . . . where . . . ? what . . . ?”

“Hold it. I’ll untie you. We didn’t want you rolling overboard in your sleep.”

Hands moved. The pressure against her chest eased. That was what had woken her. . . .

No, it wasn’t, but it had been there, against her chest. A pulse of numbness. Axtrig. She clutched at the place through her blouse and lifted the spoon clear of her chest. The moment the wood lost contact with her skin she felt the handle trying to twist itself round, until she let it fall back against her chest.

The pulse of numbness came and went.

“Meena was trying to use her?” she muttered.

“We were just talking about it. Meena’s not feeling too well. Some people get sick even on the river, if it’s a bit rough. You can sit up if you want. You’ve got a safety cord round you.”

Barely able to see for the dazzle, Tilja sat and stared around. Meena was lying by her side. Her eyes were closed and her face was a nasty yellowish color. Her lips were moving in silent, angry mutters. There was a dribble of fresh vomit from the corner of her mouth. Tilja forgot everything else and crawled to the edge of the raft so that she could dip the end of her head scarf in the rush of water, then crawled back and wiped the old face clean.

“Thanks, girl,” came the sick whisper. “I’ll live. Better had, after all this to-do. What about the spoon, then? Not doing much out here?”

Before she could answer, Tilja became aware of what was happening inside her blouse, unnoticed by her in the urgency of tending to Meena. As she had crawled to and fro the spoon had fallen into the fold of her blouse and now seemed to be trying to nudge and nuzzle, blindly but insistently, against the fabric, like a newborn pup searching helplessly for the unknown thing it wants, until its mother noses it toward her teats.

“She’s not just turning,” Tilja whispered in astonishment. “She wants to go somewhere. Over there. Is that south, Tahl?”

“Hard to tell. The sun came up over there, if the line of the waves hasn’t shifted, so where you’re pointing is a bit east of south, maybe.”

“We are still in the flow of the Great River,” said Alnor. “The water is almost fresh. Let me listen. Tahl, come and help.”

So Tahl joined him and they sat side by side in silence, with bowed heads. After a little while they started to sing, the same sort of quiet, wavering, almost tuneless chant Alnor had used to control that other raft when they had left the Valley. Tilja strapped Axtrig safely onto her arm, crawled back to the side and scooped water into her mouth. There were old stories in the Valley, going back to the times before it had been closed off, and some of them were about the sea. They all said that seawater was too salty to drink, but this had only a faint refreshing tang to it. She got a mug from her bedroll and gave Meena a drink, then she ate one of the flat cakes Tahl had bought on the sandspit outside Goloroth.

After that she lay down, pulled her head scarf over her eyes, and for a short while listened to the song as it mingled with the rippling whisper of the waves brushing along the timbers of the raft. The sound filled her with a sort of vague amazement. They were so far from home, out in the blank ocean, where there was no magic at all and all waters are lost in the end, but Alnor and Tahl could still persuade the current to carry them where they wanted to go. Then the great wave of tiredness took her again.

This time she woke and knew where she was as soon as Tahl shook her shoulder.

“We’re moving out of the current,” he said. “We may have been doing a bit of good, but we can’t keep it up now. Can we have another fix?”

With a groan Tilja sat up, crawled to the edge of the raft and rinsed her face. The water was now too salty to drink. To judge by the sun, it seemed to be about midafternoon.

She untied Axtrig and wrapped her in a fold of her skirt so that she could keep her grip on her without touching her when she let go with her other hand. When she did so, the shock of the spoon’s attraction to her unseen target was so strong that it felt that if Tilja had let her she would have slithered across the raft and gone swimming off sidelong across the slow, rolling swell. The direction was unmistakable. So was the need, and the power behind the need.

“There,” she said, pointing.

“Not too good,” said Tahl. “We’re still in some kind of current, but far as I can make out we’re heading well south of that. Not much we can do about it, either.”

They tried twice more as the afternoon wore on. Each time the line Axtrig longed for slanted slightly more across that of the waves, so that they all could tell that if the current carried them on as they were going they wouldn’t ever come to the place they had journeyed so far to reach.

By the time the sky was red in the west the waves had eased, and Meena was feeling better and sitting up.

“We’re not doing much good so far,” she said. “We’re going to go sailing right past unless we try something else. What about if I say the man’s name? Then maybe he’ll hear us and give us a hand or something.”

So Tilja knelt with her back to the sunset, facing the way Axtrig seemed to want to go. Her left arm was already numb to the shoulder, as if the spoon understood what was happening and was readying herself for the moment, and when Tilja took her in her hand she was like a living force. Tilja shifted her grip so that the bowl was toward her, and with her other hand wound the end of her shawl round the handle as Meena counted, “One. Two. Three . . .”

Tilja let go of the bowl of the spoon and grabbed for the handle, so that she had it in both hands. She heard the whispered name begin. A violent jerk pulled her flat on her face against the timbers of the raft, almost jarring the spoon free, but she managed to wedge the handle down into the cleft between two of the logs and pin it there. The whole raft seemed to be shuddering. She realized that she had heard cries from the other three, and looked round.

Both Meena and Alnor had tumbled onto their sides, and Tahl was on his hands and knees, shaking his head like a sick dog.

“What happened?” she gasped.

“Magic . . . the raft . . .”

He collapsed on his face.

Tilja stared around. Nothing else had changed in the huge emptiness of ocean. Behind her the fuzzy orange disk of the sun seemed to rest on flame-streaked wave tops, and ahead lay the darkness of night. She was helpless, trapped by the need to keep Axtrig pinned in place. It took her a while to discover that that need was gone.

The first inkling came from the feel of the raft when she tried to shift her position. She had been kneeling on her skirt, but now her left shin touched timber. For a moment the familiar numbness spread along it, and she realized that every timber of the raft, infected with Axtrig’s desperate need, had been faintly quivering with eager life, until her touch had stilled it. When she tucked her skirt back under her knee she felt the life reawaken.

Cautiously she raised her other hand an inch above the cleft, ready to grab again, but Axtrig lay content. Even so, careful to keep the spoon in contact with the raft all the time, she managed to shift her along the cleft and wedge the shaft tight under one of the cords that bound the logs together, then knelt up and looked around.

The sun was down and night looming ahead. Ahead. No longer directly into the waves, but slanting across their northward march, slanting in a rush of foam down the back of each one, across the hollow, and up the slope of the next one to its crest, and then slowly down again.

In the last light she made the others as comfortable as she could, drawing their clothes around them and wedging the garments in place, trying to see that no flesh came into contact with the magic-infected timber. When she lay down herself she did the same for herself, but for the opposite reason—to keep the magic active in the timber, and so carry them all wherever it was that Axtrig was determined to go.

Light woke her, stiff and cold. The sky in the east was pale with dawn. Dark against it rose an island, ringed with cliffs.

The other three lay as she had left them, but when she tried to wake them they didn’t stir. She couldn’t find their pulses, or hear their breathing above the sound of the waves. And yet their bodies were still as warm as hers beneath their clothes, so she tried to hope they weren’t dead. She was too worried to eat, but simply sat, watching the island draw nearer. There was nothing to see but the cliffs and a rocky shore, with waves breaking gently against it. The top was hidden.

Slowly her fear for Meena and the others left her, and she began to feel strangely calm, confident that whatever had brought them so far would see them safe to the end. A kindness was in the air. She seemed to smell it in each breath she drew, and to sense that even in their tranced sleep the other three were blessed by the same faint sweetness. There was peace in their faces. So as the dangerous-seeming shore drew nearer, with the long ocean swell being tumbled and shredded by jagged rocks, she felt no tension, but rose and watched, ready.

The raft headed for a sloping shingle beach lying in a fold of the cliffs. It was moving—Tilja could now see, with the motionless island for comparison—as fast as a cantering horse. At the last moment a wave added to that speed, lifting the whole raft up, laying it with a heavy crunch far up the beach, and withdrawing down the shingle in a pother of foam.

Tilja knelt and worked Axtrig out from beneath the lashing and tied her to her forearm. Faint numbness flowed into her flesh, but the spoon now felt peaceful, with the calm of a cat sleeping by its own hearth. When she laid her hand on the timber of the raft she could tell that the magic was gone from there. Hopeful, she waited for the others to wake, but they slept on and neither her voice nor touch would wake them. Still with that strange sense that all was well she left them and looked for a way up the cliffs.

She had been half expecting to find a stair, so easily had the last few hours gone for her, but there seemed to be only one possible place in the sheer rock, where a thin dribble of water trickled down a kind of slot, with a few juts and crannies on either side for handholds and toeholds.

She started up it, and soon found herself wondering whether there wasn’t a stair because it was not in the nature of the cliff to carve itself so, but it was doing what it could to help, all the same. There was always something to climb, provided she trusted it. When she looked down she could see the plain rectangle of the raft below her, with her three companions lying asleep on it. Rest after weary days—on this island it could be nothing else. She smiled and climbed on.

It was midmorning before she dragged herself out onto smooth turf. Three rabbits glanced up, then went back to nibbling, unperturbed. Ahead of her stood a low stone wall, with what looked like a garden beyond it. She walked to her left and found a gate, opened it and went through, closing it carefully behind her because she could see that wall and gate were there to keep the rabbits out.

This vaguely surprised her. The man they had been looking for surely had no need of such things. He could point out a line with his finger, and no creature—except perhaps an even more powerful magician, and the rabbits didn’t look that—could come beyond it. But now she thought of it she sensed that, apart from Axtrig, whom she carried sleeping against her arm, the only magic on the island was its own magical calm. And . . . and . . . a curious faint buzzing close beside her right thigh. Not an audible buzz, a buzz of feeling. But otherwise just like some tiresome insect.