The Ropemaker (9 page)

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.”