The Ropemaker (24 page)

And in the middle of it stood a man wearing a dark blue robe of some rich fabric with a lacy golden collar sewn with seed pearls. His hair must once have been jet black but was now streaked with gray. He had his back to her, but his arms were raised as if in blessing, so that she could see a dozen great rings on his left hand, but on his right, on the middle finger, only a plain circle etched to look like fine cord. With a slow movement, like a dancer’s, he drew it off, then turned toward her.

She gasped.

“Fa—”

He stopped her with a gesture. She stared. She had seen but not felt the room shudder.

The eyes were Faheel’s, and the strong black beard was what Faheel’s might well have been when he was younger. Faheel’s wrinkled old face, too, could have become what it was from a face with this shape and these features. Except that these all belonged to a different order of being, not human, ageless, living stone. Like Silena on the walls of Talagh.

He fetched the box from the shelf, put the ring in it and dropped it into a pocket.

“Yes,” he said. “I am the one you would have named. You should not have been able even to begin to do so in this place. Now, first, I will see to your friends, so that you do not distract yourself with worrying for them.”

He closed his eyes briefly. His lips moved.

“Good,” he said. “They sleep in the room below. Nothing can harm them under this roof. Now, look at your hair tie. You see the gold hair? Tease it out.”

Tilja peered at the little object and spotted a golden glimmer among the interwoven colored threads. What Faheel asked looked impossible without unraveling the whole tie, but she took one of her hairpins and picked at a strand. A loop of gold hair freed itself, and when she pulled with her fingers the whole strand slid smoothly loose.

“Remarkable,” said Faheel. “The magic that bound that in place was far more than a village charm. Now give me the tie and bring the hair to the table. . . . Wait.”

The table seemed to be made from a single block of polished black marble, an ornate stem supporting a round top, smooth as a mirror, so that Tilja could see the brightly decorated ceiling reflected in its dark depths. As Faheel leaned over the table the reflections faded and the darkness seemed to become bottomless, until up from those depths there floated a curious irregular shape. At first Tilja couldn’t make out what it was, but when it reached the surface it became a delicate inlay of colored marbles, making a map with rivers and roads and mountains, and minuscule pictures of cities, and in a blink she realized it was a map of the Empire, from Goloroth in the far south to the tremendous mountains in the north. Yes, and there, ringed in between the forest and the snow peaks, was the Valley. Screwing her eyes up, she even persuaded herself that she could see a tiny dot close in against the forest edge. She pointed at it, careful not to touch the magical surface.

“That’s where I live,” she whispered. “That’s home!”

The map changed. The pictured mountains and trees grew larger and moved apart. The trees reached the edge of the map and the mountains disappeared on the other side, and the dot itself was more than a dot, growing and still growing, until she could see Woodbourne with its fields around it, and Ma and Da side by side hoeing beans in the Home Field and Anja trying to coax an escaped cockerel back into the safety of the run. She stared until her eyes were too misty to see and she had to wipe them with the end of her head scarf. When she looked again the table once more showed the map of the Empire.

“Now,” said Faheel, “without touching the table lay the hair somewhere on the map.”

Tilja chose an empty-looking area northeast of Goloroth. The hair, when she dropped it, curled itself together into a neat spiral, as if it had been trying to regain the shape it had held in the hair tie, but then lay still.

“A curious color,” said Faheel. “I have seen nothing like it. Have you, Tilja?”

She peered. A single hair doesn’t usually declare its full color. You need at least a ringlet for that. But this one fine strand seemed to shine not only with the reflected brightness of the room, but with an inner fire of its own, shining through the gold. Yes, indeed strange, but . . .

“The unicorn!” she whispered. “And the dog! When we landed from the raft! They shone like that! And the lion at Goloroth! I didn’t see its color, but the way its fur sparkled in the moonlight . . . and that means the cat—the one that helped me on the walls of Talagh . . . do you think the donkey . . . when Silena came to the way station? She said something about it not being only my doing.”

Faheel nodded, as if she had confirmed something he’d already guessed.

He stretched his hand for a moment above the map, and it began to move once more, enlarging itself at the same time, flowing away off the edges of the table, but mainly toward the south, so that the coil of hair appeared to float rapidly north over it, straight as a rule, with the Great River and the Grand Trunk Road streaming past to the west, then across the river where it curved away east at Ramram, and on, north between road and river, all the way Tilja and the others had tramped those ninety-three days, to Talagh itself, at first no larger than a drin coin, but growing and growing until it filled the tabletop and then stilled, with the coil of hair floating over the forecourt of the pinnacled palace at the center of the city.

Faheel grunted, as if with mild surprise, and picked up the hair, wound it round the hair tie and put them into a small purse. The map started to grow again, until it showed only the palace. Minuscule people began to appear, as they had at Woodbourne, but stopped growing before Tilja could make out more than that they were human figures arranged in a pattern of rectangles. Other figures ringed the courtyard. A parade of soldiers, with spectators, she guessed, the sort of thing that Emperors did in courtyards. Faheel grunted again.

“We can come no closer,” he said quietly. “The place is well warded. I could overcome the wards, of course, but at more cost than I can afford. This will take thought. . . .”

As he turned away from the table the map vanished. For some while he stood at the window, gazing out over the sea. He sighed and returned to the table. He took the box from his pocket, removed the ring and placed it on the gleaming surface, then stood back.

“Hold your finger above the ring,” he said. “Do you feel anything? Move closer. Stop as soon as you feel anything. Closer. Still nothing? Touch it and withdraw. . . . Still nothing? Touch it again and hold your finger there. . . . Pick it up. . . . Put it in your palm and close your fingers round it. . . .”

“Oh, I can feel something now,” she said. “It isn’t the usual sort of feeling I get when I touch something magical. It’s a sort of hum. Like a noise when it gets so deep that you can’t hear it anymore, but you still know it’s there. It’s as if everything else was humming with the ring. Except me.”

Faheel spread his hands and held them a little apart on either side of Tilja’s clenched fist.

“Astonishing,” he said. “I sense nothing at all of its presence. I do not know how you do this—it is something I have never before encountered. Give it back to me now. Thank you.”

Tilja put the ring into his cupped hand, where he weighed it for a moment or two, then put it away and sighed.

“Well, we must take the risk,” he said. “The thing that you have come for will have to wait. My problem is this. I would prefer not to make use of a power I do not understand, but I have lived too far beyond my time, and I cannot hold back my death much longer. Before I die, I must destroy the power of the Watchers. I brought them into being in the first place, at the Emperor’s behest, to help me control the chaos of magic flooding through the Empire, but my cure turned out in the end to be worse than the disease. So now I must undo what I did.

“But I cannot afford to do that until I have passed the ring to a new keeper, or chaos will come again. Twice over the years I have chosen one. Both became Watchers, and both then failed me, corrupted by their own power. Now you come with news of another, this Ropemaker. From things you have told me, and from the single hair you brought me, I believe that he has great natural powers, so far uncorrupted. But what the map showed us tells us that he is at this moment present at a grand parade in the courtyard of the Emperor’s Palace, and this almost certainly means that he has been chosen to take Dorn’s place as a Watcher, and will be installed in the course of the ceremony. Then it will be too late for me to pass the ring on to him.”

“That’s the bad news, I suppose,” said Tilja. “You said I’d brought you bad news as well as good. . . . Oh, no, that was before you’d used your map to find where the Ropemaker was, so you didn’t know then.”

“No, that is not what I meant,” said Faheel. “It is in fact part of the good news. It means that everything is coming together to my advantage. Many of the Watchers will be present at the ceremony, and not in their towers, so they will be more vulnerable to the attack I have long prepared. The Ropemaker will also be there, so when I have done I will be able to give him the ring and go, for my task will be over.

“The bad news . . . no, I have no time now, and if all goes well it will no longer be my problem. What matters now is that I must go instantly to Talagh. I do not dare wait, or the chance will be lost. The Ropemaker will be lost. He is in far more danger than he can understand. But there is a difficulty. I could go to Talagh between a breath and a breath, but I must take the ring for what I may have to do, past the warded walls of Goloroth, and stand, unnoticed, with twenty Watchers around me, whose task it is to detect the existence of such things as the ring in the presence of the Emperor.

“I still have power to do all this, but that would leave me no strength for what else I have to do. Moreover, if I were detected and it came to a magical battle, the power I would need to defeat twenty Watchers would destroy me also. You understand?”

“I think so. Would it help if I came with you and held the ring? I got Axtrig past the wards, and I think I’m stronger now.”

“That is what I was about to suggest, but there is a further difficulty. Because you are what you are I cannot take you instantaneously to Talagh, as I could take myself. You must be carried there, physically, mile by mile, minute by minute. By the swiftest means I can devise this will take too long. So what I must do is ask the ring to hold all time still for everything but you and your immediate surroundings while you are carried to Talagh. There will be a sort of bubble of moving time inside an unmoving universe. The bubble will be centered on you. Our journey will seem to us to take several hours, but when we reach the palace at Talagh the parading soldiers will not have moved a step. Asking the ring to do this will take strength from me, but it is in the nature of the ring, once asked, to deal directly with time of its own un-mediated power, and I will then be able to rest while we are carried to Talagh. Will you do this?”

Tilja was too astonished and overawed to do more than nod her head. Faheel smiled at her.

“Good,” he said. “Now you had better go back downstairs while I do what I have to. Your friends are there. Do not try to wake them.”

Tilja climbed down the ladder and found Meena, Alnor and Tahl each asleep on a separate pile of cushions, but still in the exact attitudes in which they had lain when she had last seen them, far below her, from halfway up the cliff. All three faces had the same look, Meena not sharp and touchy, Alnor not proud and angry, Tahl not eager and inquisitive, but all of them full of deep, quiet content. Tilja smiled at them and went and leaned on the windowsill, gazing out over the garden and the sea to where she guessed the Empire must lie.

Her mind was full of a jumble of thoughts about the Ropemaker. They didn’t seem quite to fit together, in the same way that the Ropemaker’s own gawky body didn’t . . . and the animals he’d been didn’t either, if Faheel was right, the lion, the donkey perhaps, the cat on the walls of Talagh, the dog by the river, the unicorn on the crag, guarding them, helping them all the way south. . . .

Except for the unicorn. The unicorn was one of the things that didn’t fit. It had been different, menacing, dangerous, almost an enemy, nothing like the Ropemaker himself, strange but friendly, not frightening at all—until she remembered what Tahl had said about the bit of rope that had wrapped itself round Calico’s legs in the pine forest . . . and . . .

And—she really didn’t want to think about this—Ma’s dream.
It touched me with its horn
. What else could she have been talking about . . . ?

Tilja was jolted out of her wonderings by the appearance of the bird. A little to her right, beyond the nearest flower bed, was a small meadow cropped by a pair of sheep, each tethered to a single peg so that they mowed a series of circles. The bird appeared in what must have been one of yesterday’s circles. At one moment there was just a patch of short-cropped grass; the next it was filled by an enormous brown bird, far larger than the elephants Tilja had sometimes seen hauling loads of timber on the journey south. It had a fiery red crest and a black, hooked beak, which looked as if it had been designed for tearing at meat, but the two sheep merely glanced up at it and went back to grazing. The bird put up an immense, taloned foot and started to scratch itself under the chin, like a farmyard hen. A moment later a large, cushioned litter appeared on the grass beside it. There were poles at each corner with a striped canopy stretched between them and what looked like a sort of carrying handle lying loose on the cloth.

Before the bird had finished scratching, time stopped. Tilja both saw and heard it happen. The bird stuck, motionless, with its claw against its chin and a look of idiot absorption on its face. The sheep stuck with their mouths against the turf. The gulls wheeling above the cliffs stuck in midglide on slanting wings. All over the garden the birdsong stilled in an instant, and in the same instant the endless faint rustle of leaves and hush and shush of waves against the cliffs became a silence so intense that Tilja could hear not only her own breath but, at last, that of the three sleepers in the room.