The Eyes of the Dragon (27 page)

My poor boy,
his glimmering father said.
You've had hard trials, and there are more of them ahead, I think. But Dennis will know . . .

“Know what?” Peter gasped. His cheeks were red, but his forehead was as pale as a wax candle.

Dennis will know where the sleepwalker goes,
his father whispered, and was gone.

Peter lapsed into a faint that quickly became a deep, sound sleep. In that sleep, his fever broke. The boy who had made it his practice over the last year to do sixty push-ups and a hundred sit-ups each day awoke the next morning too weak to even get out of bed . . . but he was lucid again.

Beson and the Lesser Warders were disappointed. But after that night, they always treated Peter with a kind of awe, and took care never to go too close to him.

Which, of course, made his job that much easier.

All that is an easy enough tale to tell, though it would no doubt be better if I could say for sure that the ghost was there or that it was not. But like other matters in the larger tale, you'll have to make up your own mind about it, I suppose.

But how am I to tell you about Peter's endless, drudging work at that tiny loom? That tale is beyond me. All the hours spent, sometimes with frosty breath pluming from his mouth and nose, sometimes with sweat running down his face, always in fear of discovery; all those long hours alone, with nothing but long thoughts and almost absurd hopes to fill them. I can tell you some things, and will, but to convey such hours and days of slow time is impossible for me, and might be impossible for anyone except one of the great storytellers whose race is long vanished. Perhaps the only thing that even vaguely suggests how much time Peter spent in those two rooms was his beard. When he came in, it was only a shadow on his cheeks and a smudge under his nose—a boy's beard. In the 1,825 days which followed, it grew long and luxuriant; by the end it reached the middle of his chest, and although he was only twenty-one, it was shot with gray. The only place it did not grow was along the length of the jagged scar left by Beson's thumbnail.

Peter dared pluck only five threads from each napkin the first year—fifteen threads each day. He kept them under his mattress, and at the end of each week, he had one hundred and five. In our measure, each thread was about twenty inches long.

He wove the first batch a week after he received the dollhouse, working carefully with the loom. Using it was not as easy at seventeen as it had been at five. His fingers had grown; the loom had not. Also, he was horribly nervous. If one of the warders caught him at his work, he could tell them he was using the loom to weave errant threads from the old napkins for his own amusement . . .
if
they believed it. And
if
the loom worked. He wasn't sure that it would until he saw the first slim cable, perfectly woven, emerging from the loom's far end. When Peter saw this, his nervousness abated somewhat and he was able to weave a little faster, feeding the threads in, tugging them to keep them straight, operating the foot pedal with his thumb. The loom squeaked a little at first, but the old grease soon limbered up and it ran as perfectly as it had in his childhood.

But the cable was terribly thin, not even a quarter of an inch through the center. Peter tied off the ends and tugged experimentally. It held. He was a little encouraged. It was stronger than it looked, and he thought it
should
be strong. They were royal napkins, after all, woven from the finest cotton thread in the land, and he had woven tightly. He pulled harder, trying to guess how many pounds of strain he was putting on the slim cotton cable.

He pulled even harder, the rope still held, and he felt more hope come stealing into his heart. He found himself thinking about Yosef.

It had been Yosef, head of the stables, who told him about that mysterious and terrible thing called “breaking strain.” It was high summer, and they had been watching huge Anduan oxen pull stone blocks for the plaza of the new market. A sweating, cursing drover sat astride each ox's neck. Peter had then been no more than eleven, and he thought it better than a circus. Yosef pointed out that each ox wore a heavy leather harness. The chains that pulled the dressed blocks of stone were attached to the harness, one on each side of the animal's neck. Yosef told him the cutters had to make a careful estimate of just how much each block of stone weighed.

“Because if the blocks are too heavy, the oxen might hurt themselves trying to pull them,” Peter said. This wasn't even a question, because it seemed obvious to him. He felt sorry for the oxen, dragging those great blocks of rock.

“Nay,” Yosef said. He lit a cigarette made of cornshuck, almost burning off the end of his nose, and drew deeply and contentedly. He always liked the young prince's company. “Nay! Oxen aren't stupid—people only think them so because they are large and tame and helpful. Says more about the people than about the oxen, if you ask me, but leave that b'hind, leave that b'hind.

“If an ox can pull a block, he'll pull it; if he can't, why, he'll try twice and then stand with 'is head down. And he'll stand so, even if a bad master whups his hide to ribbons. Oxen look stupid, but they ain't. Not a bit.”

“Then why do the cutters have to guess at the weight of the blocks they cut, if the ox knows what he can pull and what he can't?”

“T'ain't the blocks; it's the chains.” Yosef pointed to one of the oxen, which was dragging a block that looked to Peter almost as big as a small house. The ox's head was down, its eyes fixed patiently ahead, as its drover sat astride it and guided it with little taps of his stick. At the end of the double length of chain, the block moved slowly along, goring a furrow in the earth. It was so deep that a small child would need to work to climb out of it. “If an ox can pull a block, he will, but an ox don't know nothing about chains, or about the breaking strain.”

“What's that?”

“Put a thing under enough of a tug, and it'll snap,” Yosef said. “If yonder chains were to snap, they'd fly around something tumble. You wouldn't want to be a witness to what can happen if a heavy chain lets go when it's under such a tug as those oxen can put on. It's apt to fly anywhere. Back'rds, mostly. Apt to hit the drover and tear him apart, or cut the legs from under the beast itself.”

Yosef took another drag at his makeshift cigarette and then tossed it in the dirt. He fixed Peter with a shrewd, friendly glare.

“Breaking strain,” he said, “is a good thing for a prince to know about, Peter. Chains break if you put on enough of a tug, and people do, too. Keep it in mind.”

He kept it in mind now, as he pulled at his first cable. How much of a “tug” was he putting on? Five rull? At least. Ten? Perhaps. But maybe that was only wishful thinking. He would say eight. No, seven. Better to make a mistake on the pessimistic side, if a mistake was to be made. If he miscalculated . . . well, the cobblestones in the Plaza of the Needle were very, very hard.

He tugged harder still, the muscles on his arms now beginning to stand out a little. When the first cable finally snapped, Peter guessed he might be applying as much as fifteen rull—almost sixty-four pounds—of tug.

He was not unhappy with this result.

Later that night, he threw the broken cable out of his window, where the men who cleaned the Plaza of the Needle daily would sweep it up with the rest of the rubbish the following day.

Peter's mother, seeing his interest in the dollhouse and the little furnishings inside, had taught him how to weave cables and braid them into tiny rugs. When we have not done a thing for a long period, we are apt to forget exactly how that thing was done, but Peter had nothing but time, and after some experimentation, the trick of braiding came back to him.

“Braiding” was what his mother had called it and so that was how he thought of it, but braiding was not really the right word for it; a braid, precisely speaking, is the hand-weaving of two cables.
Wrapping,
which is how rugs are made, is the handweaving of three or more cables. In wrapping, two cables are placed apart, but with their tops and bottoms even. The third is placed between them, but lower, so its end sticks out. This pattern is carried on as length after length is added. The result looks a little bit like Chinese finger-pullers . . . or the braided rugs in your favorite grandmother's house.

It took Peter three weeks to save enough threads to try this technique, and most of a fourth to remember exactly how the over-and-under pattern of wrapping had gone. But when he was done, he had a real rope. It was thin, and you would have thought him mad to entrust his weight to it, but it was much stronger than it looked. He found he could break it, but only by wrapping its ends firmly around his hands and pulling until the muscles bulged on his arms and chest and the cords stood out on his neck.

Overhead in his sleeping chamber were a number of stout oak beams. He would have to test his weight from one of these, when he had a rope long enough. If it snapped, he would have to start all over again . . . but such thoughts were useless and Peter knew it—so he just got to work.

Each thread he pulled was about twenty inches long, but Peter lost roughly two inches in the weaving and wrapping. It took him three months to make a rope of three strands, each strand consisting of a hundred and five cotton threads, into a cable three feet long. One night, after he was sure all of the warders were drunk and at cards below, he tied this pigtail to a rope over one of the beams. When it had been looped over and tied in a slipknot, less than a foot and a half hung down.

It looked woefully thin.

Nevertheless, Peter seized it and hung from it, mouth tightened to a grim white line, expecting the threads to let go at any moment and spill him to the floor. But they held.

Hardly daring to believe it was happening, Peter hung there from a rope almost too thin to see. He hung there for almost a full minute, and then he stood on his bed to pull the slipknot free. His hands trembled as he did it, and he had to fumble at the knot twice, because his eyes kept blurring with tears. He didn't believe his heart had been so full since reading Ben's tiny note.

H
e had been keeping the rope under his mattress, but Peter realized this would not do much longer. The Needle was three hundred and forty feet high at the peak of its conical roof; his window was just about three hundred feet above the cobblestones. He was six feet tall and believed he would dare to drop as much as twenty feet from the end of his rope. But even at best, he would eventually have to hide two hundred and seventy feet of rope.

He discovered a loose stone on the east side of the bedroom floor, and cautiously pried it up. He was surprised and pleased to find a little space beneath. He couldn't see into it properly so he reached in and felt around in the darkness, his whole body stiff and tense as he waited for something down there in the dark to crawl over his hand . . . or bite it.

Nothing did, and he was just about to withdraw it, when one of his fingers brushed something—cold metal. Peter brought it out. It was, he saw, a heart-shaped locket on a fine chain. Both locket and chain looked to be made of gold. Nor did he think, by its weight, that the locket was false gold. After some poking and feeling, he found a delicate catch. He pushed it and the locket sprang open. Inside were two pictures, one on each side—they were as fine as any of the tiny paintings in Sasha's dollhouse; even finer, perhaps. Peter stared at their faces with a boy's frank wonder. The man was very handsome, the woman very beautiful. There was a faint smile on the man's lips and a devil-may-care look in his eyes. The woman's eyes were grave and dark. Part of Peter's wonder came from the fact that this locket must be very old, judging by what he could make out of their dress, but only part of it. Most came from the fact that these two faces looked eerily familiar. He had seen them before.

He closed the locket and looked on the back. He thought there were initials entwined there, but they were too flounced and curlicued for him to read.

On impulse, he delved into the hold again. This time he touched paper. The single sheet of foolscap he brought out was ancient and crumbling, but the writing was clear and the signature unmistakable. The name was Leven Valera, the infamous Black Duke of the Southern Barony. Valera, who might someday have been King, had instead spent the last twenty-five years of his life in the room at the top of the Needle for the murder of his wife. No wonder the pictures in the locket looked familiar! The man was Valera; the woman was Valera's murdered wife, Eleanor, about whose beauty ballads were still sung.

The ink Valera had used was a strange rusty black, and the first line of his note chilled Peter's heart. The note entire chilled his heart, and not only because the similarity between Valera's position and his own seemed too great for coincidence.