“Now we must work, or we will not be gone by nightfall. First, will you go out into the garden and pick a bunch of grapes and bring it to me? You will find a sharp knife in one of the baskets by the door. If you want grapes for yourself, take them from another bunch. The small dark ones to the left of the central path are best at this season.”
Tilja went out into the garden in a daze, trying to understand what Faheel had told her. She ought to have been afraid—unable to think for fear—but she wasn’t. She guessed this was something to do with the island. Fear would come later, perhaps. But now— perhaps it was the island again that caused this, trying to help her—in her mind’s eye she saw a great brass balance, like the cunning wooden scales Ma used to measure ingredients when she was baking. There was a bowl at either end of a bar. The bar tilted at the center, one way or the other, depending on which bowl held more weight. But the bowls Tilja saw in her mind weren’t polished wood, like Ma’s. Each of them was half of the world. A small figure stood beside each bowl, waiting for the bar to tilt his way. One of them Tilja couldn’t see clearly. He was darkness in the shape of a man. The unknown magician, the enemy. His bowl was full of the same darkness. The other one was the Ropemaker, unmistakable, that gawky figure, topped by the monstrous headdress. There was nothing to tell her what was in the Ropemaker’s bowl, but whatever it was it had to be better than the darkness.
At the center of the bar was a small golden ant. The bar hid it from the two magicians. As she watched, the ant started to crawl along the beam toward the Ropemaker’s end, and she realized that when it reached the bowl its tiny weight would be just enough to tilt the balance that way—provided the other magician didn’t realize what was happening, and reach out with a magical hand, pick up the ant, and drop it into his own bowl. Then the darkness it held would spill out and smother everything.
The ant, she realized, was herself, Tilja.
When the vision cleared she found herself standing in front of the vines Faheel had told her to look for. She cut herself a small cluster to try. They had an intense, sweet, wild taste that seemed to linger in her mouth long after she’d swallowed. She chose the best bunch she could see and carried it back to the house. Faheel was just finishing his meal.
“Good,” he said picking up a small green purse from his pocket. “First, give this to one of the others when they wake—it is no use in your hands. It is just a convenient toy. Open it, and you will find it holds two gold coins. Take one out and close it, and when you open it next day you will find it again holds two gold coins, and you may again take one out. But take both out in one day and the magic is gone, and it will thenceforth be just an empty purse.
“Now I may need you to help me up the ladder to my room. Bring the grapes with you, but do not come through the trapdoor. Hand them through to me and I will close it. Then take two of the baskets, fill one with all the roses you can find and the other with whatever fruits you and your friends will need for the start of your journey home. Do not overburden yourself. There is no magic in the garden, so its fruits last no longer than those in any other garden. When you hear a bell come indoors. Stay in this room with your friends so that what is about to happen will cause them no harm. Fill another basket with stores for your journey. When your friends wake, you and the boy must come up the ladder and find me.”
“I’m sorry. Just one more thing . . . when my friends wake up . . . we came here to ask you . . . Oh, I see.
That’s
going to be their reason for looking for the Ropemaker.”
He smiled.
“Yes, of course,” he said. “There is more to the magic that protects your Valley than you imagine. While Asarta held the ring, I and others did our best to wrest it from her, and she had to use some of her strength to keep it from us. When my turn came, I decided to do as your two ancestors asked me to, and by doing so to seal all knowledge of the ring away in your Valley. I then sought out everyone who knew of the ring and either took the memory of it from their minds, or if they resisted, destroyed them, all but the one I have told you about. Tell the Ropemaker this when you give him the ring, and he will see the use of it and do the same for you. But when your friends wake and ask me . . . Wait. You will see. Now I must go.”
As it turned out he climbed the ladder without help, though with several pauses for rest. Tilja passed the grapes up to him and took the weight of the trapdoor as he lowered it into place, then wandered round the garden filling the baskets. She did the roses first. It wasn’t a sad task, though Faheel had talked of making an ending and she guessed that they might be part of that ending. He had been so calm about it, so ready and accepting, that she was sure of its rightness. There might have been no magic in the garden, but the roses by their own nature were magic enough, wonderfully shaped and colored and, as the basket filled, scenting the air around her with a richness so intense that it should have been cloying, but wasn’t.
That done, she chose her fruit carefully, grapes, peaches, nectarines and apricots, and a spicy yellow berry she had never seen before. She didn’t think it could be poisonous if it grew in such a garden. She also found a row of carrots and pulled a good bunch. The bell rang just as she was finishing and she went back indoors. None of her three companions seemed to have stirred.
While she was choosing her stores the room darkened, as if in a thunderstorm, though the sun had been only halfway down a cloudless sky when she had left the garden. Through the window she could see nothing but swirling colored mist, brownish but flecked with purple shapes that seemed to be made of a solider kind of mist and flickered as they swept by. She saw the walls of the house judder, though the floor on which she stood stayed steady. A moment later a booming voice called from outside and Faheel’s voice, loud and firm, answered from above with a name and a greeting. Other voices followed, not human or animal, the voices of mountains, perhaps, of forests and of stars. Once it sounded as if the whole sea were singing. The mist came and went outside the window. Sometimes it was dark night, with shimmerings and bolts of brilliance, sometimes day so bright and shadowless that there might have been several suns in the sky. All these beings, forces, spirits, or whatever else they might be, Faheel welcomed into his attic room by name. When they were gathered the window cleared and there was silence.
Tilja stood and waited. She could sense around her a continuous flow of movement through it, into and out of the room above her, as though Faheel’s house had become a great fire in a dark forest, a fire from which flames and sparks and lit smoke swirled endlessly upward, but not in random eddies—in shapes, shapes that had meaning, shapes that somehow held the balance of the world in place. Faheel was at the heart of the uprush, giving back to his friends the powers they had loaned him, as they blazed round him. And so was she too, Tilja. For the powers weren’t only here to say farewell to Faheel. They had come to welcome her. It was as if her gift had hidden her from them, and now they could rejoice in her finding. Though she didn’t yet know what use they had for her, she felt that there was such a use, and that one day she would learn it. For the first time since she had become aware of her strange gift she felt that she wasn’t having to use it to fight against the forces around her, but to accept them, just as they were accepting her, and accept that they and she were part of something larger, all of which belonged together and needed all its parts, balancing each other, to make it what it was.
Time had no meaning, but it must have continued to move because there was a change, and she knew that the rite was ending. The visitors gathered themselves into the attic room, and then one by one withdrew, calling their farewells as they left. When the last had gone the windows cleared and the garden lay outside, the sunlight already golden with evening, and the shadows long across the grass.
“You there, girl?”
“Meena!”
Tilja swung round. Meena had struggled up onto her elbow and was staring round the room, for once too astonished to pretend to be angry, or to push Tilja away when she rushed to hug her.
“Expecting someone else, were you?” she said. “Where’s this, then?”
“Faheel’s house. On his island.”
“Be careful how you say his name,” Alnor said sharply.
“I don’t think it matters anymore,” said Tilja. “He said it wasn’t safe for you to wake up because there was going to be too much magic here, but it’s all right now. It’s almost all gone.”
“Gone! I hope you told him what we came for before he let that happen.”
“Yes, but I don’t know . . . there’s been other things going on. Now he wants me and Tahl to go up and help him down the ladder. Then we’re going home. Are you awake, Tahl?”
“Sort of,” said Tahl’s voice, sounding much more dazed than Meena’s. “We were on the raft, and then . . . I’ve been talking to the ice dragon. It told me all sorts of stuff. Funny. It didn’t feel like a dream. It doesn’t come from this world, you know. There’s a world made of ice somewhere else in the sky . . .”
“Its name is Manzal,” said Alnor. “I too spoke with the ice dragon. With my blind eyes I saw his face, that I had never hoped to see.”
“And there’s a Queen of the Unicorns,” said Meena. “I never knew that! Maybe I’ll tell you someday. For now, I just want to think about it. . . . Well, girl, don’t just stand there! Tell us what’s going on.”
“I don’t think there’s time,” said Tilja. “We’ve got to get away from the island by nightfall, Faheel said, and it’s almost sunset now. Ready, Tahl?”
She led the way up the ladder and pushed the trapdoor open. When she poked her head through she saw that the attic was empty and bare. Faheel lay facedown at its center. She scrambled through and with Tahl’s help turned him gently over. His body seemed to weigh so little that she could almost have lifted it on her own. His lips moved. She bent her head to listen.
“Take me down,” he whispered. “Come back and fetch the things on the shelf.”
Tahl ran Tilja’s long head scarf under Faheel’s arms so that she could take some of his weight from above while he took most of it on his shoulders, and they eased Faheel down the ladder and made him comfortable on a pile of cushions. Tilja went back upstairs to find what he’d left on the shelf—the ring box and the bunch of grapes she’d brought in from the garden. The ring box had a cord attached, which she slid over her head, and then tucked the box down inside her blouse. She took the grapes and climbed down the ladder. This time, when she stepped off the last rung, the whole thing vanished, and the trapdoor too, leaving nothing but a plain, bare ceiling.
“It is over,” said Faheel, still speaking with effort. “Now we must go. First . . . First I must ask you to help me down to the shore. Once there, I will explain to you what you will need to do to return to your Valley.”
With Tilja and Tahl on each side of him carrying the two baskets of stores, and his arms around their shoulders, he led them slowly toward the western cliffs and down a series of steps to a sandy beach. Meena hobbled along behind, leaning on Alnor’s arm. In his other hand he carried the roses. The raft on which the four travelers had come from Goloroth floated in the shallows, and beside it a strange boat that seemed to be made out of seashell, with a broad stern and a high, curving prow. Faheel asked them to help him sit, and they lowered him onto the sand.
“Now,” he said, “listen carefully. I have given back all my powers . . . given them back to those who first loaned them to me, and should any enemy come I could not defend us. . . . But I still have friends, some of whom will tow me out westward into the current of the Great River, so that I may make my last journey by the common way, like my parents before me. . . . Others will take you back to the southern shore of the Empire. Once there . . . Tilja, you have the grapes from the shelf?”
“They’re in the basket.”
He nodded and straightened his back. Tilja sensed him gathering his last energies for what he now had to say.
“Set them apart and do not touch them until you are safely ashore tomorrow. Then Meena and Alnor must eat them, one at a time, turn and turn about. Eat nothing else until they are gone. But keep the stem carefully and take it with you. When you are safely home you must build a fire and burn it, to undo the magic the grapes did for you. This is most important. Fail to do it and your whole journey fails. Now we must go. Will you help me stand?”
“Is that all?” Meena burst in. “I’m sorry, sir, seeing how tired you are, but I can’t help asking. I mean, isn’t there anything else we’ve got to do? Here we’ve been sowing our barley field all these years, and trudging out winter after winter and singing to the cedars, and Alnor’s lot have been doing the same sort of thing up at Northbeck . . . and I’ve brought a loaf I baked from my field, and Alnor’s got a flask of water from his stream. . . .”
“Ah, yes,” murmured Faheel, smiling and shaking his head, as if he’d forgotten all about it. “Of course. Show me.”
With trembling fingers he broke a few crumbs from the loaf and ate them, and sipped from the flask.
“Honest bread,” he whispered. “Sweet mountain water. I bless them both, but that is all I can do. Asarta’s powers are still there, my friends. Somewhere on your journey you will find another to wake them. Or rather, he will find you—it would be dangerous for you to seek him out. . . .”
His voice trailed away in weakness. He closed his eyes, as if he were about to die where he lay. Meena clicked her tongue in frustration. Alnor was frowning and shaking his head. Part of Tilja felt like laughing aloud. The cunning old man, waiting till now, pretending he’d forgotten, making it seem a little thing. But even as she suppressed her smile it struck her that this was the start of something very uncomfortable. From now on, day after day after day, she would be keeping the secret of the ring from her friends. So far, they had all trusted each other, absolutely. But from now on, day after day after day, she was going to be lying to them.