“The only explanation I can think of is that you fear you are already being watched, or watched for. For some days after the first episode with the brigands you were extremely apprehensive, and Maja almost exhausted herself with constant listening for hidden voices. If this is the case, I have something to contribute. I am a fully trained agent, and almost the first thing we were taught is to act on the assumption that one is being constantly sought for. The fact that one has not been apprehended does not mean that one has not been observed, because one’s opponents will prefer to delay until they can strike with maximum advantage.
“In your case, this would be not until you have reached Barda and found the object or person you seek, but before you can make use of that against the Watchers. You should therefore act on the assumption that this is going to happen, and that they will give you very little time in which to act. If that is impossible for you, then your only hope is somehow to elude their watch, or mislead them into believing that you have not yet found what you are looking for. Failing that, you must try to prepare defenses that will protect you long enough for you to put your plan into action.
“If I thought that I could help with any of this I should insist on coming with you, but if my guesses are anywhere near the truth I would be no more than a distraction and encumbrance. But can you wonder that I am extremely anxious, not only for Miss Saranja, but for all of you?”
They sat in silence. If Striclan knew so much, thought Maja, how could the Watchers not know it also? And of course they’d wait until they knew where the Ropemaker was. Why hadn’t she thought about that before? There simply wasn’t going to be time. They’d pounce at once. It was all, suddenly, hopeless.
“At least I can tell you you’re a very good spy,” said Ribek after a while. “If their other spies are that good, your Sheep-faces must know practically everything there is to be known about the Empire.”
“Alas, no,” said Striclan. “Information from agents on the ground often appears contradictory, and the tendency of the authorities is always to believe what they want to believe, even when the weight of the evidence is against it.
“Well, I will do what you ask me and leave you. I shall set out early in the morning, and get as far away from you as I can before you reach Barda. And I must thank you yet again for your companionship and wish you a successful outcome to your perilous undertaking, and so bid you farewell.”
He rose and helped Saranja to her feet. She didn’t let go of his hand. Ribek also rose and Maja scrambled up, but Benayu stayed where he was, dazed with his long dream, looking as if he hadn’t heard a word.
“Good luck to you too,” said Ribek. “I really hope we’ll see you again.”
“I’ve given him one of the finder stones,” said Saranja. “When all this is over he’s coming back to live in the Valley. And thank you for not asking any questions till now.”
Still holding hands they walked away and vanished among the shadows of the way station. There was no more nonsense that night about Striclan taking Maja with him when he left.
CHAPTER
15
Coming to Barda was very different from coming to Mord, or Tarshu, or Larg, or anywhere else they’d been. For two whole days the road crossed an utterly flat landscape, drearier even than desert, scraggy little fields with reedbeds here and there, sighing in the steady wind from the ever-nearing ocean. Bank after bank of low clouds rolled in on it, endlessly threatening rain, but not a drop fell. No houses, only a few tumbledown sheds and sties, built where they were for no purpose Maja could imagine, and apparently abandoned years ago.
Once, on the first morning, they passed a sad old yellow horse in a small paddock that it had grazed almost bare. Pogo, prepared to flirt or gossip with anything vaguely horse-shaped, whinnied a greeting, but it didn’t even raise its head. Seabirds glided on the wind, hawks hovered, and there were waterfowl on the innumerable sluggish rivers and streams, all flowing from the west, that the road had begun to cross. Otherwise the landscape seemed almost completely lifeless.
But not the road. This was busier than they’d seen it at any time since they’d left Larg, apart from the two narrow strips down the center that had been set aside for nobles and other grandees, which had very few users. On the other hand there were two extra lanes in either direction for slow-moving ox-wagons and the only slightly faster horse-drawn carts, and by the time three major Highways had joined the one they were on—two on the first day and one on the second—these were pretty well nose to tail with traffic. The frequent bridges boomed and thundered to the steady drub of wheels.
Ribek no longer bothered to stop and listen to every bit of water they crossed.
“It won’t have anything new to say,” he explained. “It’s just an arm of a delta—all the same river. It’s brought down a tremendous load of silt, which has spread further and further out into the sea, with the river breaking up into different channels to find a way through it.”
“So the actual village where the Ropemaker was born won’t be on the coast any longer?”
“I suppose not. Even since he disappeared the coastline will have shifted further out. Come to think of it, that may have made things more awkward. Well, we can only see when we get there. What’s up?”
Maja had clutched him to stop herself from falling from Levanter’s back. For a moment she was back at the sheep-fold north of Tarshu, almost drowning in darkness as she clung with her mind to the fiery streak of the Ropemaker’s hair. It was a smell, a reek, that had carried her there, salty, fishy, weedy, stronger than any mere sea smell.
She shook herself back into the here and now and stared around. The reek was still in her nostrils, beginning to fade.
“What’s that smell?” she said.
“Came from one of the wagons on the other side. Oysters, I should think. Remember that fellow at Larg said Barda was famous for them?”
“It’s what I smelled when I used the hair.”
“Are you sure?”
“Almost.”
“Interesting.”
Now that Striclan had left them, Jex had returned to his natural form whenever he could. That evening, as they sat round the fire, he spoke in their heads. Benayu woke from his long half trance to listen.
“I do not know, any more than you do, what will happen at Barda, other than if we find the form into which the Ropemaker has put his physical self it will involve an explosion of magic far more powerful than any you and I have so far endured. I must return to an inert form before that happens, or I shall not survive. But we cannot find what we are looking for without Maja’s help, so she must stay in her own form until that is done, and I will protect her as best I can. Benayu must then immediately endow her with an inert form in which she no longer needs protection.”
“Any ideas, Maja?” said Benayu.
Maja hesitated. It was difficult to think. To leave her own body, which had always seemed to be so much of her, who she was, all that made her Maja, always there, ready and waiting when she woke from dreams…
How could she do that and still be the same person, Maja?
If she must, she must. She mastered her reluctance.
“Will I be able to see and hear?”
“If your inert form has got eyes and ears.”
“Whatever’s easiest, then. Something Ribek can carry on a loop round his neck.”
“I’ll think about it. Go on, Jex.”
“That done both Maja and I will for the time being be helpless, but we must all instantly escape to Angel Isle and into my alternate universe, where the Watchers cannot follow.”