“Story over. Stop now, Maja?”
“Thank you,” she whispered.
Satisfied, she closed her eyes and felt herself floating away, down and away. She was dreaming, strange, shadowy moments: a kiss beside the millrace; a wedding feast, herself at the heart of it; a caress on her naked flesh in the warm dark, with the race roaring beneath the window; the stir of a child inside her own ghostly body; two children fishing on a green bank, their reflections steady in the stillness of the millpool; a shaft of sunlight slanting through gloom, a slowly turning millwheel clear in its brightness, the shapes of a man and a half-grown lad dark against it as they watched the steady trickle of flour down the chute. Hauntings from the promised life she would never now be given. Vaguely through this she was aware of her exhausted body being laid gently on the turf, of hearing the murmur of voices, receding, almost gone…
CHAPTER
20
Change. What…? Her hands…a flow of warmth…feeling…other hands gripping them, the warmth pouring through, into her arms, spreading through her body…
Then sleep.
Then a voice, known but strange…
“Maja. You can wake up now. Wake up. You’re going to be all right.”
She opened her eyes, clenched them shut against the midday glare, and forced them open. Ribek was kneeling over her, a dark silhouette, features almost invisible. But…
She snatched her hands free and pushed herself violently up, almost clashing heads with him.
“You couldn’t’ve done that a couple of hours back,” he said.
His voice had a strange, effortful wheeze in it. She stared.
Stared at an old man, stoop-shouldered, rheumy-eyed; with a bald, mottled scalp fringed with wispy, silvery hair; smiling lips thin and purple, with a dribble of spittle at one corner; wrinkled cheeks sunken above toothless jaws. She flung out an arm to support him as he sank onto the turf beside her, laid her head on his shoulder and wept for both lost lives. He caressed her shoulder with a trembling hand.
“It’s all right,” he said. “I’ve just lent…”
“I don’t want it!” she said furiously. “You didn’t ask me! I’m going to give it right back!”
“Done that already,” said a voice above them—the Ropemaker. “Other universe, weren’t shielded, were you? Couldn’t be. Time different there, remember? Out of balance with our time. Years leaking away. Still doing it, even back here, on Angel Isle. Ribek lent you his years, just to hold you, while Benayu sorted it out with his equations. Then he took them back and lent them to me.”
“No!”
She shot to her feet. So far she’d had eyes only for Ribek, but now she saw that the others were standing close in front of them, watching and waiting. She swung to the Ropemaker. He’d changed too—changed back to the age he’d been when she’d first seen him.
“Give it back if you say so,” he said gently. “Tell you first?”
“Oh…All right.”
“Kept saying, not enough time, remember?”
“I thought you meant time till whatever was going to happen next.”
“That too. But talking about myself, mostly. Time’s almost up. Back there trapped in my egg, wasn’t any time going by. Same time over and over. Each time I went round, back to the same age I’d been last time. Didn’t get any older. Back here—you’ve seen Zara—that’s how old I am.”
“But you don’t look…”
“Angel Isle. Betwixt and between. Wouldn’t last even here. Feel the pull of it already. Couple of days, at most. Still got to disempower the Watchers, right? Think Zara could take that on, the way she is now? Me, like this—need Benayu’s help, as it is.”
“But…but…Why Ribek?”
“Because,” said Ribek, and started to struggle to his feet. Saranja moved to help him.
“I’ll do it,” said Maja furiously.
Oh, he weighed so much less than he should have!
He turned to face her and took her hands.
“Listen, my dear,” he said. “Back there, in Benayu’s egg, it was the other way round. You wanted to go and follow the magical trail to the Ropemaker, unshielded from its power, because it couldn’t be done any other way. I said no—I care deeply about you, and I knew what it would do to you. I was right. You said you had to do it. You were the only one who could. It was why you were there. And if you didn’t, the Watchers would find us and that would be even worse for you, as well as for the rest of us. All that was true, but I still didn’t want you to go. I simply had to accept it.
“And it’s true now, only the other way round, except for one thing. It won’t be as bad for you as it was for me. I knew that you might find him but we might still lose you—that very nearly happened. Now if we fail, that will still be unspeakable for all of us. But if we succeed, he will repay his loan, and I’ll have lost nothing, so nor will you. Please will you accept this? I did.”
By the time he’d finished he was wheezing for breath between every few words. Maja couldn’t speak. Weeping again, she nodded and helped him ease himself back onto the turf.
“Thank you,” said Saranja. Being her, she would have offered to lend the necessary years instead of him, of course. There must have been some reason why not. Something magical, probably. And being her, she wouldn’t have said.
Maja settled again beside Ribek, put her arm round him and curled herself up next to him with her other hand on his thigh. He laid his own hand on it and squeezed it gently. Good practice for later, she thought, when he really is old. She knew she was cheating as she cuddled against him. He cared deeply about her—he’d said so—but not in the same way she cared about him. He was an old man, needing human comfort, closeness, love, and was letting her fulfill that need, as well as her own.
She glanced across at the others to see if they’d noticed, but they seemed to be taking it for granted that that was how she felt about Ribek. Benayu and the Ropemaker were talking together, low-voiced. Benayu was trying to explain something about Fodaro’s equations—for what was going to happen next, probably. Jex was on a boulder beside them. Every now and then both human voices would stop, and Maja could hear, faintly, his granite murmur inside her head. Saranja was listening.
Now they moved apart. The Ropemaker raised his hands, touched the ring on his left forefinger and spoke quietly. The pale, cloaked figure of a woman carrying a narrow-necked urn in the crook of her arm appeared in front of the encircling rocks. Even in the full light of that stormy morning she seemed to glimmer as if lit by a full moon under starry skies. She stood the urn on a flat boulder beside her and turned. It was Zara, Zara in the form she had assumed on the hill above Larg when she and Benayu between them had bound the demon Azarod into the rock. But she too had changed. Now she looked wraithlike, almost transparent, though the urn she had carried seemed solid and heavy enough.
The Ropemaker took both her hands in his and kissed her on the cheek. She greeted the others and joined the discussion.
Maja was distracted by Ribek, who had fallen asleep almost instantly, the way old people do. He was mumbling something uninterpretable. Maja wished she could have got into his dream, the way she’d been able to do in the egg. Not in this universe, even on Angel Isle. Probably just as well. There was a movement on the rock behind her. She glanced round and saw Jex. No, Jex was still where he’d been, with Benayu and the others, and this one had purple blotches.
“Hello,” she whispered. “You must be one of Jex’s friends.”