The Ropemaker by Peter Dickinson Page B

wild young man. Yes, she could understand that, wild as a waterfall, where a young river hurls itself down a hillside. She guessed that that waterfall was still there, inside him, but his quiet, slow, formal speech and manner were ways of controlling it.
    Now he flung up his right arm.
    “Pull,” she called, and heaved on her sweep. As she did so, though she had seen nothing different in the rush of the current, she felt the whole raft suddenly trying to writhe sideways against the blade of her sweep. Alnor’s arm was still up.
    “Again!” she called, raising her own blade clear and stretching forward for another heave.
    The raft steadied and swept on. Alnor lowered his arm. In those few moments the hills seemed to have risen more steeply round them, crowding them in with trees. The raft tilted, and plunged down a dark green slope, the surface creased into straining lines, down which they rushed toward a wild pother of foam at the bottom. Then they were rocking and tossing in a roaring jumble of white water, tilting up, steep as a shed roof, with the foam creaming round Tilja’s ankles, swooping down into more foam and out into the untroubled reach beyond.
    Alnor’s left arm was up.
    “Push!” she shouted.
    Together the three of them caught and straightened the raft as it tried to slew, and they floated into calmer water. At once Tilja hauled her sweep clear, laid it down, untied her safety cord and hurried forward to the stall. Calico was fully awake and on the verge of panic, with her ears flat back and the muscles of her neck bulging stiff as she strained against her head collar. Tilja stayed with her, patting her neck, teasing her mane and talking gently to her until she saw the hemp stupor seep back into her eyes. By then her own heartbeat had steadied, and the great gulp of terror she had felt at the top of the slope was no more than a memory.
    Meena caught her eye and cackled with laughter.
    “Never fancied dying in bed,” she called.
    Tilja grinned and went back to her post.
    There were cliffs on either side of them now, black, but streaked here and there with falling streams. Time passed. Alnor and Tahl seemed to be all right, the old man sitting erect, as if his blind eyes were staring along the gorge, and Tahl kneeling beside him to tell him what was coming. Alnor was still singing his strange song, though Tilja caught only faint snatches of it through the splatter and rustle of the current. After a while Meena joined quietly in, not the same song, though it had the same kind of strangeness, slow, wavering, wordless, wonderfully peaceful. Turning, Tilja saw a dreamy look on the lined old face.
    “Are you singing to the cedars?” she asked.
    Meena smiled teasingly, a child with a secret, and went back to her song.
    The gorge twisted to and fro. At almost every bend they had to fight to hold their course in the rushing current. Twice more they swooped down roaring slopes into the welter of foam below, but each time Alnor had set the raft dead right at the start so that it came safely through. And something very odd was happening to Calico. Though the effect of the hemp must surely be wearing off, she seemed barely to notice these upheavals. When Tilja went to check her, as soon as they were through the tumbling flurries, she found her with her ears pricked, and with a bright, interested look in her eye, and every now and then she would raise her head and give a whinny of greeting and inquiry, as if she’d spotted another horse somewhere up on the left-hand cliffs.
    “Calico seems to think she’s got a friend up there,” said Tilja, as she came back to her sweep.
    Meena produced something between a sneer and a grin.
    “Can’t see there’s any trouble coming, this next bit,” she said. “Manage by yourself for a while?”
    “I think so.”
    “Right. I’ll just go and see how the old fellow’s doing.”
    There were gruntings and mutterings as Meena untied her safety cord, and then she came into