The Ropemaker by Peter Dickinson Page B

the heads of the crowd to the slope opposite. To her left were the fires and the stalls, with the river beyond them, and to her right the smooth curve of the hill that closed the bowl off. A section of it had been cut away to make a small platform where several people were standing, the drummer with his tall drum, the three convenors with their yellow scarves of office, and an old man leaning on a staff, with a slight, dark boy about Tilja’s age beside him. Despite the age difference, the old man and the boy were strikingly alike, with narrow, hooked noses and pointed chins.
    “This’ll do,” said Meena. “Move over a bit, will you? I’ve got to rest this leg of mine.”
    Without waiting for an answer she nudged the man beside her off the hummock he was standing on and groaningly lowered herself onto it. She was making far more fuss about her aches and pains than she ever did at home, but when Tilja started to sympathize she was answered with a special blank stare that told her Meena’s hip was no worse than on most days. She was just using it to get what she wanted, and why not?
    The drumbeat ended with a long roll. The crowd hushed. The convenors stood aside and the old man moved forward, feeling his way with his staff and gripping the boy’s shoulder with his other hand. The boy stopped him at the edge of the platform and he leaned on his staff for a while, as if studying his audience, though Tilja guessed he must be almost blind. His body looked slight but not frail under his dark brown cloak, and strong white hair bushed out beneath his fur cap. Judging the moment when the crowd’s attention was about to break, he drew himself up and spoke.
    “I am Alnor Ortahlson, from Northbeck, under the mountains. It is my task to sing to the snows each year, as my father did, and each one’s father before him, since the time of Reyel Ortahlson, who began it. I do so still, despite my age and blindness, because my son is dead, and his son is not yet old enough.”
    His voice seemed not much louder than a speaking voice, but it was slow and firm, and carried clearly through the come-and-go wind.
    “You all know Reyel’s story,” he went on, “though some of you do not believe it, and most of you are not aware that a man of our family still sings to the snows each year. I cannot make you believe. All I can tell you is that my own father never told me what song to sing, but when my turn came I climbed to the face of the glacier and there the song came to me and told me how I should sing it. Then I went back down to my millhouse, and by the time I was at the door the snows were falling, as they had done for my father and all our fathers before him.
    “This is the forty-seventh year in which I have climbed to the glacier and sung. Not the same music always, nor the same words, but still the same song. Each of those years the snows heard me, and fell.
    “But not this year. This year no song came to me. I sang what I could from memory, but the snows did not hear me. I knew as my grandson led me down the mountain that the true snows would not fall.
    “They did not fall. Which of you has seen true snows these last miserable months? Without them, the glacier will begin to melt, and then what will stand between us and the horsemen of the northern plains?
    “Yes, that is all I have to tell you. And yes, the convenors were uncertain whether it was cause enough to have the drum beaten, but I persuaded them. How can snow hear, or not hear, you will ask. If a family take it into their heads to go out and sing to the sun each night, before dawn, does that mean they have caused the sun to rise? Of course not.
    “In return I have two questions to ask you. Why are you all here? Why so many, and from so far, at this ill season? What persuaded you to come? Was it a dream, a voice in your head, some vaguer feeling? If so, is it possible that that dream, that voice, that feeling was, without your knowing it, the same thing that I felt