It had been Yosef, head of the stables, who told him about that mysterious and terrible thing called “breaking strain.” It was high summer, and they had been watching huge Anduan oxen pull stone blocks for the plaza of the new market. A sweat-ing, cursing drover sat astride each ox’s neck. Peter had then been no more than eleven, and he thought it better than a circus. Yosef pointed out that each ox wore a heavy leather harness. The chains that pulled the dressed blocks of stone were attached to the harness, one on each side of the animal’s neck. Yosef told him the cutters had to make a careful estimate of just how much each block of stone weighed.
“Because if the blocks are too heavy, the oxen might hurt themselves trying to pull them,” Peter said. This wasn’t even a question, because it seemed obvious to him. He felt sorry for the oxen, dragging those great blocks of rock.
“Nay,” Yosef said. He lit a cigarette made of cornshuck, al-most burning off the end of his nose, and drew deeply and contentedly. He always liked the young prince’s company. “Nay! Oxen aren’t stupid-people only think them so because they are large and tame and helpful. Says more about the people than about the oxen, if you ask me, but leave that b'hind, leave that b'hind.
“If an ox can pull a block, he’ll pull it; if he can’t, why, he’ll try twice and then stand with ’is head down. And he’ll stand so, even if a bad master whups his hide to ribbons. Oxen look stupid, but they ain’t. Not a bit.”
“Then why do the cutters have to guess at the weight of the blocks they cut, if the ox knows what he can pull and what he can’t?”
“T'ain’t the blocks; it’s the chains.” Yosef pointed to one of the oxen, which was dragging a block that looked to Peter almost as big as a small house. The ox’s head was down, its eyes fixed patiently ahead, as its drover sat astride it and guided it with little taps of his stick. At the end of the double length of chain, the block moved slowly along, goring a furrow in the earth. It was so deep that a small child would need to work to climb out of it. “If an ox can pull a block, he will, but an ox don’t know nothing about chains, or about the breaking strain.”
“What’s that?”
“Put a thing under enough of a tug, and it’ll snap,” Yosef said. “If yonder chains were to snap, they’d fly around something turrible. You wouldn’t want to be a witness to what can happen if a heavy chain lets go when it’s under such a tug as those oxen can put on. It’s apt to fly anywhere. Back'rds, mostly. Apt to hit the drover and tear him apart, or cut the legs from under the beast itself.”
Yosef took another drag at his makeshift cigarette and then tossed it in the dirt. He fixed Peter with a shrewd, friendly glare.
“Breaking strain,” he said, “is a good thing for a prince to know about, Peter. Chains break if you put on enough of a tug, and people do, too. Keep it in mind.”
He kept it in mind now, as he pulled at his first cable. How much of a “tug” was he putting on? Five rull? At least. Ten? Perhaps. But maybe that was only wishful thinking. He would say eight. No, seven. Better to make a mistake on the pessimistic side, if a mistake was to be made. If he miscalculated… well, the cobblestones in the Plaza of the Needle were very, very hard.
He tugged harder still, the muscles on his arms now beginning to stand out a little. When the first cable finally snapped, Peter guessed he might be applying as much as fifteen roll-almost sixty-four pounds-of tug.
He was not unhappy with this result.
Later that night, he threw the broken cable out of his window, where the men who cleaned the Plaza of the Needle daily would sweep it up with the rest of the rubbish the following day.
Peter’s mother, seeing his interest in the dollhouse and the little furnishings inside, had taught him how to weave cables and braid them into tiny rugs. When we have not done a thing for a long period, we are apt to forget exactly how that thing was done, but Peter had nothing but time, and after some ex-perimentation, the trick of braiding came back to him.
“Braiding” was what his mother had called it and so that was how he thought of it, but braiding was not really the right word for it; a braid, precisely speaking, is the hand-weaving of two cables. Wrapping, which is how rugs are made, is the hand-weaving of three or more cables. In wrapping, two cables are placed apart, but with their tops and bottoms even. The third is placed between them, but lower, so its end sticks out. This pattern is carried on as length after length is added. The result looks a little bit like Chinese finger-pullers… or the braided rugs in your favorite grandmother’s house.
It took Peter three weeks to save enough threads to try this technique, and most of a fourth to remember exactly how the over-and-under pattern of wrapping had gone. But when he was done, he had a real rope. It was thin, and you would have thought him mad to entrust his weight to it, but it was much stronger than it looked. He found he could break it, but only by wrapping its ends firmly around his hands and pulling until the muscles bulged on his arms and chest and the cords stood out on his neck.
Overhead in his sleeping chamber were a number of stout oak beams. He would have to test his weight from one of these, when he had a rope long enough. If it snapped, he would have to start all over again… but such thoughts were useless and Peter knew it-so he just got to work.
Each thread he pulled was about twenty inches long, but Peter lost roughly two inches in the weaving and wrapping. It took him three months to make a rope of three strands, each strand consisting of a hundred and five cotton threads, into a cable three feet long. One night, after he was sure all of the warders were drunk and at cards below, he tied this pigtail to a rope over one of the beams. When it had been looped over and tied in a slipknot, less than a foot and a half hung down.
It looked woefully thin.
Nevertheless, Peter seized it and hung from it, mouth tightened to a grim white line, expecting the threads to let go at any moment and spill him to the floor. But they held.
They held.
Hardly daring to believe it was happening, Peter hung there from a rope almost too thin to see. He hung there for almost a full minute, and then he stood on his bed to pull the slipknot free. His hands trembled as he did it, and he had to fumble at the knot twice, because his eyes kept blurring with tears. He didn’t believe his heart had been so full since reading Ben’s tiny note.
72
He had been keeping the rope under his mattress, but Peter realized this would not do much longer. The Needle was three hundred and forty feet high at the peak of its conical roof; his window was just about three hundred feet above the cobblestones. He was six feet tall and believed he would dare to drop as much as twenty feet from the end of his rope. But even at best, he would eventually have to hide two hundred and seventy feet of rope.
He discovered a loose stone on the east side of the bedroom floor, and cautiously pried it up. He was surprised and pleased to find a little space beneath. He couldn’t see into it properly so he reached in and felt around in the darkness, his whole body stiff and tense as he waited for something down there in the dark to crawl over his hand… or bite it.
Nothing did, and he was just about to withdraw it, when one of his fingers brushed something-cold metal. Peter brought it out. It was, he saw, a heart-shaped locket on a fine chain. Both locket and chain looked to be made of gold. Nor did he think, by its weight, that the locket was false gold. After some poking and feeling, he found a delicate catch. He pushed it and the locket sprang open. Inside were two pictures, one on each side-they were as fine as any of the tiny paintings in Sasha’s dollhouse; even finer, perhaps. Peter stared at their faces with a boy’s frank wonder. The man was very handsome, the woman very beau-tiful. There was a faint smile on the man’s lips and a devil-may-care look in his eyes. The woman’s eyes were grave and dark. Part of Peter’s wonder came from the fact that this locket must be very old, judging by what he could make out of their dress, but only part of it. Most came from the fact that these two faces looked eerily familiar. He had seen them before.