by Susan Cooper
For a moment she stood motionless, staring.
There were heads, limbs, bodies, but these were figures like nothing she could have imagined. They were neither human nor stone, but both together; they belonged to the earth and the empty land, and they were looking at her without eyes. Then they began to come towards her.
Cally ran. Choking with terror, she fled through the fern and brush, leaping over rocks, dodging trees; and all the time she heard a great slow tramping behind her, from the crashing stone feet of the two monstrous figures following. She dared not look over her shoulder. She ran and ran, gasping, whimpering, and at last the brush thinned and she was running through long grass, and before her in a clearing stood a low stone house with smoke rising from its chimney. Through the terrible thudding behind her she heard again the strange rhythmic sound, more metallic now, that she had heard from far off, and near the house she saw a man swinging a long hammer up over his shoulder and down.
For Cally he was the most welcome refuge she had ever seen. She raced towards him and he looked up, letting the hammer fall into a pile of rocks. He was tall and lean, wearing rough denim work-clothes; his face was deep-lined, strong and almost ugly, with a shock of wiry black hair above. Skidding, she cannoned into his legs. Behind her, the great thudding steps slowed and came to a halt. The man caught her by the shoulders. Cally looked up at him in anguished appeal.
His face was expressionless. He set her upright and let her go. “Why do you run?” he said. “They will not hurt you.”
Cally’s heart jumped; she felt cold. There was no refuge here. She had made a terrible mistake—but it was too late to draw back now.
The man looked out over her head, and raised his voice. “Why do you bring this to me?”
Behind Cally, a huge rumbling voice spoke, deep, immensely strong, filling the air like the long growl of an avalanche.
“Did not mean to make afraid. Thought you might want.”
The man said irritably, “For what?”
“For work. Did not mean. Girl—did not mean to make afraid.”
Cally stood trembling, her breath uneven. The man made a clicking sound with his tongue, impatient, and he took her again by the shoulders and spun her round. She flinched back against his knees. The two huge figures stood facing her. In the sunlight they were like rough misshapen sculptures clumsily carved from great blocks of stone: arms without hands, legs without feet, heads without features. The slow rumbling voice came again from one of them.
“Did not mean. . . .”
Even through her fear, Cally heard an incongruous note of appeal in the voice that for a wild moment reminded her of a small child apologizing. She swallowed.
“It’s all right,” she said huskily. “I’m . . . not afraid.”
“Hah!” said the man shortly, releasing her. “Not afraid? You’re shaking like an aspen. And were you running like the devil because you’re not afraid?”
Cally said, “It was —when they changed—”
“And if you don’t understand, you fear.” He gave a brief snort of disgust, and turned to pick up his hammer. “Just like Lugan’s folk. Are you one of them?”
Cally said blankly, “Who?”
“Where have you come from?”
“I—don’t know. Another country.”
“Stonecutter,” said the deep creaking voice from the stone figure. “We did wrong?”
“No, no,” said the black-haired man impatiently. “She can work with Ryan. I dare say she needs a roof over her head.”
Cally thought of the dark wood, and the malevolent face on the pillar. In relief she smiled at him. “Yes please.”
He looked at her coldly. “Behind the house there is a door. Go through it, to the woman inside. Understand that here, life is work.”
Cally nodded, her smile fading.
“And understand one thing about the People, so that we’ll have no more hysterics.” He pointed to the great stone creatures standing motionless before him. “The sun wakes them. When the sun is gone, they . . . go to sleep. All of us here live by that rule; but for them it must be the touch of the sun that brings them back to life.”
Cally remembered the beam of sunlight on the grey rock. She said, “The People?”
“It is what they call themselves.” The words were a dismissal; he turned away.
Cally glanced at the stone figures, but there was no way of telling if the blank faceless heads were looking back. She went to the house. Behind her, the thudding of the hammer began again—and with it a much more massive crashing, crunching sound, shaking the earth. Cally shivered, and did not turn to look.
The house was made of rough blocks of stone, set with small square windows deep in each wall, and roofed with blue slate. Cally found the heavy wooden door in the back wall, with a tall dark holly bush growing nearby. She knocked, timidly. Then she realised that the door was unlatched. Pushing, she found that it was in two halves; the top half swung open.
“No foot on the floor yet!” It was a quick, light voice, with a singing in its accent. Cally saw a broad, light-coloured floor, with heavy furniture all pushed into a cluster at one end of the room. By the fire in the big open hearth, a little woman with wispy grey hair caught up in a knot was kneeling with a bucket and a brush. She blinked up at Cally, in the sunlight from the doorway.
“Well, who is this now!” She stood up and padded across to the door; Cally saw that she had pieces of rag wrapped round each foot and tied at the ankles with string. The woman glanced down at them and laughed: an infectious, gurgling laugh, turning her small face into a maze of smiling wrinkled lines and rounding her cheeks like apples.
“It’s the day for the floor, you see—no use washing it clean and then grubbying it up with your own feet, is there?”
“No,” Cally said, smiling. “My mum walks about on dusters, when she’s been polishing. That is —she used to.” Her smile died suddenly, and she felt a choking in her throat.
The woman looked at her shrewdly, and reached out and gave her hand a quick light touch. But she asked no questions. “Tired, you are,” she said. “A cup of tea, and something to eat. But first I must finish my floor. What’s your name?”
“Cally. He—” Cally gestured vaguely at the yard. “He told me to come in here.
“Oh yes,” the woman said comfortably. “You would not be here if Stonecutter had not sent you in.”
“He said, she can work with Ryan.”
“That’s me. And indeed you can.”
Cally said hesitantly, “Mrs. Ryan?”
“No, my dear, just Ryan. It is a shortening, of a name harder for the tongue.” She became brisk, looking round the room critically. “Now let me see. I have the elder leaves, I need the dock. Do you know dock leaves?”
Cally was startled. “Yes. The kind you rub on nettle stings?”
Ryan nodded approvingly. She reached to a shelf and took down a basket. “Now do you go out there and bring me back four handfuls of good green dock. And—oh—” She reached again, and put a small dark pottery bowl in the basket. “And a handful of sand.”
“Sand,” Cally said blankly.
“Easy to find. Where Stonecutter is, there’s always sand.” She stood smiling at Cally like a small perky bird.
Baffled, Cally went back out into the sunshine with the basket. She turned away from the muffled thunder that was Stonecutter and the People at work, into a meadow beside the house. It stretched in a long lush sweep to the distant edge of the trees; as she wandered through the grass, she was puzzled, and did not know why. In a little while she realised: though trees and bushes and plants grew luxuriantly everywhere around the house, nowhere could she see a single flower.
She found the broad dark-green leaves of dock easily in the long grass, growing in scattered clumps, and she filled the basket. Beyond the meadow, a huge stone wall twice her height stretched into the wood and out of sight; it seemed to have no purpose, enclosing nothing, marking no particular boundary
. But it was newly-built, with trampled land and splintered young trees all around it. She imagined the clumsy crashing of the People, their handless arms raising great boulders into place, and shuddered. But she found sand for Ryan: silvery sand in little heaps all up and down the wall, from the crushing of the rock.
When she went back to the door of the house, fully open now, she paused at the step in surprise. All the grey-white floor was neatly patterned with criss-crossed strips of green; it was like a carpet. But it was not a carpet; she could see Ryan on her knees at the far corner of the room, making the last part of the pattern by rubbing a bunch of leaves hard against the floor so that they left a green stain.
Ryan looked up. “Good! Just in time! There’s the elder done—now the dock, to finish it.” And Cally saw that round the edge of the floor she had left a blank space about a foot wide.
She said, “It’s pretty.”
“And useful,” Ryan said a trifle grimly, but she did not explain what she meant. “Now do you come in with that sand, and sprinkle it all evenly across here.” She pointed to the broad hearthstone in front of the fire, which she had scrubbed clean of ash and soot.
Cally came in, stepping carefully between the green patterning. Obediently she sprinkled the hearthstone, then sat watching, still and silent, as Ryan finished rubbing her pattern with the dock leaves round the edge of the floor. The old woman heaved herself to her feet. She looked tired, her face more lined.
“Now the last thing.”
Crossing to the hearth, she took from the mantel a slab of blue stone the size of her fist; kneeled again and began rubbing it on the sanded surface, slowly, deliberately. She drew lines of crosses, crossed each with another cross, then swept the sand away with a brush so that the pattern stood out clear and blue on the hearth.
“There,” she said, sitting back on her heels. “Safe for a month, now. No need to keep from walking on it, child—it will stay and stay.”
“Safe?” Cally said.
“Protected,” Ryan said, biting off the word like a piece of thread; her small lined face was suddenly secret, enclosed. She had Cally help her pull back the heavy wooden chairs and table piled against the wall; then she poured two mugs of steaming fragrant tea from a big brown teapot. She gave Cally one, with a plateful of small flat cakes speckled with currants.
Sitting down, she said abruptly, “Where are you going?”
Cally said, “I don’t know.” She hesitated. “If I were in my own world, I’d be going to a place by the sea where my parents are. Only—I don’t think they’d be there any more.” She looked down at her cup, unseeing.
“The sea links all worlds,” Ryan said gently. “But Stonecutter would set you to work?”
For a moment Cally was silent, lost; then she looked up. “I’m sorry. Yes, that’s what he said.” She sipped her tea. “This smells so good. Like raspberries.”
“Raspberry and camomile,” Ryan said absently. She was looking at Cally, but her creased-about eyes were blank, as if she saw only her own mind. “You must not stay long,” she said, “or he will never let you go. He will keep you for her.”
The tea and cakes were making Cally feel herself again. She said, puzzled, “Her?”
“She who brought you here. She whose land this is.” Ryan pointed at Cally’s mug. “Take your cup to the door, child, and do what I shall tell you. I will give you more tea in a moment. Now.”
There was a sudden urgency in the word. Cally got up, wondering, and crossed to the open door.
“Swirl the cup twice, and throw out the tea onto the ground. Then bring the cup back to me.”
Dutifully Cally tossed the golden liquid out of the mug; it glittered for a moment in the sunshine as it fell. But in the same moment she paused, arrested, staring out across the clearing to the edge of the straggling trees. There was a patch of bright blue against the green, unmistakable: the blue of the hooded figure she had seen in the wood.
She blinked—and nothing was there.
Ryan said, “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.” Cally brought her the mug, patterned inside now with the broad wet leaves left by the tea. Ryan set it on her dark woollen skirt and peered inside, turning it slowly in both hands.
“Yes. Two gone, and a travelling. . . . And another traveller, to go by your side. A tower by the lake, a tower full of dreams and danger. And the sea, yes, and—now what is that—?”
She broke off, and looked up at Cally with a curious new expression on her small seamed face: a mixture of pleasure and surprise and a kind of wariness. She said, “Show me your hands.”
Cally hesitated, then reluctantly held out her hands, palm upward. “They’re . . . not very pretty,” she said.
Ryan gazed at the thickened, horny skin on each palm, tracing it gently with a forefinger. “Yes,” she said softly, but it was not an answer. “Well, well . . . yes. . . .” Her bright eyes flickered up to Cally’s. “Did your mother sing?”
“Yes,” said Cally in astonishment. “How did you know? She used to sing to me when—” She stopped, suddenly remembering the voice that had been like her mother’s and yet not like.
And all at once, in the same moment, the air was full of singing; it was back again, the high sweet wordless music that had driven her from that world into this. But it was gentle now, as it had been at the first; soft, beckoning. And it was not in the room or in the house, but outside, in the sunshine and the trees.
Cally turned instinctively to look out—and found herself face to face with a hooded figure in a blue robe, framed against the sky in the doorway, looking in.
CHAPTER 6
Cally gasped, and jumped backwards away from the door. Beside her Ryan was standing stiff and tense, all the smiling lines of her face drawn straight. She was gazing at the figure in hostile challenge.
“You may not come in,” she said.
The blue-robed figure raised one hand, and the music that filled the air died away. Then the hand went to the deep folds of the hood and pulled it down, and Cally saw that it was a woman who stood there. Against the bright sky her face was lost in shadow, but the sun blazed in her hair as if it were spun glass.
“Oho,” she said softly, looking down at the green-patterned floor. “Rhiannon, daughter of the Roane, you are not welcoming.”
Ryan said, unmoving, “Nor shall I ever be.”
“Not even for the sake of our Cally here?” The woman purposely moved so that the sunlight fell on her, and Cally caught her breath. It was the lined pale face, blue-eyed, old yet ageless, of the woman who had come to take her father away.
Ryan said in warning, “It is the Lady Taranis. Do not listen to her.”
“But I know her,” Cally said. “She took my father away to a hospital, by the sea. And my mother, to be with him.” She came forward eagerly. “Have you seen her? Is she all right?”
“Everything is all right,” Taranis said, but she was looking past Cally, at Ryan, and there was a coldness in her blue eyes. She said sharply, “Do not hinder me. You have not the power.”
“I have the power,” Ryan said. “This is my house.”
“But you are in my country—which none can leave without my willing it. As you know, Rhiannon.” She smiled, and there was a hint of malice in the smile that made Cally uneasy. But then the blue eyes were on hers again, shining with warmth. “Come with me, Cally. I will take you to the sea, to your mother and your father, and you will be safe again. All together.”
Cally felt Ryan take her hand; small strong fingers, holding fast. “She will go,” Ryan said. “But in her own time, and her own way.”
Cally could feel the force of Taranis’ nature reaching out for her like a wave. “Come,” said the soft coaxing voice. “Cally, come with me.”
“Do not move,” Ryan said in her ear. “But hold out your hand to her, and ask her to take it.”
“Come,” said the Lady Taranis.
Cally reached out her hand. She said nervously, “Here.”
Ryan said again at her ear, the lilt of her accent very strong now, “The patterning that I was telling you, the greening of the floor, it is a protection against all harm. None who would work harm may cross it. So now you may see.”
Taranis smiled at Cally. “First you must come out.”
Cally said nothing, but stood motionless with her hand outstretched, and Taranis’ pale beautiful face grew angry. For an instant she made as if to move forward, but it was as if she were on the other side of a glass wall, invisibly held back. Glaring at Ryan, she flung round towards the yard, her blue cloak swirling, and she called in a high clear voice, “Stonecutter!”
He came with a great rumbling and shaking of the earth, the huge faceless forms of the People around him.
“What have you been doing?” she said.
He looked at her without emotion. “Building walls.”
“Build one round this house!” said Taranis fiercely. “Keep your Rhiannon inside it for ever!”
“I mean to,” Stonecutter said.
Ryan’s fingers tightened on Cally’s hand. From the figures outside there rose a long deep murmur like the sound of a gigantic swarm of bees, and Cally realised with a chill that there must be far more of them out there now than before.
“As for the girl,” Taranis said, “I shall come back for her.”
There was a flicker like the shadow of a bird crossing the sun, and a quiver of high singing voices too brief to catch, and in the next moment she was no longer there.
Ryan’s fingers relaxed. Stonecutter came in through the doorway. “Is supper ready?” he said, as if nothing had happened.
“It will be, when you are washed. Come, Cally.” The old woman turned, with a quick swish of her long dark skirt like a girl moving, and Stonecutter went outside again; Cally heard from the side wall of the house the creaking metallic sound of a pump, and water splashing. Ryan was stirring a pot on the stove; she gestured for Cally to fetch plates from a shelf.
Cally said urgently, “But my mother and father—where are they? What will she do?”
“Nothing. They are safe from her now. Be patient for a little, child—we cannot talk yet.”