Seaward

by Susan Cooper

  In silence, they ate a stew of meat and unfamiliar vegetables, with some strange sweet-tasting greens which Cally, to her surprise, wolfed down as eagerly as the meat. “This is good!” she said.

  Ryan smiled at her.

  “You baked no bread today,” Stonecutter said, chewing; his lean face was dour and preoccupied. He offered no thanks ever, nor gave Ryan any word of praise; watching him, Cally wondered if he had ever smiled.

  “It was the day for the floor,” Ryan said.

  “You are a fool to make your patterning. It does no good—the power of the land is all hers. Why make her angry?”

  Ryan said quietly, “I will not be her creature. Or yours.”

  “Nor will you leave,” he said. “The wall is already there—the People have seen to that.”

  Cally turned in her chair to look out at the yard. All round the house, out at the edge. of the trees, the massive stone figures had been standing in a silent ominous line. Now the sun was going down, and the shadow of the trees had overtaken them—and where they had stood, there was now a long unbroken barrier of rock.

  Ryan said, “It is not your walls that keep me here.”

  Stonecutter shrugged. “The door has always been open, if you had cared to . . . leave things behind. Perhaps the wall is for the girl.”

  Cally stood up suddenly. “Please let me go,” she said.

  He looked at her with dismissive surprise, as if the chair had spoken. “I offered shelter, and you took it. And the Lady Taranis chooses to have you stay. It is almost sundown—go to bed.”

  Cally opened her mouth to argue, but Ryan took her hand firmly again and led her to a mattress close to her own bed in the back room of the house. “I will wake you,” she said in a whisper.

  • • •

  But Cally woke of her own accord, in the darkness, to the sound of Ryan’s soft breathing and the glimmer of moonlight on the wall. She had been dreaming, she knew, but in the moment that she woke the dream flickered away and would not come back; she knew only that it had woken her, like a calling.

  She lay there miserable and lost, clutching the blankets round her. Everything that had been firm and certain in her life seemed to have melted away like spring snow: her home, her parents, even the awareness of herself, like a reflection in a mirror, that she had always had inside. She thought, I don’t know who I am, I don’t know what to do—and there was an ache in her throat, and she wept silently into the rough linen pillow.

  But something in her mind said obstinately: You are Cally. You can do anything you want to do. Gradually the tears stopped, and she found herself thinking of the coldness of the Stonecutter and the warmth of Ryan, and of Ryan’s admonition: you must not stay long. And with a chill of fright and excitement she knew that she must go, now; leave this house which threatened to hold her forever, and go out into the enchanted country through which she did not know her way.

  Quietly she slipped out of bed, took off the soft voluminous nightgown Ryan had given her, and put on her clothes and shoes. Then she tiptoed out into the front room, where moonlight shafted brightly in through the window, turning the floor to white patterned with black—and she stopped stock-still. On a mattress near the hearth, Stonecutter lay sleeping, wrapped in blankets; she could see the shape of his head, and the angle of his knees. Very slowly, inch by inch, she edged sideways so that she could pass around his feet. But the space was narrow between mattress and wall, and she was no more than halfway when she overbalanced. As she toppled, her foot came forward and struck Stonecutter’s legs, and she cried out in terror—not for fear of having woken him, but for a greater fear. The body that she had kicked was not human; it was hard as stone.

  Ryan’s voice said compassionately behind her, “Yes. I would have spared you that. He does not need the warmth of the sunshine to waken him, like the People, but from sundown to sunup he is stone, as they are.”

  Cally shrank back from the still figure, terrified that she might glimpse what lay under the blankets. Ryan put an arm round her; she was dressed in a full, warm nightgown like the one she had lent Cally, and her grey hair was long and loose over her shoulders. Looking at her face in the moonlight, Cally realised that she was not a very old woman at all, and that the network of lines had been put there by care, not by age.

  She said, “Why?”

  “The Lady Taranis is a jealous mistress,” Ryan said wearily. “Once a long time ago he fell in love, and she was angry, and made sure that he would never sleep with his lover. And to take care of the days, she touched his heart with stone as well.”

  She looked down sadly at Stonecutter.

  Cally said, “Why do you stay?”

  The sadness went out of Ryan’s face, and left it empty. She said, “I came here because he had something of mine without which I can never be free. And he has it shut under stone as cold as his heart, and I cannot leave without it.” She smiled ruefully at Cally, and gave her shoulder a squeeze as she released her. “But I am used to waiting. You are not—you are young. Were you running away?”

  Cally nodded.

  “Not yet,” Ryan said. “Not while the moon is up. The moonlight belongs to Taranis —you must never forget that. While it shines, unless you are under a roof, she can turn your will to do anything she wants you to do. But in the sunlight, even in this her land, you will always have a choice.”

  Holding up her skirt to step lightly over the still figure on the floor, she crossed to the door, unbolted its top half and swung it open. “Half a moon,” she said, looking out. “And an hour more to its setting. Then it will be half-light, owl-light, the light between the dawn and the rising of the sun, and then you may go—when the night no longer obeys Taranis, and the day has not yet woken the people. I will dress and wait with you, and we will make ourselves some raspberry tea.”

  Cally followed her to the door. “I wish you’d come with me.”

  “I would if I could,” Ryan said. She stood looking out at the shadowed grey-white moonlit world, and she put up her hands to hold each side of the door-frame, so that with her arms wide it was as if she were speaking to it all. She said softly, “There are no birds here, as there are no animals in the wood, because the coldness of Stonecutter keeps them away. But there are birds in the sky and the trees and the grass, beyond the building of Stonecutter’s walls. They are the birds of Rhiannon, and they will go with you, and comfort you, and help you to the sea.”

  Standing there unmoving, she turned her young-old face and smiled, with the same gaiety suddenly that Cally had seen when she first came to the house. “Remember, child. This is all I have to give you, to help you on your way. If you are in great trouble ever, or in danger, or in emptiness of spirit, call on the birds of Rhiannon of the Roane.”

  Cally said in a whisper, “Rhiannon of the Roane. Ryan.”

  Ryan said, “And when you reach the sea, go to the rocks, and give a message to the one who will be waiting. Say: do not despair. She will come.”

  “Who will be waiting?” Cally said.

  “You will know, because he will know you. By your hands.” Ryan stepped back from the door-frame and held out her hands, palms upward. And on each palm Cally saw the same strange horny growth of skin that was on her mother’s hands, and on her own.

  • • •

  When the moon was gone, and the sky grey with the beginnings of dawn, Ryan made Cally put on a warm woven jacket, and carry a bag of tough burlap on her shoulder. “A change of clothes,” she said. “And some food.” She opened the door. The air was cold.

  “Over the wall,” Ryan said. “It will not hinder you, if you touch without fear. They will be no more than rocks, until the sun comes up. Then you must go straight, as straight as you can—follow the morning star. And you will come to a stream. Follow the water always, and it will take you in the end to the sea.”

  She put an arm round Cally’s shoulders. Cally gave her a quick hug, and set off across the yard without looking back. She knew that if she tur
ned, she might not have the courage to go at all.

  Before her the stone wall loomed, dark and ominous in the colourless early-morning world. It was twice her height. Cally hesitated, hearing again in her mind the great cracking, grinding sound of the huge boulder coming alive, becoming the People. Suppose Taranis had bewitched them so that they would not need the sun; suppose they might come alive at her touch . . . ?

  Clutching the pack Ryan had given her, she made herself march up to the wall and touch it. The rock was ice-cold, as the boulder had been the day before; but it was only rock. Nothing moved; no sound came. And now that she was close, she saw that the barrier was not smooth and vertical like a real wall, but mounded, uneven—so uneven that she scrambled over it with no need even to look for footholds.

  Then she was down in the grass on the other side. Low in the grey sky ahead of her, above a straggling line of trees, a single star shone white and steady. Cally set off towards it. Soon she was among the trees, and when she looked back, she could no longer see the wall.

  She walked for a long time through the grass and scrub and the small trees. Behind her the sun came up, and suddenly there was colour all around: the grey sky became blue, the leaves were green. The star had disappeared, but for direction now she tried always to keep the sun at her back.

  Sometimes she crossed sweeping areas of bracken, the tough green fronds as high as her waist, so that she was wading through a rustling green sea. In the beginning, she often came upon Stonecutter’s fallen, forgotten walls, winding apparently aimlessly through bracken and grass, sometimes with trees growing through them. But after a while she found no more.

  Once, she saw a little way off a tall grey pillar like the one she had seen before, and she thought she saw the shaping of the two faces carved at its peak. But she looked away at once, and took care to walk wide of it. She knew very well, now, whose two faces the statues wore.

  Gradually the trees began to change; more and more often Cally saw the dancing leaves and the smooth grey trunks of beech, with dark mounds of rhododendrons growing between. In the soft green light she felt easier, without the tense awareness of danger that had been tight around her like a rope. Nearby, a startled squirrel ran up a tree and perched on a branch, scolding her, and she realised that the air around her was no longer silent, but full of the murmur of birds.

  The wood was cool, and she found it hard to make sure that the sun, climbing higher beyond the leaves, was at her back. But soon, close by, she heard a new sound: the gentle rhythmic rippling of a stream. In her mind she heard Ryan’s voice: Follow the water, and it will take you in the end to the sea.

  It was a pretty stream, running unhurried through the wood, with moss pillowed on its banks, and a fringe of broad sedge grasses and strands of watercress. Cally followed it for a long time, winding through the trees. Small birds fluttered and chirped in the branches over her head, but she could never catch a clear sight of them. Then the water seemed to quicken, and the stream ran straight. Bright sky gleamed through the trees ahead, and almost before Cally realised it, she was out in the sunshine, standing on a high bank overlooking a lake.

  The dark water stretched before her still as glass, a broad expanse broken only by the overlapping V-shaped wakes of two ducks swimming slowly into the distance. Far out, she could see the opposite bank, fringed with trees —and closer, in the middle of the lake, the wooded green mound of an island, with a rocky cliff from which a tall stone tower rose.

  Cally stared at the tower. It was like a piece of a medieval castle: square, crenellated, with deep slit windows just visible in the walls. Its grey surface shone in the sunlight; suddenly she wanted very much to be inside it, to look out over the water and the trees from those high battlements. But there was no way to the island from the bank where she stood.

  Then the still surface of the lake was broken again. Gliding out from behind the island came a small dinghy, with a boy standing in its stern working a single oar to and fro. The water rippled out behind the boat in a long V, like the wake of the ducks, with a line of wavelets in the centre from the sculling oar. She saw the boy pause as if in surprise, looking up at the tower.

  Without stopping to think, Cally put two fingers in her mouth and blew a piercing whistle; her father had shown her how, years before, before he became ill and forgot his habit of teaching her—on principle—tricks generally thought unsuitable for girls. For a moment she found herself remembering the way he had made her learn to throw a knife, and to cast with a fly-rod: much more fun than her mother’s gentle instruction in how to sew and knit and cook.

  The boy’s head jerked round. Cally whistled again, and waved. The boat changed direction, and began moving towards her over the still dark water of the lake.

  CHAPTER 7

  Sculling to the shore, Westerly realised with astonishment and some confusion that the figure scrambling down the bank towards him was a girl. He sighed. Nothing in this country could be relied upon to be what it seemed.

  Overhead in the blue sky, a small hawk hovering over the island dropped suddenly in a long vertical dive, and disappeared into the trees behind the tower.

  Westerly let the bow of the boat crunch against the shore. “Need a lift?” he said.

  She looked all right, at any rate: straight brown hair, clear, dark-lashed grey eyes under a high forehead, a delicate mouth but a chin that looked as if it knew how to be obstinate.

  Cally in her turn saw a brown-skinned boy about her own age and height, with dark hair and eyes, grinning at her amiably. There was a long rip in the sleeve of his rather dirty white shirt. She grasped the bow of the boat.

  “Are you going to that tower?” she said.

  “I was thinking about it. Hop in. No charge for residents.”

  She clambered in. “I’m not a resident. I never saw it till a minute ago.”

  “Join the club. Neither did I. You’ll have to come further up this way, or I can’t get the bow off.”

  Cally wobbled back towards him. The boat swayed.

  “Careful,” he said.

  “Sorry.”

  “Can you swim?”

  “No,” Cally said sorrowfully.

  “In that case, be very careful.”

  She sat obediently still on a thwart, balancing herself. “I’m Cally.”

  “Westerly.” He pushed the boat out with the oar.

  “What a funny name,” Cally said.

  He looked at her sideways, raising one eyebrow.

  Cally said in confusion, “Well, yes. But it used to be worse. They christened me Calliope.”

  Westerly said, sculling back across the lake, “There was a boy in my class called Angel.”

  “What did you call him?”

  “All kinds of things. Here, sit in the stern—this isn’t working. I’d better row.”

  As he set both oars in the rowlocks Cally said abruptly, “You don’t belong here either, do you?”

  “No,” Westerly said. He thought of adding more, but could think of nothing simple. He started to row. “Tell me if I’m headed wrong.”

  “Pull on your right a bit. Where are you going?”

  “Didn’t you say to the tower?”

  “Yes. No—I mean, are you on your way somewhere?”

  Westerly hesitated; then decided there could be no guile in a girl who could whistle like a boy. “Seaward,” he said.

  “What?”

  “To the sea.”

  Cally looked up at him sharply. “So am I.”

  “Then why are we going to this tower?”

  “You’re nearly there. Pull left. Now both. I don’t know. I think I’m supposed to. Something somebody said—” She thought: I can’t tell him Ryan saw it in the tea-leaves. “Stop. Here’s the shore.”

  Westerly turned, and they were both silent as they looked up at the tower. On its rocky base it reared up over them into the blue sky, vast, mysterious; they could see the outlines of the huge stone blocks from which it was made. Nothing stirr
ed anywhere.

  Westerly shouted suddenly, “Hey! Anybody home?”

  His voice echoed back at them across the lake. “Home . . . home . . . home. . . .” No sound came from the tower.

  “Let’s have one of those oars,” Cally said. She poked it over the stern and pushed, and the dinghy nosed up on a small sandy beach. They climbed out and pulled it clear of the water.

  The sand of the beach was grey, filled with small white flakes that glittered in the sun. Broken branches and twigs littered the waterline. Westerly pulled his pack out of the boat and swung it up on his back; he looked at Cally striding long-legged up the beach with her own, and wondered what drew her to the tower. The urge to explore was strong in him too, but he felt a wariness beneath it, a sense that something perilous waited here.

  Cally called over her shoulder, “There are steps!”

  He caught up with her. The grey rock was like a cliff before them, but carved diagonally into it was a huge stairway, winding upwards, each step higher than his knee.

  He reached one leg up to the first step. “Look at the size of them! Must have been made for a giant.”

  Cally looked at him quickly, and he laughed. “Jack and the Beanstalk? Not really. Come on.”

  They heaved themselves up the stairs, scuffling through dirt and sand and dead leaves. As the stairway curved, biting into the rock, its sides cut them off; they could see nothing but the rocky walls, the rising steps and a strip of sky overhead. Silence enclosed them.

  Cally said, climbing, “That crack about Jack and the Beanstalk. . . . There are weird things in this place. Including giants —sort of.”

  “I know there are,” Westerly said. He reached for the next step. “I just wasn’t sure you did. No more cracks, okay?”

  “Okay,” Cally said.

  Then they were out in the air again, breathless, the wind loud in their ears; they were at the top of the steps, standing on a rough rocky platform, and before them was a massive stone door. It was set close against the granite blocks of the tower wall: a blue-grey slab of slate, straight-edged, smooth as paper.