by Susan Cooper
Wondering, he backed away and stayed very still beside the wall, watching. And the birds came to the tower in a vast wheeling horde, blotting out the sun, hovering over Cally, and each one plucked a feather from its own breast and released it into the air. Like a rainbow of snow the small soft feathers fluttered down, drifting on the breeze, and fell where Cally lay; more and more, as the thronging, chattering birds dived and made way for others and were gone. The cacophony of their calling was so loud Westerly could hardly bear it; he hunched his shoulders, sliding his hands up towards his ears.
Then at length the voices began to die, and the last fluttering forms were curving by his head—swallows, darting and faintly piping, and a slow-flapping pair of doves, their wisps of grey down floating to the lovely mound of feathers that showed where Cally lay. Last of all, a small hawk fell from the sky like a stone; hovered; dropped a soft brown feather and darted away.
Westerly thought sadly: they’re burying her.
But there was a stirring beneath the mound. For a frozen moment he stared. Then he saw Cally sit up, blinking, shaking feathers out of her hair.
Westerly gaped at her, feeling a great grin begin to spread over his face. She scrambled to her feet, brushing at the soft fragments of down that fell away from her with every move, and she looked round in amazement. She saw Westerly. “What happened?” she said.
Westerly crossed to her. He put his arms round her and hugged her very hard, dabbing an awkward kiss at her cheek as he let her go.
Cally turned very pink. “What was that for?” she said, busily brushing away more feathers than were there.
Westerly said simply, “I’m glad to see you.”
She glanced up at him—but then her eyes widened and her face changed, and he knew that she was looking past him at the stone dragon, remembering. She said in panic, “Stonecutter—”
“Gone. Don’t worry—he’s gone. The Lady Taranis came and . . . took him.” He flinched from the images that would come if he told her more. “He can’t hurt you now. He’s gone.”
Cally stared at him. “Taranis came?”
“He was telling the truth—she had this place built for us. This tower of dreams, she called it. She wants to keep us here. Forever. To be with her.”
Cally said fiercely, “I’d rather be dead!”
“We’ll get away,” Westerly said, with a confidence he did not feel.
“Quick then—now!” Cally’s voice was tight with fear. She ran to the empty square hole in the stone floor, where the trapdoor had been. “Has Stonecutter really gone?” Without waiting for an answer, she swung herself down over the edge of the gap and sat feeling with her feet for the ladder.
Westerly grabbed for their packs. “Here—let me go first.”
“Why?” Cally said. She disappeared. Westerly opened his mouth, shut it again and followed her. Looking back as he climbed down into the tower, he saw the stone head of the dragon outlined against a reddening sky, snarling frozen into the sinking sun.
Cally led the way down the winding stone steps, without a glance back at the rooms that bore their names and offered all their hopes. The cold white light of the tower flowed quietly round their feet, docile now as it had been when they first climbed the stairs. Westerly reached an experimental hand down into the white mist; it moved elusively away from his fingers.
He said thoughtfully, “Maybe it only does what Taranis wants. Why does she want it to help us now?”
Unheeding, Cally marched across the lofty rock-walled entrance chamber, towards the outer doors.
“Be careful,” Westerly said, suddenly full of unease.
Cally said confidently, “They’ll open.” She reached out a finger and touched one of the tall slate doors, and with a slow deep creaking it slid to one side. They blinked as the sun blazed into their eyes, a great orange ball sinking towards the treetops; for a moment they could see nothing else in the open doorway.
Then Cally let out a choked gasp and lunged for the door again, and against the glow of the sky Westerly saw, very close, towering over the doorway, the great grey figures of the People. They were massed outside in a vast crowd, blotting out the trees. He stared in horrified fascination at their huge half-made stone bodies; at the faces that could see and yet had only shallow sockets for eyes. Then the heavy door slid shut again, as Cally seized his arm and drew him back into the depths of the room.
“Well,” he said, “we aren’t going that way.”
“They’re so close!” Cally was shaking. “And so many of them, all outside—waiting. . . .” She noticed suddenly that Westerly was carrying her pack, shook her head in apology and took it from him. “After sunset we could go,” she said, pale but intent. “Between sundown and sunup they turn to stone. They really do.”
Through the door, they could hear a low rumbling: deep formless voices murmuring together.
“Don’t count on it,” Westerly said.
“But I’ve seen it. I climbed over them, just like over a wall. If we wait just half an hour. . . .”
“But are they going to wait for that?”
They stood in the cold empty room, the white mist of light lying like a pool beside them. Westerly fidgetted with the strap of his pack, and went back to the stairway from which they had come. He looked down into the black well of the descending steps, the stair they had not taken. “There’s one other way we could try.”
“Down there?” Cally crossed to look.
“Why not?”
“Those stairs go underground—how could we possibly get out that way?”
“Don’t know unless we try.”
“I wish you’d wait.”
“I don’t like waiting,” Westerly said. “Why don’t I just go and look?”
Cally hesitated. Then she said unhappily, “Well—I’ll come too. If the light goes with us.”
Westerly set his foot on the first step, and like a stream of quicksilver the light flowed in before him. He turned to grin at Cally, doggedly following him, and they went down the stone stairway with the white stream around their feet. But it did not go far. Within ten steps they came to a flat wall of stone set across the stairway, with only a narrow gap at its base.
The stream of light paused, and eddied backwards.
“Well,” Westerly said cheerfully, “that’s a challenge if ever I saw one.” He contemplated the stone barrier for a moment, then sat down facing it and began to wriggle his way under it, feet first.
Cally said, “That wall’s there to keep people out.”
“So were the doors. No handles, remember?”
“This isn’t a door.”
“Come on,” Westerly said impatiently.
“You aren’t hearing me.”
“Yes I am. You’re one of those people who don’t walk on lawns if there’s a notice saying Keep Off the Grass.”
Cally said with spirit, “That’s right.”
“I’m not.”
“You’re one of those people who tramp your big feet all over the lawn and kill the new grass they’re trying to grow.”
Westerly laughed. “That’s right.” He slid forward and disappeared under the rock wall. The light flurried like splashing water on the step he had left. Cally sighed, sat down and wriggled reluctantly feet first after him. They could just make out the shape of the steps continuing downward before them. But the light, their obedient white river, had not come through the gap with them.
Westerly peered back at it and whistled. “Come on, boy.”
Nothing happened. Cally looked up through the gap and saw the white mist retreating back up the stairs.
“It’s going away,” she said uneasily.
“You scared it.”
“Westerly, how can we go down a stone stairway in pitch darkness?” She tried to keep her voice from quavering. “We could fall. There could be anything down there.”
Westerly said nothing, but his hand reached out and found hers, holding it firmly, and very slowly he drew her on
down the steps.
Cally followed, filled with misgiving, trying to think only of the reassuring grip of his hand. Blackness was all around them; she stared into it, eyes wide, and saw only blank dark. It seemed to fill all the world, all her senses. Down they went, further and further. Uneasiness curled round her mind—and then suddenly there was no room for it, or for anything.
The dark exploded around them. Above their heads, somewhere, there came a dreadful roar as if the world were splitting apart; a long terrible thunder, bursting in great booming crashes that made them flinch down against the stairs. They felt the stone shaking beneath their feet, and heard rocks and stones rattling down the steps towards them. Together they waited, paralysed, caught in the fear of the tunneled stairway crashing down onto their heads.
After a long time, the uproar began to die away, and through the singing in their ears they could hear only an occasional muffled thud above, like the falling of a last loose stone. The air was filled with a strong smell of dust.
Cally felt a tug at her hand; Westerly was crawling back up the stairs. She went with him; nothing on earth could have induced her to let go of his hand. They could tell when they had reached the dividing wall only when their heads hit the stone. There was no glimmer of light above. Reaching up her free hand to find the gap through which they had come, Cally could feel only solid irregular rock, and the dust in the air now was so thick that it made her choke.
Westerly said hoarsely, “It’s blocked for good—down again, quick.”
They slithered back down the stairway for more steps than she could count, until he paused.
Cally said shakily, “The tower.”
“Yes. The People—just before the sun went down—”
“We’d be dead if it weren’t for you,” Cally said. “Buried. If you hadn’t made me come down here.”
Westerly shifted his hand in hers; both were wet with sweat. “Maybe we are buried,” he said.
“I don’t care,” Cally said. “From now on I’ll walk on the grass, whatever the sign says.”
Westerly laughed weakly, and began feeling his way on down the steps in the darkness, leading her with him. They could hear nothing but the slow slither of their tentative feet reaching out. The air was cool; the smell of dust grew fainter. Westerly tried to convince himself that this must mean there was air coming into the tunnel from somewhere far ahead; that they must be walking to something more than a dead end.
“Listen!” Cally said, stopping him.
Very faintly, as if it were buried deep in the earth beneath them, they heard a slow muffled thumping, regular as breathing. As they listened, puzzled, the darkness began to give way, until they could see the dim outline of the walls on either side, glimmering with a faint luminosity of their own. Peering close, Westerly saw that there were tiny bright particles embedded all through the rock. They glowed more and more brightly as he watched, pulsating gently in time to the strange heartbeat sound. Cally rubbed her finger on the wall, and when she brought it away, the fingertip was faintly glowing.
Then she stood still, lifting her head. Over the distant thumping, she began to hear new sounds.
They were faint but all-pervading; they came into her mind like a dream, flowing in and out of one another, never definite. Music was there, but no clear voice or tune; she heard birds singing, the sounds of animals, a sighing that could have been the wind in the trees or the sound of the unknown sea. Then there were voices, murmuring, indistinct.
She clutched Westerly’s arm, and knew that he could hear them too.
“What is it?” she whispered.
The wordless music drifted through the air, and with it muffled conversations they could not quite hear, broken often by laughter. Then for a moment two voices rose above the rest, though still faint and faraway: a man’s voice and then a woman’s.
“. . . better keep out of the apple tree now—the blossom will be setting. . . .”
“. . . would you mind if I went to see him on my own—would you mind . . . ?”
Westerly saw Cally stand rigid, straining to hear. But the voices drifted away into soft laughter and a contented murmuring again, and were lost.
He said, “What’s up?”
“That was my mother, and my father! I know it was —the last things they said before they left.” She stared wildly round at the dim-lit walls. “What does it mean? Are they here?”
Without waiting for an answer she broke away from him, running to the turn in the path that lay ahead. Westerly went after her. And at the bend, light broke over them like a wave, and everything that had been in their minds was wiped away.
The tunnel was gone. They stood in an immense cavern filled with light and colour and sound. It stretched before them further than they could see; its vaulted roof was lost in a tangle of thick tree-roots which reached straight down, here and there, to become massive pillars disappearing into the earth. Waves of colour shifted and danced all around them, as if they stood inside a rainbow, and the music and voices that filled the chamber swamped their senses so that all thought was gone. Instead, memories flickered and flowed; they were caught into the past, into the echoes of joyous moments from all the years that they had lived.
They walked slowly forward into the great cave, each seeing particular images, hearing particular long-lost, long-loved sounds. Each of them was held in a long private happiness, seeing it mirrored in the other’s face; it was as if they had both come home, to a security and reassurance they wanted never to leave. Westerly was a small boy, laughing at a magical game that his mother played for him in the patterning of three white bones; Cally was up in the apple tree, calling down to her father from the cradle of breathing leaves. . . .
All the time, in the distance, the steady rhythmic thumping from beneath the cavern went on and on. Imperceptibly it was growing louder, but neither Westerly nor Cally could hear it; held deep in memory, they wandered smiling through the brightness, entranced. The throbbing grew, a deep insistent rhythm beating in the air—until at last the fierceness of it broke through Westerly’s ears to his mind and abruptly he stopped, shouting aloud in pain, holding his head to keep the noise out.
But he could not keep it out; like huge heartbeats the relentless sound hammered at him. The dream had turned to a nightmare. Before him, he saw in terror the ground begin to quake and heave in the same rhythm; the earth rose up, swelling and crumbling, snapping the root pillars aside. And then something burst through the ground in a cloud of dust and exploding dirt, and the giant throbbing suddenly stopped and was overtaken by a roar of breaking rock. A chasm split open at Westerly’s feet, and out of it rose the black curve of a monstrous sinewy body, the arching back of a gigantic snake.
Westerly croaked, “Cally!” But she still walked on, oblivious, smiling, and he knew that she was lost as deep in her past happiness as he had been himself a moment before. He flung himself towards her, but it was too late. Rearing out of the splitting, widening cleft in the cavern floor, the body of the great black snake whirled out and looped itself round them, and swept them both down into the dark.
CHAPTER 11
The darkness was laughing at her, embracing her; a voice filled it. She heard release and freedom and gaiety, all in the voice that came from nowhere and yet was everywhere, deep and easy and warm.
“Your time’s your own,” said the voice. “Your life’s your own, not hers. Don’t be afraid of her, don’t be afraid of anything. Follow your own way and enjoy it—what can she do to you? Stone faces, for goodness’ sake! Stone people! All those pretentious games! Just keep your toes clear of her clodhopping creatures, and go where you want to go. You’ll like the sea. Remember the breathing of the poplar trees? It sounds like that, the sea, and it feels like this —”
The darkness rocked her, gently, rhythmically; swaying in its grasp she laughed aloud for pleasure.
Then somewhere she heard Westerly’s voice, clear, wary, challenging. “Who are you?”
The r
hythm of her rocking was like music.
“I am Snake,” said the darkness. “You know me well.”
Dreamily Cally sensed Westerly’s resistance. He said again, “Who are you?”
“Just now, my boy, I’m the saving of you,” the darkness said, with a touch of irritability. “Time Present and Time Future, yanking you back out of the past. You really must watch for her little tricks. Voices, lights, music—if you let them suck you in, she has you. And you have to be rescued—if you’re lucky—by Snake, grabbing you in that unceremonious way. Though I must say you did better than our Cally here.”
Cally remembered. It was like a discord in the music. “But I heard my mother and father—”
“You heard nothing but memory,” said Snake sharply. “You must go on, to the sea.”
“I heard them,” Cally said. “They were there.”
“They are everywhere and nowhere,” Snake said. He was like a voice from a dream. “They are not in the land of Taranis, not now.”
She said, “You mean they’re dead, don’t you?”
The voice sighed, and the sigh ran through her with the rhythm of the rocking. “Oh selkie girl, selkie girl—wherever they are, they have not become nothing, they are not gone as if they had never been. . . . Your world is all change, all journeying, and nothing that happens and no one that lives is ever lost. You above all should know that, Cally, selkie girl.”
There was a prickling in the palms of Cally’s hands. “What do you mean—‘selkie girl’?”
“I will show you,” he said. The darkness whirled round her, and for a flash she saw his face, and it was the laughing bearded face of a man. Then it was gone, and she was lying on the air, turning, diving, and there was a blue-green light around her, misty and diffused, and she was not in air but in water. Cally who could not swim was swimming, delighting in speed, turning this way and that and up and down; no longer breathing, yet not conscious of holding her breath. She saw the deep sea below her, and in it a thousand schooling fish, all twisting in the same silver-flashing instant as if they were part of a single mind—and then breaking in a scatter of panic as sleek dark shapes dived down at them from above. She was swimming with her arms at her sides and her feet tight together, swimming with her turning body; she looked at the dark seals diving around her and knew that she was no longer Cally, but one of them. And between moving almost too fast to be seen, weaving and diving and doubling back on itself with all the joy of movement that Cally felt in herself. She heard his laughing and she knew that it was Snake, and knew too that she would never see him clearly; that he was not a separate being but a fierce distillation of feelings and powers that she had never yet properly known.