Seaward

by Susan Cooper

  She rolled over in the still water and saw the bubbling flurry of the waves above her head; heard their hissing rhythm distant in her ears.

  Snake said into her mind, “Your oldest self is remembering—the part deep down that you cannot control, that comes from your ancestors who are forgotten. Even your mother had forgotten them, and her mother before her—no one had ever told them the truth. About the selkies, the seals who are human when they put aside their skins. . . .”

  Cally swam round and about him, feeling her strange-familiar skin, watching the sliding coils of the dark body that would never stay still.

  Snake said, “If a selkie should put aside her skin to swim as a girl, she is in danger. For a man may find it and take it, and then she cannot go back to the sea as a seal, but must follow him to beg for her skin. And if he hides it, she will have to live with him, marry him, bear his children, for as long as he keeps it hidden. She sings of the sea that she has lost, and her children and her children’s children are born with webs between the fingers and toes, or a horniness of the skin of their hands, that goes on down the generations for ever. And always those of selkie blood dream of the sea, even if they have never seen it, and always the selkie-singing can fill them with the joy and the horror that their selkie ancestor felt on the day that she lost her skin.”

  In the hissing of the waves Cally heard again in her memory the spectral singing that had been like her mother’s voice and yet not like, and she remembered her own fear, and the reaching out of her hands. “So some great-great-great-grandmother of mine, a long time ago—”

  “—belonged to the selkie folk,” said Snake, “the folk that they call the Roane.”

  Cally leapt through the water in a sudden flurry of understanding. “Ryan! That’s what he kept hidden—that’s why her hands —”

  “Rhiannon of the Roane,” Snake sang into her mind, “Rhiannon of the Roane. . . .”

  The whirling and the darkness came again, and the itching in Cally’s palms, and she knew as she rubbed them that she was herself again, back from the sea, suspended in the nothingness into which Snake had carried them at the first. She thought of Westerly and instantly saw him: standing straight-backed and alert, his chin up . and his mouth a thin hard line, staring at something she could not see.

  “West!” she said. “What is it?”

  Westerly seemed not to hear her. She said in alarm to Snake, “What’s wrong?”

  “He holds to his nightmare,” said the deep voice all around her; there was compassion in it now instead of laughter. “He has more of Snake in him than you do, he is all confidence and delight when he is fully awake. But he has a haunting, and he will not let it die, it pursues him. . . .” He called out, “Westerly! Let go! You have no right to guilt, your mother was killed—there was nothing you could have done—”

  “I could have reached her sooner,” Westerly said, tense, miserable. “I could have moved her out of the way.”

  “Let go, Westerly.” Snake’s voice was gentle. “Taranis will do this to you if you let her, it is her nature. You mustn’t let her. It is not your own mind you hear, it is Taranis —like the music of guilt and fear that sent Cally through the mirror. Westerly, listen to me. It was not your doing. All living things die when it is their time. Let go.”

  Westerly said in anguish, “I could have helped, I should have helped. And they’re coming—look, they’re coming!” His voice rose, high with dread, and Cally felt desperate for him.

  “Let me see,” she said urgently. “Let me see what he’s seeing.”

  “No,” Snake said. “My business is to anchor you in life, not to set you on a nightmare.”

  But she could feel only the urge to share with Westerly. “Please—let me see!”

  “Very well,” Snake said, resigned—and the darkness round Cally was all at once the darkness of a small child alone at night in a big empty house, full of uncertainty and formless fear. She too thought with terrible conviction, they’re coming, they’re coming and spun round nervously, hunting for shapes in shadows. And then she saw them.

  They moved only very slowly, but the sense of pursuit was unbearable. She knew she was being followed, she knew she must run for her life. She threw all her strength into the effort to escape, and yet her body would not answer, but moved with immense crawling weight. Frantic, flinging herself forward, she crept like a snail. And they were gaining on her: two huge looming figures, dark, faceless, reaching out—

  Cally shrieked. And at once Snake seized her back from the black imagining and carried her away, so that it was all gone from her mind as if she had never known it. He carried her away into a rocking music with sunlight in it, and the smell of lilacs, and the song of birds. New images wheeled round her mind; through green branches and flying clouds she saw a glimmer of Snake filling the world. It was the Snake of the sea. She saw the lithe sinuous body carrying her—and yet still within it the face of a man, laughing. The face belonged to the voice that had enveloped them and caught them back out of memory. For an infinite time he sang to her, rejoiced with her, caressed her; across her breasts and up through her body delight blazed like sudden fire, so that she felt herself wholly, fiercely in life in a way she had never known before. Her back arched with wonder, against a swaying floor, and she laughed aloud and opened her eyes to sunshine and a clear blue sky.

  She was in a boat. Westerly lay motionless beside her, propped on one elbow, watching. His eyes were dark-shadowed with baffled excitement, and a wary, formless jealousy. He said huskily, “What is it?”

  Cally’s smile was joyous, open. “Snake—”

  Westerly turned abruptly away from her into the stern; the boat swayed. Cally sat up, and gasped at the sight of the world around them.

  They were drifting slowly down a river, in a broad, flat-bottomed boat, through a haze of green light. Meadows stretched away from the grassy banks on either side, edged with flowering hedges and trees; massive willows leaned over the banks, trailing their long slender leaves in the water. Sunlight glittered through the branches.

  “It’s beautiful!” Cally said. “Where are we?”

  Westerly said, not looking at her, “How would I know? On a river, in a boat.”

  She stretched happily, reaching her face up to the sunshine. “Headed for the sea. Away from the tower, away from the People—”

  “Without any oars.”

  “Oh.” She looked round the boat vaguely. “Well, who needs oars? The river’s taking us.”

  Westerly said stiffly, “I’m sorry about your mother and father.”

  Cally sat looking at the dark-green water moving past the sides of the boat. She said at last, “I think I knew, really. They’d never have left me alone, otherwise. It’s all right. Snake helped.”

  “Yes,” Westerly said. He sat hunched in the stern of the boat, his arms round his knees. “Yes.”

  Cally said hesitantly, “Have you ever—?”

  “Ever what?”

  “Nothing.” She picked a floating twig out of the water. “I suppose he brought us here.”

  “I suppose he did,” Westerly said.

  Cally looked at him curiously. “What’s the matter, West?”

  “Nothing,” he said coldly. “Nothing at all. I just think it’s pretty remarkable how you can find out in one moment that your parents are probably dead, and then in the next be all happy and smiling because of—Snake.”

  “It wasn’t a moment,” Cally said, wondering. “It was a long time. And I think I’ll see them again, somehow. He made me feel that. He took the pain away.”

  Westerly made a small scornful sound like a laugh, unsmiling. “He certainly did.”

  “Westerly, what’s the matter with you? Whatever Snake is, whoever he is, he saved us. He took us away from there. That’s the only thing that’s important.”

  “Other things are important too,” Westerly said. He sat upright, his face enclosed, expressionless. “Look, I think you’ll do better if I’m n
ot around. I don’t feel like very good company at the moment. Snake seems to have made you feel you’re on your way to the sea—I expect he’ll make sure you get there. Maybe I’ll see you then.”

  Before she could say anything, he swung himself over the side of the boat and into the water. It was not deep; he found himself standing waist-deep, a few feet from the bank. The boat went shooting out into mid-stream, rocking wildly; he saw Cally clutch at the sides for balance. An eddy caught it there, and within seconds Cally was much further off, out in the middle of the river, drifting away.

  He heard her call unhappily after him, but he turned his back and splashed up onto the bank. As he climbed out, trousers dripping, shoes squelching, he found a figure standing close in front of him. He looked up, startled. It was Lugan.

  The lean, bright-eyed face was looking down at him without warmth. “That will make you feel no better, not at all,” Lugan said.

  Westerly said, “I don’t care.” Then he said, slowly, as if the words forced themselves out of him, “Who is Snake?”

  Lugan was peering after Cally; she was a small, hunched figure in the drifting boat. He began walking along the bank in the same direction as the river and the boat, motioning Westerly to follow.

  “Snake,” he said, “has much in common with the part of yourself that is giving you trouble at the moment.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Westerly said resentfully. His shoes sucked at his feet as he walked. He lengthened his stride to keep up with Lugan’s long legs.

  “Energy,” Lugan said. “Enjoyment, delight, a glad fierceness. Snake is in a fever of living—like the young.”

  “I don’t trust him,” Westerly said.

  Lugan said sharply, “You share his preoccupations, you owe him your life, and you are jealous of a seeming reality you know nothing about. Stop it. And watch the river for your girl.”

  “She’s not my girl,” Westerly said, but he turned his head to the river. He had suddenly remembered that Cally could not swim.

  They skirted a clump of willows, and when they were in sight of the water again he saw that it was running more rapidly now. The boat was swaying in the current; Cally sat tense and upright. Ahead, the river seemed to narrow; he saw pilings along the near bank, and immense wooden posts in the water, with what seemed to be a huge pair of gates holding the water back in a swirling pool. A small white-painted house stood on the bank beside the gates: a picture-book cottage banked with roses and hollyhocks, and white clematis starring the walls around the door.

  Lugan said in quick concern, “The lock!” He began to run. Taken by surprise, Westerly pounded after him, down the rutted earthen path along the riverbank. They reached the cottage, and the first great pair of sluice-gates set into the water; Westerly saw that the lock was like a narrow enclosure with gates at each end, controlling the flow of the river. The first gates were closed, and there was a four-foot drop between the river and the level of the water enclosed inside.

  Lugan began turning a metal crank set on a post beside the lock, and the waters of the upper river swirled as a sluice below the surface opened to let them pour through. He called over his shoulder, “Watch Cally!”

  Westerly was already waving at her from the bank. “Don’t stand up!” he yelled. “Keep the boat balanced!” He glimpsed her face, wide-eyed and uncertain. “Grab a branch if you can, but don’t stand up!”

  The boat brushed by the dropping fronds of a willow tree; Cally managed to grasp two of them, bracing her legs against the bottom of the boat so that it stayed there with her, turning, waiting. The river-level inside the lock rose and rose, as water poured in through the sluice; when it was the same as the level at which the boat lay, Lugan spun another crank and leaned his tall frame against a long heavy beam of wood, a great lever attached to the gates. Westerly ran to help him, and as they pushed the lock gates opened.

  Lugan called, “Cally! Let go! Let the boat come through!”

  Westerly saw Cally hesitate as the unfamiliar deep voice rolled out to her over the water. He waved reassurance. Cally released the willow branches, and the current caught the boat and turned it towards the lock. She fended it off from the gates as it floated inside.

  Westerly came to the edge, fumbling for words of apology, but she grinned up at him. “Neat. Like a staircase.” She pointed ahead to the further sluice-gates, beyond which the lower river now lay four feet below the water in the lock. “Now you just let the water out till it’s at that level, open the gates and out we go. Yes?”

  Lugan was already leaning on the beam-lever to close the first sluice-gates again. “Yes,” he said, smiling down at her; but then concern was back in his face. “We must hurry. These locks were built not only to control the river—but to control those who go through.”

  “This is Lugan,” Westerly said to Cally.

  She sat very still, gazing up at the tall lean figure, the gold-brown hair. She said slowly, “I’ve seen you before.”

  “Yes,” Lugan said. “When you were very young. Your mother was —” He stopped, his bony face suddenly secret and dour.

  Cally said, “One of Lugan’s folk?” The words had come unbidden into her head; only as she heard them did she remember Stonecutter using them.

  Lugan glanced at her quickly, but he said nothing. He turned toward the second sluice-gates, beckoning Westerly to come with him.

  The door of the cottage opened, and the Lady Taranis came out.

  For a moment there was silence, as they stood frozen, watching her. The hood of her blue cloak was down over her neck; her hair glimmered in a white halo. She said softly, looking at Cally, “Any boat passing through my lock must pay a toll.”

  Cally cleared her throat. “What kind of toll?”

  “A life,” Taranis said. Her voice was very sweet, and cold as snow.

  Lugan said sharply, from the other end of the lock, “That is not your law.”

  “Sometimes I change my laws,” Taranis said.

  He came towards her, towering, quiet. “These two are not your people. They are not here as the others are. They are travellers, free to come and go. You may watch them, steal from them, go by their side, but you cannot keep them yet, if they wish to leave your land.”

  Taranis’ blue eyes blazed at him; she stood in an ominous stillness. Watching, Westerly and Cally hardly dared breathe.

  “Do not cross me,” she said to Lugan softly.

  “These two are my charge,” he said.

  She took a deep breath, sweeping her cloak close round her, and shrieked at him, “Then pay their toll!” She flung out one arm, pointing downstream at the river. The echo of her voice seemed to hang over the water in the still sunshine, and then gradually in the distance they heard a long low rumbling sound like a far-off train. It grew louder, approaching. All other sound had stopped; no birds sang.

  Lugan swung round and reached a long swift arm down to Cally. “Come up, girl.” He half-lifted her out of the boat, and she scrambled up on the bank. The roaring grew, and as they looked out down the river they saw in disbelief a huge wave rushing towards them, rearing up, more than a man’s height.

  Taranis began to laugh.

  Lugan pulled Westerly’s pack from his shoulder and thrust it into his hands. “The knotted cloth I gave you, boy—quickly! Open it, and the winds will carry you.” He pushed them both towards the cottage. “Against the wall—now!” His voice rose over the roar of the water. Westerly seized Cally’s arm and they ran for the flower-bright wall.

  “Why isn’t he coming?” Cally looked back over her shoulder. Taranis stood staring triumphantly at Lugan, her laughter rising shrill through the tumult, and the wave rose green-brown towards them in the river. But it did not sweep straight on, over the banks and the two standing figures; it reared back at the first set of sluice-gates, pausing, enormous, and then curled down and wrapped its waters round Lugan as if it were alive, a huge grasping fist. Cally screamed. Lugan’s tall figure was tossed up in the br
eaking waters like a tree-trunk; she heard him call to them once more as he disappeared, but could not make out the words.

  “West—” She spun round to him, but he was not looking; he had the knotted cloth in his hands and was fumbling with it desperately. The wave curled sideways and reached toward them as he wrenched the cloth apart.

  And every tree along the river was flung bending to the ground, and every bloom was ripped from the vines and plants round the house, as suddenly the air all around them roared louder than the waves, and a great wind seized Cally and West and carried them high into the air and away.

  CHAPTER 12

  They tossed and turned through the air, buffetted this way and that by the disputing winds. Whirling through a blur of time and place, they could see nothing, hear nothing but confusion and turbulence; each knew only that the other was there, somewhere close by. The winds howled and whined and fought, tumbling them through night and day, warmth and cold; the long thought-numbing journey seemed to have gone on for a hundred years. Then the sense of quarrel around them grew so fierce that in their whirling they felt a soundless report as if the air that carried them had somehow broken apart, and they felt themselves falling.

  They lay on sand, in hot sunshine under a clear blue-white sky. Slowly Westerly sat up. All around them he could see nothing but the long curves of sand-dunes, white and dazzling. The sand under his fingers was so hot it almost burned the skin, and his clothes that had been soaked by the river-water were stiff and dry. Cally was sprawled beside him, blinking up at the sky; nearby, both their backpacks lay. There was no mark of any kind around them on the smooth sand.