by Susan Cooper
Cally lay basking in the sunshine, feeling it warm her through. She said drowsily, “D’you think this is where he wanted us to be?”
“In a desert? It’s a great place to find water to follow to the sea.”
She sat up, her mind suddenly clear, filled with the memory of the breaking wave. “West—d’you think he’s still alive?”
“Not if she had anything to do with it,” Westerly said bitterly. He got to his feet and picked up his pack, brushing off the sand. “I don’t know what I think any more. About anything. I think we just have to go on.”
Cally stood up. “Which way?”
He looked at the sun. It stood high over their heads, blazing down; there was no way of telling east or west. “I don’t know.”
Shouldering her bag, Cally scrambled up the side of the tall dune before them, slithering as the sand gave way at each step. Westerly followed. From the top, they could see nothing but the next white dune, and the next, all around. But far away on two opposite sides of the horizon, like distant mirror-images of one another, there were the hazy outlines of two ranges of mountains.
“One of those,” Cally said.
“Can’t tell which one’s nearer.”
She pulled off her jacket and stuffed it into her bag. “You choose.”
“That way. Westerly said, pointing, trying to feel positive. “And we should keep watching, to check we’re going straight—we’ll be out of sight of it half the time.”
They began trekking over the sand, sliding up and down the long shifting dunes; before long the unfamiliar slanting walk made a constant ache at the backs of their legs. They struggled on and on through the heat, through the silent barren slopes ruled by the sun. Cally rolled up the sleeves of her shirt; Westerly pulled his off altogether, knotting the arms round his neck so that the shirt still hung down over his back.
“Turn your collar up,” he said. “Keep the sun off the back of your neck.”
Cally felt oddly shy at the sudden sight of his muscled shoulders. She said, “You’ve been in the sun already—you’re so brown.”
Westerly laughed. “That’s not suntan, that’s nature.”
“Oh,” said Cally in confusion. “I’m sorry.”
“What for?”
“I don’t know. Making personal remarks.”
“Nothing personal about skin. It’s yours we have to watch. Lily-white northerners aren’t made for this heat.” He looked more closely at her damp, flushed face. “You all right?”
“Just thirsty.”
He swung down his pack and took out the battered leather flask. “Here—have a swallow. We’ll have to ration it. If the heat really gets to you, tell me and we’ll rest.”
Cally gulped a mouthful of water, resisting a strong urge to empty the whole flask, and handed it back. They went on. There was no sound but the steady muffled squeak of their footsteps in the sand, and no sight of anything all round but the glaring sand and the empty sky. Cally walked with eyes half-closed against the fierce white light. Her head began to ache. From time to time Westerly paused on the peak of a dune, to check that they were still headed for the distant hills. Their hazy outline seemed to grow no closer; he wondered wildly if the mountains were retreating as they approached. At each pause he searched the horizon behind them carefully too, but no one was following. The desert was empty, unpeopled.
They walked for a long time, stopping occasionally for a mouthful of water. At last Cally paused on a ridge of sand, gazing despondently ahead. “We don’t seem to have gained an inch.”
“Optical illusion,” Westerly said heartily. “They’re a whole lot closer than they look.”
“Or maybe they’re a mirage—looking close, but really hundreds of miles away.” She sat down on the sand. “Westerly, I don’t think I can walk any more.”
He squatted beside her. “The sun’s going down anyway. We have to think about what the nights will be like. Aren’t they cold, in deserts?”
“Don’t know. I’m a lily-white northerner. I can’t imagine ever being cool again.” Cally pulled the pack Ryan had given her from her shoulder and began to tug at the contents. “D’you know, I’ve never properly looked in here yet?”
On her jacket, she set out a clean shirt, skirt, underwear, socks and a knitted shawl of some soft, filmy thread she could not identify. Then there was a bottle of water—she crowed, holding it up to Westerly—and three square paper-wrapped packets, with a note attached.
“These are for the times when there is no food,” said the note, in a delicate, spidery hand. “A little goes a long way.”
Cally passed it to Westerly and opened one of the packets. Inside were half a dozen flat irregular cakes of a crumbly, dark substance bearing a vague resemblance to toast. She broke off a piece, tasted it, and handed another to Westerly.
He chewed pensively. “It’s good.”
“Whatever is it? Tastes like a sort of dry meat loaf.”
“Dry—that’s the only problem. I reckon we’ve got water for about two days at the most. Including that bottle of yours. Where did you get all that stuff ?”
“Ryan. The one I told you about, who lived with Stonecutter.”
They were both silent for a while. The soundlessness of the dunes and the heat of the sun pressed in on them. Over the ridge on which they sat, the sun was gradually sinking, golden and huge. Cally put Ryan’s food packages back in her pack. “ ‘A little goes a long way,’ ” she said with deliberate forced cheerfulness, quoting. “It sounds just like Ryan.”
“Here’s what I’ve got,” Westerly said. He took his pack, which was three times the size of Cally’s; pulled out a tightly-folded blanket, spread it on the sand and put on it an array of objects that made her blink. There was his knife in its sheath; a bundle of some mysterious white fibrous material; the flask of water; a plastic-wrapped package of matches; a pad of paper and two pencils; a small bag of salt; a bundle of clothes; three small shiny white sticks; a coil of rope; a tin cup; a tiny, chunky, three-sided bottle of green glass; a battered towel and, wrapped inside it, a comb, toothbrush and bar of soap.
Cally said, “All this was in the pack when you found it waiting for you?”
“Most of it.”
“They thought of everything. Can I borrow the comb?”
“Whoever they were,” Westerly said, handing it over.
“What’s that white stuff ?”
“Shredded wood. Kindling, for lighting fires.”
“And those white sticks?”
Westerly hesitated. He reached out a finger and touched one of them gently. Then he said, almost reluctantly, “They weren’t in the pack. I had them in my pocket. My mother gave me them once. They aren’t sticks, they’re . . . bones.”
“Oh,” Cally said blankly. Something told her to move on to the next thing. “What’s the little bottle?”
“I don’t know.” Westerly picked it up, opened it, smelled it, made a face. Cally took it from him and sniffed.
“Bluuuccchh,” she said.
“Must be some kind of medicine. Nothing else could smell so bad.”
“I wonder what it’s for?”
“I dare say we shall find out.” Westerly put down the bottle and pulled what looked like a roll of shiny cloth from the bottom of his pack. “This is the last thing.”
She watched as he unrolled it. Wrapped inside was a bundle of thin metal rods. Westerly began fitting them together into the outline of a small pyramid, and suddenly she realised what he was doing.
“It’s a tent!”
“Just about hold both of us, if you keep your elbows in.”
She helped him pull the thin, tough covering over the frame. The light was fading fast as the giant red sun sank beneath the horizon, and she was all at once desperately tired. The air was cooler now. They sat for a while as the outline of the dunes grew dim, and the stars pricked blazing pinpoints through the darkening sky; they ate another piece of Ryan’s food each, and drank a mouthful
of water, and then they curled up back to back in the tent. Westerly offered Cally his blanket, but she wrapped herself in Ryan’s shawl instead and found it astonishingly warm.
Westerly lay carefully motionless, listening to Cally’s regular breathing, very conscious of the curve of her back against his own. The stars flamed at him through the open flap of the tent; he recognised the Plough, high up, and gently raising his head he followed the line of the two marker stars until he could see the North Star. From where he lay, it hung to the right of the nearest tent-pole. He lowered his head again. With that and the sun, they could check the direction of their travelling tomorrow.
He was almost asleep when he heard, far-off out in the night, a high plaintive call, like a voice singing a single note. He felt Cally jump out of sleep; she propped herself on one elbow, tense, listening.
“What’s that?”
The sound came again, more faintly: a sad, desolate call, like a creature lost in the night, calling out for an answer and finding none.
“Some night bird,” Westerly said. “Don’t worry. It’s a good sign—means the desert must end somewhere. Goodnight.”
She lay back again, relaxing into sleep. “Night, West.”
Cautiously he reached out one hand to his pack. The knife lay there safe and ready in its sheath, comforting, waiting.
• • •
For two days they walked through the desert, knowing now that the mountains to which they were heading lay in the west. They started each morning at first light, while the air was still cool; but very soon each day after the sun burst over the horizon the heat grew fierce, beating the energy out of them. The sun burned their skin, so that even Westerly rapidly learned to keep his shirt on his back and his sleeves pulled down. Like a mirror the gleaming white sand threw heat up at them from below, and the air seemed hot and thick, difficult to breathe. In the hottest hours of the day when the sun was high overhead they gave up trying to walk at all, and crouched exhausted in the shade of the little tent, trying to forget their thirst.
They had nothing to eat but Ryan’s food, and they ate little of that because it was so dry, but it seemed to sustain them. Their greatest worry was water. Though they drank only a little each day, Westerly’s flask was empty and the bottle in Cally’s pack now only half-full.
“I wish I was a camel,” Cally said.
Westerly said, “I wouldn’t want to spend this much time with a girl who looked like a camel.”
She tried to laugh, but her tongue felt thick in her mouth, and her mind full of hopelessness. “When this is gone, we shall just die of thirst.”
“We’ll be out of the dunes by then,” Westerly said encouragingly. But he knew that the mountains, though nearer now on the hazy horizon, were far more than a day’s walk away.
On the second night, he had heard the strange plaintive cry again. It had called several times, seeming to come nearer, but then on a last bubbling, chirruping note it had died away. He wondered what bird could be calling so; he longed to believe that it belonged to a more hospitable place not far off, beyond the sand. He tried to put out of his mind the thought that someone was following them.
“You should call your birds again,” he said to Cally the next day.
She shook her head sadly. “They couldn’t come here. They’d all die.”
“I suppose so.” Westerly plodded on up the side of a dune, pausing at the top to stare out once more at the mountains. They seldom found a dune tall enough to provide a look-out, and often when they did find a sight of the hilly horizon again, they found they had curved round unknowingly and had been walking in quite the wrong direction. He wondered how many miles they were forced to waste in a day. Watching him, Cally studied his thin, sunburned face and tousled hair, and tried not to imagine what she must look like herself. They were both much weaker, and growing more tired all the time.
It was her turn to lie awake that night, looking at the thin new moon which hung overhead silvering the sand. They had only a few swallows of water left in the bottle; not even enough for the next day. What would happen then?
All around her in the huge sky the stars burned, myriad and distant; fewer, now that the moon was up, but still filling the sky. In her old life, she had never seen so many stars. Had her parents ever seen them, out in the night away from houses and cities? Could they see them now?
She closed her eyes against the sky. She and Westerly had begun sleeping in the open, using the tent as a groundsheet, glad of the cooler air. The nights were friendlier; it was easier to breathe. Cally lay relaxed, drifting into sleep.
The touch that brought her awake again was so soft that at first she did not open her eyes. Had she dreamed it, that gentle feathery brushing against her cheek? No—it came again, this time a soft tickling on her forehead. Drowsily she opened her eyes —and outlined against the bright sky, dark and angular and menacing, she saw a huge monstrous insect standing over her: a creature out of nightmare.
Cally shrieked, and rolled sideways, clutching for Westerly. The great insect leapt away. Westerly surfaced out of deep sleep, bemused by Cally’s terrified grasp on his arm. “That thing—” she was gasping. “That thing—” Hastily he reached for his knife and scrambled up, looking round.
“What’s wrong?”
“It was awful!” She stumbled nervously to her feet, staying close to him. “Awful. Right next to me, touching me. A thing—like a mosquito three feet high.”
The sand lay silent and silver, filled with dune-shadows from the moonlight; the vast sky glimmered at them. There was nothing: no movement, no sound.
Westerly said doubtfully, “Are you sure you weren’t dreaming?”
Before Cally could answer, a voice came.
CHAPTER 13
It was a small sweet voice like singing; it flowed into their hearing so gently that they were not sure if it touched their ears or their minds.
“She was not dreaming,” it said. “I am here. I have been looking for you.”
Westerly could feel Cally trembling. He swallowed, and held his knife tightly. “Where are you?” he said.
“You must not be frightened,” said the sweet-singing voice. “I do not look—like you. You must not be frightened.”
To Westerly’s astonishment, Cally said shakily into the darkness, “I’m not frightened. Truly.”
Westerly peered all round at the quiet silver-lit dunes. “Can you see me?”
“Of course,” said the voice, and there was laughter in it.
“Tell me where you are.”
The voice said, “I am to your right, and a little ahead of you. In the shadow.”
“Stay there,” Westerly said. He stared hard into the moonshadows of the dunes at the right of him, but could see nothing but bright sand and dark. Crouching, his eyes still on the sand, he groped behind him for his pack and felt about inside it. He found what he was looking for.
“What are you doing?” Cally whispered. She saw his hand holding three short sticks; then realised that they were not sticks, but the things he had called bones.
Still crouching, Westerly turned and set the three white bones on the sand in the shape of an arrow-head, pointing at the place from which the voice came. He touched each of them gently with the point of his knife. Straightening up, he said softly to Cally, “If they shine, it’s good. If they stay dark, it—isn’t.”
Cally stared at the three bones; she could only just see them, by the faint moon-shadows they cast on the sand. As she watched, they began to glow with a faint greenish light, brighter and brighter, until they lay flaring like cold fire.
The singing voice bubbled out in a long wordless sound of delight, and out of the shadows towards the three still flames, a creature came running. Westerly stiffened, and heard Cally gasp. It was not an insect, it was like nothing he had ever seen. It stood about half his height, and it was all thin lines, with no substance to it; there were six thin jointed legs, long and slender, and a small thin body and long neck,
ending in a head so small it scarcely seemed to exist. From the little head four antennae waved: two of them were straight, with blunt ends that he supposed were eyes; the others were hair-like; flickering, constantly moving, stroking the three bright bones now in a kind of glad caressing.
The eye-stalks swivelled towards Westerly; the voice said happily, “You have them from your mother then—Lugan’s guardians. You are privileged.”
Cally took a deep breath and knelt down, squatting on her heels, her hands resting on her lap. “He’s Westerly,” she said. “I’m Cally.”
The creature came towards her and paused a yard away. Cally stayed very still. There was a moment’s pause, in the silent dunes. Then the creature came close to her, and its feathery antennae reached out and gently stroked her cheek. It was the same light touch that had wakened her.
“I am sorry I startled you,” the soft voice said. “I have been looking for you. I am Peth. A . . . thing, as you said. A thing of the desert.”
“I’m sorry,” Cally said. “It was just—”
“Never mind, never mind,” Peth said consolingly, as if to a child. “Come now, you should be travelling. There is not much time. Come with me.”
“In the dark?” Westerly said.
“The night is the time for travelling, in this land,” Peth said. The music of his voice was a reassurance; every time he spoke they seemed to feel strength flowing back into them. Cally looked at Westerly. In silence he put away his knife and bent to fold up the cloth of the tent. Cally helped him put it away in his pack.
They turned to Peth, and heard a soft, lilting sound, a sweet crooning. He was standing over the three glowing signs of the arrow, stroking them with his antennae, singing to them. His eye-stalks swung round to Westerly and Cally, and the crooning died away and the light went out of the white bones.
“Put them away now,” he said. “Now I have spoken to them. It has been a long time. They will do more for you yet than perhaps you knew they could.”