Seaward

by Susan Cooper

  Peth made a strange unnerving hissing sound; it was not anger or displeasure, but a kind of discomfort. “Can the night kill the day? Can the winter kill the spring?” He made the hissing sound again, and strode off rapidly through the flowering scrub.

  CHAPTER 14

  By the time they had reached the edge of the mountains, the flowers in the desert were dying, and the leaves shrivelling. The sun’s ferocity was master once more; they could feel it drawing out their own vitality just as it drew out all moisture from the things that grew. But they had water with them, and Ryan’s oddly invigorating food, and a store of the astonishing white flower-buds which Peth had made them gather and put away in their packs. For him, Cally carefully picked a supply of the long-throated flowers from which they had seen him feed.

  Peth bubbled at her with a laugh that had affection in it, but sadness too. “They will not live,” he said.

  “Well, just for a while—won’t they? Are we going far?”

  The voice was totally sober for a moment. “Very far.”

  Cally said nothing, but wrapped the flowers carefully in Ryan’s shawl and packed them away.

  The mountains towered over them, bleak and intimidating. They began as brown foot-hills of dry clay, fissured and ridged so that it seemed impossible there should be a way up through them anywhere. Above, the peaks rose: hard grey rock, in crags and ravines reaching up out of sight into the sky.

  They stood at the base, looking up. It was afternoon; the hot sun beat at them as if in triumph.

  Westerly found himself feeling very small. He said, “Is there really a way up there?”

  “Just one,” Peth said. “And I shall show you it. But it will be hard—harder than anything you have encountered yet in this hard land.” He was quiet for a moment, eye-stalks and antennae still, facing them. He said, “Where are you going?”

  “You know so much,” Cally said in surprise, “you must know that.”

  “Yes. But I want to hear.”

  “To the sea,” she said.

  “Westerly?”

  “Yes,” Westerly said. “Over the mountains to the sea.”

  Peth said, “It matters?”

  “It matters more than anything,” Cally said at once. Then she paused. “I don’t think either of us really knows why.”

  “I do,” Westerly said belligerently. “My father’s there. And maybe yours too, and your mother.”

  She looked at him, expressionless.

  “Well,” he said more slowly, “all right, no, we don’t know for sure. But we do know it matters.”

  “Keep that in your minds,” Peth said. “Whatever happens, believe that the journey is worth taking, and then you will reach its end.” The bright singing came back into his voice, and he danced forward up the first dark slope, light on his elegant stick-like legs. “Follow me now. There is only one way.”

  Westerly called up after him, “Have you been up here before?”

  Peth’s voice came back faintly, cheerfully. “Have faith—have faith!”

  He led them gradually up the beaten brown clay of the lower hills: a zig-zag way, across gaping fissures just narrow enough for a single step, along ridges that crumpled ominously as they put down their feet. There was no path, nor any sign of others having ever passed that way. Peth seemed simply to know which foothold would be safe, which slope would lead them up to another step, without dropping them into a ravine. Stepping lightly over cracks and boulders with his pad-footed jointed legs, he paused often to hold up his head. The antennae flickered, the eye-stalks swung to and fro, but he seemed too to be listening to some inner voice, a signal that Cally and Westerly could not hear.

  As they climbed higher, the heat of the sun grew less oppressive; it no longer weighed on them like a huge heavy hand as it had in the desert valley. The mountains too began to change, the hard stone-studded clay giving way to glittering grey rock, steep and craggy. There were fewer stretches now where they could climb without using hands as well as feet.

  Peth stopped on a ledge; in the sunlight his iridescent limbs shimmered like the body of a fish newly taken from the water. He folded his spindly legs beneath him. “We will rest here.”

  As she swung her pack down from her shoulder Cally found herself facing back the way they had come. She caught her breath.

  The great valley lay spread below them, the mountain range at its further side only a dim blur on the horizon. There was no hint of green life on the plain now; only an immense grey sweep of land, blurring into white where the sand began. Very far away at one end of the valley, beyond the dunes, a brighter whiteness glimmered, merging into the haze where land met sky.

  “The salt land,” Peth said, following her gaze.

  Westerly said in awe, “We’ve come all that way?” He looked out at the vast lifeless landscape. “If it hadn’t been for you—”

  Peth sang a high note of laughter, though it seemed fainter and less bell-like than before. “We are all one, Westerly-bound. The bird cannot fly without the air, the squirrel cannot climb without the tree. And the thinking creatures can neither fly nor climb except on each other’s thoughts.”

  Cally said curiously, “When you were looking for us —how did you know we were there?”

  “By thinking,” Peth said. “The same thinking that made you sweetly gather those flowers.”

  “Have some now.” Cally pulled Ryan’s shawl out of her bag, laid it down on the ledge and carefully turned back the folds to reach the long bright blossoms she had picked for Peth. “Oh no!” she said in distress.

  The flowers were dead: brown and withered as dead leaves.

  Peth’s feathery antennae brushed her hand comfortingly. “The gift was in the thinking,” he said. “You must understand that always.”

  Westerly was sitting chin on knees, staring out at the heat-shimmering sand in the valley below. He said, “I’ve given up trying to understand anything.”

  “Never do that,” Peth said.

  “But—those shapes. With our faces. Chasing, and then gone. Real, and then nothing. Like the chessmen.”

  Cally looked at him blankly. “Our faces? Chessmen?”

  “It was something that happened. . . .” Westerly was looking intently at Peth. “The ones following,” he said persistently. “Who were they? Where did they go?”

  Cally shivered. “They’re gone—I don’t care who they were. Let’s not think about them.”

  But Westerly ignored her. He reached out a finger to one of Peth’s antennae. “You said not to give up trying to understand.”

  The fragile antenna stroked his finger slowly, to and fro, absently, as if Peth were thinking. After a while the lilting voice said, “Before you came to this world, you thought yourself pursued. Men chasing you.”

  Westerly heard in his mind the hammering at the door, the shouts outside. “Yes,” he said.

  There was another pause. A breeze stirred the air where they sat. Peth said, “This world that you are in now—it is not your own, but it is an image of your own. An echo. It may not look or sound the same as your world at any one time, not in the way that an image in a mirror looks the same. And the laws by which it exists may not be the same, sometimes, as those you know.”

  Westerly thought of Lugan: my task is to make sure that neither you nor anybody else break those laws. . . .

  “But,” Peth said, “it is an echo. It overlaps your world. You are the same in both worlds, just as you are the same person in your mind and your body. And so the things that happen in each world overlap.”

  He stopped, and made an extraordinary sequence of soft clicking and whistling sounds. “Oh dear,” he said plaintively, “this is very difficult.”

  Cally said, “You make this country sound like a dream.”

  “A waking dream,” Peth said. “And between the two worlds, the familiar life and the waking dream, there are doors through which feelings may ride. Fear, fury, sorrow—delight and faith and despair. And on the backs of tho
se feelings people may ride too. As the Lady Taranis is often in your world, riding many steeds, reaping a harvest that never ends. And as figures with the faces of your own guilts came from your world to this, riding on your fear.”

  Westerly said, low and gruff, “You mean if I hadn’t been afraid of their coming, they wouldn’t have come.”

  “Look at it another way,” Peth said. “If you had not had the courage to trust me, I could not have used the laws of this world to send them away. And your fear and needless guilt would be hounding you through all places and all times.”

  He unfolded his long-jointed legs. “We must go on. Up here, each nightfall will end our travelling. Look in your pack, Westerly. Now you will be climbing rock, and you should be roped together.”

  Westerly said in surprise, “How did you—?” He stopped, shook his head, grinned, and took the coil of rope out of his pack.

  Cally looked at it nervously. “D’you know how to do this?”

  “Nope,” said Westerly cheerfully. “But I know how to tie knots. Have to be bowlines round our waists, so they won’t slip if someone falls.” He stood thinking for a moment, then uncoiled part of the rope and tied it round Cally’s waist, about ten feet from the end. “Wind the spare part round you and tuck it in,” he said. He found the other end of the line and tied it round his own waist in the same way.

  Cally held up the coil of rope that now joined them. “What do we do with this?”

  “If I go first I ought to carry it, I suppose.”

  She said mutinously, “Why should you go first? You’re so macho, West—big strong man lead, weak little woman follow. Like Hindu wives.”

  “What about Hindu wives?”

  “They’re supposed to walk three paces behind their husbands, to show how inferior they are.”

  “I don’t think you’re inferior, for heaven’s sake,” Westerly said patiently. “But I am stronger than you. I’d have much more chance of hanging onto you if you fell, than the other way round.”

  “In that case you ought to be second on the rope,” Cally said. “There’s more strain there if, the first falls.”

  Westerly sighed. “All right. All right. You go first.”

  “We still haven’t decided what to do with the rope.”

  Peth said impatiently, “Carry the coil over your shoulder, so that it will fall loose easily, if need be.”

  Westerly stared at him, a grin breaking. “You’ve used a rope?”

  “I had time enough to work it out, while you bickered.” There was strain in Peth’s voice, and for a moment they stood quiet, penitent. Then his laugh bubbled out again, and he moved off across the ledge and up a slanting rockface, picking his way as unconcerned as a fly on a wall.

  Cally and Westerly had to struggle to keep up with him. Soon they were so intent on clinging to the mountain that they could do no more than glance up from time to time to make sure they were following his path. They would catch a quick sight of his head looking down at them; it was the brightness that they always saw, glinting out of the blue sky: the strange iridescent sheen like mother-of-pearl. And they heard his voice, singing in the wind.

  “This way. Cally—over here. Put up your right hand.”

  Cally reached, and found a secure jutting point of rock. Her fingers closed gratefully round it.

  “Put your weight on your left foot, now, and reach up your left hand. . . .”

  With his help, Cally made her way snail-like up rockfaces that seemed smooth and impassable when she first looked at them. But she soon regretted her insistence on being the leader; Westerly, behind her, had only to mark and follow the holds that she—directed by Peth—had to grope for and agonisingly find. She strained and reached, testing each hold nervously, learning by trial and error not to hug the rock, not to cross her feet, not to hang from her arms but to push up her weight with her legs.

  She said despondently to Westerly, as they stopped to rest, “We’re doing this all wrong.”

  “Oh I don’t know. I think we’re doing pretty well.”

  “Rubber soles are so slippery—we should have boots on. Any real climber watching us would have fits.”

  “Look,” said Westerly practically, “it’s hard, but it’s not Everest. For a real climber it probably wouldn’t even be a real climb.”

  Cally said, persisting, “And this business with the rope isn’t right either. It won’t do anything except bring both of us crashing down, if one falls.”

  “I’ve got an idea about that,” Westerly said tentatively. “But—” He stopped.

  “But you’d have to go first on the rope.”

  Westerly said nothing.

  Pride and reason jostled one another in Cally’s mind. She sighed. “All right.”

  Peth called faintly from above, “Are you ready?”

  Westerly waved at him. He grinned at Cally. “When we’re on the ground again I’ll walk three paces behind you,” he said.

  She made a face at him. “Go climb a mountain.”

  “Hold tight.” He reached across and untied the rope from her waist. “Now you wait till I’ve climbed as far as I can get,” he said briskly, “and then I make the rope fast and throw it down, and you tie it on and come up. Okay?”

  Without waiting for an answer he swung himself up towards Peth. It was only when she was halfway up the rope to meet him that she realised he had neatly taken all the danger out of her own ascent, and put it into his own.

  Peth flickered continually above them, calling directions, showing them foot-holds. His voice seemed fainter, as if he were tired, but he would not pause except when he felt Cally or Westerly needed a rest, or a drink of water. And then, when they had been climbing most of the day and the sun was high in the clear sky, they came to a place of such difficulty that Cally felt her forehead damp with fear as she looked at it.

  Peth had scaled it easily in his sticky-footed insect stride, but there was no such way for human feet; he looked back at them anxiously, his antennae waving in a whirl of frustration. It was a chimney: the only way up from a broad sweeping ridge that had given them a deceptively easy climb for half an hour. Now two vertical rock-faces stretched up above their heads, with a three-foot gap between; up and up, so high that they had to peer to see Peth in the bright coin of sky at the top. Even the beginning of the chimney was high—higher than Cally’s head. She looked up at it in horror. “We can’t possibly get up there!”

  Westerly was pale. He called: “Peth!”

  But the thin high voice interrupted him, echoing down through the gap. “Nothing is harder than this one—you will have no other like it. But it is the only way.”

  Way . . . way . . . way, sang the echo in the chimney.

  Westerly swallowed. He took off his pack, and stuck his head and arm through the coil of rope so that it lay diagonally across his chest. He looked at Cally with a strained grin. “Got a strong back?”

  She said unhappily, “I think so.”

  “So have I. We’ll need mine to get me up through there, and yours to get me started. And then to get you through.” He looked at her doubtfully. “I’m going to have to stand on you. Are you sure you’re strong enough?”

  “No,” Cally said. “I shall break.” She planted her feet firmly apart and her hands on the rock wall, standing head down and back bent so that her body was like a step for Westerly to climb on. “Will that do?”

  “Bring your shoulders up a bit, and bend your knees.” Westerly was feeling at the wall for handholds. He wedged his fingers hard into the rock. “Here we go!”

  In a quick gasping swing he put one foot on Cally’s knee, heaved on his hands and brought the other foot up to her shoulders, and his weight with it. Cally staggered, but held firm. He had both feet on her shoulders now, and both hands clinging to the rocky wall. His head and shoulders were in the chimney. He looked down. “You all right?”

  “Uh-huh.” Cally felt as if all her strength were screwed up into her back; there was none left for
a voice.

  “See if you can straighten up a bit. Just for a moment—”

  Her muscles were screaming at her that they could not take one more ounce or instant of strain; but she pressed both hands against the wall, took a deep breath and straightened her back, raising her shoulders and Westerly with them. And in the next moment the weight was gone and she was lurching backwards, looking up to see Westerly wedged in the chimney, his back and hands flat against one rocky wall, his feet against the other, level with his hips.

  He grinned down at her. “Terrific! You didn’t break!”

  “But how—?” Her voice quavered; he seemed so perilously balanced that it made her feel sick to look at him.

  “Physics,” Westerly said solemnly. “Pressure. If I push hard enough sideways, I can go up instead of having gravity pull me down. Watch.”

  Leaving one foot pressed forward against the opposite wall, he brought the other up under his bottom, raised his hands high on the wall behind him, and pressed with both feet and hands so that his body moved out into the chimney and up. Now the tucked-under leg was straight, and he was that much higher up the chimney. As if he were walking up the rock, he made the same upward swing again. And again, and again. Sometimes he rested, both legs locked straight against the far wall.

  Cally’s neck ached with looking. She sat down, curled tight in a ball, waiting desperately for the shout that would tell her Westerly had arrived at the top. When she could stand it no longer, she looked up just in time to see him hauling himself triumphantly over the edge. Then the circle of sky was blank.

  She felt suddenly, horribly alone.

  The rope came tumbling down the chimney, and Westerly’s voice echoed after it. “Cally! Send up the bags first—then tie the rope round your waist and tell me when you’re ready.”

  She tied the packs to the line, deliberately using a bowline knot for Westerly’s benefit. Knots had been another of her father’s favourite lessons. But when the line was back again and tied to her own waist, the security of the knot seemed small comfort. The vertical chimney of rock stretched endlessly above her head. Even if she could copy Westerly’s climbing once she was inside it, how could he possibly pull her up through the first empty eight feet of space between ground and chimney? It was impossible; she would never get up there.