by Susan Cooper
“Ready?” Westerly called.
Cally shouted in panic, “No!”
His head was small and dark in the bright circle. “What’s wrong?”
She stood rigid, cold, paralysed. I can’t do it. Then into her memory came a sudden image of Westerly taking the rope from her and climbing first, unprotected; and blurring into it, the look of the guardian fury on his face that had been the last thing she saw on the top of the tower, before Stonecutter’s reaching hand sent her into the dark. Westerly’s face and Lugan’s merged in her mind, and Peth’s voice with them. Lugan’s folk . . . we are Lugan’s folk . . . .
She shouted back, ashamed and resolute, “Ready!”
The rope drew her upward with an astonishingly strong, steady force. She was suspended in air, rising, and then she was between the rocky walls, pushing at them with her feet and hands and back, and yet drawn up all the time not by her own effort but by the rope. And the light grew brighter, and all at once her head and shoulders were out of the chimney. The rope slackened; she heaved herself out to sit on the edge of the rock, smiling. And Westerly was there laughing at her, coiling the rope into his hand, starting to tell her something, like a child with a secret. The sky was all around them, as if they were at the top of the world.
Then in a dreadful instant his face changed and he lunged backwards, his feet slipping from under him, and he fell, and there was nothing before Cally’s face but the blue of the sky.
CHAPTER 15
A brightness flashed past her before she could move; it was Peth. He stood over her, leaning over the rim of the shelf of rock, eye-stalks bent down; through his spindly confusion of legs she saw the flat line of the rope, quivering. Tied to a rocky pinnacle beside her, it led to the edge over which Westerly had fallen. She crawled forward, and saw his body hanging a few feet below, limp, slowly turning.
“West!” It was a desperate shout; she knew there would be no response. But to her joyful amazement he turned his head and gave her a crooked grin.
“Stupid,” he said, croaking. “Slipped.”
She reached for the taut rope. “I’ll pull you up.”
“No! Too hard. Catch—this.” Clutching the rope with one hand to steady himself, he groped down for the free end of line which dangled loose from his waist. Awkwardly, he flipped it up towards Cally. Twice she missed it; the edge of the shelf was slippery, and she dared not come too close. She lay flat, reaching out, and at the third attempt she caught the rope.
“Pull on that. I’ll come up the other.” Westerly’s voice was strained; the rope was cutting into his waist like wire, and he was giddy from the spinning sight of the huge drop below.
Cally pulled feverishly at the line, and felt him begin to rise towards the shelf. But her feet were slipping on the smooth rock; every pull took her closer to the edge. Frantically she looked round for a foothold, but could find nothing. She dropped onto her knees. “Hang on, West!”
Peth’s soft singing said, “I will hold you.” He planted two of his long matchstick legs before her shoulders, and two next to her knees; she could hear the hiss of suction as the padded feet went down.
“Peth,” she said in confusion. “You can’t. You’re too . . . I shall hurt you.”
“Too fragile?” The voice was weary but amused. “Things are not what they seem, Cally. Pull the rope now, steady and hard.” He called, “Come up, Westerly!”
Cally swallowed nervously. She heaved at the line, and began again to slip forward to the edge of the shelf—but felt herself held firm by what seemed like rods of iron upright against her shoulders and knees. In wonder she pulled at the line, hand over hand, and Westerly came crawling over the lip of the rock and lay there, panting.
He saw Cally locked into position by Peth’s thin shimmering legs, none of them thicker than her wrist, and he smiled weakly. “Yes. That was how—we got you up the chimney so fast.”
Peth stepped delicately backwards, still looking as fragile as a large mosquito. He shone like gold now in the late sunlight. “Westerly—are you well?”
“Thank you,” Westerly said. Cally saw that he was shaking all over. “Thank you both. Thank you a lot.”
Peth said, “A little further on . . . there is a place where we will spend the night . . . just a little further.” His voice sang faint and broken, as if he were gasping.
“You have hurt yourself,” Cally said anxiously. “All that strain. . . .” She looked from one to the other of them and was overwhelmed by an urge to protect. “I don’t think we should go anywhere, we should stop right here.”
“No time,” Peth said thinly. “No time. . . . We must go on—if Westerly—” He hovered restlessly.
“I’m all right now.” Westerly was on his feet, coiling the rope. “Let’s get there soon, then, so you can rest.”
But even when they had reached the sheltered corner of the mountain where they set up the tent for the night, Peth seemed still to be growing weaker. His voice had become softer, he moved more slowly, and in the moonlight he seemed somehow smaller and more insubstantial, in spite of the strength they now knew to be inside the fragile limbs.
“What is it, Peth?” Cally said gently. They sat outside the tent in its moon-shadow, with the whole valley spread silver-white beneath them. The air was cool. She and Westerly were nibbling slices of Ryan’s food. “There’s something wrong, I know there is. Was it really not the pulling?”
“Oh no,” Peth said. He turned his head, and one feathery antenna brushed her cheek affectionately. “I am like you or any other creature—best in my own place. And I am a thing of the desert. The high ground is not friendly to me.” He drooped, his voice fading like an echo.
“Wouldn’t water help?” Westerly had the flask in his hand.
Peth folded himself up like a heap of collapsed sticks. “No.” His voice was a singing whisper.
“You came up here to show us the way,” Cally said unhappily. “You shouldn’t have come. You should have stayed where you were meant to be.”
There was the flicker of a laugh. “I decide where I am meant to be.”
Cally said, “You should go back down tomorrow, first thing.”
“No,” Peth said. There was a flick of authority in his voice, even through the weakness. Cally sat silent.
Westerly was rummaging thoughtfully through his pack. He said, “Peth, d’you know what this is?” He was holding out the small green glass bottle, unstoppered, on the palm of one hand.
Peth made a small whickering sound that was like an echo of the welcome they had heard him give the three white bones, down in the desert. “Lugan,” he said. He uncoiled his long slender proboscis and reached it out, and Westerly held the bottle steady while he drank. They saw the faint luminous glow begin to shine in his limbs again.
Cally said happily, “We thought it must be medicine.”
“Of a kind,” Peth said. His voice was stronger. “It will help. Good. Now we must rest.”
The night air was growing colder, and they made him sleep between them in the tent, for warmth. Peth hesitated, but he came in without protest and folded up into the strange resting position that made him seem like a pile of sticks.
When Cally woke in the morning, she found that she and Westerly each had one arm reached out, resting lightly round Peth. She looked at the folded insect-legs; in the early sunlight they had the familiar colour-swirling sheen that they had had before. Suddenly Peth rose, and smoothly unfolded all his six legs until he was standing over them. He sang into her mind, “You will reach the top today, Calliope.”
“And you’ll go back down to the desert—please?” Cally said anxiously.
But Peth only raised his voice, calling on a high ringing note, “Wake up, Westerly-bound!”
He led them an odd twisting way up through the rocks. There were no perilous or even difficult places to climb now, but without his guiding they would instantly have been lost. The path he took was never straight, nor even always upward; it doub
led back on itself, took wide improbable turns, sometimes led so far downhill that they seemed to lose as much height in five minutes as they had gained in fifteen. But Peth was sure and intent, never faltering, never pausing except to ask once in a while if they needed water or rest. He led them faster than ever before, urging them gaily on as if they were racing, playing a game; he seemed so lively, almost manic, that they began to feel their worrying about him had been foolish. It was only when they were within sight of the last peak of the mountain that they found how totally they were wrong.
They were walking diagonally across a broad slope, warmed by the high sun of middle-day, when Peth suddenly dropped to the ground. He did not trip; he simply collapsed into a heap, like a puppet loosed from its strings. When they ran to him he was whimpering softly, and his antennae were flickering feebly to and fro.
“Peth!” Cally said in terror. “What is it?” She knelt down beside him and gathered the limp pile gently into her lap. The brightness was almost gone out of him; only a faint iridescence wavered in the thin, tough limbs.
Westerly pulled the green glass bottle from his pack, but it was empty.
“No—not this time.” Peth’s voice was very faint. “But it was enough. You have only one ridge to cross now. Go quickly. Up, and to the left. You will see.”
One antenna brushed Cally’s hand, and then fell. His eyestalks drooped. Cally could feel no movement in him. “Peth!” She looked up in anguish at Westerly. “Is he dying? What can we do?”
The voice sang so thin and distant that all at once they were very still, straining to hear. It seemed unrelated to Peth’s body now, as if it were truly in the air. “Calliope,” it said, whispering, “Westerly—all things die, so that other things may live. We are Lugan’s folk, we are a chain stretching through time. Each link must complete its circle, or there could be no chain. Do not mourn. Be glad that we are joined together—as all folk are, for always, whose lives have touched and held. Be glad of me.” The singing was fading, fading into the sky. “Take my pride in you . . . to the sea. . . .”
A small wind blew across the rocks, and very far off they heard one high sweet plaintive note like a calling, a trembling thread of sound; then it died away and there was nothing. All light was gone from the stick-like pile of limbs on Cally’s lap. They were grey and lifeless, with no shape, as if they had never been Peth at all. She sat there crying unashamedly, the tears welling out of her eyes. This one death contained within it all the others.
Westerly rubbed a hand over his own eyes. Then gently he moved the weightless heap from Cally’s lap and knelt beside her. She bent her head.
“Cally,” Westerly said huskily. “He told us to—to be glad.”
Cally sat hunched and miserable. “If he hadn’t come up here—if he’d stayed where he belonged—”
Westerly said, “Listen. I thought that way about my mother at first. For a long time. If, if, if. You can’t do it, you mustn’t, it drives you crazy. You just have to say to yourself, somebody who loved me gave me a present—and the only way to say thank you is to use it.” He stood, and pulled her up after him. “He told us to go. To go quickly. So we’ll do that.”
“All right,” Cally said. She looked down. “It seems so awful to just . . . leave him there.”
Westerly looked down at the small grey heap. He said gently, “That’s not Peth. Not now.”
“No.”
They went on up the slope. There was a clear way for climbing, beside a long fault where once a slab of rock had risen and formed a ridge. The breeze was stronger, blowing Cally’s hair across her face, catching at the rope that still linked her to Westerly. They climbed in silence, using hands as well as feet, and then the ridge met a sheer rock-face and they knew they were at the point where Peth had told them to turn to the left. But before they turned, to make their way between other crags rising out of sight, a shared unspoken instinct made them look back.
And the wind whined across the mountain in a sudden twisting eddy, and down on the ledge where they had left Peth’s body, they saw a plume of grey dust puff out into the air and whirl away, down from the bleak mountains into the shimmering haze of the valley below.
• • •
There were clouds in the sky, travelling fast on the wind, white rough-edged pillows growing as they moved, blowing from the east. Westerly scrambled up towards the sky, with Cally close behind. They were on the last slope. Grey crags rose behind them, cutting off all sight of the valley, and for the first time in all their travelling they found themselves on a clear, well-defined path. It led diagonally up towards the peak of the final ridge, and the ridge itself was strange, unlike any part of the mountain they had crossed before. It rose into the air like a huge flat slab set on its side, and it seemed to be made of a softer rock, weathered and ancient, born out of an earlier age than the rest.
The rising path was cut firm and wide, yet Cally felt precariously balanced as she walked it; a sheer drop yawned at her left side, between the ridge and the rocks behind, and she dared not look down. She stared resolutely upward instead, at Westerly’s swinging stride, and at last saw him stop, outlined against the blue sky and the rushing white clouds. She came up to stand beside him on the flat top of the ridge, and the wind sang in their ears.
They were looking out across a different world: a green land of rolling hills and wooded valleys, all its soft slopes dappled with cloud-shadows. Range after range of hills stretched out before them, purple and green and brown, merging into the misty horizon, but none was as high as the ridge on which they stood. And far out in the distance, between two of the rounded hilltops, they could see sparkling like a lost jewel the blue-white glint of the sea.
Westerly said softly, “There it is.”
“It’s a long way away.”
“But there it is!” He gave a sudden whoop, and grabbed her round the waist and hugged her. Laughing, Cally hugged him back, but then staggered.
“Careful! We’re so high up—”
“Come on, then,” Westerly said promptly, gazing eagerly ahead. “Let’s find the way down.”
He drew her further ahead, to a curve in the path from which they could look down at the side of the mountain that belonged to the green world, and Cally looked, and gasped.
The huge sideways slab on which they stood was not merely the top of the hard hills they had climbed; on this side, it was the whole mountain. For hundreds and thousands of feet it dropped away, almost sheer, to the trees and slopes below. But its steepness was not forbidding; they could see the path winding down it in an endless wide series of hairpin bends, edged all the way with wildflowers and clumps of grass. On the slope between the zig-zags of the path, trees and bushes grew, rising out of land so steep that all their branches on one side brushed against the slanting earth.
Westerly said, grinning, “Can you manage that?”
“I can manage anything that gets us down from here!” She ran ahead to find the first downward turn to the path, but the rope at her waist brought her up short. “Oh. Sorry.” She untied the knot and coiled her part of the rope; Westerly took it from her.
“Shan’t need that now,” he said cheerfully. He put it in his pack. The sunlight glimmered on the green glass bottle inside.
Westerly took the bottle out and held it up. He said, suddenly sober, “Should we leave this here?”
Cally was silent for a moment. “I think we should take it. It’s like—part of him.”
“All right.”
They walked on together, round the first bend, where the path curved round to face the green seaward land.
Facing them, in the centre of the path, was a granite pillar. Cally stopped dead as she recognised it, clutching at Westerly’s arm. Its top was carved into the familiar double face of the Lady Taranis, with the long hair rippling down, blending both sides. Then Cally breathed more easily: it was the gentle face which looked at them, smiling out in benison over the new land, towards the sea.
Westerl
y said softly, “That’s beautiful!”
“You know who it is?”
“Of course. She does look like that sometimes.” He moved forward. “Come on. It can’t do us any harm.”
Cally went on with him. But the air grew suddenly colder as a cloud came over the sun, and they heard a rasping, grinding sound, and felt the earth vibrate under their feet. In horror, they stared ahead. The pillar was turning. With a rumble of rock against rock it slowly moved round, gradually, relentlessly, and staring full at them with cold malignant eyes was the other face of Taranis.
They stared into the eyes, paralysed, unable to move a step further on the path. And out of a sky massed now with gathering grey cloud, snow began to fall, fast, white, blinding.
CHAPTER 16
The sudden whirl of fat white snowflakes was so fast, so thick, that in an instant both Cally and Westerly were isolated in whiteness; they could see nothing, not even one another.
“Cally!” His voice was muffled; she could not tell where it came from. She groped at the place where he had been, and could not find him.
“West! Where are you?”
“Stand still—don’t move. Don’t move an inch. Just keep talking, and I’ll find you. Talk—recite something—just so I can hear.”
Cally’s mind was blank. The only thing that came into it was the last poem she had had to learn at school.
“And so the shortest day came, and the year died,
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees,
The hung their homes with evergreen,
They burned beseeching fires all night long—”
“I’ll bet they did,” Westerly said. His arm was firm around her shoulders; she gasped in relief, clutching at him. The snow already lay thick on his jacket and his hair. It whirled into Cally’s eyes; she knew that if he moved more than an arm’s length away, she would lose sight of him again.