by Susan Cooper
The white stone gleamed dazzling in the sunlight, so that it was hard to tell how far the gateway reached; they could see only that it was divided by many entrances, and that each member of the moving crowd ended his or her long walking at one of these. They could not see what happened beyond. They drew nearer, the white stone walls reaching high over their heads. At each entrance a man or woman stood, with one hand on a round white stone set in the wall. Cally looked puzzled at one face after another, all these greeting guardians. She saw a man with a dark pointed beard, another with shoulder-length hair and a gold circlet round his forehead; a woman with green eyes and a smile like sunlight, a twinkling man with a square white beard and grizzled hair: they all looked oddly familiar, and yet she could not remember having seen any of them before.
Every man or woman or child who approached one of the gateways spoke his or her name, and then the name of a country. The round stone flashed golden for a moment, and the guardian at the gate smiled in welcome and reached out both hands. And the arrival, dazed still but smiling, took the hands for a moment and then went in; through the gate of the harbour, towards the ships.
“Guy Leclerc, France.”
“Ramon Chavez, Guatemala.”
“John Ndala, Zimbabwe.”
“Danny Kelly, United States.”
“Wu Yi-ming, China.”
“Sarah Farr, England. . . .”
The gulls wheeled overhead, a salt breeze blew in from the sea. Cally and Westerly moved forward to the nearest entrance, and a tall dark-eyed woman there smiled at them, beckoning. They went to her, and stood under the white stone arch. Cally began, “Calliope—”
The round stone flashed red, and suddenly over all the arching gateways and through the air of the harbour there was a furious jangling of alarm bells. Lights blazed, sirens wailed, and crashing down on all four sides of Cally and Westerly came four gleaming white walls. They slammed into place and stood solid and firm, enclosing them in a tight white square, a cell of stone.
CHAPTER 18
The silence was sudden and total. Cally and Westerly could see nothing but the white walls. It was as if they had been wrenched out of life.
But as they stared at the enclosing room there was a blurring, a mistiness all around, and the walls seemed to retreat until the space in which they stood was far larger, far higher: a great hall walled with white mist. And the mist at one end of the hall glowed golden, and they saw a tall figure, cloaked in gold, walk out of it towards them.
Westerly leapt forward. “Lugan!”
Cally followed, in hope and relief edged with an odd feeling of shyness —but then she stopped. Out of the mist behind Lugan, gleaming cold as moonlight, came the Lady Taranis. Her light hair streamed loose over her blue robes.
Lugan was smiling at them. “Well done,” he said. “For enduring your journey, and now this last . . . astonishment. You are my folk indeed.”
Westerly said triumphantly, “I knew you weren’t dead.”
“Why couldn’t we go through the gateway?” Cally said. She was dazed, half her mind still held by the image of the silent walking crowd, and the ships waiting on the sea.
“Because you are in life, Calliope,” Taranis said. There was a warmth in her face and voice that caught at them in spite of their mistrust. “Because you and Westerly belong still to your own world, if you wish it. But those other travellers have left it behind.”
Lugan said, “The gateway is for them—not for you, not yet. And so the alarms rang when you tried to pass.” He looked at their uncomprehending faces. “Come,” he said abruptly. “We will show you the country, so that you may understand.”
As Cally and Westerly drew level with him he swung round, holding his cloak by its edge, flinging out both arms so that he seemed to enfold them and Taranis in two great golden wings. He drew them forward into the white mist that swirled where there had been a wall, and through the mist into brightness. And they were standing out under the blue sky on a grassy headland high above the sea, with the sweep of that limitless flat horizon before them, and at their backs the rolling green hills and plains inland. Below on the edge of the sea was the bustling harbour; faintly they could hear the cries of the gulls, and see the glimmer of the broad white gate where the thronging travellers passed through to reach the ships. One tall-masted schooner was putting out to sea as they watched; they could see its sails take shape and fill as it drew away from the land.
Inland, they saw the shining course of the river, and beside it the broad highway filled with moving figures. But they could not see where the highway came from; it seemed simply to begin, somewhere in the misty hills, as if it burst from under the ground like a spring.
Taranis pointed down at the flowing crowds. “Those are the travellers from your world,” she said. “All those who were glad to be alive, but who in your terms are dead. They pass in their thousands every day, and the crowd never grows less. But not all choose the journey to the sea. Many are so weary, after a long life and a hard one, that when it is over they wish only to sleep. So sleep is what they are granted, and their spirits drift out in peace through the gentle darkness, and lie resting on the winds that blow between the bright stars, forever.”
Lugan said, turning his lean, handsome face to the hills, “And those who lived but would take no joy from living, or who sought to destroy life, are caught forever between life and death in the manner of the Stone People. Devoted still only to destruction, and to the building of Stonecutter’s endless, meaningless walls.” A hard note came into his voice. “To the service only of the Lady Taranis.”
She said softly, “I have two faces, certainly. But so do you.”
He paid no attention; he looked down at the crowded harbour and the blue-green sea, and his voice grew warm again. “All the rest, all those travelling down there, are those who loved their lives even through the hardness of them. Lugan’s folk. Those who took pleasure in the world, and gave it—who sometimes gave even their lives, for the sake of others. On that joy they travel to the edge of the sea, and they may put out across it to my islands, the land of the Tir Na n’Og, the ever-young—where my folk may live without hurt, without change. It is a different kind of living, a different delight, lapped by the sea of time. And—my sister may not come there.”
He glanced at Taranis, with a mixture of love and wariness in his tawny eyes. Wondering, Cally and Westerly looked at them both, and for the first time saw a hint of likeness between his strong, clear profile and the beautiful fine-boned face in its glimmering frame of silver hair. Taranis looked back at them.
“Do you not know us?” she said. “Do you not know us yet, in this our country? I am Death, my children. I rule this world just as I rule your own, I have followed you everywhere here, just as I follow you there. But Life rules with me. He is my brother and my father and my son, and all of them are called Lugan. We are one, even in our opposition.”
They stared. Cally saw again in her mind the huge wave rushing up the river to the lock, heard the shrill cold triumph in Taranis’ laughter as the brown water swirled round Lugan’s head. She said, “But you tried to kill him!”
Taranis’ blue eyes glinted, and for a moment Cally felt deathly cold, as she saw a flash of the dreadful second face on the guardian pillars. But Lugan’s deep calm voice broke in.
“It is the nature of things, Cally. Death ends life, and life is renewed. My lady is bound to me, for without life how could there be death? But so too I am bound to her—as the leaves must die in winter so that the new buds may swell in the spring. In a world set within Time, there can be no beginning without an end.”
“So it goes in the Country of Life and Death,” Taranis said, “and so the echo of it is played out in your world. And once in a very great while a Cally or a Westerly is brought by chance from one world to the other, to see the two of us plain.”
Westerly was sitting on the grass with his chin on his knees, watching the ships slowly moving out across the sea. �
��By chance?” he said bitterly. “Her mother died. So did mine.”
“And you were driven by the force of your grief,” Taranis said, “which is still with you, and which only time will take away. Yes. But it was by chance that each of you found the old power of crossing between worlds —you through your mother’s knowledge, Cally through her selkie hands. That power comes from laws which we do not control, or even understand. We did not bring you here.”
Lugan cocked an eyebrow at her quizzically. “But once they were here—”
“Yes, I would have kept them,” she said petulantly. “Small wonder if I want company. I am Death, and I am lonely. You care only for your folk.”
“There are two of them here that I care for,” he said. “And since they have followed this long journey to the sea, they have the charge of their own lives now. They are out of my control, or yours. They may choose where they will go.”
“Very well,” Taranis said. Her blue eyes were remote. “They will choose your way, of course. The land where I may not come. The land of eternal summer, where nothing passes, or ends, or begins. For them, I am nothing but cruelty and grief and pain, a losing, a sense of darkness. And indeed I am all those things, sometimes. But I wish the journey might have taught them”—her eyes sought Cally’s, deliberate, gazing—“that I am also your twin, that I have my other face. That it is the endings that make the beginnings. Sunrise, flowers in the desert, blossom on the apple trees.”
Cally looked back at her, wondering.
Westerly jumped to his feet. “We can really go where we want to?”
“Yes,” Lugan said.
“I promised I’d find my father,” Westerly said. “He’s on an island.”
Taranis held Cally’s gaze for a last moment, then turned to him. “Your father is of Lugan’s folk,” she said, “and so he is in the islands to which the ships sail. And so is your mother, and so are Cally’s parents. Is that where you wish to go?”
“Of course,” Westerly said firmly. He hitched his pack over his shoulder, and grinned at Cally. “Right?”
Cally said nothing. She looked out at the sea, and saw, away beyond the headland, waves breaking over a long black outcropping of rock. Unconsciously she rubbed the palms of her hands.
Taranis stood tall, straight and beautiful in the sunlight, and with one arm she swept out her blue cloak like an embracing wing, as Lugan had done. “Come to the ships then,” she said, and her cloak swirled round Westerly, and they disappeared. The last flicker of an image that Cally saw was the dark eyes wide in his brown face, looking back at her.
She heard the sea gulls calling faint and plaintive in the clear sky, out over the sea.
Lugan said, “Well, Calliope?”
She looked up at him; at the laugh-lines sober and straight now in the lean face, and the sunlight gilding his hair. She thought: he looks like the sun.
“I made a promise too,” she said.
“I know.”
Lugan took her hand. He raised his other arm and pointed down at the black rocks that rose wet-gleaming out of the sand below. There was a rushing of wind, and a singing in Cally’s ears, and she found herself down in a mist of sea-spray with the smell of salt in the air.
She stood on the rocks; at her feet the dark sea rose and fell in great rolling swells, like the huge heart-beat from which Snake had come to them, under the earth. She found herself breathing to the rhythm of it. The wind blew in her face, and faint within it she heard voices, a high wordless singing; and down in the swelling water she saw shining black shapes swimming, diving, curving over and under one another in a sinuous, joyous blur of movement. In that too she felt she found Snake. His words echoed out of the past: your life’s your own—follow your own way, and enjoy it: and she felt somehow that the meaning of them was down there with the dark creatures revelling in the waves, and she felt an itching ache in the palms of her hands, as strong as pain, calling her down to join them.
Dark eyes looked at her from the sea, where a head broke through the waves as the biggest of the turning bodies rose and wheeled and splashed back again. The face was whiskered, and the teeth flashed white as if in a smile, but it was not the head of a man, or of Snake. It was a great grey seal, darkened by its sleek wetness; again and again it dived and rose and broke through the waves to look at her.
Cally gazed into the huge liquid black eyes as they rose again. She said softly, “Don’t despair. She will come.”
In a gleaming dark flash the seal swerved and dived and was gone, and behind her Cally heard a voice calling.
“Cally! Calliope!”
It was a shout, but faint and far away. Cally turned, to face the long golden sweep of the beach, and the tiny shapes of the ships in the distance beyond, and she saw Ryan running down the beach towards the sea. She seemed no longer old and worn, but young, running like a girl; her hair blew out long and straight in the wind, and she was carrying a black bundle in her arms. She shouted indistinctly to Cally again, and waved.
Cally’s hands were calling her toward the sea.
“Come with us!” Ryan called. “Come home!”
Cally clenched her hands together, and felt the throbbing in the palms. She swung round and looked down again at the glistening, swirling seals playing in the waves; a face rose up laughing at her, and this time she knew that it was Snake.
The sea and the spray and the voices of the waves all called to her; the rhythm of the swells was the beating of her own heart. She turned back irresolute to look at Ryan, and saw her running into the sea, fully clothed, holding the black bundle to her. Further out in the waves she saw the big grey seal swimming, waiting, a dark flashing shape in the green water and the white spray.
Ryan called and waved to her once more, laughing, excited, and then she dived into the waves and disappeared. And when Cally looked again for the big dog-seal she saw not one but two dark sleek figures, curving and playing in the sea.
Without thinking of what she was doing, she turned her face up to the sky in longing, and she heard herself call out, “Oh Westerly! Where are you?”
Lugan’s voice said gently at her side, “Yes. That’s why you didn’t go with her, isn’t it? Why you held back from the wanting, and the inheritance.”
Cally looked up. He was standing beside her on the rocks, his golden robe wrapped round him by the wind. He reached out and touched her clenched fists, and Cally realised that all the shouting pain had gone out of them. Slowly she opened her hands, holding them out before her, and saw that each palm was smooth and unscarred, as if the thick, horny skin of the selkie had never been there.
She stared at them, wondering.
“You chose not to use it,” Lugan said. “So it is gone.”
Cally said uncertainly, “Was that the wrong thing to do?”
“Of course not. There is no right or wrong, here. There are only different ways of living.”
Cally looked at the dark, heaving sea. She could see nothing there now but the waves. “Are the selkies your folk too?”
“Oh yes,” he said. He laughed. “They are like Snake—all joy in their element, and no doubts or fears. You carry that in your blood, if you will listen to it. Ryan feared no one but Stonecutter—and when Taranis took away his powers, Rhiannon of the Roane was free to take back her skin that he had hidden from her, and come home here to the seals.”
Further out on the sea, small and distant in the mouth of the harbour, another ship was moving towards the misty horizon where the islands lay. Cally said bleakly, “Westerly must be on board that one.”
“Perhaps,” Lugan said.
He was looking down along the flat golden expanse of the beach, standing tense and somehow expectant, his lean face expressionless. Cally glanced too at the long stretch of sand, shimmering in the heat of the sun—and then she stood very still, staring.
A figure was running towards them, running in a straight line along the beach from the direction of the harbour. Dwarfed at first by distance
, it grew gradually clearer, loping along at a steady unbroken pace. Cally gazed at the runner for a long silent time before she was certain. It was Westerly.
He ran steadily, without pausing, without looking up, until he came to the single line of Ryan’s footprints on the sand. Then he stopped at once. He stood staring at them for a moment; then flung himself down to the point at which they disappeared into the sea. Watching his taut figure peering at the waves, Cally suddenly realised what he must be thinking.
She shouted, “West! West!”
His head jerked up, and he turned. As he began to run again, Cally clambered down over the edge of the rocks towards him, slipping and slithering on seaweed and wet stone. She jumped down onto the sand just as Westerly came running up to her, to pause breathless and panting, a few feet away, looking at her.
His face and his shirt were damp with sweat. He said, haltingly, but with a smile breaking, “I—couldn’t go without you.”
Cally was laughing; she felt delight bubbling up in her like a spring. Instinctively she flung her arms round him, feeling the length of his body against her own, her face pressed against his neck. Westerly held her for a moment and then drew back. His hands were holding her shoulders. He said, grinning at her, “Hello, Cal.”
Ceremonially he kissed her on both cheeks; then paused for a second, and kissed her on the mouth.
Neither of them was laughing then; they stood staring at one another, shaken by discovery.
Lugan said, behind them, “Welcome back, Westerly.” He was smiling at them, the tawny eyes bright; he looked, Cally thought suddenly, like a father proud of his children.
Westerly let his hands drop from Cally’s shoulders, but took her hand. He said to Lugan, “Wherever we go, can we go together?”