Seaward (17 page)

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 those 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.

“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.

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.