Seaward (19 page)

Westerly 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.

T
he 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.

“The rope,” she said.

“You're right.” He pulled it from his pack, and they roped themselves together once more. Westerly shouldered the coil and raised a hand, peering past her. “Now—I found you from this way, so the inside of the path is over there. Go slowly.”

Hands out, groping through the whirling snow, they moved forward until they found the rock. The cold bit through their clothes; Cally thought with longing of the warm jacket in her pack. Westerly tugged at the line round her waist. “This way.”

He was moving cautiously downhill. She held back, hissing at him. “West, no! That face—”

Westerly said, low and determined, “Lugan said to her, you can't keep them if they wish to leave. Remember?
Whatever awful things she dreams up, she can't
attack
us. Come on—just stay close to the rock.”

Blindly they shuffled down the slope, pressing against the rocky wall, shaking off the snow as it spread itself on them. Cally looked fearfully sideways for a glimpse of the stone pillar, but there was nothing. At last Westerly paused.

“There's a corner here—the first turn in the path. We can't go on like this —we'll go over the edge. Let's get the tent out.”

Fighting the heavy snow that came blanketing down into every fold and crevice, they had the thin, tough covering stretched over the frame just as the wind hit them. In a moment the snow was whipping at them as if driven by a blizzard; as if it were alive and had realised, just too late, that they should be stopped. The light tent-frame lifted and tipped; Westerly clutched at it. “Quick! Get inside!”

They dived into the tiny space, trying to shake off the snow as they went. The wind howled over the tent as if in frustration, and in moments the heavy snow was piling in drifts outside, covering the curving roof.

Cally was scooping out blown snow before it could melt. “The wind helped us once—now it's the opposite.”

“The same with everything. The sun, the river.”

“They belong to her.”

“But to Lugan too,” Westerly said. He pulled out his
blanket, and Ryan's jacket and shawl for Cally, and they wrapped themselves like cocoons.

“Lugan's folk,” Cally said. “We keep hearing that we're Lugan's folk. But Lugan's dead.”

“I don't think so. I don't think she can kill him. That wave—it was as if they were playing some terrible game.” He stopped abruptly, hearing his own words, remembering the game of chess.

The wind hurled an icy spatter of snow against the roof of the tent. They sat hunched in the dim, cold light that filtered through from the whirling grey-white world outside. There was a layer of darkness at the base of the tent, where the snowdrifts were rising.

Cally felt suddenly dreadfully tired, as if the life were draining out of her. She said miserably, “We'll never get away. Every time we start to get somewhere, she stops us.”

“We know where the sea is,” Westerly said. “We saw it.”

“That was just to make it worse. To show us what we couldn't have. And then she sent the snow, and it's getting worse and worse and we're never going to get out. . . .” Her voice tailed away.

Westerly said firmly, “We're just going to wait it out. It can't go on for ever. You'd feel better if you weren't so tired—lie down, come on. Get some rest.” He folded the flap of his pack over its knobbly contents and pushed it
under Cally's head for a pillow as she lay curled up on the tent floor. “Are you warm enough?”

“I'm all right.” Cally's voice was muffled, her back turned toward him. “Oh West. You should have gone on your own, that time you wanted to.”

“You crazy? Who'd have pulled me up when I fell over the rock?”

“You wouldn't have fallen over, if you'd been on your own.”

“I wouldn't have trusted Peth either. So now where would I be?”

Cally made a small snuffling sound that might have been crying; he reached out a hand to her back, then hesitated and withdrew it again.

She said, “You've done much more for me than I have for you. And there's all the others who've done things, just to get us to the sea, and what's happened to them? That dragon was killed—and Lugan—and Peth—”

Westerly said positively, “Lugan's not dead.”

“We don't know that.” Cally's voice was thick with misery. “There's no point in it all. My mother and father are dead and there's no point in anything.”

Her shoulders were shaking. In swift overwhelming concern Westerly slid down and put an arm round her from behind, holding her close to him. “Don't, love. Come on, Cal.”

Choking, she shook her head violently. “There's no point, there's no point. I just want to go to sleep and not wake up any more.”

Westerly felt desperate to comfort her, and at the same time his body stirred at the closeness of her, at the curve of her breast against his hand, and the smell of her hair. He made himself bring his arm back from holding her, and he stroked her hair and kissed the back of her neck. “We're going to the sea, Cal, we're going to get there. Remember what Peth said? Whatever happens, he said, believe that the journey is worth taking, and then you will reach its end.”

Snow thudded heavy against the roof of the tent, falling in a wave from the rock above, and the curve of the roof swelled down ominously towards them. Cally did not move. She said in a small dull voice, “It's never going to stop.”

He cupped his hand over her shoulder, his face against her hair. “Oh Cally, Cally—” Lying close, he rocked her gently as if she were a small child; but he was fiercely aware that she was not a child, and he would have turned her round to his own wanting body if his own words had not still been echoing in his head.
Remember Peth said . . . remember what Peth said. . . .

What had Peth said? He knew the small insistent voice must have some purpose, but he could not understand. What had Peth said that could help stop the snow?

Now listen well, and always remember. There is a calling you may do. . . .

“Cally!” Westerly shouted.

He swung upright, and scrambled to his feet, lurching against the tent wall. It swung, heavy with snow. Cally sat up, her eyes wide and frightened. The look on her face caught at him, but he was too excited to stop.

“I've got it, I've got it!”

He bent beside her to his pack, and scrabbled inside. Pulling out the three white bones, he knelt down and ripped open the fastening of the tent-flap. Snow came whipping in on the wind, and Cally made a small sound of distress —but then stopped herself, watching, hunched under her shawl.

Carefully Westerly planted the three bones in the heavy snow outside, standing them upright in a triangle, pointing at the sky. Then he clambered out of the tent, stepping over them. The wind blew his hair into his eyes; in a moment snow was clinging to his shoulders, driving cold down his neck. He stood there happy and oblivious in the whirling white world, and he said, loudly and clearly, like a calling:

“Water and fire and air, by these we live,

By rain and sun and wind.

Oh sky, I am in need.

Send me the sun.”

The wind dropped. With the end of its howling, echoing shriek, silence fell on the snow like a blanket. Holding her breath, Cally crawled forward to the door of the tent, and saw Westerly standing rigid, legs apart, arms spread, gazing up at the sky as the snowflakes fell into his eyes.

But the snowflakes were growing less, and somewhere in the whiteness a brighter glow was beginning, somewhere out beyond the path where the tent stood. Then out there, as they watched, there was a blaze of sunlight and a flash of blue, and they looked up, and saw the huge bank of grey cloud that had covered their world boiling like steam, curling in on itself, rushing away across the sky as if driven by a great wind. Yet they felt no wind. They felt only the warmth of the sun, embracing them, hanging fiery in a clear sky, glittering on the still snow that lay all around them on rock and path and tree.

Westerly looked at Cally, and spread his hands.

“Peth,” he said. “He showed me how.”

“It's gone,” Cally said in wonder. “It's all gone.” She stood up, slowly. “Oh West. I'm sorry. I was . . . in a pit.”

“Hey,” he said. “Taranis put you there.” He swung round to the tent. “Come on, let's get this off.” He began cheerfully sweeping armfuls of snow down to the ground.

Cally helped him. When the roof was clear they paused, looking over the mounded edge of the path. Between the green hills on the horizon there was the glimmer of the sea
still, and below it the distant land was hazed with green and purple and brown as it had been before. But over all the mountain the snow lay thick and glittering, mounded white on every branch of every tree, masking the crevices of the steep dropping hillside with smooth rounded drifts.

“It's so beautiful,” Cally said. “And a few moments ago it could have killed us.”

“Speciality of the country,” Westerly said. “The murderous beauty, the beautiful murderer. Just like the owner of the property.” He looked down the precipitous hillside, all its angles smoothed now by snow. “And we can't even get away yet. The path's buried.”

But by the time they had dismantled the tent, discovered that they were hungry and eaten the last of Ryan's food, the path was clear. Looking down, they could see it written in a dark zig-zag pattern through the white snow, as if the beaten earth had itself grown warm enough to melt its way through to the sun. Rivulets of water ran down the path from the dripping, dwindling snowdrifts.

Bare-armed in the hot sun, they set off down the hillside to the green land waiting below.

H
alfway down the hill, they heard the sound of water moving much faster than the tiny trickle about their feet; a spring ran out of the rock, cascading down in a long miniature waterfall. Twice their criss-crossing path led across its course, so that they ran laughing through the spray. At the foot of the hill the fall splashed into a deep green pool, irresistible in the hot sun. Cally and Westerly swam, yelping at the coldness of the water; washed the dirtiest of their clothes with the soap from Westerly's pack, and spread them on the bushes to dry.