Seaward (21 page)

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?”

“Oh indeed,” Lugan said. The smile faded as he looked at them, and the lines of his lean face grew oddly tense. “But then you face the biggest of all the choices, my children.” He hesitated, turning his head to the sea as if he were looking for something. The sun was huge out there, sinking to the horizon; his hair and his robe glowed in its red-gold light. There was the flash of a swifter light for an instant, flicking past them, and they saw that from the harbour beyond the beach, the long white beam of a
lighthouse was swinging steadily round over sea and land.

Lugan said, “You may go over the sea, if you choose, with those other travellers. You may go to my islands, to join your parents and all the memories, and you may go together. But you will go as children, as you are now, and you will never change. Time does not pass, in that land. Because Death may not go there, nothing alters, nothing fades —the old do not die, the young do not grow old. And those who are on the edge of leaving childhood behind them, as you are, will never cross that edge, but live on it for ever.” He looked from one to the other of them. “Which is to say, that if you love one another, as I think perhaps you do, the loving too will remain on the edge, suspended, never growing up.”