Seaward (13 page)

Before she could say anything, he swung himself over the side of the boat and into the water. It was not deep; he found himself standing waist-deep, a few feet from the bank. The boat went shooting out into mid-stream, rocking wildly; he saw Cally clutch at the sides for balance. An eddy caught it there, and within seconds Cally was much further off, out in the middle of the river, drifting away.

He heard her call unhappily after him, but he turned his back and splashed up onto the bank. As he climbed out, trousers dripping, shoes squelching, he found a figure standing close in front of him. He looked up, startled. It was Lugan.

The lean, bright-eyed face was looking down at him without warmth. “That will make you feel no better, not at all,” Lugan said.

Westerly said, “I don't care.” Then he said, slowly, as if the words forced themselves out of him, “Who is Snake?”

Lugan was peering after Cally; she was a small, hunched figure in the drifting boat. He began walking along the bank in the same direction as the river and the boat, motioning Westerly to follow.

“Snake,” he said, “has much in common with the part of yourself that is giving you trouble at the moment.”

“I don't know what you mean,” Westerly said resentfully. His shoes sucked at his feet as he walked. He lengthened his stride to keep up with Lugan's long legs.

“Energy,” Lugan said. “Enjoyment, delight, a glad fierceness. Snake is in a fever of living—like the young.”

“I don't trust him,” Westerly said.

Lugan said sharply, “You share his preoccupations, you owe him your life, and you are jealous of a seeming reality you know nothing about. Stop it. And watch the river for your girl.”

“She's not my girl,” Westerly said, but he turned his head to the river. He had suddenly remembered that Cally could not swim.

They skirted a clump of willows, and when they were in sight of the water again he saw that it was running more rapidly now. The boat was swaying in the current; Cally sat tense and upright. Ahead, the river seemed to narrow; he saw pilings along the near bank, and immense wooden posts in the water, with what seemed to be a huge pair of gates holding the water back in a swirling pool. A small white-painted house stood on the bank beside the gates: a picture-book cottage banked with roses and hollyhocks, and white clematis starring the walls around the door.

Lugan said in quick concern, “The lock!” He began to run. Taken by surprise, Westerly pounded after him, down the rutted earthen path along the riverbank. They reached
the cottage, and the first great pair of sluice-gates set into the water; Westerly saw that the lock was like a narrow enclosure with gates at each end, controlling the flow of the river. The first gates were closed, and there was a four-foot drop between the river and the level of the water enclosed inside.

Lugan began turning a metal crank set on a post beside the lock, and the waters of the upper river swirled as a sluice below the surface opened to let them pour through. He called over his shoulder, “Watch Cally!”

Westerly was already waving at her from the bank. “Don't stand up!” he yelled. “Keep the boat balanced!” He glimpsed her face, wide-eyed and uncertain. “Grab a branch if you can, but
don't stand up!”

The boat brushed by the dropping fronds of a willow tree; Cally managed to grasp two of them, bracing her legs against the bottom of the boat so that it stayed there with her, turning, waiting. The river-level inside the lock rose and rose, as water poured in through the sluice; when it was the same as the level at which the boat lay, Lugan spun another crank and leaned his tall frame against a long heavy beam of wood, a great lever attached to the gates. Westerly ran to help him, and as they pushed the lock gates opened.

Lugan called, “Cally! Let go! Let the boat come through!”

Westerly saw Cally hesitate as the unfamiliar deep voice rolled out to her over the water. He waved reassurance.
Cally released the willow branches, and the current caught the boat and turned it towards the lock. She fended it off from the gates as it floated inside.

Westerly came to the edge, fumbling for words of apology, but she grinned up at him. “Neat. Like a staircase.” She pointed ahead to the further sluice-gates, beyond which the lower river now lay four feet below the water in the lock. “Now you just let the water out till it's at that level, open the gates and out we go. Yes?”

Lugan was already leaning on the beam-lever to close the first sluice-gates again. “Yes,” he said, smiling down at her; but then concern was back in his face. “We must hurry. These locks were built not only to control the river—but to control those who go through.”

“This is Lugan,” Westerly said to Cally.

She sat very still, gazing up at the tall lean figure, the gold-brown hair. She said slowly, “I've seen you before.”

“Yes,” Lugan said. “When you were very young. Your mother was —” He stopped, his bony face suddenly secret and dour.

Cally said, “One of Lugan's folk?” The words had come unbidden into her head; only as she heard them did she remember Stonecutter using them.

Lugan glanced at her quickly, but he said nothing. He turned toward the second sluice-gates, beckoning Westerly to come with him.

The door of the cottage opened, and the Lady Taranis came out.

For a moment there was silence, as they stood frozen, watching her. The hood of her blue cloak was down over her neck; her hair glimmered in a white halo. She said softly, looking at Cally, “Any boat passing through my lock must pay a toll.”

Cally cleared her throat. “What kind of toll?”

“A life,” Taranis said. Her voice was very sweet, and cold as snow.

Lugan said sharply, from the other end of the lock, “That is not your law.”

“Sometimes I change my laws,” Taranis said.

He came towards her, towering, quiet. “These two are not your people. They are not here as the others are. They are travellers, free to come and go. You may watch them, steal from them, go by their side, but you cannot keep them yet, if they wish to leave your land.”

Taranis' blue eyes blazed at him; she stood in an ominous stillness. Watching, Westerly and Cally hardly dared breathe.

“Do not cross me,” she said to Lugan softly.

“These two are my charge,” he said.

She took a deep breath, sweeping her cloak close round her, and shrieked at him, “Then pay their toll!” She flung out one arm, pointing downstream at the river. The echo
of her voice seemed to hang over the water in the still sunshine, and then gradually in the distance they heard a long low rumbling sound like a far-off train. It grew louder, approaching. All other sound had stopped; no birds sang.

Lugan swung round and reached a long swift arm down to Cally. “Come up, girl.” He half-lifted her out of the boat, and she scrambled up on the bank. The roaring grew, and as they looked out down the river they saw in disbelief a huge wave rushing towards them, rearing up, more than a man's height.

Taranis began to laugh.

Lugan pulled Westerly's pack from his shoulder and thrust it into his hands. “The knotted cloth I gave you, boy—quickly! Open it, and the winds will carry you.” He pushed them both towards the cottage. “Against the wall—now!” His voice rose over the roar of the water. Westerly seized Cally's arm and they ran for the flower-bright wall.

“Why isn't he coming?” Cally looked back over her shoulder. Taranis stood staring triumphantly at Lugan, her laughter rising shrill through the tumult, and the wave rose green-brown towards them in the river. But it did not sweep straight on, over the banks and the two standing figures; it reared back at the first set of sluice-gates, pausing, enormous, and then curled down and wrapped its waters round Lugan as if it were alive, a huge grasping fist. Cally screamed. Lugan's tall figure was tossed up in the breaking
waters like a tree-trunk; she heard him call to them once more as he disappeared, but could not make out the words.

“West—” She spun round to him, but he was not looking; he had the knotted cloth in his hands and was fumbling with it desperately. The wave curled sideways and reached toward them as he wrenched the cloth apart.

And every tree along the river was flung bending to the ground, and every bloom was ripped from the vines and plants round the house, as suddenly the air all around them roared louder than the waves, and a great wind seized Cally and West and carried them high into the air and away.

T
hey tossed and turned through the air, buffetted this way and that by the disputing winds. Whirling through a blur of time and place, they could see nothing, hear nothing but confusion and turbulence; each knew only that the other was there, somewhere close by. The winds howled and whined and fought, tumbling them through night and day, warmth and cold; the long thought-numbing journey seemed to have gone on for a hundred years. Then the sense of quarrel around them grew so fierce that in their whirling they felt a soundless report as if the air that carried them had somehow broken apart, and they felt themselves falling.

They lay on sand, in hot sunshine under a clear blue-white sky. Slowly Westerly sat up. All around them he could see nothing but the long curves of sand-dunes, white and dazzling. The sand under his fingers was so hot it almost burned the skin, and his clothes that had been soaked by the river-water were stiff and dry. Cally was sprawled beside
him, blinking up at the sky; nearby, both their backpacks lay. There was no mark of any kind around them on the smooth sand.

Cally lay basking in the sunshine, feeling it warm her through. She said drowsily, “D'you think this is where he wanted us to be?”

“In a desert? It's a great place to find water to follow to the sea.”

She sat up, her mind suddenly clear, filled with the memory of the breaking wave. “West—d'you think he's still alive?”

“Not if she had anything to do with it,” Westerly said bitterly. He got to his feet and picked up his pack, brushing off the sand. “I don't know what I think any more. About anything. I think we just have to go on.”

Cally stood up. “Which way?”

He looked at the sun. It stood high over their heads, blazing down; there was no way of telling east or west. “I don't know.”

Shouldering her bag, Cally scrambled up the side of the tall dune before them, slithering as the sand gave way at each step. Westerly followed. From the top, they could see nothing but the next white dune, and the next, all around. But far away on two opposite sides of the horizon, like distant mirror-images of one another, there were the hazy outlines of two ranges of mountains.

“One of those,” Cally said.

“Can't tell which one's nearer.”

She pulled off her jacket and stuffed it into her bag. “You choose.”

“That
way. Westerly said, pointing, trying to feel positive. “And we should keep watching, to check we're going straight—we'll be out of sight of it half the time.”

They began trekking over the sand, sliding up and down the long shifting dunes; before long the unfamiliar slanting walk made a constant ache at the backs of their legs. They struggled on and on through the heat, through the silent barren slopes ruled by the sun. Cally rolled up the sleeves of her shirt; Westerly pulled his off altogether, knotting the arms round his neck so that the shirt still hung down over his back.

“Turn your collar up,” he said. “Keep the sun off the back of your neck.”

Cally felt oddly shy at the sudden sight of his muscled shoulders. She said, “You've been in the sun already—you're so brown.”

Westerly laughed. “That's not suntan, that's nature.”

“Oh,” said Cally in confusion. “I'm sorry.”

“What for?”

“I don't know. Making personal remarks.”

“Nothing personal about skin. It's yours we have to watch. Lily-white northerners aren't made for this heat.”
He looked more closely at her damp, flushed face. “You all right?”

“Just thirsty.”

He swung down his pack and took out the battered leather flask. “Here—have a swallow. We'll have to ration it. If the heat really gets to you, tell me and we'll rest.”

Cally gulped a mouthful of water, resisting a strong urge to empty the whole flask, and handed it back. They went on. There was no sound but the steady muffled squeak of their footsteps in the sand, and no sight of anything all round but the glaring sand and the empty sky. Cally walked with eyes half-closed against the fierce white light. Her head began to ache. From time to time Westerly paused on the peak of a dune, to check that they were still headed for the distant hills. Their hazy outline seemed to grow no closer; he wondered wildly if the mountains were retreating as they approached. At each pause he searched the horizon behind them carefully too, but no one was following. The desert was empty, unpeopled.