Seaward (16 page)

“You are learning,” Peth said mildly. “That is what this journey of yours is for. And now you will learn something your mother did not know. Take the three and plant them in the ground, in a triangle. They must point upwards.”

Westerly did his best to drive the bones into the hard ground. They leaned sideways, and would not stand upright. He collected small stones and built a miniature cairn round each one, propping them so that they pointed to the sky.

“Good,” Peth said. “Now listen well, and always remember. There is a calling you may do, for the sun, or the rain, or the wind. When the guardians are pointed to the sky, you must say the words . . .”

He lifted his head.

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

By rain and sun and wind.

Oh sky, I am in need.

Send me the rain.”

He paused. “Remember most of all that the need must always be real,” he said. “Now—do you have it?”

Westerly nodded, intent. Taking a deep breath, he said clearly and slowly,

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

By rain and sun and wind.

Oh sky, I am in need.

Send me the rain.”

Peth said, “Each of us can do more than he knows. It takes only the teaching. Now—watch the sky.”

At first Westerly saw nothing but the hazy blue all around, and the glare of the sun. Then he realised that in the sky over the distant mountains a long low bank of cloud was growing. Slowly it rose and came towards them, grey-white and swirling; soon it filled half the sky, and still it came. It swallowed the sun, and the fierce heat died from the air. High up, racing on a wind he could not feel, the cloudbank swept across the valley to fill the whole sky. As it passed overhead, he felt the first few fat drops of rain.

Westerly whooped with delight, and turned his face upward. “Cally!” he called “Cally!” He dived into the shelter and pulled her out. The rain grew heavier; they reached to it, opened their mouths to it, laughing in relief.

Peth laughed too. “But stay inside,” he said. “Wet clothes will not dry at night. See where the water comes to you.”

He waved his antennae at the strange translucent roof of their shelter, and although they could not see its substance they could see the water gathering in it, and spilling over one slanting edge. Cally set her mouth to the overspill; Westerly went burrowing for cup and flask.

They drank and ate and slept, while the rain pummelled at the roof and Peth stood watch outside. He made no move for shelter, but stood there with his antennae spread as if he were revelling in the rain. Glancing out sleepily, Westerly thought:
he's the colour of rain.

When Peth roused them, the sky was clear and the moon was high, and the travelling began again. They moved far more quickly now over the firm ground, and the mountains began to loom close and dark over the desert.

And when the sun rose, and colour came back into the world, they saw that the rain had worked a transformation. The desert was flowering.

All over the stony ground the leaves of small plants were fat and green, wonderfully restored from the grey tatters that before had lain limp and apparently dead. Each plant was starred with blossoms, white and yellow and red; white-budded sprays had sprung out of flat leafy rosettes scarcely visible before. Small round cactuses each wore a bright pink flower perched above their bristling spines, and in the tall spindly tree-cactuses, yellow and white blossoms hung in echo of the sun and moon. Everywhere, the grey scrubby ground was hazed with a faint mist of green.

Peth made a chirruping sound of pleasure and began bending his head close to the larger flowers, uncoiling a delicate proboscis that they had not noticed before, and drinking the nectar. He looked up at them, and waved his
antennae at the white buds spraying out above his head. “Those are for you.”

“To
eat
?” Cally said doubtfully.

Peth chirrupped again, laughing. Westerly reached out tentatively and picked a bud; nibbled, then eagerly pushed it into his mouth and grasped for a handful. “Mmmm,” he said indistinctly.

Cally picked one of the tight-closed white flowers and began dubiously chewing; then her face changed. “Peaches,” she said, reaching for more. “And oranges.”

“And pears and bananas,” said Westerly with relish. “And I think just a hint of celery.”

“Celery?”

“Well, it's a nice change from dried meat loaf.”

They moved slowly through the scrubland, browsing like contented cattle. Even Peth seemed quite lacking in any sense of urgency now. The sun rose higher, as hot as it had been before and yet no longer threatening.

“Peth,” Westerly said, “what is this place?”

“The Valley of the White Sea,” said the soft singing voice.

“Have you always been here? How do you live?”

“No place is totally dead,” Peth said. “Sooner or later the rains come. One needs only patience.” He bent his head, and uncoiled the long slender tube of his mouth into a flower.

Cally said, “Are there others like you?”

“Not altogether like.” Peth stood still in the sunshine, his skeleton body gleaming; he looked like some great prehistoric insect, the last of a species vanished for thousands of years. He said, “But Lugan's folk are everywhere. No one of us is like another. Even you two are not like one another.”

“Us?”

“Of course. You are in life—strongly in life, because you are young. So of course you are Lugan's folk.” His spindly legs tensed, and he turned away. “Come—a little further, and then we must rest. And then travel again.”

Cally tried to keep his attention. “Who is Lugan? Has Taranis killed him?”

Peth made a strange unnerving hissing sound; it was not anger or displeasure, but a kind of discomfort. “Can the night kill the day? Can the winter kill the spring?” He made the hissing sound again, and strode off rapidly through the flowering scrub.

B
y the time they had reached the edge of the mountains, the flowers in the desert were dying, and the leaves shrivelling. The sun's ferocity was master once more; they could feel it drawing out their own vitality just as it drew out all moisture from the things that grew. But they had water with them, and Ryan's oddly invigorating food, and a store of the astonishing white flower-buds which Peth had made them gather and put away in their packs. For him, Cally carefully picked a supply of the long-throated flowers from which they had seen him feed.

Peth bubbled at her with a laugh that had affection in it, but sadness too. “They will not live,” he said.

“Well, just for a while—won't they? Are we going far?”

The voice was totally sober for a moment. “Very far.”

Cally said nothing, but wrapped the flowers carefully in Ryan's shawl and packed them away.

The mountains towered over them, bleak and intimidating. They began as brown foot-hills of dry clay, fissured
and ridged so that it seemed impossible there should be a way up through them anywhere. Above, the peaks rose: hard grey rock, in crags and ravines reaching up out of sight into the sky.

They stood at the base, looking up. It was afternoon; the hot sun beat at them as if in triumph.

Westerly found himself feeling very small. He said, “Is there really a way up there?”

“Just one,” Peth said. “And I shall show you it. But it will be hard—harder than anything you have encountered yet in this hard land.” He was quiet for a moment, eye-stalks and antennae still, facing them. He said, “Where are you going?”

“You know so much,” Cally said in surprise, “you must know that.”

“Yes. But I want to hear.”

“To the sea,” she said.

“Westerly?”

“Yes,” Westerly said. “Over the mountains to the sea.”

Peth said, “It matters?”

“It matters more than anything,” Cally said at once. Then she paused. “I don't think either of us really knows why.”

“I do,” Westerly said belligerently. “My father's there. And maybe yours too, and your mother.”

She looked at him, expressionless.

“Well,” he said more slowly, “all right, no, we don't know for sure. But we do know it matters.”

“Keep that in your minds,” Peth said. “Whatever happens, believe that the journey is worth taking, and then you will reach its end.” The bright singing came back into his voice, and he danced forward up the first dark slope, light on his elegant stick-like legs. “Follow me now. There is only one way.”

Westerly called up after him, “Have you been up here before?”

Peth's voice came back faintly, cheerfully. “Have faith—have faith!”

He led them gradually up the beaten brown clay of the lower hills: a zig-zag way, across gaping fissures just narrow enough for a single step, along ridges that crumpled ominously as they put down their feet. There was no path, nor any sign of others having ever passed that way. Peth seemed simply to know which foothold would be safe, which slope would lead them up to another step, without dropping them into a ravine. Stepping lightly over cracks and boulders with his pad-footed jointed legs, he paused often to hold up his head. The antennae flickered, the eye-stalks swung to and fro, but he seemed too to be listening to some inner voice, a signal that Cally and Westerly could not hear.

As they climbed higher, the heat of the sun grew less oppressive; it no longer weighed on them like a huge heavy
hand as it had in the desert valley. The mountains too began to change, the hard stone-studded clay giving way to glittering grey rock, steep and craggy. There were fewer stretches now where they could climb without using hands as well as feet.

Peth stopped on a ledge; in the sunlight his iridescent limbs shimmered like the body of a fish newly taken from the water. He folded his spindly legs beneath him. “We will rest here.”

As she swung her pack down from her shoulder Cally found herself facing back the way they had come. She caught her breath.

The great valley lay spread below them, the mountain range at its further side only a dim blur on the horizon. There was no hint of green life on the plain now; only an immense grey sweep of land, blurring into white where the sand began. Very far away at one end of the valley, beyond the dunes, a brighter whiteness glimmered, merging into the haze where land met sky.

“The salt land,” Peth said, following her gaze.

Westerly said in awe, “We've come all that way?” He looked out at the vast lifeless landscape. “If it hadn't been for you—”

Peth sang a high note of laughter, though it seemed fainter and less bell-like than before. “We are all one, Westerly-bound. The bird cannot fly without the air, the squirrel cannot climb
without the tree. And the thinking creatures can neither fly nor climb except on each other's thoughts.”

Cally said curiously, “When you were looking for us —how did you know we were there?”

“By thinking,” Peth said. “The same thinking that made you sweetly gather those flowers.”

“Have some now.” Cally pulled Ryan's shawl out of her bag, laid it down on the ledge and carefully turned back the folds to reach the long bright blossoms she had picked for Peth. “Oh no!” she said in distress.

The flowers were dead: brown and withered as dead leaves.

Peth's feathery antennae brushed her hand comfortingly. “The gift was in the thinking,” he said. “You must understand that always.”

Westerly was sitting chin on knees, staring out at the heat-shimmering sand in the valley below. He said, “I've given up trying to understand anything.”

“Never do that,” Peth said.

“But—those shapes. With our faces. Chasing, and then gone. Real, and then nothing. Like the chessmen.”

Cally looked at him blankly. “Our faces? Chessmen?”

“It was something that happened. . . .” Westerly was looking intently at Peth. “The ones following,” he said persistently. “Who were they? Where did they go?”

Cally shivered. “They're gone—I don't care who they were. Let's not think about them.”

But Westerly ignored her. He reached out a finger to one of Peth's antennae. “You said not to give up trying to understand.”

The fragile antenna stroked his finger slowly, to and fro, absently, as if Peth were thinking. After a while the lilting voice said, “Before you came to this world, you thought yourself pursued. Men chasing you.”

Westerly heard in his mind the hammering at the door, the shouts outside. “Yes,” he said.

There was another pause. A breeze stirred the air where they sat. Peth said, “This world that you are in now—it is not your own, but it is an image of your own. An echo. It may not look or sound the same as your world at any one time, not in the way that an image in a mirror looks the same. And the laws by which it exists may not be the same, sometimes, as those you know.”