Seaward (12 page)

But he could not keep it out; like huge heartbeats the relentless sound hammered at him. The dream had turned to a nightmare. Before him, he saw in terror the ground begin to quake and heave in the same rhythm; the earth rose up, swelling and crumbling, snapping the root pillars aside. And then something burst through the ground in a cloud of dust and exploding dirt, and the giant throbbing suddenly stopped and was overtaken by a roar of breaking rock. A chasm split open at Westerly's feet, and out of it rose the black curve of a monstrous sinewy body, the arching back of a gigantic snake.

Westerly croaked, “Cally!” But she still walked on, oblivious, smiling, and he knew that she was lost as deep in her past happiness as he had been himself a moment before. He flung himself towards her, but it was too late. Rearing out of the splitting, widening cleft in the cavern floor, the body of the great black snake whirled out and looped itself round them, and swept them both down into the dark.

T
he darkness was laughing at her, embracing her; a voice filled it. She heard release and freedom and gaiety, all in the voice that came from nowhere and yet was everywhere, deep and easy and warm.

“Your time's your own,” said the voice. “Your life's your own, not hers. Don't be afraid of her, don't be afraid of anything. Follow your own way and enjoy it—what can she do to you? Stone faces, for goodness' sake! Stone people! All those pretentious games! Just keep your toes clear of her clodhopping creatures, and go where you want to go. You'll like the sea. Remember the breathing of the poplar trees? It sounds like that, the sea, and it feels like this —”

The darkness rocked her, gently, rhythmically; swaying in its grasp she laughed aloud for pleasure.

Then somewhere she heard Westerly's voice, clear, wary, challenging. “Who are you?”

The rhythm of her rocking was like music.

“I am Snake,” said the darkness. “You know me well.”

Dreamily Cally sensed Westerly's resistance. He said again, “Who are you?”

“Just now, my boy, I'm the saving of you,” the darkness said, with a touch of irritability. “Time Present and Time Future, yanking you back out of the past. You really must watch for her little tricks. Voices, lights, music—if you let them suck you in, she has you. And you have to be rescued—if you're lucky—by Snake, grabbing you in that unceremonious way. Though I must say you did better than our Cally here.”

Cally remembered. It was like a discord in the music. “But I heard my mother and father—”

“You heard nothing but memory,” said Snake sharply. “You must go on, to the sea.”

“I heard them,” Cally said. “They were
there.”

“They are everywhere and nowhere,” Snake said. He was like a voice from a dream. “They are not in the land of Taranis, not now.”

She said, “You mean they're dead, don't you?”

The voice sighed, and the sigh ran through her with the rhythm of the rocking. “Oh selkie girl, selkie girl—wherever they are, they have not become nothing, they are not gone as if they had never been. . . . Your world is all change, all journeying, and nothing that happens and no one that lives is ever lost. You above all should know that, Cally, selkie girl.”

There was a prickling in the palms of Cally's hands. “What do you mean—‘selkie girl'?”

“I will show you,” he said. The darkness whirled round her, and for a flash she saw his face, and it was the laughing bearded face of a man. Then it was gone, and she was lying on the air, turning, diving, and there was a blue-green light around her, misty and diffused, and she was not in air but in water. Cally who could not swim was swimming, delighting in speed, turning this way and that and up and down; no longer breathing, yet not conscious of holding her breath. She saw the deep sea below her, and in it a thousand schooling fish, all twisting in the same silver-flashing instant as if they were part of a single mind—and then breaking in a scatter of panic as sleek dark shapes dived down at them from above. She was swimming with her arms at her sides and her feet tight together, swimming with her turning body; she looked at the dark seals diving around her and knew that she was no longer Cally, but one of them. And between moving almost too fast to be seen, weaving and diving and doubling back on itself with all the joy of movement that Cally felt in herself. She heard his laughing and she knew that it was Snake, and knew too that she would never see him clearly; that he was not a separate being but a fierce distillation of feelings and powers that she had never yet properly known.

She rolled over in the still water and saw the bubbling
flurry of the waves above her head; heard their hissing rhythm distant in her ears.

Snake said into her mind, “Your oldest self is remembering—the part deep down that you cannot control, that comes from your ancestors who are forgotten. Even your mother had forgotten them, and her mother before her—no one had ever told them the truth. About the selkies, the seals who are human when they put aside their skins. . . .”

Cally swam round and about him, feeling her strange-familiar skin, watching the sliding coils of the dark body that would never stay still.

Snake said, “If a selkie should put aside her skin to swim as a girl, she is in danger. For a man may find it and take it, and then she cannot go back to the sea as a seal, but must follow him to beg for her skin. And if he hides it, she will have to live with him, marry him, bear his children, for as long as he keeps it hidden. She sings of the sea that she has lost, and her children and her children's children are born with webs between the fingers and toes, or a horniness of the skin of their hands, that goes on down the generations for ever. And always those of selkie blood dream of the sea, even if they have never seen it, and always the selkie-singing can fill them with the joy and the horror that their selkie ancestor felt on the day that she lost her skin.”

In the hissing of the waves Cally heard again in her memory the spectral singing that had been like her mother's
voice and yet not like, and she remembered her own fear, and the reaching out of her hands. “So some great-great-great-grandmother of mine, a long time ago—”

“—belonged to the selkie folk,” said Snake, “the folk that they call the Roane.”

Cally leapt through the water in a sudden flurry of understanding. “Ryan! That's what he kept hidden—
that's
why her hands —”

“Rhiannon of the Roane,” Snake sang into her mind, “Rhiannon of the Roane. . . .”

The whirling and the darkness came again, and the itching in Cally's palms, and she knew as she rubbed them that she was herself again, back from the sea, suspended in the nothingness into which Snake had carried them at the first. She thought of Westerly and instantly saw him: standing straight-backed and alert, his chin up . and his mouth a thin hard line, staring at something she could not see.

“West!” she said. “What is it?”

Westerly seemed not to hear her. She said in alarm to Snake, “What's wrong?”

“He holds to his nightmare,” said the deep voice all around her; there was compassion in it now instead of laughter. “He has more of Snake in him than you do, he is all confidence and delight when he is fully awake. But he has a haunting, and he will not let it die, it pursues him. . . .” He called out, “Westerly! Let go! You have no right to guilt,
your mother was killed—there was nothing you could have done—”

“I could have reached her sooner,” Westerly said, tense, miserable. “I could have moved her out of the way.”

“Let go, Westerly.” Snake's voice was gentle. “Taranis will do this to you if you let her, it is her nature. You mustn't let her. It is not your own mind you hear, it is Taranis —like the music of guilt and fear that sent Cally through the mirror. Westerly, listen to me.
It was not your doing. All living things die when it is their time.
Let go.”

Westerly said in anguish, “I could have helped, I should have helped. And they're coming—look, they're coming!” His voice rose, high with dread, and Cally felt desperate for him.

“Let me see,” she said urgently. “Let me see what he's seeing.”

“No,” Snake said. “My business is to anchor you in life, not to set you on a nightmare.”

But she could feel only the urge to share with Westerly. “Please—let me see!”

“Very well,” Snake said, resigned—and the darkness round Cally was all at once the darkness of a small child alone at night in a big empty house, full of uncertainty and formless fear. She too thought with terrible conviction,
they're coming
,
they're coming
and spun round nervously, hunting for shapes in shadows. And then she saw them.

They moved only very slowly, but the sense of pursuit was unbearable. She knew she was being followed, she knew she must run for her life. She threw all her strength into the effort to escape, and yet her body would not answer, but moved with immense crawling weight. Frantic, flinging herself forward, she crept like a snail. And they were gaining on her: two huge looming figures, dark, faceless, reaching out—

Cally shrieked. And at once Snake seized her back from the black imagining and carried her away, so that it was all gone from her mind as if she had never known it. He carried her away into a rocking music with sunlight in it, and the smell of lilacs, and the song of birds. New images wheeled round her mind; through green branches and flying clouds she saw a glimmer of Snake filling the world. It was the Snake of the sea. She saw the lithe sinuous body carrying her—and yet still within it the face of a man, laughing. The face belonged to the voice that had enveloped them and caught them back out of memory. For an infinite time he sang to her, rejoiced with her, caressed her; across her breasts and up through her body delight blazed like sudden fire, so that she felt herself wholly, fiercely in life in a way she had never known before. Her back arched with wonder, against a swaying floor, and she laughed aloud and opened her eyes to sunshine and a clear blue sky.

She was in a boat. Westerly lay motionless beside her,
propped on one elbow, watching. His eyes were dark-shadowed with baffled excitement, and a wary, formless jealousy. He said huskily, “What is it?”

Cally's smile was joyous, open. “Snake—”

Westerly turned abruptly away from her into the stern; the boat swayed. Cally sat up, and gasped at the sight of the world around them.

They were drifting slowly down a river, in a broad, flat-bottomed boat, through a haze of green light. Meadows stretched away from the grassy banks on either side, edged with flowering hedges and trees; massive willows leaned over the banks, trailing their long slender leaves in the water. Sunlight glittered through the branches.

“It's beautiful!” Cally said. “Where are we?”

Westerly said, not looking at her, “How would I know? On a river, in a boat.”

She stretched happily, reaching her face up to the sunshine. “Headed for the sea. Away from the tower, away from the People—”

“Without any oars.”

“Oh.” She looked round the boat vaguely. “Well, who needs oars? The river's taking us.”

Westerly said stiffly, “I'm sorry about your mother and father.”

Cally sat looking at the dark-green water moving past the sides of the boat. She said at last, “I think I knew, really.
They'd never have left me alone, otherwise. It's all right. Snake helped.”

“Yes,” Westerly said. He sat hunched in the stern of the boat, his arms round his knees. “Yes.”

Cally said hesitantly, “Have you ever—?”

“Ever what?”

“Nothing.” She picked a floating twig out of the water. “I suppose he brought us here.”

“I suppose he did,” Westerly said.

Cally looked at him curiously. “What's the matter, West?”

“Nothing,” he said coldly. “Nothing at all. I just think it's pretty remarkable how you can find out in one moment that your parents are probably dead, and then in the next be all happy and smiling because of—Snake.”

“It wasn't a moment,” Cally said, wondering. “It was a long time. And I think I'll see them again, somehow. He made me feel that. He took the pain away.”

Westerly made a small scornful sound like a laugh, unsmiling. “He certainly did.”

“Westerly, what's the
matter
with you? Whatever Snake is, whoever he is, he saved us. He took us away from there. That's the only thing that's important.”

“Other things are important too,” Westerly said. He sat upright, his face enclosed, expressionless. “Look, I think you'll do better if I'm not around. I don't feel like very
good company at the moment. Snake seems to have made you feel you're on your way to the sea—I expect he'll make sure you get there. Maybe I'll see you then.”