Seaward (6 page)

She found the broad dark-green leaves of dock easily in the long grass, growing in scattered clumps, and she filled the basket. Beyond the meadow, a huge stone wall twice her height stretched into the wood and out of sight; it seemed to have no purpose, enclosing nothing, marking no particular boundary. But it was newly-built, with trampled land and splintered young trees all around it. She imagined the clumsy crashing of the People, their handless arms raising great boulders into place, and shuddered. But she found sand for Ryan: silvery sand in little heaps all up and down the wall, from the crushing of the rock.

When she went back to the door of the house, fully open now, she paused at the step in surprise. All the grey-white floor was neatly patterned with criss-crossed strips of green; it was like a carpet. But it was not a carpet; she could see Ryan on her knees at the far corner of the room, making the last part of the pattern by rubbing a bunch of leaves hard against the floor so that they left a green stain.

Ryan looked up. “Good! Just in time! There's the elder done—now the dock, to finish it.” And Cally saw that round the edge of the floor she had left a blank space about a foot wide.

She said, “It's pretty.”

“And useful,” Ryan said a trifle grimly, but she did not explain what she meant. “Now do you come in with that sand, and sprinkle it all evenly across here.” She pointed to
the broad hearthstone in front of the fire, which she had scrubbed clean of ash and soot.

Cally came in, stepping carefully between the green patterning. Obediently she sprinkled the hearthstone, then sat watching, still and silent, as Ryan finished rubbing her pattern with the dock leaves round the edge of the floor. The old woman heaved herself to her feet. She looked tired, her face more lined.

“Now the last thing.”

Crossing to the hearth, she took from the mantel a slab of blue stone the size of her fist; kneeled again and began rubbing it on the sanded surface, slowly, deliberately. She drew lines of crosses, crossed each with another cross, then swept the sand away with a brush so that the pattern stood out clear and blue on the hearth.

“There,” she said, sitting back on her heels. “Safe for a month, now. No need to keep from walking on it, child—it will stay and stay.”

“Safe?” Cally said.

“Protected,” Ryan said, biting off the word like a piece of thread; her small lined face was suddenly secret, enclosed. She had Cally help her pull back the heavy wooden chairs and table piled against the wall; then she poured two mugs of steaming fragrant tea from a big brown teapot. She gave Cally one, with a plateful of small flat cakes speckled with currants.

Sitting down, she said abruptly, “Where are you going?”

Cally said, “I don't know.” She hesitated. “If I were in my own world, I'd be going to a place by the sea where my parents are. Only—I don't think they'd be there any more.” She looked down at her cup, unseeing.

“The sea links all worlds,” Ryan said gently. “But Stonecutter would set you to work?”

For a moment Cally was silent, lost; then she looked up. “I'm sorry. Yes, that's what he said.” She sipped her tea. “This smells so good. Like raspberries.”

“Raspberry and camomile,” Ryan said absently. She was looking at Cally, but her creased-about eyes were blank, as if she saw only her own mind. “You must not stay long,” she said, “or he will never let you go. He will keep you for her.”

The tea and cakes were making Cally feel herself again. She said, puzzled, “Her?”

“She who brought you here. She whose land this is.” Ryan pointed at Cally's mug. “Take your cup to the door, child, and do what I shall tell you. I will give you more tea in a moment.
Now.”

There was a sudden urgency in the word. Cally got up, wondering, and crossed to the open door.

“Swirl the cup twice, and throw out the tea onto the ground. Then bring the cup back to me.”

Dutifully Cally tossed the golden liquid out of the mug;
it glittered for a moment in the sunshine as it fell. But in the same moment she paused, arrested, staring out across the clearing to the edge of the straggling trees. There was a patch of bright blue against the green, unmistakable: the blue of the hooded figure she had seen in the wood.

She blinked—and nothing was there.

Ryan said, “What's the matter?”

“Nothing.” Cally brought her the mug, patterned inside now with the broad wet leaves left by the tea. Ryan set it on her dark woollen skirt and peered inside, turning it slowly in both hands.

“Yes. Two gone, and a travelling. . . . And another traveller, to go by your side. A tower by the lake, a tower full of dreams and danger. And the sea, yes, and—now what is
that
—?”

She broke off, and looked up at Cally with a curious new expression on her small seamed face: a mixture of pleasure and surprise and a kind of wariness. She said, “Show me your hands.”

Cally hesitated, then reluctantly held out her hands, palm upward. “They're . . . not very pretty,” she said.

Ryan gazed at the thickened, horny skin on each palm, tracing it gently with a forefinger. “Yes,” she said softly, but it was not an answer. “Well, well . . . yes. . . .” Her bright eyes flickered up to Cally's. “Did your mother sing?”

“Yes,” said Cally in astonishment. “How did you know?
She used to sing to me when—” She stopped, suddenly remembering the voice that had been like her mother's and yet not like.

And all at once, in the same moment, the air was full of singing; it was back again, the high sweet wordless music that had driven her from that world into this. But it was gentle now, as it had been at the first; soft, beckoning. And it was not in the room or in the house, but outside, in the sunshine and the trees.

Cally turned instinctively to look out—and found herself face to face with a hooded figure in a blue robe, framed against the sky in the doorway, looking in.

C
ally gasped, and jumped backwards away from the door. Beside her Ryan was standing stiff and tense, all the smiling lines of her face drawn straight. She was gazing at the figure in hostile challenge.

“You may not come in,” she said.

The blue-robed figure raised one hand, and the music that filled the air died away. Then the hand went to the deep folds of the hood and pulled it down, and Cally saw that it was a woman who stood there. Against the bright sky her face was lost in shadow, but the sun blazed in her hair as if it were spun glass.

“Oho,” she said softly, looking down at the green-patterned floor. “Rhiannon, daughter of the Roane, you are not welcoming.”

Ryan said, unmoving, “Nor shall I ever be.”

“Not even for the sake of our Cally here?” The woman purposely moved so that the sunlight fell on her, and Cally caught her breath. It was the lined pale face, blue-eyed, old
yet ageless, of the woman who had come to take her father away.

Ryan said in warning, “It is the Lady Taranis. Do not listen to her.”

“But I know her,” Cally said. “She took my father away to a hospital, by the sea. And my mother, to be with him.” She came forward eagerly. “Have you seen her? Is she all right?”

“Everything is all right,” Taranis said, but she was looking past Cally, at Ryan, and there was a coldness in her blue eyes. She said sharply, “Do not hinder me. You have not the power.”

“I have the power,” Ryan said. “This is my house.”

“But you are in my country—which none can leave without my willing it. As you know, Rhiannon.” She smiled, and there was a hint of malice in the smile that made Cally uneasy. But then the blue eyes were on hers again, shining with warmth. “Come with me, Cally. I will take you to the sea, to your mother and your father, and you will be safe again. All together.”

Cally felt Ryan take her hand; small strong fingers, holding fast. “She will go,” Ryan said. “But in her own time, and her own way.”

Cally could feel the force of Taranis' nature reaching out for her like a wave. “Come,” said the soft coaxing voice. “Cally, come with me.”

“Do not move,” Ryan said in her ear. “But hold out your hand to her, and ask her to take it.”

“Come,” said the Lady Taranis.

Cally reached out her hand. She said nervously, “Here.”

Ryan said again at her ear, the lilt of her accent very strong now, “The patterning that I was telling you, the greening of the floor, it is a protection against all harm. None who would work harm may cross it. So now you may see.”

Taranis smiled at Cally. “First you must come out.”

Cally said nothing, but stood motionless with her hand outstretched, and Taranis' pale beautiful face grew angry. For an instant she made as if to move forward, but it was as if she were on the other side of a glass wall, invisibly held back. Glaring at Ryan, she flung round towards the yard, her blue cloak swirling, and she called in a high clear voice, “Stonecutter!”

He came with a great rumbling and shaking of the earth, the huge faceless forms of the People around him.

“What have you been doing?” she said.

He looked at her without emotion. “Building walls.”

“Build one round this house!” said Taranis fiercely. “Keep your Rhiannon inside it for ever!”

“I mean to,” Stonecutter said.

Ryan's fingers tightened on Cally's hand. From the figures outside there rose a long deep murmur like the sound
of a gigantic swarm of bees, and Cally realised with a chill that there must be far more of them out there now than before.

“As for the girl,” Taranis said, “I shall come back for her.”

There was a flicker like the shadow of a bird crossing the sun, and a quiver of high singing voices too brief to catch, and in the next moment she was no longer there.

Ryan's fingers relaxed. Stonecutter came in through the doorway. “Is supper ready?” he said, as if nothing had happened.

“It will be, when you are washed. Come, Cally.” The old woman turned, with a quick swish of her long dark skirt like a girl moving, and Stonecutter went outside again; Cally heard from the side wall of the house the creaking metallic sound of a pump, and water splashing. Ryan was stirring a pot on the stove; she gestured for Cally to fetch plates from a shelf.

Cally said urgently, “But my mother and father—where are they? What will she do?”

“Nothing. They are safe from her now. Be patient for a little, child—we cannot talk yet.”

In silence, they ate a stew of meat and unfamiliar vegetables, with some strange sweet-tasting greens which Cally, to her surprise, wolfed down as eagerly as the meat. “This is good!” she said.

Ryan smiled at her.

“You baked no bread today,” Stonecutter said, chewing; his lean face was dour and preoccupied. He offered no thanks ever, nor gave Ryan any word of praise; watching him, Cally wondered if he had ever smiled.

“It was the day for the floor,” Ryan said.

“You are a fool to make your patterning. It does no good—the power of the land is all hers. Why make her angry?”

Ryan said quietly, “I will not be her creature. Or yours.”

“Nor will you leave,” he said. “The wall is already there—the People have seen to that.”

Cally turned in her chair to look out at the yard. All round the house, out at the edge. of the trees, the massive stone figures had been standing in a silent ominous line. Now the sun was going down, and the shadow of the trees had overtaken them—and where they had stood, there was now a long unbroken barrier of rock.

Ryan said, “It is not your walls that keep me here.”

Stonecutter shrugged. “The door has always been open, if you had cared to . . . leave things behind. Perhaps the wall is for the girl.”

Cally stood up suddenly. “Please let me go,” she said.

He looked at her with dismissive surprise, as if the chair had spoken. “I offered shelter, and you took it. And the Lady Taranis chooses to have you stay. It is almost sundown—go to bed.”

Cally opened her mouth to argue, but Ryan took her hand firmly again and led her to a mattress close to her own bed in the back room of the house. “I will wake you,” she said in a whisper.

•  •  •

But Cally woke of her own accord, in the darkness, to the sound of Ryan's soft breathing and the glimmer of moonlight on the wall. She had been dreaming, she knew, but in the moment that she woke the dream flickered away and would not come back; she knew only that it had woken her, like a calling.

She lay there miserable and lost, clutching the blankets round her. Everything that had been firm and certain in her life seemed to have melted away like spring snow: her home, her parents, even the awareness of herself, like a reflection in a mirror, that she had always had inside. She thought,
I don't know who I am, I don't know what to do—
and there was an ache in her throat, and she wept silently into the rough linen pillow.