by Susan Cooper
The man smiled a little. “Well?”
“Eyes like an owl,” Westerly said. “Weird.” He grinned suddenly, and went in through the log-framed door.
The brightness inside made him pause, blinking. It was a single arched room, running the length of the house; lanterns burned on all four walls and on a rough wooden table set in the middle, and flames leapt in a high stone fireplace that filled the far wall.
The man in gold latched the door behind them and swung off his long cloak; he was still a regal figure, in jerkin and trousers as tawny-gold as his eyes.
Westerly said, “Who are you?”
“I knew your mother once,” the man said.
“In that country or in this?”
“In both.”
“But who are you?”
“Lugan,” said the man. “You may call me Lugan. And while you are in my house, give no thought to those who may follow you. Sit down.”
He crossed to the fire and took the cover from a black iron pot standing beside it; the smell that rose filled Westerly’s mouth with water, and his stomach felt suddenly as if it were flat and empty against his spine. Lugan filled two bowls with a thick aromatic soup heavy as a stew; set them on the table and broke chunks from a loaf of dark crusty bread. “Eat,” he said, smiling. “That was a small fish, and it was a long time ago.”
Westerly was too hungry for wonder; they sat opposite one another at the table, and there was no talk for a while. Then he said through a mouthful, “D’you know everything that happens?”
Lugan sat playing with a piece of bread, frowning a little, the youthful lines of his face turned sombre with thought. He said at length, “I am your . . . watchman. As a hawk hangs watching in the sky, I see those things that happen to you—but only when they are happening, not before. Sometimes I may intervene. Not always. There are perils in this country, but there are also laws —and while you journey here, I watch that neither you nor anyone else break those laws.”
Westerly chewed on a crust. “You’re a sort of policeman.”
The big man snorted with laughter, and shook his head. “I do what I choose. Did your mother never speak of me?”
Westerly shook his head. “She taught me—” He hesitated. “She taught me some things ordinary people don’t learn. She was —special. She talked about my father a lot, and she always said that one day I’d go off to look for him. And that the same people who’d taken him away would come after me. She didn’t say anything about you—or the lady.”
Lugan stood up abruptly, his head almost brushing the ceiling. “No. The Lady Taranis is not often spoken of, anywhere.” He sighed. “Taranis. She is brightness and she is darkness, she is kind and she is cruel. She is —unpredictable. This is her country. And so perhaps is the one from which you came.”
He reached one long arm up to a shelf on the rough log wall, and brought down a wooden box. Westerly looked at it curiously. All its sides and top were intricately carved with the forms of dragons, coiling and interweaving, with tiny red gems set in their scaly heads for eyes. Lugan took a key from his pocket and unlocked the box.
“I cannot keep her from you,” he said. “She will come whenever she chooses. Sometimes she may help you, sometimes her treachery will engulf you like a wave. The only protection I can give you against the lady is this.”
He lifted the lid of the dragon box and took out a small bundle wrapped in red cloth, the corners knotted together over the top. He held it out. Westerly took it gingerly; it was heavy and oddly-shaped, but no larger than his fist.
Lugan said, “Do not untie the knots until you need strength. And then take care. She will—”
He broke off suddenly, his head up, listening. He said abruptly, “Cover your ears.”
But the sound was already filling Westerly’s head and mind, the high sweet wordless singing, filling every corner of the room: soft, gentle, yet totally overwhelming. He felt the music all around him as if it were water, as if he were drowning; he could not tell where it came from. He clutched the edge of the table. In a blur he saw Lugan’s lean face dark with anger, but he too seemed held powerless by the singing. And then, out of the music, the Lady Taranis was in the room.
Her white hair glinted in the firelight; the blue robe shimmered like a sunlit sea. She stood beside them, looking bright-eyed at the little cloth-wrapped bundle in Westerly’s hand.
“Presents,” he said petulantly, looking up at Lugan. “You never give me presents.”
His deep voice was expressionless. “You have always taken what you wanted.”
Taranis shook her head, smiling. “I try to,” she said. “But sometimes I am prevented.” She laughed, and turned her head to Westerly; he gazed fascinated at the brilliant blue of her eyes. “And here is our chance-taker,” she said, “who is travelling to the sea, and has the wit not always to do what he is told. I like that, Westerly. You will do well—if they do not catch you first.”
Westerly said, resentment making him bold, “And if I’m not turned into thin air, like a chessman off a board.”
She laughed again, like a delighted child. “How could you think I would let that happen?” The warmth in her voice was like an embrace; Westerly could feel it wrapping him round, easing away his wariness. He made himself resist it. Staring at her, he eased his hand down beside his chair to his pack; his fingers quietly slipped the knotted bundle inside, and took firm hold of the carrying strap.
Taranis held his gaze. Her voice came low and coaxing. “Come with me, Westerly. I will take you to the sea, and there shall be no more pursuing and no more peril. Come with me, and I will send you over the ocean, to the land of the Tir n’An Og, the ever-young, where there is neither loss nor age nor pain. You will find your father there.”
Westerly could feel the tense stillness of Lugan’s big figure across the table. He said, “That may be what I shall find, in the end. But I must go seaward on my own.”
Taranis said softly, “Oho.” She flicked a glance at Lugan, the blue eyes suddenly cold; then smiled again at Westerly. There was an edge to the voice now. “I could take you, if I chose. Because I like your looks. Oh yes, I could take you.”
Lugan’s deep voice said quietly, “I think not.”
She swung round to him, glaring. “We shall see.”
Before Westerly could take a breath, she moved one swift step backwards, a whirl of blue and white, and she raised one arm and pointed. And from every stub and knot-hole in the logs that were the walls, all at once branches were growing, twining, reaching out; green leaves brushed their faces, and sprays of blossom fragrant as spring. The house was a woodland suddenly; there were no more walls, but a gentle jungle of leaves and bloom and scented air. Westerly’s fingers clenched hard round the strap that they held; it was the one firm point in a world of dream. He could no longer see Lugan through the leafy branches.
But he could see the Lady Taranis. She was younger now, many years younger, the blue eyes glowing in a smooth sweet face no older than his own. Her white-blonde hair was a cloud of curls like the tendrils of the honeysuckle twining over his shoulders, and she wore flowers in her hair. She laughed at him, and reached out her hands, white and young and beckoning. She belonged to the leaves and the blossom and the greenwood, and she was calling him there, to fleet the time carelessly, as they did in the golden world. . . .
He ached suddenly with the burden of loneliness that he carried always now; he yearned for brightness and laughter and the spring. And perhaps he would have reached out his hand to hers and gone with her—but there was all at once a hissing through the rustle of the wind in the leaves, and a dark look of rage and alarm twisted Taranis’ young face. And through the lovely wilderness around them came twining and twisting the scaly spined bodies of dragons, golden and green and brown. Like great armoured eels they crashed through the graceful trees, their spiny folded wings ripping the leaves, their long teeth agape and gleaming. Their red eyes shone like live coals fanned by the wind. W
esterly leapt backwards, clutching his pack like a shield, and a strong hand took him by the shoulder.
Lugan was towering over him, his craggy face stern. In his other hand he held the carved wooden box, and from its writhing sides the dragons were leaping out, growing monstrously as they came, hissing and crackling like fire. His deep voice came low and urgent.
“Go, boy—go westerly, as you are named. Go your own way to the sea, in what company you choose. Follow the sun. I shall watch for you.”
A high terrible shriek rose from the tumult around them.
“But Taranis —”
“Go!”
He swung Westerly about, and sent him stumbling through the trees.
And in a whirling moment all the turbulent noise was gone. There were no enveloping fragrant blossoms, no seething dragons; there was no Taranis, no Lugan. There was only a silent woodland of towering wide-set beech trees, their grey trunks reaching high to a green canopy overhead, and the only sound was the rustle of Westerly’s feet treading the brown carpet of dead fallen leaves.
He walked blindly on through the wood, in the sunlight filtering down through the roof of branches, and he began to hear the music of water running. He came to a stream tumbling through the trees, and he followed it to a place of slower, deeper music, where abruptly the woodland ended and the stream lost itself in the broad waters of a river.
Westerly stood on a rocky bluff, looking out. The river was wide and smooth as a giant highway; moving slowly, but ruffled by rapids in the distance where it turned a bend. Thickets of alder and poplar lined the far bank, with the beech trees rising again behind them. Looking directly down at the water from the high bank on which he stood, he saw a small boat moored below.
He scrambled down. It was a battered wooden dinghy with two thwarts: old, but dry inside. Two oars lay in the bottom, and a small anchor with a coil of line. The boat was tied up to an iron post set firmly into the bank; it lay there rocking gently, pulled backwards by the tug of the current.
Westerly hesitated for a moment, held by memories of all the hours he had spent helping boatmen on the broad river near his home. Then he threw his backpack into the boat and climbed in after it. Lying in the centre of the coil of anchor line he found three brass rowlocks. He picked them up, feeling the warmth of the sun in the metal, and looked for the holes set for them: two in the sides of the boat, one in the stern. The boat was an exact copy of those he had always known. He fitted in the stern rowlock, and pulled out one oar to be ready for it. Then he looked at the bow line tied to the post, and hesitated again. Even in this country, he had scruples about taking a stranger’s boat, uninvited. “There are laws,” Lugan had said.
But they were not the laws of policemen.
The dinghy rocked as Westerly moved, and below one thwart a bright point of light caught his eye. Crouching, he reached down. The light blinked red. He picked up a piece of wood half the length of his hand, hard to see against the wooden bottom of the boat. It was carved in the shape of a dragon, and set with two tiny red gems for eyes.
Westerly looked at the dragon: at the delicately carved scales and the small sharp teeth. Then he slipped it into his pack, and with a new confidence cast off the boat from the iron post. Its bow swung slowly round in the current. Westerly set the oar in the stem rowlock and stood there to scull. With a tug, the water caught the dinghy and carried it out into midstream, travelling with the river, travelling wherever the river might go.
In the blue sky overhead, a small hawk hung in the air, looking down, watching.
CHAPTER 5
Cally stepped through the mirror, out of the room, and the world blurred as if she were swimming underwater. Then her eyes cleared and she was walking, walking down a broad path with tall, straight-trunked pine trees towering dark on either side. She looked back. Nothing was there but the pine trees. A soft layer of needles covered the path, and her footsteps made no sound. At the edge of the trees, ferns grew green in a thick fringe. Far overhead, where the pines reached together in a high arch, she could hear the wind in the treetops, breathing.
Cally walked slowly, automatically. She felt dazed, detached, as if she were living a dream. Where am I? How did I get here? Where am I going? Half-formed, half-heard, the questions floated aimlessly at the back of her mind.
The path seemed to have no end. Before her and behind, it stretched on and on, dwindling into the darkness of the trees. Sometimes as she walked she thought she could hear a distant thudding like the chopping of wood, but whenever she paused to listen, it died away. Then ahead, at the edge of the trees, she saw a signpost.
It stood beside the path among the tall feathery ferns, pointing into the forest. Its post was green with lichen, and Cally could see no word written on its blank pointing arm. In the direction of its pointing, there was no trace of a trail cut through the woods. There was nothing but the trees. The signpost pointed nowhere.
Yet it gave her a direction; it was better than the endless straight shadowed path. She plunged through the ferns and into the trees, following the signpost’s blind finger.
Almost at once she was lost. The ground was rough and treacherous, hummocked with moss-covered boulders and rotting branches that caught at her feet. Stumbling through the trees, ducking beneath dead trunks that leaned against the living, Cally turned this way and that, fighting her way through low leafless twigs with her hands up to shield her face. Overhead a squirrel chattered shrilly at her, but she could not see it. Sometimes she found herself clambering over small rocks piled in long broken heaps, as if they were the fallen remnants of what had long ago been walls. But the wood had swallowed the walls, grown over and through them.
She thought again that she heard the thudding of an axe somewhere far off, but could not tell it from the rhythm of the blood beating in her ears.
The pines were thinning out now; they were smaller, with ferns and scrubby undergrowth between them, and Cally could see broken cloud in the sky above. Then, looking ahead, she saw something among the trees that was not a tree: a dark, straight pillar half as tall again as a man. She went towards it; then caught her breath and stood still.
It was a pillar of granite; its white-flecked surface gleamed dully in the grey light. But it had a head. Carved into the top of the pillar, so lifelike that it seemed about to move, was the face of a woman. The features were clear and beautiful, framed by long waving hair that flowed down and into the rough-cut stone beneath; the mouth smiled, and the eyes were welcoming. There was a gentle kindliness in the face that made Cally feel warm, cherished, as if the sun shone. She looked at it for a long time, feeling her taut wariness gradually relax—until she moved a step further, and saw the other side.
At the back of the head, another face was carved, staring out in the opposite direction. The long rippling hair was the same, merged with the hair of the first. But this face was startlingly different. There were the same clear-cut features, but now they were cold and stern; the mouth was a thin cruel line, and the eyes bored into Cally’s with a dreadful chill menace that made her skin prickle with fear. Instinctively she moved aside, but the eyes seemed to follow, relentlessly holding her own.
Cally moved hastily backward to the mildness of the first stone face. But it no longer reassured her; she could not force out the image of the second, waiting on the other side. Then beyond the pillar, she caught sight of a figure standing some way off among the trees. It wore a blue cloak, with a hood pulled over the head: a bright shout of colour in the sombre wood. It stood very still, the dark opening of the hood turned towards Cally, as if it were watching her.
For a moment Cally felt cold with fright; she stood rigid, her fingernails digging into the palms of her hands. But the gentle stone face smiling at her from the pillar gave her confidence once more, and she took a deep breath.
“Hi!” she called, waving one arm at the cloaked figure. “Hi!”
She moved forward, still waving—and suddenly the figure was no longer there.
Cally blinked. Her eyes had been fixed on the patch of blue, and she knew that it had not moved—and there was no cover among the small scrubby trees that could hide it. She paused, unhappy and irresolute, and glanced back at the pillar. Unexpectedly the fierce cold stare of the terrifying second face blazed full at her. Cally looked quickly away. Longing to run, she made herself walk deliberately away through the stunted pines, all the time feeling the stare of the cold stone eyes at her back, until the pillar was out of sight.
She was out in bright daylight now, under a sky filled with drifting clouds. Nearby, a great boulder twice her height rose from the scrubland. Feeling very small and alone, Cally sat down on the edge of the rock to rest. What would she do when night came if she were still wandering over this empty land? She felt in the pocket of her jeans, but produced nothing but a handkerchief, a stub of pencil and a broken comb. Shoving them despondently back again, she leant one hand on the rock—and jumped up at once as if she had been burned. Though this seemed a warm spring day, the surface of the giant boulder was cold as ice: terrifyingly cold, as if all the warmth of the air had been sucked out of it.
Staring at the rock, Cally backed slowly away from it, feeling once more a rising sense of unease, and the beginning of panic. As she watched, a ray of sunlight slanted briefly down from a break in the clouds. It rested on the boulder, brightening the smooth grey rock.
And there came suddenly a cracking, grinding sound, and a rumbling through the earth all around, and Cally saw the boulder move. She thought wildly of earthquakes, but the ground did not shake; instead the giant rock shifted and split and writhed apart, as if it were alive. Watching incredulously, she saw it take shape, two particular shapes, until suddenly there was no boulder at all but two huge figures, standing, turning to her.
