Seaward by Susan Cooper Read Free Book Online

there?”
    â€œNo,” Cally said, smiling. “My mum walks about on dusters, when she’s been polishing. That is —she used to.” Her smile died suddenly, and she felt a choking in her throat.
    The woman looked at her shrewdly, and reached out and gave her hand a quick light touch. But she asked no questions. “Tired, you are,” she said. “A cup of tea, and something to eat. But first I must finish my floor. What’s your name?”
    â€œCally. He—” Cally gestured vaguely at the yard. “He told me to come in here.
    â€œOh yes,” the woman said comfortably. “You would not be here if Stonecutter had not sent you in.”
    â€œHe said, she can work with Ryan.”
    â€œThat’s me. And indeed you can.”
    Cally said hesitantly, “Mrs. Ryan?”
    â€œNo, my dear, just Ryan. It is a shortening, of a name harder for the tongue.” She became brisk, looking round the room critically. “Now let me see. I have the elder leaves, I need the dock. Do you know dock leaves?”
    Cally was startled. “Yes. The kind you rub on nettle stings?”
    Ryan nodded approvingly. She reached to a shelf and took down a basket. “Now do you go out there and bring me back four handfuls of good green dock. And—oh—” She reached again, and put a small dark pottery bowl in the basket. “And a handful of sand.”
    â€œSand,” Cally said blankly.
    â€œEasy to find. Where Stonecutter is, there’s always sand.” She stood smiling at Cally like a small perky bird.
    Baffled, Cally went back out into the sunshine with the basket. She turned away from the muffled thunder that was Stonecutter and the People at work, into a meadow beside the house. It stretched in a long lush sweep to the distant edge of the trees; as she wandered through the grass, she was puzzled, and did not know why. In a little while she realised: though trees and bushes and plants grew luxuriantly everywhere around the house, nowhere could she see a single flower.
    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.”
    â€œAnd 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 tothe 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.
    â€œNow the last thing.”
    Crossing to