Seaward
By Susan Cooper
4/5
()
About this ebook
His name is West. Her name is Cally. They speak different languages and come from different countries thousands of miles apart, but they do not know that. What they do know are the tragedies that took their parents, then wrenched the two of them out of reality and into a strange and perilous world through which they must travel together, understanding only that they must reach the sea. Together, West and Cally embark upon a strange and sometimes terrifying quest, learning to survive and to love—and, at last, discovering the true secret of their journey.
Susan Cooper
Susan Cooper is one of our foremost fantasy authors; her classic five-book fantasy sequence The Dark Is Rising has sold millions of copies worldwide. Her books’ accolades include the Newbery Medal, a Newbery Honor, the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award, and five shortlists for the Carnegie Medal. She combines fantasy with history in Victory (a Washington Post Top Ten Books for Children pick), King of Shadows, Ghost Hawk, and her magical The Boggart and the Monster, second in a trilogy, which won the Scottish Arts Council’s Children’s Book Award. Susan Cooper lives on a saltmarsh island in Massachusetts, and you can visit her online at TheLostLand.com.
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Reviews for Seaward
143 ratings10 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Cally pushes herself through a mirror to escape an endless, unearthly voice. Westerly escapes his pursuers through a hidden doorway. They each find themselves in another world, where magic and thought have power beyond their imagining. This is very much a coming of age adventure story, full of chases and near-escapes, but it is told in such beautiful language that I found myself re-reading the descriptions of the countryside.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Lyrical, mythological, beautifully written. I first read this years ago, and now, having re-read it, like it even more. My favorite character is Peth, an ancient insect-being who leads Westerly and Calliope with all his heart and life. If I could meet a book character, Peth is whom I'd choose.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5More than 25 years later, I still remember parts of this book vividly. I'm afraid to reread it and ruin the memories. *g*
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This is a lovely, lovely book. The tone and quality of the writing reminds me very much of Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising sequence, although it seems in some ways more mature than that sequence. It's the first book in a while that I just couldn't put down once I got started -- I stayed up late to finish reading it. Fortunately, it's quite a quick read, so that didn't matter too much. It's also the first book in a long, long while to make me think that I couldn't actually go to Cardiff without taking it with me, just so that I could sometimes pick it up and reread a favourite part to make me smile.
I love the relationship between West and Cally. Somehow, in such a short book, Susan Cooper builds up a love story that I really feel and want to follow. The build-up of awareness between them is well done, even in so short a space. And the ending is beautiful -- the knowledge that they will find each other. It's enough, in a way, too: I would read more, and I do want more, but I feel it ends on just the right note, and neither too early nor too late.
The world of the story is magical, drawing on Celtic myth and making up a mythology of its own, as well. I love the descriptions of the world -- the chess game, the tower, Snake, Peth...
I'll definitely be revisiting this book. Probably many times. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This is the first time I've read Seaward. Don't know how it would have struck me when I was a teen because I turned 29 the year it was first published. It reminds me a little of George MacDonald's Lilith, but not as dark. Cally and Westerly are good people. I liked Lugan, Ryan, and Peth, too. I might have felt sorry for Lady Taranis if she didn't create her own trouble. Stonecutter was a selfish twit. The origin of the People was... fitting.Although written for young adults, it's well worth reading for those of us adults who won't let that label stop us from enjoying a good book. If you're one of the readers who share my disappointment with the end of the Dark is Rising pentalogy or sequence), don't worry. The end of Seaward didn't disappoint.David Wiesner is the artist for the cover which shows Lugan with the wooden box in one hand and the knotted red cloth. A golden dragon and Snake are behind him. Within his open cloak we see the sea, the white wall with the gates, and the Lady Taranis.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I was one of those rare children that came to Seward before I came to The Dark is Rising. So, years later, when I did an internet search with a few vague keywords during the dark hours of a read-a-thon to try and re-find this childhood novel that I half remembered I was shocked (no, seriously, shocked) to discover that it was by none other than Susan Cooper. And then… I wasn’t shocked at all.In a lot of ways Seaward is a short story version of all the things that made The Dark is Rising so incredibly awesome. The magic, the danger, the young people caught up and confused in an grown ups plot, all combined to make this a tense journey as West and Cally attempt to make it to the sea and to find answers to why they are there.The symbolism in this book is amazing. There is no way I got all of this the first time around. Everything from the many faces of death, to the constant rebirth of life, from the people of stone, to the selkie, to Snake all had many meanings and additional ramifications that were often just hinted at (since this IS just a YA novel). I have to admit Snake bothered me the first time around but after some thought I decided to think of him as an inner expression and not an outward standalone person. Before snakes were given such a bad rap in genesis to deter other religions who glorified the animal, snakes and women were once considered in the same mysterious light. Snakes shed their skin, women bled, and yet they both kept on living, a predominant theme in this book, continued life against all odds.With the overall message of life and hope amidst death and destruction, I found this book to be really uplifting and much more powerful the second time around. The symbolism was amazing and multi-layered reaching out to all sorts of different audiences at different ages. Cally and West were an inspiring couple to read about and it was touching watching them discover the world, the journey and ultimately each other along the way. You root for them from page one, and their story is a roller-coaster of magic, excitement and mystery to the last page. I really recommend reading this forgotten Susan Cooper story, or re-reading if you read it once long ago, especially if you are a fan of The Dark is Rising. You won't regret it.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This was one of my favorite books when I was a teenager, and it's one that has stayed in my head since I first read it, what feels like decades ago. The story focuses on two teenagers, Cally and West. Both are running metaphorically and literally, respectively, from both the common stresses of teenage life and from larger, more uncommmon stresses. They end up in a strange land ruled by two ambiguous figures, who each angle to use the young people for their own ends. Together, the two must find their way to the sea and home--but nothing is ever quite that simple, not even the final choice to go home.Cooper revisits many of the same themes from her Dark is Rising Sequence, but with greater refinement and sophistication. The novel is clearly aimed for a higher age-group as well, which allows for this more complex examination of life, death, good, bad, and love. Crisp prose, likable and empathetic characters, and a good dose of mysticism come together to make an extremely enjoyable and well-written book.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I didn't like it as much as The Dark is Rising Sequence, but it is definitely worth a read for Cooper fans.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A stand-alone fantasy, to me strongly reminiscent of the tales of George MacDonald (or of C. S. Lewis), but with a pagan Celtic rather than a Christian subtext. Cally and West, two teenagers from our world who have lost their parents, find themselves somewhere else, a world of woods and streams, deserts and mountains, where there seem to be rules and dangers about which they know nothing. They find that they must make a quest to the sea, but the ruler of the land, the Lady Taranis, seeks to thwart them. They are variously helped, as one might expect, and learn something of Life and Death. There are episodes which remain stubbornly inexplicable, and some incoherent aspects to the secondary world, but the book is definitely a page-turner. MB 23-i-08
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5An exhilarating novel! It's strongly reminiscent of Cooper's "The Dark Is Rising" sequence, but with a slightly older audience in mind. It also brings to mind Madeline L'Engle's _A Wrinkle In Time_. Great stuff.
Book preview
Seaward - Susan Cooper
CHAPTER 1
Westerly came down the path at a long lope, sliding over the short moorland grass. His pack thumped against his back with each stride. A lark flicked suddenly into the air a yard away from him; flew low for a few feet; dropped; flew again.
Go home,
he said. It’s not you they want.
He strode on without pausing, without turning to see the bird wheel and dart her watchful way back to the nest. He had promised himself not to look behind him—not more than once every mile. He had turned too often in the last few days, expecting always to see the figures prickling the horizon, far-off but implacable, following. But each time the hills had been empty.
Beyond the hollow in the moors that he was crossing now, the land rose again in a long bony sweep, purple and green, dappled by cloud shadow. But trees clustered in the hollow, and faintly he could hear water splashing. He was thirsty, and hungry too; he had been walking since first light, and the sun was hot now, halfway up the sky. He came to a fork in the faintly-marked path, the way trodden no longer by men but written on the land by the memory of them, and he turned downhill to the sound of the running stream.
It ran fast, wider than he had expected, eddying bright round glistening grey stones. Westerly curled himself awkwardly round a young alder clump and lay flat, splashing his hot face, drinking until he gasped. Water ran down his chest as he sat up, making tiny runic letters out of the tentative dark hair that was beginning to thicken there, and his wet shirt came clammy-cold against his skin.
For a while he prowled the banks of the stream, pausing wherever a rock turned the quick water aside into a pool. Each time he lay flat beside the pool, motionless, staring down; then patiently rose again, shouldered his creased leather pack and moved onto the next. By the time he had found what he was looking for, his shirt was long dry and the sun was high overhead, hot on his back.
He went back through the trees to stare out over the hazy purple moorland, but in all the rolling miles nothing moved.
Westerly lay down again on the bank of the stream, his chin propped on a big overhanging rock, and carefully lowered his right hand into a pool fringed with green weed. His fingers moved, unceasingly but almost imperceptibly, rippling as the weed rippled. Very soon in the cold mountain water his whole hand was numb, but gently he kept the fingers waving, waving, and his arm moving slowly, very slowly, to one side—until with a swift sure lunge he thrust two fingers into the gills of the trout that had hung there all this time resting in the little slow-eddying pool, and he rolled over stiff-armed and brought the fish out twisting silver and frantic onto the grass.
Sorry,
Westerly said to the flailing bright body, and he hit it once with a stone and it lay still. For a few minutes he sat hunched in the sunshine, turning and twisting his stiff neck, with his cold right hand cradled in his left armpit to thaw. Then he took kindling and a long knife from his pack, made a fire, gutted the fish and held it skewered on the knife to cook. In the sunlight the fire was scarcely visible, after its beginning smoke; only its heat rippled the air. The silver fish blackened and sputtered, and the smell of it made Westerly’s stomach clutch at him with emptiness. But before he ate, he went once more to the edge of the trees, to look back.
The moors were empty still. Only the cloud-shadows moved.
He picked the fish clean and stamped out the dying fire. Then he took the glistening white skeleton, tipped still with head and tail-fin, and laid it across the blackened twigs pointing back the way that he had come. He took out his knife and raised it high, stabbing the blade down into the ground behind the white bone-arrow’s tail, and hesitantly, trying to remember, he said some words under his breath.
And the skeleton of the fish called out, in a thin high scream shrilling like a cicada, and Westerly knew that there was danger, that he must go on.
He threw bone and ashes into the swift water, wiped his knife clean, shouldered his pack and set out once more, striding wearily towards the upland path that led away over the hill.
CHAPTER 2
Cally sat in the apple tree. It grew less comfortable each year, but it was still her place to be alone. Round her head, leaves dappled the sky, with everywhere among them green bud-small apples clustering. A branch poked into Cally’s leg, prickling even through the tough jeans; she shifted, and petals showered round her like spring snow. Better keep out of the apple tree,
her father had said that morning, lying frail and listless in bed when she took his breakfast upstairs. The blossom will be setting.
But still she went back. Whenever she climbed the apple tree, she could hear the long soft breathing of the tall poplars that filled the sky beyond the garden; her mother said they sounded like the sea. Cally had never heard the sea, or seen it. She would lie back on a branch sometimes when the wind blew, and try to imagine that she was being rocked by the waves. It was a way of trying to forget the thing she had known for six months now: that her father was dying.
A cowbell clanged from the house: it was her private summons. She slithered down, a twig scratching the back of one hand. When she reached the house a line of tiny red beads of blood had sprung up on the skin; she licked them away, tasting salt.
Her mother said, Your father’s going away for a little while.
He stood there docile in overcoat and slippers; Cally thought again how small he seemed to have become since he had been ill.
He’s going to a special hospital by the sea,
her mother said, with a curious mixture of pleading and bravado in her voice. The change will do him good.
Cally saw that the front door was open, and a long dark blue car standing at the gate. She hugged her father. Can we come and see you?
Soon,
he said. He patted her shoulder wearily. That’s my lovely girl.
Cally’s mother pulled up the collar of his coat, and stood with her arm around him. Then there was a tall figure at the front door, reaching down, picking up the suitcase waiting on the floor. Cally stared. It was a woman, older than her mother yet somehow more strongly alive; from the lined pale face and the frame of white hair, startlingly blue eyes looked keenly into her own.
Hallo, Cally,
the woman said. Her voice was soft, with a lilt of accent.
Cally smiled uncertainly.
We’ve met before;
the woman said, but only at a distance. We shall meet again soon.
She took Cally’s father’s arm, very gently. We’ll take good care of him.
Cally and her mother followed his slow shuffling way out to the car. A uniformed driver helped him into the back seat, and settled a blanket round his knees; the woman sat beside him. A small sudden wind blew Cally’s hair across her face; then the car was gone. She felt a quick surge of fear that she would never see her father again.
Cally’s mother took her hand and held it, hard.
Are you all right?
Cally said.
Her mother said, Let’s go in out of the wind.
She turned Cally’s hand in hers; both were smeared with blood. You’ve hurt yourself!
Only a scratch,
Cally said. And only on the back.
But her mother was looking at the palm, as Cally had known she would. The palms of both Cally’s hands were strangely marked, and had been since she was born; at the base of the fingers the skin was rough and thickened, so that it was difficult for the hand to curl into a fist. Her mother’s hands were the same; it was, she said vaguely, an obscure inherited disease. Cally was used to the ugliness of it, and paid it little attention, but her mother was always concerned that she might damage the thick, slow-healing skin. She said now, anxiously, I wish you wouldn’t climb trees.
"Oh Ma!" Cally said. She looked up the empty road, after the vanished car. She said, I meant to tell Dad—the blossom’s all set. There’ll be lots of apples this year.
The change will do him good,
her mother said.
But she missed Cally’s father, and she pined for him. It was a while before Cally noticed the change in her; this was examination time at school, and from morning to night her head was full of Latin verbs and the structures of molecules. Only after the examinations were over did she look properly one day at her mother across the dinner table, and see the shadowed eyes, and the deep lines that seemed not to have been there before. Like her father in his illness, her mother seemed somehow to be shrinking; there was an uncanny look of him in her lean, hollowed face, and a sound of him in her voice, hoarse with fatigue.
Cally said in concern, You do look tired. I haven’t been helping enough.
She got up to clear the table and looked accusingly at her mother’s half-full plate. And you aren’t eating, Ma.
Her mother glanced at the plate without interest. You always help. You’re a good girl. But I am tired—it was all those months when your father. . . .
She looked up suddenly, the thin, pointed face like an appealing child’s. Cally—would you mind if I went to see him, on my own? You can come as soon as school’s over. Would you mind?
Of course not,
Cally said.
Your Aunt Tess will come and stay.
Her mother was looking at her but not seeing; she was lost in her own images. I may be gone for a while—there are some tests they want to do. . . .
Tests?
Cally said. On you?
Just checking up,
her mother said vaguely. They want me to go tomorrow. Tess can’t come till Sunday, though—
Cally put an arm round her, feeling suddenly warm and maternal; it was an odd reversal, after all the years of running to her for comfort and support. Just don’t worry. You go. So long as you can rest while you’re there.
Oh yes,
her mother said. Oh yes. And I shan’t be far away.
She patted Cally’s hand, and kissed her, but the shadows were still in her face and eyes. Suddenly Cally felt was a long time since she had seen her mother smile.
But she heard her singing, that night, as she lay in bed: a strange, wordless half-tune that seemed to bring a flicker of memory into Cally’s listening head from long ago. Her mother was in her own bedroom; she could hear her moving about.
Cally called, Ma? What’s that?
The crooning stopped abruptly. Just an old song I used to know.
Did you ever sing it to me, when I was little?
I may have done. Sleep well, now.
In a little while she began to hum softly again, so that the music was still drifting through Cally’s mind when she fell asleep.
• • •
When Cally came home from school the next day, the long dark-blue car was standing at the gate again. The driver jumped out when he saw her, and went round to open the rear door; her mother was sitting inside. She had a blanket wrapped round her knees, just as Cally’s father had done, and again Cally thought she looked strangely like him: the same fragility, the same remote, shadowed eyes. She felt fear hollow in the pit of her stomach, but she smiled at her mother and slipped into the car to hug her.
Her mother kissed her cheek gently. I’ve left the telephone number, and everything you and Tess should need. She’ll be here the day after tomorrow. Now you’re sure—"
I’m going to be fine, Ma. If I get lonely I’ll have Jen come over—or I can go to her house. Give my love to Dad. Is he—
She stopped. After the first talk when they had faced her with the news of the disease that was wasting her father away, her parents had never mentioned it again; it was as if they felt safer in silence.
There’s money in the kitchen drawer if you need it,
her mother said. She kissed her again. Don’t stay up too late, now.
Cally grinned. With Aunt Tess around? Goodbye, Ma.
As she clambered out of the car, a figure in the front seat turned, and Cally saw that it was the woman with silver hair who had come for her father. She said nothing to Cally this time, but only smiled; the blue eyes were bright, watching.
Then the car was moving off, driving down the road. Cally waved it out of sight. She could see the white blur of her mother’s face turned, looking back, all the way.
There was an unfamiliar itching in the palms of her hands; she rubbed them absently with her fingers as she went into the house. She was remembering what the silverhaired woman had said when she drove away with her father, that other day. We shall meet again soon. . . .
• • •
In the refrigerator Cally found food for several days, carefully labelled: cold chicken, ham, stew to be warmed up. (Heat in double boiler for fifteen minutes,
said the note in her mother’s neat hand, and DON’T FORGET TO PUT WATER IN POT!
) Cally made herself a cup of tea. She had expected to feel lonely but instead was cheerful; to be alone and in charge of the house was like a game, as if she were camping out. She found she was pleased that her aunt would not be coming to keep her company for two days yet.
Then she heard the singing.
It was her mother’s wordless humming, the same oddly unfinished tune: a voice in the air. In the first shock she thought it was indeed her mother’s voice, that she might have come back for something forgotten, but though she went through every room in the little house, in search of the singing that gently filled it, there was no one there. She checked the radio and television sets, and the record-player; all were firmly switched off. Yet the singing went on, soft, insistent, coming from nowhere: rhythmic waves of melody repeated over and over again. Cally was too puzzled to be alarmed. She sat on the stairs, chin on hands, listening, and gradually the singing died away.
After a while she thought she must have