Silver on the Tree (11 page)

Then walking blindly on she bumped into Barney, and found all the others standing still in sudden silence, and looked up and saw why.

They were on the rim of a magnificent valley. At their feet the hillside dropped away in a sweep of waving green bracken, where a few sheep precariously grazed on scattered patches of grass. Far, far below, among the green and golden fields of the valley floor, a road ran like a wavering thread, past a toy church and a tiny farm. And across the valley, beyond its further side patched blue with cloud-shadows and dark with close-planted fir, there rolled in line after line the massing ancient hills of Wales.

“Oh!” Jane said softly.

“Cwm Maethlon,” Bran said.

“Happy Valley,” said Will.

“Now you see why they call this path Panorama Walk,” Bran said. “This is what brings the cars. And walkers too, fair play.”

“Wake up, Jane,” Will said lightly.

Jane was standing quite still, staring out over the valley, her eyes wide. She turned her head slowly and looked at Will, but did not smile. “It's … it's … I can't explain. Beautiful. Lovely. But—frightening, somehow.”

“Vertigo,” Simon said confidently. “You'll feel better in a minute. Don't look over the edge.”

“Come on,” Will said, expressionless, suddenly reminding
her of Merriman. He turned and continued up the path along the edge of Happy Valley. Simon followed.

“Vertigo, my foot,” Jane said.

Bran said curtly, “Frightening, my foot, too. If you start listening to silly feelings, up here, you will never stop. Will has enough to worry about without that.”

Astonished, Jane stared, but he had turned and was plodding up the road again with Simon and Will.

She looked crossly after him. “Who does he think he is? My feelings are in my head, not his.”

Barney stuck his fingers into the knapsack straps over his shoulders. “Now perhaps you'll understand what I meant yesterday.”

Jane raised her eyebrows.

“Up on the hill over the sea,” Barney said. “That was sort of frightening too. When I was sure I'd been there before, and you both said rubbish. Only, I've been thinking—it's really more like living inside something that's happened before. Without its really having happened at all.”

They went on in silence after the others.

The rain began soon afterwards: a gentle persistent rain, from the low grey clouds that had been growing steadily larger and had begun to merge now into a covering over all the broad sky. They pulled anoraks and raincoats from the rucksacks and went doggedly on along the high moorland road, between open grassy slopes with no shelter anywhere.

One by one, cars came back down the road past them. Round one last bend, the paved road ended at an iron gate, and a footworn earthen track went on instead, past a lone white farmhouse and away over the mountain. Five cars were parked tipsily on the grass before the gate; back down the mountain came a straggle of damp holiday-makers with drooping headscarves and complaining children.

“There's one thing to be said for rain,” Barney said. “It does wash the people away.”

Simon glanced back. “Gloomy-looking lot, aren't they?”

“Those two kids from the blue car are still thumping one another. I suppose anyone'd look gloomy with brats like that.”

“You aren't long out of the brat stage yourself, chummy.”

Barney opened and shut his mouth, hunting the right insult; but then glanced at Jane instead. She stood silent, unsmiling, gazing at nothing.

“You aren't still feeling odd, Jane?” Simon peered at her.

“Look at them,” Jane said in a strange small, tight voice. She pointed ahead to Will and Bran, trudging one after the other up the track through the grass: two matching figures in oilskins rather too big for them, distinguishable only by Bran's cap and the sou'wester pulled low over Will's head. “Look at them!” Jane said again, miserably. “It's all mad! Who are they, where are they going, why are we doing what they want to do? How do we know what's going to happen?”

“We don't,” Barney said. “But then we never have, have we?”

“We ought not to be here,” Jane said. Impatiently she tugged the hood of her anorak closer over her head. “It's all too … vague. And it doesn't feel right. And”—the last words burst out defiantly—“I'm scared.”

Barney blinked at her, out of the folds of an enveloping plastic mackintosh. “But Jane, it's all right, it must be. Anything to do with Great-Uncle Merry—”

“But Gumerry isn't
here.”

“No, he's not,” Simon said. “But Will's here, and that's just about the same.”

Surprise sang through Jane's head. She stared at him. “But you never liked Will, not really. I mean I know you never said anything, but there was always….” She stopped. Firm ground seemed to have become suddenly shaky; Simon was now so much bigger than she, as well as being almost a year older, that somehow she had imperceptibly begun to take him more seriously than before, paying
attention to his opinions and prejudices even when she disagreed with them herself. It was unnerving to find one of those opinions turning itself upside down.

“Look,” Simon said. “I don't pretend to understand anything that's ever happened to us with Great-Uncle Merry and Will. But there's not much point in trying, is there? I mean basically it's very simple, it's a matter of—well, there's a good side and a bad, and those two are absolutely without question the good side.”

“Well, of course,” Jane said pettishly.

“Well then. Where's the problem?”

“It's not a
problem.
It's that Bran. It's just—oh dear, you wouldn't understand.” Jane poked dolefully at a tuft of grass.

“They're waiting for us,” Barney said.

High up on the path beyond the farmhouse, beside another gate, the two small dark figures stood turned, looking back.

“Come on, Jane,” said Simon. He patted her tentatively on the back.

Barney said, in a sudden rush of discovery, “You know, if you're really scared—it isn't like you—you ought to think whether you're being”—he flapped one hand vaguely—“being got at.”

“Got at?” said Jane.

“The Dark,” Barney said. “You remember—the way it makes something wriggle into your mind and say
I don't want you, go away.
… Makes you feel something terrible is going to happen.”

“Yes,” Jane said. “Oh yes. I do remember.”

Barney hopped in front of her like some small fierce animal. “Well, if you fight it, it can't get hold. Push it off, run away from it—” He grabbed her sleeve. “Come on. Race you up the hill!”

Jane tried to smile. “All right!”

They rushed up the path to the waiting figures on the hill, raindrops scattering from their coats as they ran. Simon followed,
more slowly. He had been listening with only half his attention. The rest had been caught, while Barney spoke, by two sinuous red animals slinking into the bracken from a thicket of gorse; and then out of the gorse, if he had not been imagining it, two bright pairs of eyes, watching them.

But it seemed a bad moment to mention that to Jane.

Bran said, as they watched Barney and Jane running towards them up the path. “What was that all about, d'you think?”

“They could just have been discussing whether it was time for lunch,” Will said.

Bran pulled his glasses down his nose, and the tawny eyes regarded Will steadily for a moment, between the dark lenses and cap. “Old One,” Bran said softly. “You know better than that.” Then he pushed his glasses back and grinned. “Anyway, it's too early.”

But Will looked soberly down at the approaching figures. “The Light needs those three. It always has, in this whole long quest. So the Dark must be watching them very hard, now. We must stay close to them, Bran—specially Barney, perhaps.”

Barney came panting up to them, his hood flapping on his shoulders and his yellow hair damp-dark with rain. “When's lunch?” he said.

Bran laughed. “Cam March Arthur is just over the next slope.”

“What does it look like?” Without waiting for an answer Barney was gone, trotting up the path, mackintosh flapping.

Bran turned to go after him. But Jane was in his way. She stood there, breathing unevenly, looking coolly at them both in a way Will did not recognize. “It won't do, you know,” she said. “We're all marching along as if everything was ordinary but we just can't go on pretending to one another.”

Will looked at her, patience battling urgency in his mind; his head dropped for a moment on to his chest and he let
out a short hiss of breath. “All right then. What do you want us to say?”

“Just something about what we might find, up there,” Jane said, quavering, exasperated. “About what we're
doing
here.”

Bran was on the words like a terrier at a bone, before Will could open his mouth. “Doing? Nothing, girl—you will probably have nothing to do but look at a valley and a lake and say, oh, how pretty. What's the fuss? If you don't like the rain, wrap yourself up and go home. Go on!”

“Bran!” Will said sharply.

Jane stood very still, eyes wide.

Bran said angrily, “The hell with it! If you have seen the raising of fear, and the killing of love, and the Dark creeping in over all things, you do not ask stupid questions. You do what you are intended to do, and no nonsense. And so that is what we should all be doing now, going on to where we might perhaps find out the next right move.”

“And no nonsense!” said Jane tightly.

Simon came up behind her, silent, listening, but she paid no attention.

“Right!” Bran snapped.

Watching Jane, Will felt suddenly that he was seeing someone he had never met before. Her face was drawn into furious lines of emotion that seemed to belong to someone else.

“You!” Jane said to Bran, pushing her hands fiercely into her pockets. “You, you think you're so special, don't you, with the white hair and the difference, and the eyes behind those silly glasses. Super-different. You can tell us what we ought to do, you think you're even more special than Will. But who are you, anyway? We never met you at all until yesterday, in the middle of nowhere on a mountain, and why should we get into danger just because you—” Her voice quivered and dwindled, and she swung away from them, up the hill, towards Barney's small eager vanishing form.

Simon began to go after her and then paused, irresolute.

“Special, is it?” Bran said softly as if to himself. “Special. That's nice. After all the years of people sneering and muttering about the boy with no colour in his creepy skin. That's lovely. Special. And what is this about the eyes?”

“Yes,” Will said shortly. “Special. You know it.”

Bran hesitated; he pulled off his glasses and stuffed them in his pocket. “That is separate. She knows nothing of that. And that is not at all what she meant.”

“No,” Will said. “But you and I may not forget it for a moment. And you may not … let go, like that.”

“I know,” Bran said. “I'm sorry.” He looked deliberately at Simon as he spoke, including him in the apology.

Simon said awkwardly, “I don't know what all this is about, but you shouldn't be bothered by Jane flying off the handle. It doesn't mean anything.”

“Doesn't seem like her,” Will said.

“Well … now and then she does it, these days. A sort of flare-up … I think,” Simon said confidingly, “she's going through a
stage.”

“Maybe,” Will said. He was looking at Bran. “Or maybe it is Jane we should be specially watching?”

“Come on,” Bran said. He brushed raindrops from the brim of his cap. “Carn March Arthur.”

They climbed on, to the line where the green grassy slope met a grey sky. On the downward sweep of the path on the other side, Jane and Barney were crouched beside a small outcropping of rock, identical with every other rocky scar on the hill but singled out by a neat slate marker like a label. Will came slowly down the path, his senses open and alert as the ears of a hunting dog, but he felt nothing. Glancing across, he saw the same blankness on Bran's face.

“There's a sort of carved-out circle here that's supposed to be where the hoof of Arthur's horse trod—look, it's marked.” Barney measured the hollow in the rock with his hand. “And another over there.” He sniffed, unimpressed. “Pretty small horse.”

“They are hoof-shaped, though,” Jane said. Her head was down, her voice slightly husky. “I wonder what really made them?”

“Erosion,” Simon said. “Water swirling round.”

“With dirt rubbing,” Bran said.

Jane said hesitantly, “And frost, cracking the rock.”

“Or the hoof of a magic horse, coming down hard,” Barney said. He looked up at Will. “Only it wasn't, was it?”

“No,” Will said, smiling. “Hardly. If Arthur had ridden over every hollow called Arthur's Hoofprint, or sat on every rock called Arthur's Seat, or drunk from every spring called Arthur's Well, he'd have spent his whole life travelling round Britain without a stop.”

“And so would the knights,” Barney said cheerfully, “to sit round every hill called King Arthur's Round Table.”

“Yes,” Will said. He picked up a small white quartz pebble and rolled it round and round his palm. “Those too. Some of the names mean … other things.”

Barney jumped up. “Where's the lake, the one he's supposed to have taken the monster from?”

“Llyn Barfog,” Bran said. “The Bearded Lake. Over here.”

He led them on, down the path into a hollow between hilltops, curving round a slope; the rain, which had been gentle, began here to whip at their faces in uneven gusts, as the high wind eddied round the gullied land. The cloud was low over their heads.