Silver on the Tree (32 page)

There was anguish in the voice now; it was a long aching lament. “Lost, all lost…. The savages bring in the Dark, and the servants of the Dark thrive. Our craftsmen and our builders leave, or die, and none replace them except to deck out barbaric kings. And on our roads, on the old ways, the green grass grows.”

“And men flee westward,” Merriman said gently, out of the bow of their vessel, “to the last corners of the land where the old tongue lives, for a while. To those places where the Light waits always for the force of the Dark to ebb, so that the grandsons of the invaders may be gentled and tamed by the land their forefathers despoiled. And one of those fleeing men carries a golden chalice called a grail, that bears on its side the message by which a later time will be able better to withstand the last and most menacing rising of the Dark—when it will rise not through the spilling of blood but through the coldness in the hearts of men.”

Arthur bent his head in a kind of apology. The mist blew round him; he seemed fainter now, the sea-blue cloak less bright. “True, true. And the grail is found, and all the other Things of Power, by the six of you, and the Light thus fortified so that all of us in the Circle may come to its aid at the end. I know, my lion. I do not forget the hope promised by
the future, even though I weep for the pain suffered by my land here in the past.”

The river began to swing the boats apart; the sound of battle and of triumphant shouting rose again from the mists around them. Arthur's voice grew distant, rising in a last call.

“Sail the river. Sail on. I shall be with you in a little while.”

And the ship and its flags and armed men were gone into the bright mist, and instead a darkness came whirling around them, on both sides of the gleaming stream, a darkness as deep and vast as the sea, battering at their minds, rising, enveloping.

John Rowlands rose slowly to his feet in the stern of the boat where he had been silently sitting. Will could see him only as a vague shape; he could not tell how much Rowlands saw of what was happening.

Rowlands reached out an arm into the darkness, standing pressed against the gunwale of the boat, and with fear and longing in his voice he called out something in Welsh. And then he called, “Blodwen!
Blodwen!”

Will closed his eyes at the pain in the voice, and tried not to hear or think. But John Rowlands came stumbling up the boat towards them, his head turned for guide towards the blue-flaming blade of the sword in Bran's hand, and when he reached them he put out one hand and grasped Merriman by the shoulder.

Light glimmered round them as if they carried the moon in their vessel, sailing through clouds, yet the light came only from the sword, burning like a cold torch. John Rowlands said, taut with anguish, “Was she always so? Always … from outside the earth, like yourself?” He was gazing at Merriman like a man begging for his life, pleading. “Was not one part of it ever real?”

Merriman said unhappily, “Real?” For the first time since Will had come to know him, his voice was without authority, seeking, lost. “Real? When we live in your world as you do,
John, those of the Light or those of the Dark, we feel and see and hear as you do. If you prick us, we bleed, if you tickle us, we laugh—only, if you poison us we do not die, and there are certain feelings and perceptions in us that are not in you. And these in the last resort have dominion over the others. Your life with your Blodwen was real, it existed, she felt it just like you. But … there was another more powerful side to her nature as well, of which you never had sight.”

John Rowlands flung out one arm and struck the side of the boat a fierce blow that his hand did not seem to feel. “Lies!” The word was a shout. “That is all it was, a deceiving, a pretending! Can you deny that? I have been living my life on a lie!”

“All right.” Merriman's broad shoulders drooped for a moment, then slowly straightened. His voice seemed to Will to hold a great weariness. “I am sorry, John. Do you blame the Light? Would it have been less of a lie if you had never discovered the Dark?”

“The hell with both of them,” John Rowlands said bitterly. He stared coldly at Merriman, at Bran, at Will, and his voice rose in anger and misery. “The hell with all of you. We were happy, before any of this. Why couldn't you leave us alone?”

And while the words rang in the air, to all of them on the boat a figure appeared immediately out of the whirling misty darkness as if riding on the echoes of the angry voice: a dark shape, riding. Each of them saw it in a different way, this towering figure, cloaked, the hood put back from the arrogant head.

Bran saw the Lord of the Dark who had hounded Will and himself through the Lost Land, in wild pursuit through the City, in wait beside the Castle, in roaring fury at their achieving of the sword.

Jane and Simon and Barney saw a figure they had hoped to forget, from days earlier in their lives when they had been caught up in a search for the grail of the Light: a black-haired
black-eyed man named Hastings, fierce and powerful, and in the end raging with the urge for revenge.

Will saw the Black Rider, riding his black stallion in a whirling cloudy turret of the Dark, with one side of his face turned awry out of sight. He caught the glare of a blue eye beneath glinting chestnut hair, and the sweep of a robed arm as the Rider turned in his saddle, pointing at Bran. The tall horse reared up over them, hooves glinting, eyes white and wide. Beside him, Will saw Jane instinctively duck.

“A challenge, Merlion!” the Black Rider called. His voice was clear but faint, as if muffled by the surrounding dark. “We claim there is no place for the Pendragon, the boy, in this flight and this quest. A challenge! He must go!”

Merriman swung round, turning his back in contemptuous dismissal. But the Rider did not move, but stayed by them, his spinning dark tower of cloud rushing with them down the misty river—yet moving gradually more slowly, slowly, just as the boat on which they themselves travelled, Will realised, was slowing now. Soon it was motionless, resting on the still water. For a moment there came a break in the misty darkness ahead, as if a watery sunlight were breaking through; they saw hints of green fields, of swelling green hillsides and the darker green of trees, all hung about still with ragged mist so that nothing was properly distinct.

And then through the mist came flying a pair of swans, their great white wings beating the air so that the wind sang through the feathers. They flapped slowly overhead, now visible, now gone, now bright again, through the patches of mist, and then both dived and came awkwardly down, on either side of the boat, skidding into the river, settling, long necks taking back their peaceful graceful curve. And in the moment of raising his eyes from the two handsome birds, Will saw as if standing high on the prow of their boat the figure of the Lady.

She was neither old nor young, now, her beauty ageless: she stood a straight upright figure with the wind blowing round her the folds of a robe blue as an early morning sky.
Will leapt forward, overjoyed, reaching out a hand in welcome. But the Lady's fine-boned face was grave; she looked at Will as if she did not properly see him, and then at Merriman, and then at Bran. Her gaze flickered over the others, with a hint of a pause for Jane, and then came back to Merriman.

“The challenge holds,” she said.

Will could not believe what he heard. There was no emotion in the musical voice; it stated merely, without expression but with utter finality. Merriman took one quick unthinking step forward and then stopped; Will, not daring to look up, could see the long fingers of one gnarled bony hand curve tight into a fist, the nails cutting into the palm.

“The challenge holds,” the Lady said again, a faint quiver in her voice. “For the Dark has invoked the High Law against the Light, claiming that Bran ap Arthur has no rightful place in this part of Time, and may therefore not take the journey to the tree. That challenge is their right, and must be heard. For without the hearing, the High Magic will let nothing go further forward in this matter.”

The beauty of her face was a grave sadness, and she reached out one arm, graceful as a bird's wing in the falling folds of the blue robe, and pointed the five fingers of her hand toward Bran. For an instant a breeze blew on the still river, and there was a hint of a delicate music in the air; and then the blue light died out of the blade of Eirias, and in a strange slow movement without a sound the sword fell to the deck of the ship. And Bran stiffened and then stood motionless, upright, his arms at his sides, a slim dark-clad figure with the face almost as white now as the hair, caught out of movement as if out of all life. A misty brightness took shape and hovered all about him, like a cage of light, so that he was still in their company and yet kept separate.

The Lady looked out into space at the hovering figure of the Black Rider in the cloudy dark.

“Speak your challenge,” she said.

The Black Rider said, “We challenge the boy Bran, of Clwyd in the Dysynni Valley in the kingdom of Gwynedd, called Bran Davies for his father in the world of his growing, called the Pendragon for his father the Pendragon in the world from which he came. We challenge his place in this business. He has not the right.”

“He has the right of birth,” Will said sharply.

“There lies the challenge, Old One. You shall hear.” The Black Rider could not now be seen; his voice came hollowly out of the dark turmoil beyond the mist. Will had the sudden sense of an endless army of unseen forms behind him, out there in the dark; he looked quickly away.

The Lady's clear voice said, overhead, “Whom do you seek to judge the challenge, Lord of the Dark? For you have the right to choose, as the Light has the right to approve or deny your choice.”

There was a deliberate pause. All at once the Rider was visible again, a distinct figure; his hooded head turned toward Merriman.

“We choose the man, John Rowlands,” he said.

Merriman glanced down at Will; he said nothing, either aloud or in the silent speech of the Old Ones, but Will could feel his indecision. He was filled with the same vague suspicion himself—
what are they up to?—
but it fell back, like a wave that breaks over a rock, when he thought of John Rowlands and their long reasons for trusting his judgment.

Merriman nodded. He lifted his wild-haired white head. “That is agreed.”

John Rowlands was paying them no attention. He stood in the middle of the boat, with Jane, Barney and Simon grouped beside him on a thwart as if they had drawn close for comfort, though for whose comfort Will would not have cared to tell. Rowlands was gazing at Bran, his lean, lined brown face tight with anxiety. His dark eyes flickered to the tranquil, gleaming form of the Lady and then back to the bright mist enclosing Bran. “Bran
bach,”
he said unhappily, “are you all right?”

But there was no answer, and instead the Lady turned her grave face to Rowlands and he was suddenly very still, looking up at her, a silent awkward figure with the dark formal suit sitting on his lithe frame as if it belonged to someone else.

“John Rowlands,” the cool, musical voice said, “there will be things said to you now, by the Lords of the Dark and of the Light, and you must listen to each with good attention, and weigh in your own mind the merit of what is said by each. And then you must say which you think is in the right, without fear or favour. And the power of the High Magic, which is present in this place as it is everywhere in the universe, will put its seal on your decision.”

John Rowlands stood there, still looking at her. He seemed caught in awe, but there were spots of colour on his high cheek-bones, and the finely modelled mouth was set in a straight line. Very quietly, he said,
“Must?”

Will flinched, and carefully did not look at the Lady; he heard Merriman hiss softly between his teeth.

But the Lady's voice grew quieter, more gentle.

“No, my friend. This matter holds no compulsion. We ask a favour of you, to make such a judgement. For in this world of men it is the fate of men which is at stake, in the long run, and no one but a man should have the judging of it. Have you not said as much yourself, to the Old Ones, here and elsewhere?”

John Rowlands turned and looked at Will, without expression. Then he said slowly, “Very well.”

Suddenly Will was conscious of a crowding of the Old Ones, an immense array of shadowy presences, all around him and behind him on the still, misted river; hovering in the unseen vessels like their own that he had glimpsed, just as they travelled across the miles and years of the island of Britain in the vehicle that had taken the appearance of a train. It was as if he heard the murmuring of a great crowd, as he had heard the whole Circle of the Old Ones gathered twice before in the course of his life; yet there was no sound, he knew, but the whispering of the wind in the trees that edged the river. Holding in his mind the sense of their attendance, and his awareness of Merriman's tall blue-robed form at his side, he looked hard and openly at the whirling black mist of the Dark as he had not dared look before. The voice of the Rider came strong and confident out of it.

“Judge then. You know that the boy Bran was born in a time long past, and brought into the future to grow there. His mother brought him, because she had once in her own time greatly deceived her lord and husband Arthur, and although the boy was his true son she feared that he would not believe that was so.”

John Rowlands said emptily, “Men may be deceived indeed.”

“But men forgive,” the Rider said swiftly, smoothly. “And the boy's father would have forgiven, and believed Guinevere, if he had had the chance. But a Lord of the Light took Guinevere through Time, at her asking, and so there was no chance and the boy was taken away.”

Merriman said, soft and deep,
“At her asking.”