The Dark Is Rising (11 page)

By Saint Agnes' fou . . . oun . . . tain
. . . .

. . . And just as he began to wonder, through the strange sweet accompanying music that seemed to come out of the air, quite how the next verse could be done, unless a boy soprano were expected to sound like good King Wenceslas as well as his page, a great beautiful deep voice rolled out through the room with the familiar words, a great deep voice that Will had never heard employed in song before and yet at once recognised.

. . .
Bring me flesh and bring me wine

Bring me pine-logs hither;

Thou and I will see him dine

When we bear them thither
. . . .

Will's head swam a little, the room seemed to grow and then shrink again; but the music went on, and the pillars of light stood still above the candle-flames, and as the next verse began Merriman reached casually out and took his hand, and they walked forward, singing together:

Page and monarch forth they went,

Forth they went together,

Through the rude wind's wild lament

And the bitter weather.

They walked down the long entrance hall, away from the motionless Stantons, past Miss Greythorne in her chair, and the cook-housekeeper, and the maid, all unmoving, alive and yet suspended out of life. Will felt as though he were walking in the air, not touching the ground at all, down the dark hall; no light ahead of them now, but only a glow from behind. Into the dark . . .

Sire, the night is darker now,

And the wind blows stronger;

Fails my heart I know not how,

I can go no longer
. . . .

Will heard his voice shake, for the words were the right words for what was in his mind.

Mark my footsteps, good my page;

Tread thou in them boldly . . .

Merriman sang; and suddenly more was ahead of Will than the dark.

There before him rose the great doors, the great carved doors that he had first seen on a snow-mounded Chiltern hillside, and Merriman raised his left arm and pointed at them with his five fingers spread wide and straight. Slowly the doors opened, and the elusive silvery music of the Old Ones came swelling up briefly to join the accompaniment of the carol, and then was lost again. And he walked forward with Merriman into the light, into a different time and a different Christmas, singing as if he could pour all the music in the world into these present notes — and singing so confidently that the school choirmaster, who was very strict about raised heads and well-moving jaws, would have fallen mute in astonished pride.

They were in a bright room again, a room unlike anything Will had ever seen. The ceilings were high, painted with pictures of trees and woods and mountains; the walls were panelled in shiny gold wood, lit here and there by strange glowing white globes. And the room was full of music, their own carol taken up by many voices, in a gathering of people dressed like a brilliant scene from a history book. The women, bare-shouldered, wore long full dresses with elaborately looped and ruffled skirts; the men wore suits not unlike Merriman's, with squared-off tailcoats, long straight trousers, white ruffles or black silk cravats at the neck. Indeed now that Will came to look again at Merriman, he realised that the clothes he wore had never really been those of a butler at all, but belonged totally to this other century, whichever it might be.

A lady in a white dress was sweeping forward to meet them, people round her moving respectfully back to make way, and as the carol ended she cried: “Beautiful! Beautiful! Come in, come in!” The voice was exactly the voice of Miss Greythorne greeting them at the Manor door a little while earlier, and when Will looked up at the face he saw that in a sense this was Miss Greythorne too. There were the same eyes and rather bony face, the same friendly but imperious manner — only this Miss Greythorne was much younger and prettier, like a flower that has unfolded from the bud but not yet been battered by the sun and wind and days.

“Come, Will,” she said, and took his hand, smiling down at him, and he went easily to her; it was so clear that she knew him and that those around her, men and women, young and old, all smiling and
gay, knew him too. Most of the bright crowd was leaving the room now, couples and chattering groups, in the direction of a delicious cooking smell that clearly signalled supper somewhere else in the house. But a group of a score or so remained.

“We were waiting for you,” said Miss Greythorne, and drew him towards the back of the room where a fire blazed warm and friendly in an ornate fireplace. She was looking at Merriman too, including him in the words. “We are all ready, there are no — hindrances.”

“You are sure?” Merriman's voice came quick and deep like a hammer-stroke, and Will glanced up curiously. But the hawk-nosed face was as secret as ever.

“Quite sure,” said the lady. Suddenly she knelt down beside Will, her skirt billowing round her like a great white rose; she was at his eye-level now, and she held both his hands, gazing at him, and spoke softly and urgently. “It is the third Sign, Will. The Sign of Wood. We call it sometimes the Sign of Learning. This is the time for remaking the Sign. In every century since the beginning, Will, every hundred years, the Sign of Wood must be renewed, for it is the only one of the six that cannot keep its nature unchanged. Every hundred years we have remade it, in the way that we were first taught. And now this will be the last time, because when your own century comes you will take it out for all time, for the joining, and there need be no more renewing then.”

She stood up, and said clearly, “We are glad to see you, Will Stanton, Sign-Seeker. Very, very glad.” And there was a general rumble of voices, low and high, soft and deep, all approving and agreeing; it was like a wall, Will thought, you could lean against it and feel support. Very strongly he could feel the strength of friendship that came out of this small group of unfamiliar, handsomely-dressed people; he wondered whether all of them were Old Ones. Looking up at Merriman beside him, he grinned in delight, and Merriman smiled down at him with a look of more open relaxed pleasure than Will had yet seen on the stern, rather grim face.

“It is almost time,” Miss Greythorne said.

“Some small refreshment for the newcomers first, perhaps,” a man beside them said: a small man, not much taller than Will. He held out a glass. Will took it, glancing up, and found himself staring into a thin, lively face, almost triangular, thickly lined yet not old, with a
pair of startlingly bright eyes staring at and somehow into him. It was a disturbing face, with much behind it. But the man had swung away from him, presenting Will only with a neat, green-velvet-covered back, and was handing a glass to Merriman.

“My lord,” he said deferentially as he did so, and bowed.

Merriman looked at him with a comical twist of the mouth, said nothing, but stared mockingly and waited. Before Will had a chance even to begin puzzling over the greeting, the small man blinked and seemed suddenly to collect his wits, like a dreamer abruptly woken. He burst out laughing.

“Ah, no,” he said spluttering. “Stop it. I have had the habit for long years, after all.” Merriman chuckled affectionately, raised the glass to him, and drank; and since he could make no sense of this odd exchange Will drank too, and was filled with astonishment by an unrecognisable taste that was less a taste than a blaze of light, a burst of music, something fierce and wonderful sweeping over all his senses at once.

“What is it?”

The small man swung round and laughed, his creased face slanting all its lines upwards. “Metheglyn used to be the nearest name,” he said, taking the empty glass. He blew into it, said unexpectedly, “An Old One's eyes can see,” and held it out; and staring into the clear base, Will suddenly felt he could see a group of figures in brown robes making whatever it was that he had just drunk. He glanced up to see the man in the green coat watching him closely, with a disturbing expression that was like a mixture of envy and satisfaction. Then the man chuckled and whisked the glass away, and Miss Greythorne was calling for them to come to her; the white globes of light in the room grew dim, and the voices quiet. Somewhere in the house Will thought he could still hear music, but he was not sure.

Miss Greythorne stood by the fire. For a moment she looked down at Will, then up at Merriman. Then she turned away from them and looked at the wall. She stared and stared for a long time. The panelling and the fireplace and the overmantel were all one, all carved from the same golden wood: very plain, with no curves or flourishes, but only a simple four-petalled rose set in a square here and there. She put up her hand to one of these small rose carvings on the top left-hand corner of the fireplace, and she pressed its centre. There was a
click, and below the rose, at the level of her waist, a square dark hole in the panelling appeared. Will did not see any panel slide away; the hole was simply, suddenly, there. And Miss Greythorne put in her hand and drew out an object shaped like a small circle. It was the image of the two that he had himself, and he found that his hand, as once before, had already moved of its own accord and was clasping them protectively. There was total silence in the room. From outside the doors Will could certainly hear music now, but could not make out the nature of it.

The sign-circle was very thin and dark, and one of its inside cross-arms broke as he watched. Miss Greythorne held it out to Merriman, and a little more fell away into dust. Will could see now that it was wood, roughened and worn, but with a grain running through.

“That's a hundred years old?” he said.

“Every hundred years, the renewing,” she said. “Yes.”

Will said impulsively, into the silent room, “But wood lasts much longer than that. I've seen some in the British Museum. Bits of old boats they dug up by the Thames. Prehistoric.
Thousands
of years old.”

“
Quercus Britannicus,
” Merriman said, severely and abruptly, sounding like a cross professor. “Oak. The canoes you refer to were made of oak. And further south, the oaken piles on which the present cathedral of Winchester stands were sunk some nine hundred years ago, and are as tough today as they were then. Oh yes, oak lasts a very long time, Will Stanton, and there will come a day when the root of an oak tree will play a very important part in your young life. But oak is not the wood for the Sign. Our wood is one which the Dark does not love. Rowan, Will, that's our tree. Mountain ash. There are qualities in rowan, as in no other wood on the earth, that we need. But also there are strains on the Sign that rowan cannot survive as oak might, or as iron and bronze do. So the Sign must be reborn” — he held it up, between one long finger and a deeply back-curved thumb — “every hundred years.”

Will nodded. He said nothing. He found himself very conscious of the people in the room. It was as if they were all concentrating very hard on one thing, and you could hear the concentration. And they seemed suddenly multiplied, endless, a vast crowd stretching out beyond the house and beyond this century or any other.

He did not fully understand what happened next. Merriman jerked his hand forward suddenly, broke the wooden Sign easily in half and tossed it in the fire, where a great single log like their own Yule log was halfway burned down. The flames leapt. Then Miss Greythorne reached out towards the small man in the green velvet coat, took from him the silver jug from which he had poured drinks, and threw the contents of the jug on the fire. There was a great hissing and smoking, and the fire was dead. And she leaned forward in her long white dress and put her arm into the smoke and the smouldering ashes, and brought out a part-burned piece of the big log. It was like a large irregular disc.

Holding the lump of wood high so that everyone could see, she began to take blackened pieces from it as though she were peeling an orange; her fingers moved quickly, and the burned edges fell away and the skeleton of the wooden piece was left: a clear, smooth circle, containing a cross.

There was no irregularity to it at all, as though it had never before had any other shape than this. And on Miss Greythorne's white hands there was not even a trace of soot or ash.

“Will Stanton,” she said, turning to him, “here is your third Sign. I may not give it to you in this century. Your quest must all along be fulfilled within your own time. But the wood is the Sign of Learning, and when you have done with your own particular learning, you will find it. And I can leave in your mind the movements that the finding will take.” She looked hard at Will, then reached up and slipped the strange wooden circle into the dark hole in the panelling. With her other hand, she pressed the carved rose in the wall above it, and with the same sight-defeating flash as before the hole was suddenly no longer there. The wood-panelled wall was smooth and unbroken as if there had been no change at all.

Will stared. Remember how it was done, remember. . . . She had pressed the first carved rose at the top left-hand corner. But now there were three roses in a group at that corner; which one should it be? As he looked more closely, he saw in fearful astonishment that now the whole wall of panelling was covered in squares of carved wood, each containing a single four-petalled rose. Had they grown at this moment, beneath his eyes? Or had they been there all along, invisible because of a trick of the light? He shook his head in alarm and looked
round for Merriman. But it was too late. Nobody was close by him. Solemnity had left the air; the lights were bright again, and everybody was cheerfully talking. Merriman was murmuring something to Miss Greythorne, bending almost double to speak close to her ear. Will felt a touch on his arm, and swung round.

It was the small man in the green coat, beckoning to him. Near the doors at the other end of the room, the group of musicians who had accompanied the carol began playing again: a gentle sound of recorders and violins and what he thought was a harpsichord. It was another carol they were playing now, an old one, much older than the century of the room. Will wanted to listen, but the man in green had hold of his arm and was drawing him insistently towards a side door.

Will stood firm, rebellious, and turned towards Merriman. The tall figure jerked upright instantly, swinging round to look for him; but when he saw what was happening Merriman relaxed, merely raising one hand in assent. Will felt the reassurance put into his mind:
go on, it's all right. I'll follow
.

The small man picked up a lamp, glanced casually about him, then quickly swung the side door open just far enough for Will and himself to slip through. “Don't trust me, do you?” he said in his sharp, jerky voice. “Good. Don't trust anyone unless you have to, boy. Then you'll survive to do what you're here for.”

“I seem to know about people now, mostly,” Will said. “I mean, somehow I can tell which ones I can trust. Usually. But you —” he stopped.

“Well?” said the man.

Will said: “You don't fit.”

The man shouted with laughter, his eyes disappearing in the creases of his face, then stopped abruptly and held up his lamp. In the circle of wavering light, Will saw what seemed to be a small room, wood-panelled, with no furniture except an armchair, a table, a small stepladder, and a wall-height glass-fronted bookcase in the centre of each wall. He heard a deep measured ticking and saw, peering through the gloom, that a very large grandfather clock stood in the corner. If the room were dedicated only to reading, as it seemed to be, then it held a timepiece that would give a very loud warning against reading for too long.

The small man thrust the lamp into Will's hand. “I think there's a light over here — ah.” There began an indefinable hissing sound that Will had noticed once or twice in the room next door; then there was the crack of a match lighting and a loud “Pop!”, and a light appeared on the wall, burning at first with a reddish flame and then expanding into one of the great white glowing globes.

“Mantles,” he said. “Still very new in private houses, and most fashionable. Miss Greythorne is uncommonly fashionable, for this century.”