The Dark Is Rising (19 page)

The window ahead of them flew open, outwards, scattering all the snow. A faint luminous path like a broad ribbon lay ahead, stretching into the snow-flecked air; looking down, Will could see through it, see the snow-mounded outlines of roofs and fences and trees below. Yet the path was substantial too. In one stride Merriman had reached it through the window and was sweeping away at great speed with an eerie gliding movement, vanishing into the night. Will leapt after him, and the strange path swept him too off through the night, with no feeling either of speed or cold. The night around him was black and thick; nothing was to be seen except the glimmer of the Old Ones' airy way. And then all at once they were in some bubble of Time, hovering, tilted on the wind as Will had learned from his eagle of the Book of Gramarye.

“Watch,” Merriman said, and his cloak swirled round Will as if in protection.

Will saw in the dark sky, or in his own mind, a group of great trees, leafless, towering over a leafless hedge, wintry but without snow. He heard a strange, thin music, a high piping accompanied by the small constant thump of a drum, playing over and over again a single melancholy tune. And out of the deep dark and into the ghostly grove of trees a procession came.

It was a procession of boys, in clothes of some time long past, tunics and rough leggings; they had hair to their shoulders and baglike caps of a shape he had never seen before. They were older than he: about fifteen, he guessed. They had the half-solemn expressions of players in a game of charades, mingling earnest purpose with a bubbling sense of fun. At the front came boys with sticks and bundles of birch twigs; at the back were the players of pipe and drum. Between these, six boys carried a kind of platform made of reeds and branches woven together, with a bunch of holly at each corner. It was like a stretcher, Will thought, except that they were holding it at shoulder height. He thought at first that it was no more than that, and empty; then he saw that it supported something. Something very small. On a cushion of ivy leaves in the centre of the woven bier lay the body of a minute bird: a dusty-brown bird, neat-billed. It was a wren.

Merriman's voice said softly over his head, out of the darkness: “It is the Hunting of the Wren, performed every year since men can remember, at the solstice. But this is a particular year, and we may see more, if all is well. Hope in your heart, Will, that we may see more.”

And as the boys and their sad music moved on through the sky-trees and yet did not seem to pass, Will saw with a catch in his breath that instead of the little bird, there was growing the dim shape of a different form on the bier. Merriman's hand clutched at his shoulder like a steel clamp, though the big man made no sound. Lying on the bed of ivy between the four holly tufts now was no longer a tiny bird, but a small, fine-boned woman, very old, delicate as a bird, robed in blue. The hands were folded on the chest, and on one finger glimmered a ring with a huge rose-coloured stone. In the same instant Will saw the face, and knew that it was the Lady.

He cried out in pain, “But you said she wasn't dead!”

“No more she is,” Merriman said.

The boys walked to their music, the bier with the silent form lying there came close, and then moved away, vanishing with the procession into the night, and the piping sad tune and the drumbeats dwindled after it. But on the very edge of disappearance, the three boys who had been playing paused, put down their instruments, and turned to stand gazing without expression at Will.

One of them said: “Will Stanton, beware the snow!”

The second said: “The Lady will return, but the Dark is rising.”

The third, in a quick sing-song tone, chanted something that Will recognised as soon as it began:

“
When the Dark comes rising, six shall turn it back;

Three from the circle, three from the track
.

Wood, bronze, iron; water, fire, stone;

Five will return, and one go alone
.”

But the boy did not end there, as Merriman had done. He went on:

“
Iron for the birthday, bronze carried long;

Wood from the burning, stone out of song;

Fire in the candle-ring, water from the thaw;

Six signs the circle, and the grail gone before
.”

Then a great wind came up out of nowhere, and in a flurry of snowflakes and darkness the boys were gone, whirled away, and Will too felt himself whirling backwards, back through Time, back along the shining way of the Old Ones. The snow lashed at his face. The night was in his eyes, stinging. Out of the darkness he heard Merriman calling to him, urgently, but with a new hope and resonance in his deep voice: “Danger rises with the snow, Will — be wary of the snow. Follow the Signs, beware the snow. . . .”

And Will was back in his room, back in his bed, falling into sleep with the one ominous word ringing in his head like the chiming of the deepest church bell over the mounting snow. “Beware . . . beware. . . .”

The next day the snow still fell, all day. And the next day too.

“I do wish it would stop,” said Mary unhappily, gazing at the blind white windows. “It's horrible the way it just goes on and on — I hate it.”

“Don't be stupid,” said James. “It's just a very long storm. No need to get hysterical.”

“This is different. It's creepy.”

“Rubbish. It's just a lot of snow.”

“Nobody's ever seen so much snow before. Look how high it is — you couldn't get out of the back door if we hadn't been clearing it since it started to fall. We're going to be buried, that's what. It's pushing at us — it's even broken a window in the kitchen, did you know that?”

Will said sharply, “What?”

“The little window at the back, near the stove. Gwennie came down this morning and the kitchen was cold as ice, with snow and bits of glass all over that corner. The snow had pushed the window in, the weight of it.”

James sighed loudly. “Weight isn't pushing. The snow gets blown into a drift at that side of the house, that's all.”

“I don't care what you say, it's horrible. As if the snow was trying to get in.” She sounded close to tears.

“Let's go and see if the Wa — the old tramp's woken up yet,” Will said. It was time to stop Mary before she came too near the truth. How many other people in the country were being made as frightened as this by the snow? He thought fiercely of the Dark, and longed to know what to do.

The Walker had slept through the previous day, hardly stirring except for occasional meaningless mutterings, and once or twice a small hoarse shout. Will and Mary went up to his room now, carrying a tray, with cereal and toast and milk and marmalade. “Good morning!” Will said loudly and brightly as they went in. “Would you like some breakfast?”

The Walker opened a slit of an eye and peered at them through his shaggy grey hair, longer and wilder than ever now that it was clean. Will held out the tray towards him.

“Faugh!” the Walker croaked. It was a noise like spitting.

Mary said, “
Well
!”

“D'you want something else instead, then?” said Will. “Or are you just not hungry?”

“Honey,” the Walker said.

“Honey?”

“Honey and bread. Honey and bread. Honey and —”

“All right,” Will said. They took the tray away.

“He doesn't even say please,” Mary said. “He's a nasty old man. I'm not going near him any more.”

“Suit yourself,” Will said. Left alone, he found the tail-end of a jar of honey in the back of the larder, rather crystalline round the edges, and spread it lavishly on three hunks of bread. He took this with a glass of milk up to the Walker, who sat up greedily in bed and wolfed the lot. When eating, he was not a pretty sight.

“Good,” he said. He tried to wipe some honey off his beard and licked the back of his hand, peeping at Will. “Still snowing? Still coming down, is it?”

“What were you doing out in the snow?”

“Nothing,” the Walker said sullenly. “Don't remember.” His eyes narrowed craftily, and he gestured at his forehead and said in a plaintive whine, “Hit my head.”

“D'you remember where we found you?”

“No.”

“Do you remember who I am?”

Very promptly he shook his head. “No.”

Will said softly again, this time in the Old Speech, “Do you remember who I am?”

The Walker's shaggy face was expressionless. Will began to think
that perhaps he really had lost his memory. He leaned over the bed to pick up the tray with its empty plate and glass, and suddenly the Walker let out a shrill scream and flinched away from him, cowering down at the far side of the bed. “No!” he screeched. “No! Get away! Take them away!”

Eyes wide and terrified, he was staring at Will in loathing. For a moment Will was baffled; then he realised that his sweater had lifted as he reached out his arm, and the Walker had seen the four Signs on his belt.

“Take them away!” the old man howled. “They burn! Get them out!”

So much for lost memory, Will thought. He heard concerned feet running up the stairs, and went out of the room. Why should the Walker be terrified by the Great Signs, when he had carried one of them himself for so long?

*  *  *

His parents were grave. The news on the radio grew worse and worse as the cold gripped the country and one restriction followed another. In all records of temperature Britain had never been so cold; rivers that had never frozen before stood as solid ice, and every port on the entire coast was iced in. People could do little more than wait for the snow to stop; but still the snow fell.

They led a restless, enclosed life — “like cavemen in winter,” said Mr Stanton — and went to bed early to save fires and fuel. New Year's Day came and went and was scarcely noticed. The Walker lay in bed fidgeting and muttering and refused to eat anything but bread and milk, which by now was tinned milk, watered down. Mrs Stanton said kindly that he was regaining his strength, poor old man. Will kept away. He was growing increasingly desperate as the cold tightened and the snow floated down and down; he felt that if he did not get out of the house soon he would find the Dark had boxed him up forever. His mother gave him an escape, in the end. She ran out of flour, sugar, and tinned milk.

“I know nobody's supposed to leave the house except in dire emergency,” she said anxiously, “but really this counts as one. We do need things to eat.”

It took the boys two hours to shovel a way through the snow in
their own garden to the road, where a kind of roofless tunnel, the width of one snowplough, had been kept clear. Mr Stanton had announced that only he and Robin would go to the village, but throughout the two hours Will, panting and digging, begged to be allowed to go too, and by the end his father's resistance was so much lowered that he agreed.

They wore scarves over their ears, heavy gloves, and three sweaters each under their coats. They took a torch. It was mid-morning, but the snow was coming down as relentlessly as ever, and nobody knew when they might get home. From the steep-sided cutting in the one road of the village, tiny uneven paths had been trodden and shovelled to the few shops and most of the central houses; they could see from the footprints that someone had brought horses out from Dawsons' Farm to help carve a way to the cottages of people like Miss Bell and Mrs Horniman, who could never have managed it for themselves. In the village store, Mrs Pettigrew's tiny dog was curled up in a twitching grey heap in one corner, looking limper and unhappier than ever; Mrs Pettigrew's fat son Fred, who helped run the store, had sprained his wrist by falling in the snow and had one arm in a sling, and Mrs Pettigrew was in a state. She twittered and dithered with nervousness, she dropped things, she hunted in quite the wrong places for sugar and flour and found neither of them, and in the end she sat down suddenly in a chair, like a puppet dropped from its strings, and burst into tears.

“Oh,” she sobbed, “I'm so sorry, Mr Stanton, it's this terrible snow. I'm so frightened, I don't know . . . I have these dreams that we're cut off, and nobody knows where we are. . . .”

“We already are cut off,” said her son lugubriously. “Not a car's been through the village for a week. And no supplies, and everyone running out — there's no butter, and not even any tinned milk. And the flour won't last long; there's only five bags after this one.”

“And nobody with any fuel,” Mrs Pettigrew sniffed. “And the little Randall baby sick with a fever and poor Mrs Randall without a piece of coal, and goodness knows how many more —”

The shop-bell twanged as the door opened, and in the automatic village habit, everyone turned to see who had come in. A very tall man in a voluminous black overcoat, almost a cloak, was taking off his broad-brimmed hat to show a mop of white hair; deep-shadowed eyes looked down at them over a fierce hooked nose.

“Good afternoon,” Merriman said.

“Hallo,” said Will, beaming, his world suddenly bright.

“Afternoon,” said Mrs Pettigrew, and blew her nose hard. She said, muffled by the handkerchief: “Mr Stanton, do you know Mr Lyon? He's at the Manor.”

“How d'you do?” said Will's father.

“Butler to Miss Greythorne,” Merriman said, inclining his head respectfully. “Until Mr Bates comes back from holiday. That is to say, when the snow stops. At present, of course, I can't get out, and Bates can't get in.”

“It'll never stop,” Mrs Pettigrew wailed, and she burst into tears again.

“Oh,
Mum
,” said fat Fred in disgust.

“I have some news for you, Mrs Pettigrew,” said Merriman in loud soothing tones. “We have heard an announcement over the local radio — our telephone being dead, of course, like yours. There's to be a fuel and food drop in the Manor grounds, as the place most easily visible from the air in this snow. And Miss Greythorne is asking if everyone in the village would not like to move into the Manor, for the emergency. It will be crowded, of course, but warm. And comforting, perhaps. And Dr Armstrong will be there — he is already on his way, I believe.”

“That's ambitious,” Mr Stanton said reflectively. “Almost feudal, you might say.”

Merriman's eyes narrowed slightly. “But with no such intention.”

“Oh, no, I do see that.”

Mrs Pettigrew's tears ceased. “What a lovely idea, Mr Lyon! Oh dear, it would be such a relief to be with other people, especially at night.”

“I'm other people,” said Fred.

“Yes, dear, but —”

Fred said stolidly, “I'll go and get some blankets. And pack some stuff from the shop.”

“That would be wise,” Merriman said. “The radio says the storm will grow very much worse this evening. So the sooner everyone can gather, the better.”

“Would you like some help with telling people?” Robin began pulling up his collar again.

“Excellent. That would be excellent.”

“We'll all help,” said Mr Stanton.

Will had turned to look out of the window at the mention of the storm, but the snow floating down out of the solid grey sky seemed much as before. The windows were so misted that it was difficult to see out of them at all, but he caught a glimpse now of something moving outside. There was someone out there on the snow-road carved through Huntercombe Lane. He saw clearly only for a second, as the figure passed the end of the Pettigrews' path, but a second was all he needed to recognise the man sitting erect on the great black horse.

“The Rider has passed!” he said quickly and clearly in the Old Speech.

Merriman's head jerked round; then he collected himself and ostentatiously swept his hat on to his head. “I shall be very grateful to have assistance.”

“
What
did you say, Will?” Robin, distracted, was staring at his brother.

“Oh, nothing.” Will went to the door, making a great fuss over buttoning his coat. “Just thought I saw someone.”

“But you said something in some funny language.”

“Of course I didn't. I just said 'Who's that out there?' Only it wasn't anyone anyway.”

Robin was still staring at him. “You sounded just like that old tramp, when he was babbling when we first put him to bed. . . .” But he was not given to wasting time on surmise; he shook his practical head and dropped the subject. “Oh well.”

Merriman managed to walk closely behind Will, as they were leaving the Pettigrews' to scatter and warn the rest of the villagers. He said softly in the Old Speech, “Get the Walker to the Manor if you can. Quickly. Or he will stop you from getting out yourself. But you may have a little trouble with your father's pride.”

By the time the Stantons reached home, after their struggling tour of the village, Will had almost forgotten what Merriman had said about his father. He was too busy working out how they could get the Walker to the Manor without actually having to carry him. He remembered only when he heard Mr Stanton talking in the kitchen, as they pulled off their coats and delivered their supplies.

“. . . good of the old girl, having everyone in there. Of course
they've got the space, and the fires, and those old walls are so thick they keep the cold out better than anyone's. Much the best thing for the people from the cottages — poor Miss Bell wouldn't have lasted long. . . . Still, of course, we're all right here. Self-contained. No point in adding to the manorial load.”

“Oh, Dad,” Will said impulsively, “don't you think we ought to go too?”

“I don't think so,” said his father, with the lazy assurance that Will should have known was harder to break than any fervour.

“But Mr Lyon said it would be much more dangerous later on, because of the storm getting worse.”

“I think I can make my own judgement of the weather, Will, without help from Miss Greythorne's butler,” said Mr Stanton amiably.