The Dark Is Rising (27 page)

But into the dead, world-muffling silence enwrapping him, one small sound came. It was the same strange high whickering far up in the sky, like the passing of many migrant geese on an autumn night, that he had heard three times that day. Nearer, louder it grew, opening his eyes. And he saw then a scene like nothing he had ever seen before, nor ever saw again. Half the sky was thick and dreadful with the silent raging of the Dark and its whirling tornado power; but now riding down towards it, out of the west with the speed of dropping stones, came Herne and the Wild Hunt. At the peak of their power now, in full cry, they came roaring out of the great dark thundercloud, through streaking lightning and grey-purple clouds, riding on the storm. The yellow-eyed antlered man rode laughing dreadfully, crying out the
avaunt
that rallies hounds on the full chase, and his brilliant, white-gold horse flung forward with mane and tail flying.

And around them and endlessly behind them like a broad white river poured the Yell Hounds, the Yelpers, the Hounds of Doom, their red eyes burning with a thousand warning flames. The sky was white with them; they filled the western horizon; and still they came, unending. At the sound of their bell-like, thousand-tongued yelping,
the magnificence of the Dark flinched and swayed and seemed to tremble. Will caught sight of the Black Rider once more, high in the dark mist; his face was twisted in fury and dread and frozen malevolence, and behind these the awareness of defeat. He spun his horse so fiercely round that the lithe black stallion tottered and almost fell. As he jerked at the rein, the Rider seemed to cast something impatiently from his saddle, a small dark object that fell limp and loose to the ground, and lay there like a discarded cloak.

Then the storm and the rushing Wild Hunt were upon the Rider. He rode up into his whirling black refuge. The fantastic tornado-pillar of the Dark curved and twisted, lashed like a snake in agony until finally there was a great shriek in the heavens, and it began rushing at furious speed northward. Over the Park and the Common and Hunter's Combe it fled, and after it went Herne and the Hunt in full cry, a long white crest on the surge of the storm.

The yelping of the hounds died with distance, fading last of all the sounds of the chase, and above Herne's Oak the silver half-moon was left floating in a sky flecked with small ragged remnants of cloud.

Will drew a long breath, and looked round. Merriman stood exactly as he had last seen him, tall and straight, hooded, a dark featureless statue. Old George had drawn Pollux back into the trees, for no normal animal could have faced the Hunt so close and survived.

Will said, “Is it over?”

“More or less,” Merriman said, faceless under the hood.

“The Dark — is —” He dared not bring out the words.

“The Dark is vanquished, at last, in this encounter. Nothing may outface the Wild Hunt. And Herne and his hounds hunt their quarry as far as they may, to the very ends of the earth. So at the ends of the earth the Lords of the Dark must skulk now, awaiting their next time of chance. But for the next time, we are this much stronger, by the completed Circle and the Six Signs and the Gift of Gramarye. We are made stronger by your completed quest, Will Stanton, and closer to gaining the last victory, at the very end.” He pushed back his broad hood, the wild white hair glinting in the moonlight, and for a moment the shadowed eyes looked into Will's with a communication of pride that made Will's face warm with pleasure. Then Merriman
looked out across the dappled, snow-mounded grassland of the Great Park.

“There is left only the joining of the Signs,” he said. “But before that, one — small — thing.”

A curious jerkiness caught at his voice. Will followed, puzzled, as he strode forward close to Herne's Oak. Then he saw on the snow, at the edge of the tree's shadow, the crumpled cloak that the Black Rider had let fall as he turned to flee. Merriman stooped, then knelt down beside it in the snow. Still wondering, Will peered closer, and saw with a shock that the dark heap was not a cloak, but a man. The figure lay face upward, twisted at a terrible angle. It was the Walker; it was Hawkin.

Merriman said, his voice deep and expressionless, “Those who ride high with the Lords of the Dark must expect to fall. And men do not fall easily from such heights. I think his back is broken.”

It occurred to Will, looking at the small still face, that this time he had forgotten that Hawkin was no more than an ordinary man. Not ordinary perhaps — that was not the word for a man who had been used by both Light and Dark, and sent many ways through Time, to become at the last the Walker battered by wandering through six hundred years. But a man nonetheless, and mortal. The white face flickered, and the eyes opened. Pain came into them, and the shadow of a different, remembered pain.

“He threw me down,” Hawkin said.

Merriman looked at him, but said nothing.

“Yes,” Hawkin whispered bitterly. “You knew it would happen.” He gasped with pain as he tried to move his head; then panic came into his eyes. “Only my head . . . I feel my head, because of the pain. But my arms, my legs, they are . . . not there. . . .”

There was a dreadful, desolate hopelessness in the lined face now. Hawkin looked full at Merriman. “I am lost,” he said. “I know it. Will you make me live on, with the worst suffering of all now come? The last right of a man is to die. You prevented it all this time; you made me live on through the centuries when often I longed for death. And all for a betrayal that I fell into because I had not the wit of an Old One. . . .” The grief and longing in his voice were intolerable; Will turned his head away.

But Merriman said, “You were Hawkin, my foster-son and liege
man, who betrayed your lord and the Light. So you became the Walker, to walk the earth for as long as the Light required it. And so you lived on, indeed. But we have not kept you since then, my friend. Once the Walker's task was done, you were free, and you could have had rest forever. Instead you chose to listen to the promises of the Dark and to betray the Light a second time. . . . I gave you the freedom to choose, Hawkin, and I did not take it away. I may not. It is still yours. No power of the Dark or of the Light can make a man more than a man, once any supernatural role he may have had to play comes to an end. But no power of the Dark or the Light may take away his rights as a man, either. If the Black Rider told you so, he lied.”

The twisted face gazed up at him in agonised near-belief. “I may have rest? There can be an end, and rest, if I choose?”

“All your choices have been your own,” said Merriman sadly. Hawkin nodded his head; a spasm of pain flashed across his face and was gone. But the eyes that looked up at them then were the bright, lively eyes of the beginning, of the small, neat man in the green velvet coat. They turned to Will. Hawkin said softly, “Use the gift well, Old One.”

Then he looked back at Merriman, a long unfathomable private look, and he said almost inaudibly: “Master. . . .”

Then the light went out behind the bright eyes, and there was no longer anyone there.

In the low-roofed smithy Will stood with his back to the entrance, staring into the fire. Orange and red and fierce yellow-white it burned, as John Smith pushed at the long bellows-arm; the warmth made Will feel comfortable for the first time that day. There was no great harm in an Old One being fish-wet in an icy river, but he was glad to feel warm in his bones again. And the fire lit his spirits, as it lit the whole room.

Yet it did not properly light the room, for nothing that Will could see appeared solid. There was a quivering in the air. Only the fire seemed real; the rest might have been a mirage.

He saw Merriman watching him with a half-smile.

“It's that half-world feeling again,” Will said, baffled. “The same as that day in the Manor when we were in two kinds of Time at once.”

“It is. Just the same. And so we are.”

“But we're in the time of the smithy,” Will said. “We went through the Doors.”

So they had; he and Merriman, Old George, and the huge horse Pollux. Out on the wet, dark common, when the Wild Hunt had driven the Dark away over the sky, they had gone through the Doors into the time six centuries earlier from which Hawkin had once come, and into which Will had walked on the still, snowy morning of his birthday. They had brought Hawkin back to his century for the last time, borne on Pollux's broad back; when they were all come through the Doors, Old George had taken the horse away, bearing Hawkin's body in the direction of the church. And Will knew that in his own time, somewhere in the village churchyard, covered either
by more recent burials or by a stone crumbling into illegibility now, there would be the grave of a man named Hawkin, who had died some time in the thirteenth century and lain there in peace ever since.

Merriman drew him to the front of the smithy, where it faced the narrow hard-earth track through Hunter's Combe, the Old Way. “Listen,” he said.

Will looked at the bumpy track, the dense trees on the other side, the cold grey strip of almost-morning sky. “I can hear the river!” he said, puzzled.

“Ah,” Merriman said.

“But the river's miles away, the other side of the Common.”

Merriman cocked his head to the rushing, rippling sound of water. It had the sound of a river that is full but not in flood, a river running after much rain. “What we are hearing,” he said, “is not the Thames, but the sound of the twentieth century. You see, Will, the Signs must be joined by John Wayland Smith in this smithy, in this time — for not long after this the smithy was destroyed. Yet the Signs were not brought together until your quest, which has been within your own time. So the joining must be done in a bubble of Time between the two, from which the eyes and ears of an Old One may perceive both. That's not a real river we hear. It is the water running in your time down Huntercombe Lane, from the melting of the snow.”

Will thought of the snow and of his family beset by floods, and suddenly he was a small boy wanting very much to be at home. Merriman's dark eyes looked at him compassionately. “Not long,” he said.

A hammering sound came from behind them; they turned. John Smith had finished pumping the bellows at his red-white fire; he was working at the anvil instead, while the long tongs waited ready before the fire's glow. He was not using his usual heavy hammer, but another that looked ridiculously small in his broad fist; a delicate tool more like those Will saw his father use for jewellery. But then, the object on which he was working was far more delicate than horseshoes; a golden chain, broad-linked, from which the Six Signs would hang. The links lay in a row beside John's hand.

He looked up, his face flushed red by the fire. “I am almost ready.”

“Very well, then.” Merriman left them and stalked out to the road. He stood there alone, tall and imposing in the long blue cloak, the
hood pushed back so that his thick white hair glinted like snow. But there was no snow here, and even through the sound of the water that Will could still hear rushing, no water either. . . .

Then the change began. Merriman seemed not to have moved. He stood there with his back to them, his hands loose at his sides, very still, without the least movement. But all around him, the world was beginning to move. The air shivered and quaked, the outlines of trees and earth and sky trembled, blurred, and all things visible seemed to swim and intermingle. Will stood looking at this wavering world, feeling a little giddy, and gradually he began to hear over the sound of the unseen, rushing river-road the murmur of many voices. Like a place seen through a shimmering haze of heat, the trembling world began to resolve itself into outlines of visible things, and he saw that a great indistinct throng of people filled the road and the spaces between all the trees and all the open yard before the smithy. They seemed not quite real, not quite firm; they had a ghostly quality as if they might disappear when touched. They smiled at Merriman, greeting him where he stood, his face turned away still from Will. Thronging round him, they gazed eagerly ahead at the smithy like an audience about to watch a play, but as yet none of them seemed to see Will and the smith.

There was an endless variety of faces — gay, sombre, old, young, paper-white, jet-black, and every shade and gradation of pink and brown between vaguely recognisable, or totally strange. Will thought he recognised faces from the party at Miss Greythorne's manor, the party in a nineteenth-century Christmas that had led Hawkin to disaster and himself to the Book of Gramarye — and then he knew. All these people, this endless throng that Merriman had somehow summoned, were the Old Ones. From every land, from every part of the world, here they were, to witness the joining of the Signs. Will was all at once terrified, longing to sink into the ground and escape the gaze of this his great new enchanted world.

He thought: these are my people. This is my family, in the same way as my real family. The Old Ones. Every one of us is linked, for the greatest purpose in the world. Then he saw a stir in the crowd, running like a ripple along the road, and some began to shift and move as if to make way. And he heard the music: the piping, thrumming sound, almost comical in its simplicity, of the fifes and drums
he had heard in his dream that might not have been a dream. He stood stiffly with his hands clenched, waiting, and Merriman swung round and strode to stand beside him, as out of the crowd towards them came the little procession just as it had been before.

Through the thronging figures, and curiously seeming more solid than any, came the little procession of boys: the same boys in their rough, unfamiliar tunics and leggings, shoulder-length hair, and strange bunched caps. Again those at the front carried sticks and bundles of birch twigs, while those at the back played their single repeated melancholy tune, on pipes and drums. Again between these two groups came six boys carrying on their shoulders a bier woven of branches and reeds with a bunch of holly at each corner.

Merriman said, very softly, “First on St Stephen's Day, the day after Christmas. Then on Twelfth Night. Twice in the year, if it is a particular year, comes the Hunting of the Wren.”

But now Will could see the bier plainly, and even at the beginning, this time, there was no wren. Instead, that other delicate form lay there, the old lady, robed in blue, with a great rose-coloured ring on one hand. And the boys marched up to the smithy and very gently laid the bier down on the ground. Merriman bent over it, holding out his hand, and the Lady opened her eyes and smiled. He helped her to her feet. Moving forward towards Will, she took both his hands in hers. “Well done, Will Stanton,” she said, and through all the crowd of Old Ones thronging the track, a murmur of approval went up like the wind singing in the trees.

The Lady turned to face the smithy, where John stood waiting. She said, “On oak and on iron, let the Signs be joined.”

“Come, Will,” said John Smith. Together they moved to the anvil. Will laid down the belt that had borne the Signs through all their seeking. “On oak and on iron?” he whispered.

“Iron for the anvil,” said the smith softly. “Oak for its foot. This big wooden base of the anvil is always oak — the root of an oak, strongest part of the tree. Have I not heard someone telling you the nature of the wood a while ago ?” His blue eyes twinkled at Will, and then he turned to his work. One by one he took the Signs and joined them with rings of gold. In the centre he set the Signs of Fire and Water; on one side of them the Signs of Iron and Bronze, and on the other, the Signs of Wood and Stone. At each end he fastened a length
of the sturdy gold chain. He worked swiftly and delicately, while Will gazed. Outside, the great crowd of Old Ones was still as growing grass. Behind the tapping of the smith's hammer and the occasional hiss of the bellows, there was no sound anywhere but the running water of the invisible river-road, centuries away in the future and yet close at hand.

“It is done,” said John at last.

Ceremonially he handed Will the glittering chain of linked Signs, and Will gasped at the beauty of them. Holding the Signs now, he felt from them suddenly a strange fierce sensation like an electric shock: a strong, arrogant reassurance of power. Will was puzzled: danger was past, the Dark was fled, what purpose had this? He walked to the Lady, still wondering, put the Signs into her hands, and knelt down before her.

She said, “But it's for the future, Will, don't you see? That is what the Signs are for. They are the second of the four Things of Power, that have slept these many centuries, and they are a great part of our strength. Each of the Things of Power was made at a different point in Time by a different craftsman of the Light, to await the day when it would be needed. There is a golden chalice, called a grail; there is the Circle of Signs; there is a sword of crystal, and a harp of gold. The grail, like the Signs, is safely found. The other two we must yet achieve, other quests for other times. But once we have added those to these, then when the Dark comes rising for its final and most dreadful attempt on the world, we shall have hope and assurance that we can overcome.”

She raised her head, looking out over the unnumbered ghostly crowd of the Old Ones. “
When the Dark comes rising
,” she said, expressionless, and the many voices answered her in a soft, ominous rumble, “
six shall drive it back
.”

Then she looked down again at Will, the lines around her ageless eyes creasing in affection. “Sign-seeker,” she said, “by your birth and your birthday you came into your own, and the circle of the Old Ones was complete, for now and forever. And by your good use of the Gift of Gramarye, you achieved a great quest and proved yourself stronger than the testing. Until we meet again, as meet we shall, we remember you with pride.”

The far-stretching crowd murmured again, a different, warm re
sponse, and with her thin small hands, the great rose ring glimmering, the Lady bent down and set the chain of the linked Signs around Will's neck. Then she kissed him lightly on the forehead, the gentle brushing-by of a bird's wing. “Farewell, Will Stanton,” she said.

The murmur of the voices rose, and the world spun round Will in a flurry of trees and flame, and rising over it all was the bell-like haunting phrase of his music, louder and more joyful now than ever before. It chimed and rang in his head, filling him with such delight that he closed his eyes and floated in its beauty; it was, he knew for a crack of a second, the spirit and essence of the Light, this music. But then it began gradually to fade, to grow distant and beckoning and a little melancholy, as it always had been before, fading into nothing, fading, fading, with the sound of running water rising to take its place. Will cried out in sorrow, and opened his eyes.

And he was kneeling on the cold beaten snow in the grey dead light of early morning, in a place he did not recognise beside Huntercombe Lane. Bare trees rose out of pitted, wet snow on the other side of the road. Though the Lane itself was once more a clear paved road, water ran furiously in each of its gutters with a sound like a stream, or even a river. . . . The road was empty; no one was anywhere to be seen among the trees. Will could have wept with the sense of loss; all that warm crowd of friends, the brightness and light and celebration, and the Lady: all gone, all fled, leaving him alone.

He put his hand to his neck. The Signs were still there.

Behind him, Merriman's deep voice said, “Time to go home, Will.”

“Oh,” Will said unhappily, without turning round. “I'm glad you're still there.”

“You sound most glad,” Merriman said drily. “Restrain your ecstasy, I pray you.”

Sitting back on his heels, Will looked at him over his shoulder. Merriman gazed down at him with immense solemnity, his dark eyes owlish, and suddenly the emotions that were drawn into a tight, unbearable knot inside Will cracked and broke, and he dissolved into laughter. Merriman's mouth twitched slightly. He put out his hand, and Will scrambled to his feet, still spluttering.

“It was just —” Will said, and stopped, not quite sure yet whether he was laughing or crying.

“It was — an alteration,” Merriman said gently. “Can you walk now?”

“Of course I can walk,” said Will indignantly. He stared about him. Where the smithy had been, there was a battered brick building like a garage, and around it he could see traces of cold-frames and vegetable beds through the melting snow. He looked quickly up and saw the outline of a familiar house. “It's the Manor!” he said.