The Dark Is Rising (7 page)

But rearing questions very soon chased it out. “Merriman? Do you mean this clearing is here hundreds of years before I first saw it? And the great hall, is it a Manor before the Manor, out of centuries ago? And the forest all round us, that I came through when I saw the smith and the Rider — it stretches everywhere, does it all belong to —”

Merriman looked down at him and laughed, a gay laugh, suddenly without the heaviness that had been over them both.

“Let me show you something else,” he said, and he drew Will further through the trees, away from the clearing, until there was an end to the sequence of trunks and mounds of snow. And before him Will saw not the morning's narrow track that he had been expecting, winding its way through an endless forest of ancient crowding trees — but the familiar twentieth-century line of Huntercombe Lane, and beyond it, a little way up the road, a glimpse of his own house. The Manor railings were before them, somewhat shortened by the deep snow; Merriman stepped stiff-legged over, Will crept through his usual gap, and they were standing on the snow-banked road.

Merriman put back his hood again, and lifted his white-maned head as if to sniff the air of this newer century. “You see, Will,” he said, “we of the Circle are planted only loosely within Time. The doors are a way through it, in any direction we may choose. For all times co-exist, and the future can sometimes affect the past, even though the past is a road that leads to the future. . . . But men cannot understand this. Nor will you for a while yet. We can travel through the years in other ways too — one of them was used this morning to bring you back through five centuries or so. That is where you were — in the time of the Royal Forests, that stretched over all the southern part
of this land from Southampton Water up to the valley of the Thames here.”

He pointed across the road to the flat horizon, and Will remembered how he had seen the Thames twice that morning: once among its familiar fields, once buried instead among trees. He stared at the intensity of remembering on Merriman's face.

“Five hundred years ago,” Merriman said, “the kings of England chose deliberately to preserve those forests, swallowing up whole villages and hamlets inside them, so that the wild things, the deer and the boars and even the wolves, might breed there for the hunt. But forests are not biddable places, and the kings were without knowing it establishing a haven too for the powers of the Dark, which might otherwise have been driven back then to the mountains and remotenesses of the North. . . . So that is where you were until now, Will. In the forest of Anderida, as they used to call it. In the long-gone past. You were there in the beginning of the day, walking through the forest in the snow; there on the empty hillside of the Chilterns; still there when you had first walked through the doors — that was a symbol, your first walking, for your birthday as one of the Old Ones. And there, in that past, is where we left the Lady. I wish that I knew where and when we shall see her again. But come she will, when she can.” He shrugged, as if to shake away the heaviness again. “And now you can go home, for you are in your own world.”

“And you are in it too,” said Will.

Merriman smiled. “Back again. With mixed feelings.”

“Where will you go?”

“About and roundabout. I have a place in this present time, just as you do. Go home now, Will. The next stage in the quest depends on the Walker, and he will find you. And when his circle is on your belt beside the first, I shall come.”

“But —” Will suddenly wanted to clutch at him, to beg him not to go away. His home no longer seemed quite the unassailable fortress it had always been.

“You will be all right,” Merriman said gently. “Take things as they come. Remember that the power protects you. Do nothing rash to draw trouble towards you, and all will be well. And we shall meet soon, I promise you.”

“All right,” Will said uncertainly.

An odd gust of wind eddied round them, in the still morning, and gobbets of snow spattered down from the roadside trees. Merriman drew his cloak around him, its bottom edge swirling a pattern in the snow; he gave Will one sharp look, of warning and encouragement mixed, pulled his hood forward over his face, and strode off down the road without a word. He disappeared round the bend beside Rooks Wood, on the way to Dawsons' Farm.

Will took a deep breath, and ran home. The lane was silent in the deep snow and the grey morning; no birds moved or chirped; nothing stirred anywhere. The house too was utterly quiet. He shed his outdoor clothes, went up the silent stairs. On the landing he stood looking out at the white roofs and fields. No great forest mantled the earth now. The snow was as deep, but it was smooth over the flat fields of the valley, all the way to the curving Thames.

“All right, all right,” said James sleepily from inside his room.

From behind the next door, Robin gave a kind of formless growl and mumbled, “In a minute. Coming.”

Gwen and Margaret came stumbling together out of the bedroom they shared, wearing nightdresses, rubbing their eyes. “There's no need to bellow,” Barbara said reproachfully to Will.

“Bellow?” He stared at her.

“
Wake up everyone!
” she said in a mock shout. “I mean, it's a holiday, for goodness' sake.”

Will said, “But I —”

“Never mind,” Gwen said. “You can forgive him for wanting to wake us up today. After all, he has a good reason.” And she came forward and dropped a quick kiss on the top of his head.

“Happy birthday, Will,” she said.

“More snow to come, they say,” said the fat lady with the string bag to the bus conductor.

The bus conductor, who was West Indian, shook his head and gave a great glum sigh. “Crazy weather,” he said. “One more winter like this, and I going back to Port of Spain.”

“Cheer up, love,” said the fat lady. “You won't see no more like this. Sixty-six years I've lived in the Thames Valley, and I never saw it snow like this, not before Christmas. Never.”

“Nineteen forty-seven,” said the man sitting next to her, a thin man with a long pointed nose. “That was a year for snow. My word it was. Drifts higher than your head, all down Huntercombe Lane and Marsh Lane and right across the Common. You couldn't even cross the Common for two weeks. They had to get snow ploughs. Oh, that was a year for snow.”

“But not before Christmas,” said the fat lady.

“No, it was January.” The man nodded mournfully. “Not before Christmas, no —”

They might have gone on like this all the way to Maidenhead, and perhaps they did, but Will suddenly noticed that his bus stop was approaching in the featureless white world outside. He jumped to his feet, clutching at bags and boxes. The conductor punched the bell for him.

“Christmas shopping,” he observed.

“Uh-huh. Three . . . four . . . five . . .” Will squashed the packages against his chest, and hung on to the rail of the lurching bus. “I've finished it all now,” he said. “About time.”

“Wish I had,” said the conductor. “Christmas Eve tomorrow too. Frozen blood, that's my problem — need some warm weather to wake me up.”

The bus stopped, and he steadied Will as he stepped off. “Merry Christmas, man,” he said. They knew one another from Will's bus rides to and from school.

“Merry Christmas,” Will said. On an impulse he called after him, as the bus moved away, “You'll have some warm weather on Christmas Day!”

The conductor grinned a broad white grin. “You gonna fix it?” he called back.

Perhaps I could,
Will thought, as he tramped along the main road towards Huntercombe Lane.
Perhaps I could
. The snow was deep even on the pavements; few people had been out to tread it down in the last two days. For Will they had been peaceful days, in spite of the memory of what had gone before. He had spent a cheerful birthday, with a family party so boisterous that he had fallen into bed and asleep with scarcely a thought of the Dark. After that, there had been a day of snowball fights and improvised toboggans with his brothers, in the sloping field behind the house. Grey days, with more snow hanging overhead but inexplicably not falling yet. Silent days; hardly a car came down the lane, except the vans of the milkman and the baker. And the rooks were quiet, only one or two of them drifting slowly to and fro sometimes over their wood.

The animals, Will found, were no longer frightened of him. If anything, they seemed more affectionate than before. Only Raq, the elder of the two collies, who liked to sit with his chin resting on Will's knee, would jerk away from him sometimes for no apparent reason, as if propelled by an electric shock. Then he would prowl the room restlessly for a few moments, before coming back to gaze enquiringly up into Will's face, and make himself comfortable again as before. Will did not know what to make of it. He knew that Merriman would know; but Merriman was out of his reach.

The crossed circle at his belt had remained warm to the touch since he had arrived home two mornings before. He slipped his hand under his coat now as he walked, to check it, and the circle was cold; but he thought that must simply be because he was outdoors, where everything was cold. He had spent most of the afternoon shopping
for Christmas presents in Slough, their nearest large town; it was an annual ritual, the day before Christmas Eve being the day when he was certain of having birthday present money from assorted aunts and uncles to spend. This, however, was the first year he had gone alone. He was enjoying it; you could think things out better on your own. The all-important present for Stephen — a book about the Thames — had been bought long before, and posted off to Kingston, Jamaica, where his ship was on what was called the Caribbean Station. Will thought it sounded like a train. He decided he must ask his bus conductor friend what Kingston was like; though since the bus conductor came from Trinidad perhaps he might have stern feelings about other islands.

He felt again the small drooping of the spirits that had come in the last two days, because this year for the first time that he could remember there had been no birthday present from Stephen. And he pushed the disappointment away for the hundredth time, with the argument that the posts had gone wrong, or the ship had suddenly sailed on some urgent mission among the green islands. Stephen always remembered; Stephen would have remembered this time, if something had not got in the way. Stephen couldn't possibly forget.

Ahead of him, the sun was going down, visible for the first time since his birthday morning. It blazed out fat and gold-orange through a gap in the clouds, and all around the snow-silver world glittered with small gold flashes of light. After the grey slushy streets of the town, everything was beautiful again. Will plodded along, passing garden walls, trees, and then the top of a small unpaved track, scarcely a road, known as Tramps' Alley, that wandered off from the main road and eventually curled round to join Huntercombe Lane close to the Stantons' house. The children used it as a short cut sometimes. Will glanced down it now, and saw that nobody had been along the path since the snow began; down there it lay untrodden, smooth and white and inviting, marked only by the picture-writing of birds' footprints. Unexplored territory. Will found it irresistible.

So he turned down into Tramps' Alley, crunching with relish through the clear, slightly crusted snow, so that fragments of it clung in a fringe to the trousers tucked into his boots. He lost sight of the sun almost at once, cut off by the block of woodland that lay between the little track and the few houses edging the top of
Huntercombe Lane. As he stomped through the snow, he clutched his parcels to his chest, counting them again: the knife for Robin, the chamois-leather for Paul, to clean his flute; the diary for Mary, the bathsalts for Gwennie; the super-special felt-tipped pens for Max. All his other presents were already bought and wrapped. Christmas was a complicated festival when you were one of nine children.

The walk down the Alley began quite soon to be less fun than he had expected. Will's ankles ached from the strain of kicking a way through the snow. The parcels were awkward to carry. The red-golden glow from the sun died away into a dull greyness. He was hungry, and he was cold.

Trees loomed high on his right: mostly elms, with an occasional beech. At the other side of the track was a stretch of wasteland, transformed by the snow from a messy array of rank weeds and scrub into a moon-landscape of white sweeping slopes and shaded hollows. All around him on the snow-covered track twigs and small branches lay scattered, brought down from the trees by the weight of snow; just ahead, Will saw a huge branch lying right across his path. He glanced apprehensively upward, wondering how many other dead arms of the great elms were waiting for wind or snow-weight to bring them crashing down. A good time for collecting firewood, he thought, and had a sudden tantalising image of the leaping fire that had blazed in the fireplace of the great hall: the fire that had changed his world, by vanishing at the word of his command and then obediently blazing into life again.

As he stumbled along in the cold snow, a sudden wild cheerful idea sprang up in his mind out of the thought of that fire, and he paused, grinning to himself.
You gonna fix it?
Well, no, friend, I probably can't get you a warm Christmas Day really, but I could warm things up a bit here, now. He looked confidently at the dead branch lying before him, and with easy command now of the gift he knew was in him, he said to it softly, mischievously, “Burn!”

And there on the snow, the fallen arm of the tree burst into flame. Every inch of it, from the thick rotted base to the smallest twig, blazed with licking yellow fire. There was a hissing sound, and a tall shaft of brilliance rose from the fire like a pillar. No smoke came from the burning, and the flames were steady; twigs that should have
blazed and crackled briefly and then fallen into ash burned continuously, as if fed by other fuel within. Standing there alone, Will felt suddenly small and alarmed; this was no ordinary fire, and not to be controlled by ordinary means. It was not behaving at all in the same way as the fire in the hearth had done. He did not know what to do with it. In panic, he focused his mind on it again and told it to go out, but it burned on, steady as before. He knew that he had done something foolish, improper, dangerous perhaps. Looking up through the pillar of quivering light, he saw high in the grey sky four rooks flapping slowly in a circle.

Oh Merriman, he thought unhappily, where are you?

Then he gasped, as someone grabbed him from behind, blocked his kicking feet in a scuffle of snow, and twisted his arms by the wrists behind his back. The parcels scattered in the snow. Will yelled with the pain in his arms. The grip on his wrists slackened at once, as if his attacker were reluctant to do him any real harm; but he was still firmly held.

“Put out the fire!” said a hoarse voice in his ear, urgently.

“I can't!” Will said. “Honestly. I've tried, but I can't.”

The man cursed and mumbled strangely, and instantly Will knew who it was. His terror fell away, like a released weight. “Walker,” he said, “let me go. You don't have to hold me like that.”

The grip tightened again at once. “Oh no you don't, boy. I know your tricks. You're the one all right, I know now, you're an Old One, but I don't trust your kind any more than I trust the Dark. You're new awake, you are, and let me tell you something you don't know — while you're new awake, you can't do nothing to anyone unless you can see him with your eyes. So you aren't going to see me, that I know.”

Will said: “I don't want to do anything to you. There really are some people who can be trusted, you know.”

“Precious few,” the Walker said bitterly.

“I could shut my eyes, if you'd let me go.”

“Pah!” the old man said.

Will said, “You carry the second Sign. Give it to me.”

There was a silence. He felt the man's hands fall away from his own arms, but he stood where he was and did not turn round. “I have the first Sign already, Walker,” he said. “You know I do. Look,
I'm undoing my jacket, and I'll pull it back, and you can see the first circle on my belt.”

He pulled aside his coat, still without moving his head, and was aware of the Walker's hunched form slipping round at his side. The man's breath hissed out through his teeth in a long sigh as he looked, and he turned his head up to Will without caution. In the yellow light from the steadily-burning branch Will saw a face contorted with battling emotions: hope and fear and relief wound tightly together by anguished uncertainty.

When the man spoke, his voice was broken and simple as that of a small sad child.

“It's so heavy,” he said plaintively. “And I've been carrying it for so long. I don't even remember why. Always frightened, always having to run away. If only I could get rid of it, if only I could rest. Oh, if only it was gone. But I daren't risk giving it to the wrong one, I daren't. The things that would happen to me if I did, they're too terrible, they can't be put into words. The Old Ones can be cruel, cruel. . . . I think you're the right one, boy, I've been looking for you a long time, a long time, to give the Sign to you. But how can I be really sure? How can I be sure you aren't a trick of the Dark?”

He's been frightened so long, Will thought, that he's forgotten how to stop. How awful, to be so absolutely lonely. He doesn't know how to trust me; it's so long since he trusted anyone, he's forgotten how. . . . “Look,” he said gently. “You must know I'm not part of the Dark. Think. You saw the Rider try to strike me down.”

But the old man shook his head miserably, and Will remembered how he had fled shrieking from the clearing the moment the Rider had appeared.

“Well, if that doesn't help,” he said, “doesn't the fire tell you?”

“The fire almost,” the Walker said. He looked at it hopefully; then his face twisted in recalled alarm. “But the fire, it'll bring them. boy, you know that. The rooks will already be guiding them. And how do I know whether you lit the fire because you're a new-awake Old One playing games, or as a signal to bring them after me?” He moaned to himself in anguish, and clutched his arms round his shoulders. He was a wretched thing, Will thought pityingly. But somehow he had to be made to understand.

Will looked up. There were more rooks circling lazily overhead now, and he could hear them calling harshly to one another. Was the old man right, were the dark birds messengers of the Dark? “Walker, for goodness' sake,” he said impatiently. “You must trust me — if you don't trust someone just once, for long enough to give him the Sign, you'll be carrying it for ever. Is that what you want?”

The old tramp wailed and muttered, staring at him from mad little eyes; he seemed caught in his centuries of suspicion like a fly in a web. But the fly still has wings that can break the web; give him the strength to flap them, just once. . . . Driven by some unfamiliar part of his mind, without quite knowing what he was doing, Will gripped the iron circle on his belt, and he stood up as straight and tall as he could and pointed at the Walker, and called out, “The last of the Old Ones has come, Walker, and it is time. The moment for giving the Sign is now, now or never. Think only of that — no other chance will come. Now, Walker. Unless you would carry it for ever, obey the Old Ones now.
Now!
”