by Susan Cooper
No voice replied, but Will had a feeling of benison. Then it was gone, and the tall, glowing form that was and yet was not the old lady moved slowly forward in the darkness towards the doors, and for an instant Will heard again the haunting phrase of music that he could never capture in his memory, and the doors slowly opened. Outside there was a grey light and silence, and the air was cold.
Behind him, the light of the candle-ring was gone, and there was only darkness. It was an uneasy, empty darkness, so that he knew the hall was no longer there. And suddenly he realised that the luminous golden figure before him was fading too, vanishing away, like smoke that grows thinner, thinner, until it cannot be seen at all. For an instant there was a flash of rose-coloured brilliance from the huge ring that had been on the old lady’s hand, and then that too dimmed, and her bright presence faded into nothing. Will felt a desperate ache of loss, as if his whole world had been swallowed up by the Dark, and he cried out.
A hand touched his shoulder. Merriman was at his side. They were through the doors. Slowly the great wooden carved portals swung back behind them, long enough for Will to see clearly that they were indeed the same strange gates that had opened for him before on the white untrodden slope of a Chiltern hill. Then, at the moment that they closed, the doors too were no longer there. He saw nothing: only the grey light of snow that reflects a grey sky. He was back in the snow-drowned woodland world into which he had walked early that morning.
Anxiously he swung round to Merriman. “Where is she? What happened?”
“It was too much for her. The strain was too great, even for her. Never before — I have never seen this before.” His voice was thick and bitter; he stared angrily at nothing.
“Have they — taken her?” Will did not know what words to use for the fear.
“No!” Merriman said. The word was so quick with scorn it might have been a laugh. “The Lady is beyond their power. Beyond any power. You will not ask a question like that when you have learned a little. She has gone away for a time, that is all. It was the opening of the doors, in the face of all that was willing them shut. Though the Dark could not destroy her, it has drained her, left her like a shell. She must recover herself, away alone, and that is bad for us if we should need her. As we shall. As the world always will.” He glanced down at Will without warmth; suddenly he seemed distant, almost threatening, like an enemy; he waved one hand impatiently. “Close your coat, boy, before you freeze.”
Will fumbled with the buttons of his heavy jacket; Merriman, he saw, was wrapped in a long battered blue cloak, high-collared.
“It was my fault, wasn’t it?” he said miserably. “If I hadn’t run forward, when I saw the doors — if I’d kept hold of your hands, and not broken the circle —”
Merriman said curtly: “Yes.” Then he relented a little. “But it was their doing, Will, not yours. They seized you, through your impatience and your hope. They love to twist good emotion to accomplish ill.”
Will stood hunched with his hands in his pockets, staring at the ground. Behind his mind a chant went sneering through his head: you have lost the Lady, you have lost the Lady. Unhappiness was thick in his throat; he swallowed; he could not speak. A breeze blew through the trees, and sprayed snow-crystals into his face.
“Will,” Merriman said. “I was angry. Forgive me. Whether you had broken the Three or not, things would have been the same. The doors are our great gateway into Time, and you will know more about the uses of them before long. But this time you could not have opened them, nor I, nor perhaps any of the circle. For the force that was pushing against them was the full midwinter power of the Dark, which none but the Lady can overcome alone — and even she, only at great cost. Take heart; at the proper time, she will return.”
He pulled at the high collar of his cloak, and it became a hood that he drew over his head. With the white hair hidden he was a dark figure suddenly, tall and inscrutable. “Come,” he said, and led Will through the deep snow, among great beeches and oaks bare of leaves. At length they paused, in a clearing.
“Do you know where you are?” Merriman said.
Will stared round at the smooth snowbanks, the rearing trees. “Of course I don’t,” he said. “How could I?”
“Yet before the winter is three-quarters done,” Merriman said, “you will be creeping into this dell to look at the snowdrops that grow everywhere between the trees. And then in the spring you will be back to stare at the daffodils. Every day for a week, to judge from last year.”
Will gaped at him. “You mean the Manor?” he said. “The Manor grounds?”
In his own century, Huntercombe Manor was the great house of the village. The house itself could not be seen from the road, but its grounds lay along the side of Huntercombe Lane opposite the Stantons’ house, and stretched a long way in each direction, edged alternately by tall wrought-iron railings and ancient brick walls. A Miss Greythorne owned it, as her family had for centuries, but Will did not know her well; he seldom saw her or her Manor, which he remembered vaguely as a mass of tall brick gables and Tudor chimneys. The flowers that Merriman had spoken of were private landmarks in his year. For as long as he could remember, he had slipped through the Manor railings at the end of winter to stand in this one magical clearing and gaze at the gentle winter-banishing snowdrops, and later the golden daffodil-glow of spring. He did not know who had planted the flowers; he had never seen anyone visiting them. He was not even sure whether anyone else knew they were there. The image of them glowed now in his mind.
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, Wi
ll. 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.
• The Walker on the Old Way • “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 wor
ld 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.