by Susan Cooper
The choir, coated and muffled, began to leave too, with cries of “Happy Christmas!” and “See you on Sunday, Vicar!” to Mr Beaumont, who would be giving only this service here today and the rest in his other parishes. The rector, talking music with Paul, smiled and waved vaguely. The church began to empty, as Will waited for his brother. He could feel his neck prickling, as though with the electricity that hangs strongly oppressive in the air before a giant storm. He could feel it everywhere, the air inside the church was charged with it. The rector, still chatting, reached out an absentminded hand and turned off the lights inside the church, leaving it in a cold grey murk, brighter only beside the door where the whiteness of the snow reflected in. And Will, seeing some figures move towards the door out of the shadows, realised that the church was not empty after all. Down there by the little twelfth-century font, he saw Farmer Dawson, Old George, and Old George’s son John, the smith, with his silent wife. The Old Ones of the Circle were waiting for him, to support him against whatever lurked outside. Will felt weak for a moment as relief washed over him in a great warm wave.
“All ready, Will?” said the rector genially, pulling on his overcoat. He went on, still preoccupied, to Paul, “Of course, I do agree the double concerto is one of the best. I only wish he’d record the unaccompanied Bach suites. Heard him do them in a church in Edinburgh once, at the Festival — marvellous —”
Paul, sharper-eyed, said, “Is anything wrong, Will?”
“No,” Will said. “That is — no.” He was trying desperately to think of some way of getting the two of them outside the church before he came near the door himself. Before — before whatever might happen did happen. By the church door he could see the Old Ones move slowly into a tight group, supporting one another. He could feel the force now very strong, very close, all around, the air was thick with it; outside the church was destruction and chaos, the heart of the Dark, and he could think of nothing that he could do to turn it aside. Then as the rector and Paul turned to walk through the nave, he saw both of them pause in the same instant, and their heads go up like the heads of wild deer on the alert. It was too late now; the voice of the Dark was so loud that even humans could sense its power.
Paul staggered, as if someone had pushed him in the chest, and grabbed a pew for support. “What is that?” he said huskily. “Rector? What on earth is it?”
Mr Beaumont had turned very white. There was a glistening of sweat on his forehead, though the church was very cold again now. “Nothing on earth, I think, perhaps,” he said. “God forgive me.” And he stumbled a few paces nearer the church door, like a man struggling through waves in the sea, and leaning forward slightly made a sweeping sign of the Cross. He stammered out, “Defend us thy humble servants in all assaults of our enemies; that we, surely trusting in thy defence, may not fear the power of any adversaries. . . .”
Farmer Dawson said very quietly but clearly from the group beside the door, “No, Rector.”
The rector seemed not to hear him. His eyes were wide, staring out at the snow; he stood transfixed, he shook like a man with fever, the sweat came running down his cheeks. He managed to half-raise one arm and point behind him: “. . . vestry . . .” he gasped out. “. . . book, on table . . . exorcise. . . .”
“Poor brave fellow,” said John Smith in the Old Speech. “This battle is not for his fighting. He is bound to think so, of course, being in his church.”
“Be easy, Reverend,” said his wife in English; her voice was soft and gentle, strongly of the country. The rector stared at her like a frightened animal, but by now all his powers of speech and movement had been taken away.
Frank Dawson said: “Come here, Will.”
Pushing against the Dark, Will came forward slowly; he touched Paul on the shoulder as he passed, looking into puzzled eyes in a face as twisted and helpless as the rector’s, and said softly: “Don’t worry. It’ll be all right soon.”
Each of the Old Ones touched him gently as he came into the group, as if joining him to them, and Farmer Dawson took him by the shoulder. He said, “We must do something to protect those two, Will, or their minds will bend. They cannot stand the pressure, the Dark will send them mad. You have the power, and the rest of us do not.”
It was Will’s first intimation that he could do anything another Old One could not, but there was no time for wonder; with the Gift of Gramarye, he closed off the minds of his brother and the rector behind a barrier that no power of any kind could break through. It was a perilous undertaking, since he the maker was the only one who could remove the barrier, and if anything were to happen to him the two protected ones would be left like vegetables, incapable of any communication, forever. But the risk had to be taken; there was nothing else to be done. Their eyes closed gently as if they had gone quietly to sleep; they stood very still. After a moment their eyes opened again, but were tranquil and empty, unaware.
“All right,” said Farmer Dawson. “Now.”
The Old Ones stood in the doorway of the church, their arms linked together. None spoke a word to another. Wild noise and turbulence rose outside; the light darkened, the wind howled and whined, the snow whirled in and whipped their faces with white chips of ice. And suddenly the rooks were in the snow, hundreds of them, black flurries of malevolence, cawing and croaking, diving down at the porch in shrieking attack and then swooping up, away. They could not come close enough to claw and tear; it was as if an invisible wall made them fall back within inches of their targets. But that would be only for as long as the Old Ones’ strength could hold. In a wild storm of black and white the Dark attacked, beating at their minds as at their bodies, and above all driving hard at the Sign-Seeker, Will. And Will knew that if he had been on his own his mind, for all its gifts of protection, would have collapsed. It was the strength of the Circle of the Old Ones that held him fast now.
But for the second time in his life, even the Circle could do no more than hold the power of the Dark at bay. Even together, the Old Ones could not drive it back. And there was no Lady now to bring aid of a greater kind. Will realised once more, helplessly, that to be an Old One was to be very old before the proper time, for the fear he began to feel now was worse than the blind terror he had known in his attic bed, worse than the fear the Dark had put into him in the great hall. This time, his fear was adult, made of experience and imagination and care for others, and it was the worst of all. In the moment that he knew this, he knew too that he, Will, was the only means by which his own fear could be overcome, and thus the Circle fortified and the Dark driven away. Who are you? he asked himself — and answered: you are the Sign-Seeker. You have three of the Signs, half the circle of Things of Power. Use them.
The sweat was standing on his own forehead now as it had done on the rector’s — though now the rector and Paul stood in smiling peace, oblivious, outside everything that was going on. Will could see the strain on the faces of the others, Farmer Dawson most of all. Slowly he moved his hands inwards, bringing the hands each held closer to one another; John Smith’s left hand nearer to Farmer Dawson’s right. And when they were close enough, he joined his neighbours’ hands, shutting himself out. For a panicking moment he clutched them again, as if he were tightening a knot. Then he let go, and stood alone.
Unprotected now by the Circle, though sheltered behind it, he swayed under the impact of the raging ill-will outside the church. Then moving very deliberately, he unclasped his belt with its three precious burdens and draped it over his arm; took from his pocket the rook’s feather, and wove it into the centre Sign: the bronze quartered circle. Then he took the belt in both his hands, holding it up before him, and moved slowly round until he stood alone in the church porch, facing the howling, rook-screaming, icy dark beyond. He had never felt so lonely before. He did nothing, he thought nothing. He stood there, and let the Signs work for themselves.
And suddenly, there was silence.
The flapping birds were gone. No wind howled. The dreadful, mad humming tha
t had filled the air and the mind was vanished altogether. Every nerve and muscle in Will’s body went limp as the tension disappeared. Outside, the snow still quietly fell, but the flakes were smaller now. The Old Ones looked at one another and laughed.
“The full circle will do the real job,” said Old George, “but half a circle can do a lot, eh, young Will?”
Will looked down at the Signs in his hand, and shook his head in wonder.
Farmer Dawson said softly, “In all my days since the grail disappeared, that’s the first time I’ve seen anything but the mind of one of the great ones drive back the Dark. Things, this time. They did it alone, for all our willing. We have Things of Power again. It has been a long, long time.”
Will was still looking at the Signs, staring, as if they held his eyes for some purpose. “Wait,” he said abstractedly. “Don’t move. Stay still for a moment.”
They paused, startled. The smith said, “Is there trouble?”
“Look at the Signs,” Will said. “Something’s happening to them. They’re — they’re glowing.”
He turned slowly, still holding the belt with the three Signs as before, until his body was blocking the grey light from the door and his hands were in the gloom of the church; and the Signs grew brighter and brighter, each of them glowing with a strange, inward light.
The Old Ones stared.
“Is it the power of driving back the Dark?” said John Smith’s wife in her soft lilt. “Is it something in them that was sleeping, and begins to wake now?”
Will was trying vainly to sense what the Signs were telling him. “I think it’s a message, it means something. But I can’t get through . . .”
The light poured out of the three Signs, filling their half of the dark little church with brilliance; it was a light like sunlight, warm and strong. Nervously, Will reached out a finger to touch the nearest circle, the Sign of Iron, but it was neither hot nor cold.
Farmer Dawson said suddenly, “Look up there!”
His arm was out, pointing up the nave, towards the altar. In the instant they turned, they saw what he had seen: another light, blazing from the wall, just as beside them the light blazed from the Signs. It shone out like the beam from a great torch.
And Will understood. He said happily, “So that’s why.”
He walked up towards the second patch of brilliance, carrying the belt and the Signs so that the shadows on the pews and on the beams of the roof moved with him as he went. As the two lights grew closer and closer together each seemed to grow brighter still. With Frank Dawson’s tall, heavy form looming behind him, Will paused in the middle of the shaft of brilliance reaching out from the wall. It looked as if a slit window were letting light through from some unimaginably bright room beyond. He saw that the light was corning from something very small, as long as one of his fingers, lying on its side.
He said with certainty to Mr Dawson: “I must take it quickly, you know, while the light still shines from it. If the light is not shining, it can’t be found at all.” And putting the belt with the Sign of Iron and the Sign of Bronze and the Sign of Wood into Frank Dawson’s hands, he went forward to the light-cleft wall and reached in to the small source of the enchanted beam.
The glowing thing came out of the wall easily from a break in the stucco where the Chiltern flints of the wall showed through. It lay on his palm: a circle, quartered by a cross. It had not been cut into that shape. Even through the light in it, Will could see the smooth roundness of the sides that told him this was a natural flint, grown in the Chiltern chalk fifteen million years ago.
“The Sign of Stone,” Farmer Dawson said. His voice was gentle and reverent, his dark eyes unreadable. “We have the fourth Sign, Will.”
Together they walked back to join the others, carrying the bright Things of Power. The three Old Ones watched, in silence. Paul and the Rector now sat tranquil in a pew as if sleeping. Will stood with his fellows and took the belt, and threaded on the Sign of Stone to stand there next to the other three. He had to squint through half-closed eyes to keep the brightness from blinding him. Then when the fourth Sign was in position next to the rest, all the light in them died. They were dark and quiet as they had been before, and the Sign of Stone showed itself as a smooth and beautiful thing with the grey-white surface of an undamaged flint.
The black rook’s feather was still woven into the Sign of Bronze. Will took it out. He did not need it now.
When the light went out of the Signs, Paul and the rector stirred. They opened their eyes, startled to find themselves sitting in a pew when a moment ago — it seemed to them — they had been standing. Paul jumped up instinctively, his head turning, questing. “It’s gone!” he said. He looked at Will, and a peculiar expression of puzzlement and wonder and awe came over his face. His eyes travelled down to the belt in Will’s hands. “What happened?” he said.
The rector stood up, his smooth, plump face creased in an effort to make sense of the incomprehensible. “Certainly it has gone,” he said, looking slowly round the church. “Whatever — influence it was. The Lord be praised.” He too looked at the Signs on Will’s belt, and he glanced up again, smiling suddenly, an almost childish smile of relief and delight. “That did the work, didn’t it? The cross. Not of the church, but a Christian cross, nonetheless.”
“Very old, them crosses are, rector,” said Old George unexpectedly, firm and clear. “Made a long time before Christianity. Long before Christ.”
The rector beamed at him. “But not before God,” he said simply.
The Old Ones looked at him. There was no answer that would not have offended him, so no one tried to give one. Except, after a moment, Will.
“There’s not really any before and after, is there?” he said. “Everything that matters is outside Time. And comes from there and can go there.”
Mr Beaumont turned to him in surprise. “You mean infinity, of course, my boy.”
“Not altogether,” said the Old One that was Will. “I mean the part of all of us, and of all the things we think and believe, that has nothing to do with yesterday or today or tomorrow because it belongs at a different kind of level. Yesterday is still there, on that level. Tomorrow is there too. You can visit either of them. And all Gods are there, and all the things they have ever stood for. And,” he added sadly, “the opposite, too.”
“Will,” said the rector, staring at him, “I am not sure whether you should be exorcised or ordained. You and I must have some long talks, very soon.”
“Yes, we must,” Will said equably. He buckled on his belt, heavy with its precious burden. He was thinking hard and quickly as he did so, and the chief image before his mind was not Mr Beaumont’s disturbed theological assumptions, but Paul’s face. He had seen his brother looking at him with a kind of fearful remoteness that bit into him with the pain of a whiplash. It was more than he could stand. His two worlds must not meet so closely. He raised his head, gathering all his powers, spread straight the fingers of both his hands and pointed one hand at each of them.
“You will forget,” he said softly in the Old Speech. “Forget. Forget.”
“— in a church in Edinburgh once, marvellous,” the rector said to Paul, reaching to do up the top button of his overcoat. “The Sarabande in the fifth suite literally had me in tears. He’s the greatest cellist in the world, without a doubt.”
“Oh yes,” said Paul. “Oh yes, he is.” He hunched his shoulders inside his own coat. “Has Mum gone ahead, Will? Hey, Mr Dawson, hallo, happy Christmas!” And he beamed and nodded at the rest, as they all turned towards the church porch and the scattered flakes of drifting snow.
“Happy Christmas, Paul, Mr Beaumont,” said Farmer Dawson gravely. “A nice service, sir, very nice.”
“Ah, seasonal warmth, Frank,” said the rector. “A wonderful season too. Nothing can interfere with our Christmas services, not even all this snow.”
Laughing and chatting, they went out into the white world, where the snow lay mounded over the
invisible tombstones and the white fields stretched down to the freezing Thames. There was no sound anywhere, no disturbance, only the occasional murmur of a car passing on the distant Bath Road. The rector turned aside to find his motorbike. The rest of them went on, in a cheerful straggle, to take their respective paths home.
Two black rooks were perched on the lych-gate as Will and Paul drew close; they rose into the air slowly, half-hopping, dark incongruous shapes against the white snow. One of them passed close to Will’s feet and dropped something there, giving a deprecatory croak as he passed. Will picked it up; it was a glossy horse-chestnut from the rooks’ wood, as fresh as if it had ripened only yesterday. He and James always collected such nuts from the wood in early autumn for their school games of conkers, but he had never seen one as large and round as this.
“There, now,” said Paul, amused. “You have a friend. Bringing you an extra Christmas present.”
“A peace offering, perhaps,” said Frank Dawson behind them, with no trace of expression in his deep Buckinghamshire voice. “And then again, perhaps not. Happy Christmas, lads. Enjoy your dinner.” And the Old Ones were gone, up the road.
Will picked up the conker. “Well I never,” he said.
They closed the church gate, knocking a shower of snow from its flat iron bars. Round the corner came the coughing roars of a motorcycle as the rector tried to kick his steed into life. Then, a few feet ahead of them on tile trampled snow, the rook flew down again. It walked backwards and forwards irresolutely and looked at Will.
“Caark,” it said, very gently, for a rook. “Caaark, caark, caark.” Then it walked a few paces forward to the churchyard fence, jumped down again into the churchyard, and walked back a few paces as before. The invitation could hardly have been more obvious. “Caark,” said the rook again, louder.