by Susan Cooper
Old George did not answer; he leant down to Merriman. “Is all well?”
“All goes well,” Merriman said. He shivered, and drew his long cloak round him. “Give it to the boy.”
He looked hard at Will out of his inscrutable deepset eyes, and Will, wondering, went towards the cart-horse and stood at George’s knee, looking up. With a quick mirthless grin that seemed to mask great strain, the old man lowered the shadowed burden towards him. It was half as large as Will himself, though not heavy; it was wrapped in sacking. As he laid hands on it, Will knew instantly what it was. It can’t be, he thought incredulously; what would be the point?
Thunder rumbled again, all around.
Merriman’s voice said, deep in the shadows behind him, “But of course it is. The water brought it, in safety. Then the Old Ones took it from the water at the proper time.”
“And now,” Old George said, from his place high on patient Pollux, “you must take it to the Hunter, young Old One.”
Will swallowed nervously. An Old One had nothing in the world to fear, nothing. Yet there had been something so strange and awesome about that shadowy figure beneath the giant oak, something that made one feel unnecessary, insignificant, small. . . .
He straightened. Unnecessary was the wrong word, at any rate; he had a task to perform. Raising his burden like a standard, he pulled away its covering, and the bright, eerie carnival head that was half-man, half-beast emerged as smooth and gay as if it had just arrived from its distant island. The antlers stood up proudly; he saw that they were exactly the shape of those on the golden stag, the figure-head to the dead king’s ship. Holding the mask before him, he walked firmly towards the deep shadow of the broad-spreading oak. At its edge, he paused. He could see a glimmer of white from the mare, moving gently in recognition; he could see that the mare had a rider. But that was all.
The figure on the horse bent down towards him. He did not see the face, but only felt the mask lifted from his hands — and his hands fell back as if they had been relieved of a great weight, even though the head had from the beginning seemed so light. He backed away. The moon came sailing suddenly out from behind a cloud, and for a moment his eyes dazzled as he looked full into its cold white light; then it was gone again, and the white horse was moving out of the shadow, with the figure on its back changed in outline against the dim-lit sky. The rider had a head now that was bigger than the head of a man and horned with the antlers of a stag. And the white mare, bearing this monstrous stag-man, was moving inexorably towards Will.
He stood, waiting, until the great horse came close; its nose gently touched his shoulder, once, for the last time. The figure of the Hunter towered over him. The moonlight now glimmered clear on his head, and Will found himself gazing up into strange tawny eyes, yellow-gold, unfathomable, like the eyes of some huge bird. He gazed into the Hunter’s eyes, and he heard in the sky that strange high yelping begin again; with the difficulty of escaping an enchantment, he dragged his gaze aside to look properly at the head, the great horned mask that he had given the Hunter to put on.
But the head was real.
The golden eyes blinked, feather-fringed and round, with the deliberate blink of an owl’s strong eyelids; the man’s face in which they were set was turned full on Will, and the firm-carved mouth above the soft beard parted in a quick smile. That mouth troubled Will; it was not the mouth of an Old One. It could smile in friendship, but there were other lines round it as well. Where Merriman’s face was marked with lines of sadness and anger, the Hunter’s told instead of cruelty, and a pitiless impulse to revenge. Indeed he was half-beast. The dark branches of Herne’s antlers curved up over Will, the moonlight glinting on their velvety sheen, and the Hunter laughed softly. He looked down at Will out of his yellow eyes, in the face that was no longer a mask but living, and he spoke in a voice like a tenor bell. “The Signs, Old One,” he said. “Show me the Signs.”
Without taking his eyes from the towering figure, Will fumbled with his buckle and held the six quartered circles high in the moonlight. The Hunter looked at them and bent his head. When he raised it again, slowly, the soft voice was half-singing, half-chanting words that Will had heard before.
“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.
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.”
But he too did not end where Will expected him to; he went on.
“Fire on the mountain shall find the harp of gold
Played to wake the Sleepers, oldest of the old;
Power from the green witch, lost beneath the sea;
All shall find the light at last, silver on the tree.”
The yellow eyes looked at Will again, but they did not see him now; they had grown cold, abstracted, a chill fire mounting in them that brought the cruel lines back to the face. But Will saw the cruelty now as the fierce inevitability of nature. It was not from malice that the Light and the servants of the Light would ever hound the Dark, but from the nature of things.
Herne the Hunter wheeled round on the great white horse, away from Will and the single oak tree, until his fearsome silhouette was in the open, under the moon and the still-lowering stormclouds. He raised his head, and he made to the sky a call that was like the halloo blown by a huntsman on the horn to call up hounds. The hunting horn of his voice seemed to grow and grow, and to fill the sky and come from a thousand throats at once.
And Will saw that this it did, for from every point of the Park, behind every shadow or tree and out of every cloud, leaping round the ground and through the air, came an endless pack of hounds, sounding, belling as hunting dogs do when they are starting after a scent. They were huge white animals, ghostly in the half-light, loping and jostling and bounding together; they paid not the least attention to the Old Ones or to anything but Herne on his white horse. Their ears were red, their eyes were red; they were ugly creatures. Will drew back involuntarily as they passed, and one great silvery dog broke stride to glance at him with as casual a curiosity as if he had been a fallen branch. The red eyes in the white head were like flames, and the red ears stood taut upright with a dreadful eagerness, so that Will tried not to imagine what it would be like to be hunted by such dogs.
Round Herne and the white mare they bayed and belled, a heaving sea of red-flecked foam; then all at once the antlered man stiffened, his great horns pointing as a hunting dog points, and he called the hounds together with the rapid urgent collecting-call, the menée, that sends a pack after blood. A bedlam of yelping urgency rose from the milling white dogs, filling the sky, and at the same moment the full strength of the thunderstorm erupted. Clouds split roaring into bright, jagged lightning as Herne and the white horse leapt exultantly up into the arena of the sky, with the red-eyed hounds pouring up into the stormy air after them in a great white flood.
But then a sudden terrible silence like suffocation came, blotting out all sound of the storm. In the moment of its last desperate chance, breaking across the barrier that had been holding it at bay, the Dark came for Will. Shutting out the sky and the earth, the deadly spinning pillar came at him, dreadful in its furious whirling energy and utter quiet. There was no time for fear. Will stood alone. And the towering black column rushed to engulf him with all the monstrous forces of the Dark arrayed in its writhing mist, and at its centre the great foam-mouthed black stallion reared up with the Black Rider, his eyes two brilliant points of blue fire. Will called vainly on every spell of defence at his command, yet knew that his hands were powerless to move to the Signs for help. He stood where he was, despairing, and closed his eyes.
But into the dead, world-muffling silence enwrapping him, one small sou
nd 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.
• The Joining of the Signs • 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 cent
uries 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.