The Dark Is Rising

by Susan Cooper

  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 response, 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 de
light 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.

  “The back entrance,” Merriman said. “Near the village. Used mainly by tradesmen — and butlers.” He smiled at Will.

  “This really is where the old smithy used to be?”

  “In the plans of the old house it is called Smith’s Gate,” Merriman said. “Buckinghamshire historians writing about Huntercombe are very fond of speculating on the reason. They’re always wrong.”

  Will stared through the trees at the manor’s tall Tudor chimneys and gabled roofs. “Is Miss Greythorne there?”

  “Yes, she is, now. But didn’t you see her in the crowd?”

  “The crowd?” Will became aware that his mouth was foolishly gaping, and shut it. Conflicting images chased one another through his head. “You mean she is one of the Old Ones?”

  Merriman raised an eyebrow. “Come now, Will, your senses told you that long ago.”

  “Well . . . yes, they did. But I never knew quite which Miss Greythorne it was who belonged to us, the one from today or from the Christmas party. Well. Well, yes, I suppose I knew that too.” He looked up tentatively at Merriman. “They’re the same, aren’t they?”

  “That’s better,” Merriman said. “And Miss Greythorne gave me, while you and Wayland Smith were intent on your work, two gifts for Twelfth Night. One is for your brother Paul, and one is for you.” He showed Will two shapeless, small packages wrapped in what looked like silk; then drew them again under his cloak. “Paul’s is a normal present, I think. More or less. Yours is something to be used only in the future, at some point when your judgment tells you you may need it.”

  “Twelfth Night,” Will said. “Is that tonight?” He looked up at the grey early-morning sky. “Merriman, how have you stopped my family wondering where I’ve been? Is my mother truly all right?”

  “Of course she is,” Merriman said. “And you have spent the night at the Manor, asleep. . . . Come now, these are small things. I know all the questions. You will have all the answers, when you are once at home, and in any case really you know them already.” He turned his head down towards Will, and the deep dark eyes stared compelling as a basilisk. “Come, Old One,” he said softly, “remember yourself. You are no longer a small boy.”

  “No,” said Will. “I know.”

  Merriman said, “But sometimes, you feel how very much more agreeable life would be if you were.”

  “Sometimes,” Will said. He grinned. “But not always.”

  They turned and strode over the little edge-stream of the road to walk together towards the Stantons’ house along Huntercombe Lane.

  * * *

  The day grew brighter, and light began to infuse the edge of the sky before them, where the sun would soon come up. A thin mist hung over the snow on both sides of the road, wreathing round the bare trees and the little streams. It was a morning full of promise, with a hazy, cloudless sky tinged faintly with blue, the kind of sky that Huntercombe had not seen for many days. They walked as old friends walk, without often speaking, sharing the kind of silence that is not so much silence as a kind of still communication. Their footsteps rang out on the bare wet road, making the only sound anywhere in the village except the song of a blackbird and, somewhere further off, the sound of someone shovelling. Trees loomed black and leafless over the road on one side, and Will saw that they were at the corner that passed Rook’s Wood. He stared upwards. Not a sound came out of the trees, or the untidy great nests high up there in the misted branches.

  “The rooks are very quiet,” he said.

  Merriman said, “They are not there.”

  “Not there? Why not? Where are they?”

  Merriman smiled, a small grim smile. “When the Yell Hounds are hunting across the sky, no animal or bird may stay within sight of them and not be driven wild by terror. All through this kingdom, along the path of Herne and the Hunt, masters will not be able to find any creature that was loose last night. It was better known in older days. Countrymen everywhere used to lock up their animals on Twelfth Night Eve, in case the Hunt should ride.”

  “But what happens? Are they killed?” Will found that in spite of all the rooks had done for the Dark, he did not want to think of them all destroyed.

  “Oh, no,” Merriman said. “Scattered. Driven willy-nilly across the sky for as long as the nearest hound chooses to drive them. The Hounds of Doom are not of a species that kills living creatures or eats flesh. . . . The rooks will come back eventually. One by one, bedraggled, weary, sorry for themselves. Wiser birds who had no dealings with the Dark would have hidden themselves away last night, beneath branches or house-eaves, out of sight. Those who did are still here, unharmed. But it will take a while for our friends the rooks to recover themselves. I think you will have no trouble with them again, Will, though I would never quite trust one if I were you.”

  “Look,” Will said, pointing ahead. “There are two to trust.” Pride came thick into his voice, as down the road towards them came rushing and bounding the two Stanton dogs, Raq and Ci. They leapt at him, barking and whining with delight, licking his hands in a greeting as gigantic as if he had been gone for a month. Will stooped to speak to them and was enveloped in waving tails and warm panting heads and large wet feet. “Get off, you idiots,” he said happily.

  Merriman said, very softly: “Gently, now.” Instantly the dogs calmed and were still, only their tails enthusiastically waving; both turned to Merriman and looked up at him for a moment, and then they were trotting amiably in silence at Will’s side. Then the Stanton driveway was ahead, and the noise of shovels grew loud, and round the corner they found Paul and Mr Stanton, wrapped against the cold, clearing wet snow and leaves and twigs away from a drain.

  “Well, well,” said Mr Stanton, and stood leaning on his shovel.

  “Hallo, Dad,” said Will cheerfully, and ran and hugged him.

  Merriman said: “Good morning.”
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br />   “Old George said you’d be about early,” said Mr Stanton, “but I didn’t think he meant quite this early. However did you manage to wake him up?”

  “I woke myself up,” Will said. “Yah. I turned over a new leaf for the New Year. What are you doing?”

  “Turning over old leaves,” Paul said.

  “Ho, ho, ho.”

  “We are, though. The thaw came so suddenly that the ground was still frozen, and nothing could drain away. And now that the drains are beginning to thaw as well, the flood’s got everything jammed up with washed-away rubbish. Like this.” He lifted a dripping bundle.

  Will said, “I’ll get another spade, and help.”

  “Wouldn’t you like some breakfast first?” Paul said. “Mary’s getting us some, believe it or not. There’s a lot of leaf-turning going on here, while the year’s still new.”

  Will suddenly realised that it was a long time since he had last eaten, and felt a gigantic hunger. “Mmmm,” he said.

  “Come on in and have some breakfast or a cup of tea or something,” said Mr Stanton to Merriman. “It’s a chilly walk from the Manor this time of the morning. I really am extremely grateful to you for delivering him, not to mention looking after him last night.”

  Merriman shook his head, smiling, and pulled up the collar of what Will saw had now again subtly changed from a cloak to a heavy twentieth-century overcoat. “Thank you. But I’ll be getting back.”

  “Will!” a voice shrilled, and Mary came flying up the drive. Will went to meet her, and she skidded into him and punched him in the stomach. “Was it fun at the Manor? Did you sleep in a four-poster?”

  “Not exactly,” Will said. “Are you all right?”

  “Well, of course. I had a super ride on Old George’s horse, it was one of Mr Dawson’s huge ones, the show horses. He picked me up in the Lane, quite soon after I’d gone out. Seems ages ago, not last night.” She looked at Will rather sheepishly. “I suppose I shouldn’t have gone out after Max like that, but everything was happening so quickly, and I was worried about Mum not having help —”