by Susan Cooper
John Rowlands flung out one arm and struck the side of the boat a fierce blow that his hand did not seem to feel. “Lies!” The word was a shout. “That is all it was, a deceiving, a pretending! Can you deny that? I have been living my life on a lie!”
“All right.” Merriman’s broad shoulders drooped for a moment, then slowly straightened. His voice seemed to Will to hold a great weariness. “I am sorry, John. Do you blame the Light? Would it have been less of a lie if you had never discovered the Dark?”
“The hell with both of them,” John Rowlands said bitterly. He stared coldly at Merriman, at Bran, at Will, and his voice rose in anger and misery. “The hell with all of you. We were happy, before any of this. Why couldn’t you leave us alone?”
And while the words rang in the air, to all of them on the boat a figure appeared immediately out of the whirling misty darkness as if riding on the echoes of the angry voice: a dark shape, riding. Each of them saw it in a different way, this towering figure, cloaked, the hood put back from the arrogant head.
Bran saw the Lord of the Dark who had hounded Will and himself through the Lost Land, in wild pursuit through the City, in wait beside the Castle, in roaring fury at their achieving of the sword.
Jane and Simon and Barney saw a figure they had hoped to forget, from days earlier in their lives when they had been caught up in a search for the grail of the Light: a black-haired black-eyed man named Hastings, fierce and powerful, and in the end raging with the urge for revenge.
Will saw the Black Rider, riding his black stallion in a whirling cloudy turret of the Dark, with one side of his face turned awry out of sight. He caught the glare of a blue eye beneath glinting chestnut hair, and the sweep of a robed arm as the Rider turned in his saddle, pointing at Bran. The tall horse reared up over them, hooves glinting, eyes white and wide. Beside him, Will saw Jane instinctively duck.
“A challenge, Merlion!” the Black Rider called. His voice was clear but faint, as if muffled by the surrounding dark. “We claim there is no place for the Pendragon, the boy, in this flight and this quest. A challenge! He must go!”
Merriman swung round, turning his back in contemptuous dismissal. But the Rider did not move, but stayed by them, his spinning dark tower of cloud rushing with them down the misty river—yet moving gradually more slowly, slowly, just as the boat on which they themselves travelled, Will realised, was slowing now. Soon it was motionless, resting on the still water. For a moment there came a break in the misty darkness ahead, as if a watery sunlight were breaking through; they saw hints of green fields, of swelling green hillsides and the darker green of trees, all hung about still with ragged mist so that nothing was properly distinct.
And then through the mist came flying a pair of swans, their great white wings beating the air so that the wind sang through the feathers. They flapped slowly overhead, now visible, now gone, now bright again, through the patches of mist, and then both dived and came awkwardly down, on either side of the boat, skidding into the river, settling, long necks taking back their peaceful graceful curve. And in the moment of raising his eyes from the two handsome birds, Will saw as if standing high on the prow of their boat the figure of the Lady.
She was neither old nor young, now, her beauty ageless: she stood a straight upright figure with the wind blowing round her the folds of a robe blue as an early morning sky. Will leapt forward, overjoyed, reaching out a hand in welcome. But the Lady’s fine-boned face was grave; she looked at Will as if she did not properly see him, and then at Merriman, and then at Bran. Her gaze flickered over the others, with a hint of a pause for Jane, and then came back to Merriman.
“The challenge holds,” she said.
Will could not believe what he heard. There was no emotion in the musical voice; it stated merely, without expression but with utter finality. Merriman took one quick unthinking step forward and then stopped; Will, not daring to look up, could see the long fingers of one gnarled bony hand curve tight into a fist, the nails cutting into the palm.
“The challenge holds,” the Lady said again, a faint quiver in her voice. “For the Dark has invoked the High Law against the Light, claiming that Bran ap Arthur has no rightful place in this part of Time, and may therefore not take the journey to the tree. That challenge is their right, and must be heard. For without the hearing, the High Magic will let nothing go further forward in this matter.”
The beauty of her face was a grave sadness, and she reached out one arm, graceful as a bird’s wing in the falling folds of the blue robe, and pointed the five fingers of her hand toward Bran. For an instant a breeze blew on the still river, and there was a hint of a delicate music in the air; and then the blue light died out of the blade of Eirias, and in a strange slow movement without a sound the sword fell to the deck of the ship. And Bran stiffened and then stood motionless, upright, his arms at his sides, a slim dark-clad figure with the face almost as white now as the hair, caught out of movement as if out of all life. A misty brightness took shape and hovered all about him, like a cage of light, so that he was still in their company and yet kept separate.
The Lady looked out into space at the hovering figure of the Black Rider in the cloudy dark.
“Speak your challenge,” she said.
• The Rising •
The Black Rider said, “We challenge the boy Bran, of Clwyd in the Dysynni Valley in the kingdom of Gwynedd, called Bran Davies for his father in the world of his growing, called the Pendragon for his father the Pendragon in the world from which he came. We challenge his place in this business. He has not the right.”
“He has the right of birth,” Will said sharply.
“There lies the challenge, Old One. You shall hear.” The Black Rider could not now be seen; his voice came hollowly out of the dark turmoil beyond the mist. Will had the sudden sense of an endless army of unseen forms behind him, out there in the dark; he looked quickly away.
The Lady’s clear voice said, overhead, “Whom do you seek to judge the challenge, Lord of the Dark? For you have the right to choose, as the Light has the right to approve or deny your choice.”
There was a deliberate pause. All at once the Rider was visible again, a distinct figure; his hooded head turned toward Merriman.
“We choose the man, John Rowlands,” he said.
Merriman glanced down at Will; he said nothing, either aloud or in the silent speech of the Old Ones, but Will could feel his indecision. He was filled with the same vague suspicion himself—what are they up to?—but it fell back, like a wave that breaks over a rock, when he thought of John Rowlands and their long reasons for trusting his judgment.
Merriman nodded. He lifted his wild-haired white head. “That is agreed.”
John Rowlands was paying them no attention. He stood in the middle of the boat, with Jane, Barney and Simon grouped beside him on a thwart as if they had drawn close for comfort, though for whose comfort Will would not have cared to tell. Rowlands was gazing at Bran, his lean, lined brown face tight with anxiety. His dark eyes flickered to the tranquil, gleaming form of the Lady and then back to the bright mist enclosing Bran. “Bran bach,” he said unhappily, “are you all right?”
But there was no answer, and instead the Lady turned her grave face to Rowlands and he was suddenly very still, looking up at her, a silent awkward figure with the dark formal suit sitting on his lithe frame as if it belonged to someone else.
“John Rowlands,” the cool, musical voice said, “there will be things said to you now, by the Lords of the Dark and of the Light, and you must listen to each with good attention, and weigh in your own mind the merit of what is said by each. And then you must say which you think is in the right, without fear or favour. And the power of the High Magic, which is present in this place as it is everywhere in the universe, will put its seal on your decision.”
John Rowlands stood there, still looking at her. He seemed caught in awe, but there were spots of colour on his high cheek-bones, and the finely modelled mouth was s
et in a straight line. Very quietly, he said, “Must?”
Will flinched, and carefully did not look at the Lady; he heard Merriman hiss softly between his teeth.
But the Lady’s voice grew quieter, more gentle.
“No, my friend. This matter holds no compulsion. We ask a favour of you, to make such a judgement. For in this world of men it is the fate of men which is at stake, in the long run, and no one but a man should have the judging of it. Have you not said as much yourself, to the Old Ones, here and elsewhere?”
John Rowlands turned and looked at Will, without expression. Then he said slowly, “Very well.”
Suddenly Will was conscious of a crowding of the Old Ones, an immense array of shadowy presences, all around him and behind him on the still, misted river; hovering in the unseen vessels like their own that he had glimpsed, just as they travelled across the miles and years of the island of Britain in the vehicle that had taken the appearance of a train. It was as if he heard the murmuring of a great crowd, as he had heard the whole Circle of the Old Ones gathered twice before in the course of his life; yet there was no sound, he knew, but the whispering of the wind in the trees that edged the river. Holding in his mind the sense of their attendance, and his awareness of Merriman’s tall blue-robed form at his side, he looked hard and openly at the whirling black mist of the Dark as he had not dared look before. The voice of the Rider came strong and confident out of it.
“Judge then. You know that the boy Bran was born in a time long past, and brought into the future to grow there. His mother brought him, because she had once in her own time greatly deceived her lord and husband Arthur, and although the boy was his true son she feared that he would not believe that was so.”
John Rowlands said emptily, “Men may be deceived indeed.”
“But men forgive,” the Rider said swiftly, smoothly. “And the boy’s father would have forgiven, and believed Guinevere, if he had had the chance. But a Lord of the Light took Guinevere through Time, at her asking, and so there was no chance and the boy was taken away.”
Merriman said, soft and deep, “At her asking.”
“But,” the Rider said, “and mark this, John Rowlands—but, not to a time of her asking.”
Will felt a coldness creeping into his mind: a dreadful misgiving, like a tiny crack that grows in a great secure dike holding back the sea. Merriman’s robe rustled, beside him.
The Rider’s voice was quiet and confident. “She came to the mountains of Gwynedd, with her child, without thought of the time to which she came. And a man of the twentieth century, called Owen Davies, fell in love with her, and took her and reared her child as his own when she vanished away again. But that century was not of her choosing. She went where the Lord of the Light took her, she did not care. But the Light had great care.”
Suddenly his voice rose, and became harsh and accusing. “The Light chose, and made sure that Bran ap Arthur, Bran pen Dragon, came to this time to grow into the right place at the right moment for the working of the quest of the Light. Thus all the old prophecies have been fulfilled only by their manipulation of Time. And that is a twisting of the terms of the High Magic, and so we claim that the boy Bran, who is here only through the craft of the Light, should go back to the time in which he belongs.”
John Rowlands said thoughtfully, “Send him back more than a thousand years? And what language were men speaking here then?”
“Latin,” Will said.
“He has very little Latin,” John Rowlands said, looking out at the dark mist beyond the river.
“You are frivolous,” the voice out of the darkness said, curtly. “He may be taken out of Time merely, as he is now, so long as he plays no part in this present matter.”
“Not frivolous,” John Rowlands said, softly still. “I am simply wondering how a boy can be said to belong to a time whose language he does not even speak. Just wondering, sir, in order to judge.”
Merriman said, without moving from his place at the stern of the boat, “Belonging. That is the answer to this challenge. Whether it was the boy’s mother or the Light who chose the time into which he came to grow up, or whether the choice was random, nevertheless he has attached himself to that time. He has bound himself by love to those with whom he has lived there, most particularly Owen Davies his adopted father, and Davies’ friend—John Rowlands.”
“Yes,” Rowlands said, looking up in the same swift anxiety as before to the strange cage of misty light in which, dimly, they could see Bran held motionless.
“Such loving bonds,” Merriman said, “are outside the control even of the High Magic, for they are the strongest thing on all this earth.”
But then out of the darkness beside them, over the still water, from no direction that they could tell, a frightened voice cried urgently, “John! John!”
John Rowlands’ head jerked upright, wary and yet longing.
“That’s Mrs. Rowlands!” Jane whispered.
“Where is she?” Barney swung all round, for the voice had seemed to come out of the air.
“There!” Simon was pointing. His voice trailed away. “There….”
They could see only her face, dimly lighted in the churning darkness beside the boat, and her hands, out-stretched. She was gazing imploringly at John Rowlands, and her voice was the soft warm voice they had known in the beginning, and it was full of fear.
“John, help me, help—I have no hand in all these things, I am possessed. There is a mind of the Dark that comes into my own, and then … I say things, and I do things, and I do not know what they are…. John, we too have loving bonds of our own. Shoni bach, you must help, they say they will let me go free if you will help them!”
“Help … them?” John Rowlands seemed to speak with difficulty; his voice sounded slow and rusty.
“Set right the balance,” the Black Rider said curtly. “Give us the proper decision, that the Light is not entitled to the help of the boy Bran. And we will leave the mind of your wife Blodwen Rowlands, and give her back to you.”
“Oh please, John?” Mrs. Rowlands reached out her arms to him, and the appeal in her voice was so poignant that Jane, listening, could hardly bear to keep still. The things she had learned about Blodwen Rowlands vanished totally from her mind; she could hear only the unhappiness and yearning of one human being cut off from another.
“Possession.” There was the same odd creaking quality in John Rowlands’ voice, as if he were forcing the words out. “It is like the possession by demons, you mean, that they used to speak of in the old days?”
The Black Rider gave a low bubbling laugh, a cold sound.
Blodwen Rowlands said eagerly, “Yes, yes, it is the same. It is the Dark taking over my mind and making me into something else while it is there. Oh John cariad, say what they want, so that we can go home to the cottage and be as happy again as we have been all these years. This is all a terrible dream—I want to go home.”
John Rowlands’ fists clenched tight as the plaintive musical voice rose in appeal; he gazed at his wife’s face long and closely. Turning, uncertain, he looked up at Merriman and Will, and last of all at the high remote form of the Lady, but each one of them looked back at him expressionless, without any sign of threat or appeal or advice. John Rowlands looked again at Blodwen—and suddenly Jane felt a hollow feeling of shock at the pit of her stomach, for the look that she saw on his face now was like a sad farewell for something that is forever gone.
His voice was low and gentle, and they could barely hear it over the soft whimpering of the breeze on the riverbank.
“I do not believe any power can possess the mind of a man or woman, Blod—or whatever your name should really be. I believe in God-given free will, you see. I think nothing is forced on us, except by other people like ourselves. I think our choices are our own. And you are not possessed therefore, you must be allied to the Dark because you have chosen to be—terrible though that is for me to believe after all these long years. Either that, or you are n
ot human, wholly a creature of the Dark, a different creature whom I have never really known.”
The soft deep voice hung over the misty river, and for a moment there was no sound or movement anywhere, from the indistinct flotilla of the Light or the teeming black emptiness of the Dark. Blodwen Rowlands’ glimmering face was there still, and the towering figure of the Rider.
John Rowlands’ deep whisper went on, as if he were speaking his thoughts to himself. “And as to Bran, that is a matter of a boy whose choice at first was not his own, but who has lived his own life since then. Which is all that you can say of most of us, in the end. He has indeed made loving bonds for himself, with his father—adopted father, if you like. And with me, and with the others who have watched him grow up on Clwyd Farm. Though not with my wife, as I had thought.” His voice husked to nothing, and he swallowed and was silent for a moment.
Jane was watching Blodwen Rowlands’ face; she saw it begin gradually to harden. The longing dropped away like a mask, leaving indifference and a cold rage.
“If I am to judge,” John Rowlands said, “then I judge that Bran Davies belongs to the time in which both he and I live our lives. And that since he is not separate, as I am, but has thrown in his lot with the Light and risked much for them—then there is no reason why he should not be free to help their cause. As … others … are free to help the Dark if they choose.”
He looked up at the Lady. “There’s my judgment, then.” His voice seemed deliberately rough and rural, as if he were trying to isolate himself.