Silveronthetree

Silver on the Tree

Book 5 of 5 in "The Dark is Rising" series

Scanned September 2002 reader51 v1.0

A Puffin Book Published by Penguin Books

'When the Dark is rising - six shall turn it back,' ran the prophetic rhyme. And in this, the fifth and last book, the story which began with Will Stanton's discovery that he was the last of the Old Ones, wielders on Earth of the giant powers of good and evil, is brought to a triumphant climax. But the search for the crystal sword is a daunting task which leads the chosen six from high summer in England to the dark hills of Wales and the haunting, magical, lost land between sea and shore.

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On the day of the dead, when the year too dies,

Must the youngest open the oldest hills

Through the door of the birds, where the breeze breaks.

There fire shall fly from the raven boy,

And the silver eyes that see the wind,

And the Light shall have the harp of gold.

By the pleasant lake the Sleepers lie,

On Cadfan's Way where the kestrels call;

Though grim from the Grey King shadows fall,

Yet singing the golden harp shall guide

To break their sleep and bid them ride.

When light from the lost land shall return,

Six Sleepers shall ride, six Signs shall burn,

And where the midsummer tree grows tall

By Pendragon's sword the Dark shall fall.

Y maent yr mynyddoedd yn canu,

ac y mae'r arglwyddes yn dod.

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Contents

Part One: When the Dark Comes Rising

Part Two: The Singing Mountains

Part Three: The Lost Land

The King of the Lost Land

Part Four: The Midsummer Tree

Part One: When the Dark Comes Rising

Midsummer's Eve

Will said, turning a page, 'He liked woad. He says - listen - the decoction of Woad drunken is good for wounds in bodies of a strong constitution, as of country people, and such as are accustomed to great labour and hard coarse fare.'

'Such as me, and all other members of Her Majesty's Navy,' Stephen said. With great precision he pulled a tall, heavy-headed stem of grass out of its sheath, and lay back in the field nibbling it.

'Woad,' said James, wiping a mist of sweat from his plump pink face. 'That's the blue stuff the Ancient Britons used to paint themselves with.'

Will said, 'Gerard says here that woad flowers are yellow.'

James said rather pompously, 'Well, I've done a year's more history than you have and I know they used it for blue.' There was a pause. He added, 'Green walnuts turn your fingers black.'

'Oh, well,' said Will. A very large velvety bee, overloaded with pollen, landed on his book and waddled dispiritedly across the page. Will blew it gently on to a leaf, pushing back the straight brown forelock that flopped over his eyes. His glance was caught by a movement on the river beyond the held where they lay. 'Look! Swans!'

Lazy as the hot summer day, a pair of swans sailed slowly by without a sound; their small wake lapped at the riverbank.

'Where?' said James, clearly with no intention of looking.

'They like this bit of the river, it's always quiet. The big boats stay over in the main reach, even on a Saturday.''Who's coming fishing?' said Stephen. But he still lay unmoving on his back, one leg folded over the other, the slender stem of grass swaying between his teeth.

'In a minute.' James stretched, yawning. 'I ate too much cake.'

'Mum's picnics are as huge as ever.' Stephen rolled over and gazed at the grey-green river. 'When I was your age, you couldn't fish at all in this part of the Thames. Pollution, then. Some things do improve.'

'A paltry few,' Will said sepulchrally, out of the grass.

Stephen grinned. He reached out and picked a slender green stalk with a tiny red flower; solemnly he held it up. 'Scarlet pimpernel. Open for sun, closed for rain, that's the poor man's weathervane. Grandad taught me that. Pity you never knew him. What does your friend Mr Gerard say about this one, Will?'

'Mmm?' Will was lying on his side, watching the weary bumblebee flex its wings.

'Book,' James said. 'Scarlet pimpernel.'

'Oh.' Will turned the crackling pages. 'Here it is. Oh loverly. The juyce purgeth the head by gargarising or washing the throat therewith; it cures the tooth-ach being snift up into the nosethrils, especially into the contrary nosethril.'

'The contrary nosethril, of course,' Stephen said gravely.

'He also says it's good against the stinging of vipers and other venomous beasts.'

'Daft,' said James.

'No it's not,' Will said mildly. 'Just three hundred years old. There's one super bit at the end where he tells you very seriously how barnacle geese are hatched out of barnacles.'

'The Caribbean might have foxed him,' Stephen said. 'Millions of barnacles, but not one barnacle goose.'

James said, 'Will you go back there, after your leave?'

'Wherever their Lordships send us; mate.' Stephen threaded the scarlet pimpernel into the top buttonhole of his shirt, and unfolded his lanky body. 'Come on. Fish.'

'I'll come in a minute. You two go.' Will lay idly watching as they fitted rods together, tied hooks and floats. Grass-hoppers skirled unseen from the grass, chirruping their solos over the deep summer insect hum: it was a sleepy, lulling sound. He sighed with happiness. Sunshine and high summer and, rarer than either, his eldest brother home from sea. The world smiled on him; nothing could possibly be improved. He felt his eyelids droop; he jerked them apart again. Again they closed in sleepy content; again he forced them open. For a flicker of a moment he wondered why he would not let himself fall harmlessly asleep.

And then he knew.

The swans were there on the river again, slow-moving white shapes, drifting back upstream. Over Will's head the trees sighed in the breeze, like waves on distant oceans. In tiny yellow-green bunches the flowers of the sycamore scattered the long grass around him. Running one of them between his fingers, he watched Stephen standing tall a few yards off threading his fishing-line through his rod. Beyond, on the river, he could see one of the swans moving slowly ahead of its mate. The bird passed Stephen.

But as it passed, it did not disappear behind Stephen. Will could see the white form clearly through the outline of Stephen's body.

And through the outline of the swan, in turn, he could see a steep slope of land, grassy, without trees, that had not been there before.

Will swallowed.

'Steve?' he said.

His eldest brother was close before him, knotting a leader on his line, and Will had spoken loudly. But Stephen did not hear. James came past, holding his rod erect but low as he fastened the hook safely into its cork handle. Will could still see, through him, the forms of the swans as if in a faint mist. He sat up and stretched out his hand to the rod as James went by, and his fingers moved through the substance of the wood as if there had been nothing there.

And Will knew, with dread and delight, that a part of his life which had been sleeping was broad awake once more.

His brothers walked off to the river, moving diagonally across the field. Through their phantom forms Will could see the only earth that in this elusive patch of time was for him solid and real: the grassy slope, its edges merging into mistiness. And on it he saw figures, running, bustling, driven by some urgent haste. If he stared at them too hard, they were not there. But if he gazed with sleepy eyes, not quite focused, he could see them all, sun-dappled, hurrying.

They were small, dark-haired. They belonged to a very distant time. They wore tunics of blue, green or black; he saw one woman in white, with a string of bright blue heads about her neck. They were gathering bundles of spears, arrows, tools, sticks; packing pots into wrappings of animal skin; putting together packages of what he supposed was meat, in dry rippled strips. There were dogs with them: full-haired dogs with short pointed muzzles. Children ran and called, and a dog lifted his head to bay, but no sound came. For Will's ears, only the grasshoppers chirruped, over the deep insect hum.

He saw no animals but the dogs. These people were travellers; not belonging here, but passing through. He was not even sure whether the land on which they stood, in their own time, lay in his own part of the Thames Valley or in some totally different place. But he knew one thing very clearly, suddenly: they were all very much afraid.

Often they raised their heads, fearfully, and gazed away to the east. They spoke seldom to one another, but worked on, hastily. Something, someone, was coming, threatening them, driving them on. They were running away. Will found himself catching the sense of urgency, willing them to hurry, to escape whatever disaster was on its way. Whatever disaster ... he too stared eastward. But it was hard to tell what he saw. A strange double landscape lay before him, a firm curving slope visible through the phantom misty lines of the flat fields and hedges of his own day and the glimmering half-seen Thames. The swans were still there, and yet not there; one of them dipped its elegant neck to the surface of the water, ghostly as an image reflected in a window-pane…….

…... and all at once, the swan was real, solid, opaque, and Will was no longer looking out of his own time into another. The travellers were gone, out of sight in that other summer day thousands of years before. Will shut his eyes, desperately trying to hold some image of them before it faded from his memory. He remembered a pot glinting with the dull sheen of bronze; a cluster of arrows tipped with sharp black flakes of flint; he remembered the dark skin and eyes of the woman in white, and the bright luminous blue of the string of beads about her neck. Most of all he remembered the sense of fear.

He stood up in the long grass; holding his book; he could feel his legs trembling. Unseen in a tree over his head, a song-thrush poured out its trilling twice-over song. Will walked shakily towards the river; James's voice hailed him.

'Will! Over here! Come and see!'

He veered blindly towards the sound. Stephen the purist fisherman stood casting delicately out into the river, his line whispering through the air. James was threading a worm on his hook. He put it down, and triumphantly held up a cluster of three small perch tied through the gills.

'Goodness,' Will said. 'That's quick!'

Before he could regret the word, James was raising an eye-brow. 'Not specially. You been asleep? Come on, get your rod.'

'No,' said Will, to both question and command. Stephen, glancing round at him, suddenly let his line go slack. He looked hard at Will, frowning.

'Will? Are you all right? You look - '

'I do feel a bit funny,' Will said.

'Sun, I bet. Beating down on the back of your neck, while you were sitting there reading that book.'

'Probably.'

'Even in England it can get pretty fierce, matey. Flaming June. And Midsummer's Eve, at that ... go and lie down in the shade for a while. And drink the rest of that lemonade.'

'All of it?' said James indignantly. 'What about us?'

Stephen aimed a kick at him. 'You catch ten more perch and I'll buy you a drink on the way home. Go on, Will. Under the trees.'

'All right,' said Will.

'I told you that book was daft,' James said.

Will crossed the field again and sat down on the cool grass beneath the sycamore trees, beside the remains of their picnic tea. Sipping lemonade slowly from a plastic cup, he looked uneasily out at the river - but all was normal. The swans had gone. Midges danced in the air; the world was hazy with heat. His head ached; he put aside the cup and lay on his back in the grass, looking up. Leaves danced above him; the branches breathed and swayed, to and fro, to and fro, shifting green patterns against the blue sky. Will pressed his palms to his eyes, remembering the faint hurrying forms that had flickered up to him out of the past; remembering the fear ...

Even afterwards, he could never tell whether he fell asleep. The sighing of the breeze seemed to grow louder, more fierce; all at once he could see different trees above him, beech trees, their heart-shaped leaves dancing agitated in a wilder swirl than sycamore or oak. And this now was not a hedge-line of trees stretching unbroken to the river, but a copse; the river was gone, the sound and smell of it, and on either side of him Will could see the open sky. He sat up.

He was high over the wooded valley of the Thames on a curving grassy slope; the cluster of beech trees around him marked the top of the hill like a cap. Golden vetch grew in the short springy grass at his side; from one of the curled flowers a small blue butterfly fluttered to his hand and away again. There was no more heavy hum of insects in valley fields; instead, high over his head through the stirring of the wind, a skylark's song poured bubbling into the air.

And then, somewhere, Will heard voices. He turned his head. A string of people came hurrying up the hill, each darting from one tree or bush to the next, avoiding the open slope. The first two or three had just reached a curious deep hole sunk into the hill, so closely overgrown by brush that he would not have noticed it if they had not been there, tugging branches aside. They were laden with bundles wrapped in rough dark cloth - but so hastily wrapped that Will could see the contents jutting through. He blinked: there were gold cups, plates, chalices, a great gold cross crusted with jewels, tall candlesticks of gold and silver, robes and cloths of glimmering silk woven with gold and gems; the array of treasure seemed endless. The figures bound each bundle with rope, and lowered one after another into the hole. Will saw a man in the robes of a monk, who seemed to be supervising them: directing, explaining, always keeping a nervous watch out over the surrounding land.

A trio of small boys came hurrying up to the top of the hill, despatched by the pointing arm of the priest. Will stood up slowly. But the boys trotted past him without even a glance, ignoring him so completely that he knew he was in this past time only an observer, invisible, not able even to be sensed.

The boys paused on the edge of the copse, and stood looking out keenly across the valley; they had clearly been sent to keep watch from there. Looking at them huddled nervously together, Will let his mind dwell on hearing them, and in a moment the voices were echoing in his head.

'No one coming this way.'

'Not yet.'

'Two hours maybe, the runner said. I heard him talking to my father, he said there's hundreds of them, terrible, rampaging along the Old Way. They've burned London, he said, you could see the black smoke rising in great clouds - '

'They cut off your ears if they catch you. The boys. The men they slit right open, and they do even worse things to the women and girls - '

'My father knew they'd come. He said. There was blood instead of rain fell in the east last month, he said, and men saw dragons flying in the sky.'

'There's always signs like that, before the heathen devils come.'

'What's the use of burying the treasures? Nobody'll ever come back to get them. Nobody ever comes back when the devils drive them out.'

'Maybe this time.'

'Where are we going?'

'Who knows? To the west - '

Urgent voices called the boys back; they ran. The hiding of bundles in the hole was finished, and some of the figures already scurrying down the hill. Will watched fascinated while the last men heaved over the top of the hole a great flat flint boulder, the largest he had ever seen. They fitted it neatly inside the opening like a kind of lid, then unrolled over the top a section of grassy sod. Branches growing from surrounding bushes were tugged across the top. In a moment there was no sign of any hiding place, no scar on the hillside to show that the hasty work had even taken place. Crying out in alarm, one of the men pointed across the valley; beyond the next hill a thick column of smoke was rising. At once, in panic, all the group fled down the grass-skinned chalk slope, slipping and leaping, the monkish figure as hasty and helter-skelter as the rest.

And Will was swept by a wave of fear so intense that it turned his stomach. For a moment he knew, as vividly as these fugitives, the animal terror of cruel violent death: of pain, of hurting, of hate. Or of something worse than hate: a dreadful remote blankness, that took joy only from destruction and tormenting and others' fear. Some terrible threat was advancing, on these people just as on those others, shadowy forms he had seen in a different, distant past a little while before. Over there in the east, the threat was once more rising, roaring down.

'It's coming,' Will said aloud, staring at the column of smoke, trying not to envision what might happen when its makers came over the brow of the hill. 'It's coming - '

James' voice said, full of a curious excitement, 'No it isn't, it's not moving at all. Are you awake? Look!'

Stephen said, 'What an extraordinary thing!'

Their voices were above Will's head; he was lying on his back in cool grass. It was a moment before he could recollect himself, and stop shaking. He heaved himself up on to his elbows, and saw Stephen and James standing a few paces away, their hands full of rods and fish and bait pails. They were staring at something in a kind-of wary fascination. Will craned his head round to the hot humming meadow, to see what held them. And he gasped, as his mind was half torn apart by a great wave of that same blind terror that had swamped him a moment before, a world and ten centuries and yet no more than a breath away.

Ten yards off in the grass, a small black animal was standing motionless, facing him: a lithe, lean animal perhaps a foot and a half long with a long tail and sinuous, curving back. It was like a stoat or a weasel and yet it was neither. Its sleek fur was pitch black from nose to tail; its unwinking black eyes were fixed unmistakably on Will. And from it he felt a pulsing ferocity of viciousness and evil so strong that his mind rebelled against believing it could exist.

James made a sudden quick hissing sound.

The black creature did not move. Still it stared at Will. Will sat staring back, caught up in the unreasoning shout of terror that twanged on through his brain. Out of the corner of his eye he was aware of Stephen's tall form standing at his side, very still.

James said softly, 'I know what it is. It's a mink. They've just started turning up round here - I saw it in the paper. Like weasels, only nastier, it said. Look at those eyes - '

Impulsively breaking the tension, he yelled wordlessly at the creature and slashed at the grass with his fishing rod. Swiftly, but without panic, the black mink turned and slid away through the field towards the river, its long back undulating with a strange unpleasant gliding movement like a large snake. James bounded after it, still clasping his rod.

'Be careful!' Stephen called sharply.

James shouted, 'I won't touch it. Got my rod ...' He disappeared along the riverbank, past a clump of stubby willow.

'I don't like this,' Stephen said.

'No,' Will said. He shivered, looking at the place in the field where the animal had stood, staring at him with its intent black eyes. 'Creepy.'

'I don't mean just the mink, if that's what it was.' There was an unfamiliar note in Stephen's voice that made Will abruptly turn his head. He moved to get to his feet, but his tall brother squatted down beside him, arms resting on knees, hands fiddling with the wire leader on a piece of fishing-line.

Stephen wound the line round his finger and back again, round and back again.

'Will,' he said in this strange taut voice. 'I've got to talk to you. Now, while James is off chasing that thing. I've been trying to get you alone ever since I came home - I hoped today, only Jamie wanted to fish - '

He floundered, stumbling over his words in a way that filled Will with astonishment and alarm, coming from the cool adult brother who had always been so much his symbol of everything fulfilled, complete, grown-up. Then Stephen brought his head up and stared at Will almost belligerently, and Will stared nervously back.

Stephen said, 'When the ship was in Jamaica last year, I sent you a big West Indian carnival head, for a Christmas and birthday present put together.'

'Well of course,' Will said. 'It's super. We were all looking at it only yesterday.'

Stephen went on, ignoring him. 'I'd got it from an old Jamaican who grabbed me one day in the street, out of nowhere, in the middle of Carnival. He told me my name, and he said I was to give the head to you. And when I asked how on earth he knew me, he said, There is a look that we Old Ones have. Our families have something of it too.'

'I know about all that,' Will said brightly, swallowing the foreboding that hollowed his throat. 'You sent a letter, with the head. Don't you remember?'

'I remember it was a damn funny thing for a stranger to say,' Stephen said. 'Old Ones, we Old Ones. With capital letters - you could hear them.'

'Oh not really. Surely - I mean, you said he was an old man - '

'Will,' Stephen said, looking at him with cold blue eyes, 'the day we sailed from Kingston, that old man turned up at the ship. I don't know how he talked them into it, but someone was sent to fetch me to him. He stood there on the dock, with his black, black face and his white, white hair, and he looked quietly at the rating who'd fetched me, until the boy left, and then he said just one thing. Tell your brother, he said, that the Old Ones of the ocean islands are ready. Then he went away.'

Will said nothing. He knew there would be more. He looked at Stephen's hands; they were clenched, and one thumb was flicking automatically to and fro over its fist.

'And then,' Stephen said, his voice shaking a little, 'we put in at Gibraltar on the way home, and I had half a day ashore, and a stranger said something to me in the street. He was standing beside me, we were waiting for a traffic light - he was very tall and slim, Arab I think. Do you know what he said? Tell Will Stanton that the Old Ones of the south are ready. Then he just disappeared into the crowd.'

'Oh,' Will said.

The thumb abruptly stopped moving on Stephen's hand. He stood up, in one swift movement like a released spring. Will too scrambled to his feet, blinking up, unable to read the suntanned face against the bright sky.

'Either I'm going out of my head,' Stephen said, 'or you're mixed up in something very strange, Will. In either case you might have a little more to say to me than oh. I told you, I don't like it, not one bit.'

'The trouble is, you see,' Will said slowly, 'that if I tried to explain, you wouldn't believe me.'

'Try me,' his brother said.

Will sighed. Of all the nine Stanton children, he was the youngest and Stephen the oldest; there were fifteen long years between them, and until Stephen had left home to join the Navy, a smaller Will had shadowed him everywhere in silent devotion. He knew now that he was at the ending of something he had hoped would never end.

He said, 'Are you sure? You won't laugh at me, you won't ... judge?'

'Of course not,' Stephen said.

Will took a deep breath. 'Well then. It's like this . . . This where we live is a world of men, ordinary men, and although in it there is the Old Magic of the earth, and the Wild Magic of living things, it is men who control what the world shall be like.' He was not looking at Stephen, for fear of seeing the changing expression that he knew he would certainly see. 'But beyond the world is the universe, bound by the law of the High Magic, as every universe must be. And beneath the High Magic are two . . . poles . . . that we call the Dark and the Light. No other power orders them. They merely exist. The Dark seeks by its dark nature to influence men so that in the end, through them, it may control the earth. The Light has the task of stopping that from happening. From time to time the Dark has come rising and has been driven back, but now very soon it will rise for the last and most perilous time. It has been gathering strength for that rising, and it is almost ready. And therefore, for the last time, until the end of Time, we must drive it back so that the world of men may be free.'

'We?' Stephen said, expressionless.

'We are the Old Ones,' Will said, strong and self-confident now. 'There is a great circle of us, all over the world and beyond the world, from all places and all corners of time. I was the last one to be born, and when I was brought into my power as an Old One, on my eleventh birthday, the circle became complete. I knew nothing about all this, till then. But the time is coming closer now, and that is why you were given the reassurances - warnings, in a way - to bring to me, I think from two of the three oldest of the circle.'

Stephen said, in the same flat voice, 'The second one didn't look very old.'

Will looked up at him and said simply, 'Nor do I.'

'For God's sake,' Stephen said irritably, 'you're my little brother and you're twelve years old and I can remember you being born.'

'In one sense only,' Will said.

Stephen stared in exasperation at the figure before him: the stocky small boy in blue jeans and battered shirt, with straight brown hair falling untidily over one eye. 'Will, you're too old for these silly games. You sound almost as if you believed all this stuff.'

Will said calmly, 'What do you think those two messengers were, then, Steve? You think I'm smuggling diamonds, maybe, or part of a drug ring?'

Stephen groaned. 'I don't know. Perhaps I dreamt them . . . perhaps I really am going out of my head.' The tone tried to be light, but there was unmistakable strain in his voice.

'Oh no,' Will said. 'You didn't dream them. Other ... warnings . . . have begun coming too.' He fell silent for a moment, thinking of the anxious hurrying figures looming misty out of a time three thousand years past, and the Saxon boys, after that, watching terrified for the marauding Danes. Then he looked sadly at Stephen.

'It's too much for you,' he said. 'They should have known that. I suppose they did. The messages had to come by word of mouth, that's the only way secure from the Dark. And after that it's up to me ...' Quickly he seized his brother's arm, pointing, as the incomprehension on Stephen's face began changing unbearably to alarm. 'Look - there's James.'

Automatically Stephen half-turned to look. The movement made his leg brush against a low bramble clump growing out into the field from the trees and hedge behind. And out of the sprawling green bush rose a flickering, sudden cloud of delicate white moths. They were an astonishing sight, feathery, exquisite. Endlessly flowing upward, hundred upon hundred, they fluttered like a gentle snow-flurry round Stephen's head and shoulders. Startled, he flapped his arms to brush them away.

'Stay still,' Will said softly. 'Don't hurt them. Stay still.'

Stephen paused, one arm raised apprehensively before his face. Over and around him the tiny moths flurried, round and around, wheeling, floating, never settling, drifting down. They were like infinitely small birds fashioned of snowflakes; silent, ghostly, each tiny wing a filigree of five delicate feathers, all white.

Stephen stood still, dazed, shielding his face with one hand. 'They're beautiful! But so many ... what are they?'

'Plume moths,' Will said, looking at him with a strange loving regret, like a farewell. 'White plume moths. There's an old saying, that they carry memories away.'

In one last whirl the white cloud of moths flowed and fluttered round Stephen's uncertain head; then the cloud parted, dispersing like smoke, as in the same curious communion the moths disappeared into the hedge. The leaves enfolded them; they were gone.

James came thudding up behind them. 'Gosh, what a chase! It was a mink - must have been.'

'Mink?' Stephen said. He shook his head suddenly, like a dog newly come out of water.

James stared at him. 'The mink. The little black animal.'

'Yes, of course,' Stephen said hastily, still looking dazed. 'Yes. It was a mink, then?'

James was bubbling with triumph. 'I'm sure it was. What a piece of luck! I've been watching out for one ever since that article in the Observer. It told you to, because they're a pest. They eat chickens, and all kinds of birds. Someone brought them over from America, years ago, to breed them for the fur, and a few escaped and went wild.'

'Where did he go?' said Will.

'Jumped into the river. I didn't know they could swim.'

Stephen picked up the picnic basket. 'Time we took the fish home. Hand me that lemonade bottle, Will.'

James said promptly, 'You said you'd get me a drink on the way back.'

'I said, if you caught ten more fish.'

'Seven's pretty close.'

'Not close enough.'

'Stingy lot, sailors,' said James.

'Here,' said Will, poking him with the bottle. 'I didn't drink all the lemonade anyway.'

'Go on, Sponge,' said Stephen. 'Finish it.' One corner of the basket was fraying; he tried to weave the loose ends of wicker together, while James gulped his lemonade.

Will said, 'Falling to bits, that basket. Looks as though it belonged to the Old Ones.'

'Who?' said Stephen.

'The Old Ones. In the letter you sent me from Jamaica, with that big carnival head, last year. Something the old man said, the one who gave you it. Don't you remember?'

'Good Lord no,' said Stephen amiably. 'Much too long ago.' He chuckled. 'That was a crazy present all right, wasn't it? Like the stuff Max makes at art school.'

'Yes,' Will said.

They strolled home, through the long feathery grass, through the lengthening shadows of the trees, through the yellow-green flowers of the sycamore.

Part One: When the Dark Comes Rising

Black Mink

The way home was a winding way: first through fields and along towpaths, to the place where they had left their bicycles, then along curving small green-shaded roads. Oak and sycamore and Lombardy poplar reached high on either side; houses slept behind hedges fragrant with honeysuckle and starred with invading bindweed. In the distance they could hear the hum of a hurrying, more preoccupied world, and see the cars flicking by on the motorway that straddled the valley of the Thames. It was late afternoon now; the horizons were lost in haze, and clouds of gnats danced in the warm air.

They were cycling along Huntercombe Lane, half a mile from home, past Will's favourite flint-walled, brick-trimmed cottages, when James braked suddenly.

'What's up?'

'Back tyre. I thought it would last, but it keeps getting softer. I can pump it up enough to get home.'

Will and Stephen waited, while he unhitched his pump. Faint voices drifted towards them from further up the road; the road crossed a small bridge, up there, over a stream that meandered through the farm fields on its way to join the Thames. Generally the stream moved so sluggishly that it hardly deserved the name, though on just one wild day of his life Will had seen it in spate. He scooted his bicycle idly up towards it. No sound of running water today; the stream glimmered shallow and still, scummed with green weed like a pond.

Voices came nearer; Will leaned over the side of the little bridge. Below on the bank a small boy came running, panting, with a shiny leather music-case that looked half as big as himself banging against his legs. Three others were in pursuit of him, yelling and laughing. Will was about to turn away, thinking it a game, when the first boy, finding his way blocked by the side of the bridge, twisted, skidded and then turned at bay in a movement that somehow spoke not play but desperation. He was dark-skinned, neatly dressed; the boys following were white, and scruffier. Will could hear them now. One was yelping like a hound.

'Pakkie - Pakkie - Pakkie! Here boy, here boy! Here Pakkie-'

They slid to a halt in front of the small tense figure. Will recognised two of them as boys who went to his own school, a tough troublesome pair much given to gang-rumpus on the playground. One of them smiled a thin nasty smile at the boy they had been chasing.

'Don't want to say hallo, Pakkie-boy? What you scared of, eh? Where you been?'

The boy jerked to one side and lunged, trying to slip past and away, but one of the others stepped swiftly sideways and blocked him. The music-case fell to the ground, and as the small boy leaned to pick it up a large dirty foot came down on its handle.

'Been to piano lesson, has he? Didn't know Pakkies played the piano, did you, Frankie? Only those funny little plinky-plink instruments, wheee-eeeee-eeeeee-' He capered about making sounds like a bad violinist; the others gurgled with unpleasant laughter, one of them picking up the music-case and whacking it for applause.

'Please give me back my case,' said the small boy, in a precise, unhappy little voice.

The bigger boy held it high over the water of the stream. 'Come and get it, Pakkie, come and get it!'

Will shouted indignantly, 'Give it back!'

Their heads turned sharply; then the bully's face relaxed into a sneer as he recognised Will. 'Mind your own mucking business, Stanton!'

The other boys hooted derisively.

'You brainless oiks!' Will yelled. 'Always picking on little kids - give it back to him, or-'

'Or what?' said the boy, and he looked at the small smaller boy and smiled. He opened his hand, and let the music-case fall into the stream.

His friends guffawed and cheered. The small boy burst into tears. Will, spluttering, thrust his bicycle aside; but before he could move further a whirl of limbs shot past him and Stephen's tall rangy form was bounding down the slope.

The boys scattered, too late. In only a few paces Stephen had grabbed the ringleader. Holding him by the shoulders, he said softly, 'Get that case out of the water.'

Will watched, motionless, caught by the controlled fury in the quiet voice, but the other boy was riding too high on his own confidence. He twisted in Stephen's grasp, snarling at him. 'You crazy? Get meself all wet for some bleedin' nignog? That little cat-food eater? You think I'm-'

The last word had no chance. With a quick shift of grip Stephen suddenly heaved the boy off his feet and into the air, and dropped him into the scummy green water of the stream.

The splash left silence. A bird chirruped gaily overhead. The two boys on the bank stood motionless, staring at their leader as he slowly hoisted himself up, dripping weed and muddy water, to stand knee-deep in the nearly stagnant stream. He looked at Stephen, his face empty of expression; then bent, picked up the flat leather music-case and held it out, dripping, at arm's length. Stephen handed it to the little boy, and he took it, dark eyes saucer-wide; then turned and fled without a word.

Stephen swung round and climbed back up to the road. As he stepped long-legged over the wire fence, the boy standing in the water came suddenly to life as if released from a spell. He splashed back to the bank, muttering. They heard a few scattered obscenities, then a furious shout: 'You think you're so great, just because you're bigger'n me!'

'The pot is speaking to the kettle,' said Stephen peacefully, swinging his leg over his bicycle.

The boy yelled: 'If my Dad ever catches you, you just wait-'

Stephen paused, propelled himself to the edge of the bridge and leaned over. 'Stephen Stanton, at the Old Vicarage,' he said. 'You tell your Dad he can come and discuss you with me any time he likes.'

There was no answer. James came up at Will's side as they rode away; he was beaming. 'Lovely,' he said. 'Beautiful.'

'Yes,' Will said, pedalling. 'But-'

'What?'

'Oh, nothing.'

'That must have been little Manny Singh,' Mrs Stanton said, digging a large knife into the treacle tart. 'They live at the other end of the village, in one of the houses on that new estate.'

'I know them,' Mary said. 'Mr Singh wears a turban.'

'That's right. They aren't Pakistani, as it happens, they're Indian - Sikhs. Not that it's relevant. What horrible boys those three are.'

'They're horrible to everybody, that lot,' James said, hopefully watching the size of the piece of tart about to be cut for him . 'No relation to race, colour or creed - they'll bash anyone. So long as he's smaller than them.'

'They seemed a little more . . . selective today,' Stephen said quietly.

'I'm not sure you should have dropped him in the water, though,' his mother said placidly. 'Pass the custard round, Will.'

'Richie Moore called the little boy a cat-food eater,' Will said.

Stephen said, 'Pity that stream wasn't ten feet deep.'

James said, 'There's an extra piece of tart there, Mum.'

'For your father,' Mrs Stanton said. 'Eyes off. He doesn't work late for you to pinch his dinner. Don't stuff, James. Even Mary's eating more slowly than you.' Then she raised her head suddenly, listening. 'What's that?'

They had all heard the faint noise outside; it came again, louder. Distant squawking sounds rose from the chickens in their yard behind the house; not ordinary squawks of protest or demand, but high cackles of alarm.

Instantly the children stampeded, James even forgetting his treacle tart. Will was first out of the back door - and then instantly, abruptly, he stopped, so that Stephen and James blundered round him and almost fell. They ran on. But Will could feel the sense of malevolence, of immanent undiluted ill-wishing, so strong all around him that he could scarcely move. He stood, shaking. Thrusting against the sensation as against a high wind, he stumbled on after the others. His mind felt thick and slow. He thought, I have felt this before . . . But there was no time to remember.

He heard shouting from the yard, and scuffling feet, through the cackling of the frightened birds. In the half-light of the hazy evening he saw Stephen and James dodging to and fro as if chasing something; closer, he thought he saw a small twisting dark body, lithe and swift, darting between them. Stephen grabbed for a stick; whacked at the shape; missed. The stick hit the ground, splintering. A garden fork stood against the fence of the hen run; Will seized it, moving closer. The animal ran past his feet. It made no sound.

'Get it, Will!'

'Hit it!'

Feet flurried, birds squawked, the yard was full of colliding bodies, grey shapes in the dim light. For an instant Will saw the full moon, an enormous yellow arc beginning to rise over the trees. Then James was bumping into him again.

'Over here! Catch him!'

Will had one quick clear glimpse. 'It's another mink!'

'Of course! Over here!'

Twisting in its urgent search for flight, the mink was suddenly between Will and the fence, cornered. White teeth flashed. It stood taut, staring, and screamed suddenly, a high angry screech that pierced Will's mind and brought flooding into it the overwhelming awareness of evil he had felt when stepping outside the door. He flinched.

'Now, Will, now! Hard!'

They were both yelling at him. Will swung the garden fork high. The mink stared at him, and screamed again. Will looked at it. The Dark is rising; killing one of its creatures will not stop the Dark from rising. He let the fork drop.

James groaned loudly. Stephen leapt to Will's side. The mink, teeth bared, ran straight at Stephen as if to attack him; Will gasped in horror, but at the last minute the creature veered aside and darted between Stephen's legs. Even then it did not run at once for freedom; it dived at a frightened huddle of chickens, seized one by the neck and bit hard at the back of its head, so that the bird went instantly limp. The mink let it drop, and fled into the night.

James was stamping in angry frustration. 'The dogs! Where are the dogs?'

A beam of light wavered outside the kitchen door. 'Barbara took them to Eton to be clipped,' his mother's voice said. 'She's late because of picking up your father.'

'Oh damn!'

'I agree,' said his mother mildly, 'but there it is.' She came forward with the light. 'Let's look at the damage.'

The damage was considerable. When the boys had sorted noisy hysterical pullets from their dead companions, they had six fat corpses lying in a row. Each bird had been killed by a vicious bite at the back of its head.

Mary said, bewildered, 'But so many? Why so many? It didn't even try to take a single one away.'

Mrs Stanton shook her head in bafflement. 'A fox will kill one bird and run off with it, quickly. Which makes more sense, I must say. You say this thing was a mink?'

'I'm sure,' James said. 'There was a piece in the paper. Besides, we saw one this afternoon by the river.'

Stephen said dryly, 'Looks as though it just enjoyed killing our chickens.'

Will was standing a little way of, leaning against the wall of the barn. 'Killing for the love of it,' he said.

James snapped his fingers. 'That's what the paper said. Why they were pests. It said the mink was the only animal beside the polecat that killed for the sake of killing. Not just when it was hungry.'

Mrs Stanton picked up a pair of dangling dead chickens. 'Well,' she said with brisk resignation, 'bring them in. We'll just have to make the best of it and hope the wretched animal didn't choose the best layers. And just let him try to come back ... Steve, will you tuck up the rest of them?'

'Sure,' Stephen said.

'I'll help,' said James. 'Wow - you were lucky, Steve. I thought it was going to bite you. Wonder what stopped it?'

'I taste bad,' Stephen looked up at the sky. 'Look at that moon - we hardly need a torch at all . . . Come on. Wood, nails, hammer. We'll make that hen-run eternally mink- proof.'

Will said, 'It won't come back.' He was looking at the pimpernel flower drooping wilted and forgotten from Stephen's buttonhole. 'Good against venomous beasts. It won't come back.'

James peered at him. 'You look funny. You okay?'

'Of course I am,' Will said, fighting the turmoil in his mind. 'Course I am. Course . . .'

His head was whirling; it was like giddiness, except that it seemed also to be destroying his sense of time, of what was now and what before or after. Had the mink gone, or were they still chasing it? Had it yet come at all; were they shortly to be attacked, the hens to begin a dreadful frightened clamour? Or was he...somewhere else...entirely...?

He shook his head abruptly. Not yet. Not yet. 'Dad's tool chest is in the barn now. He moved it,' he said.

'Come on, then.' Stephen led the way into the wooden out-building that was known, more romantically than it deserved, as the barn. Their house had once been a vicarage, never a farm, but the chickens and rabbits that their farm-bred mother kept were enough to change its mood.

James snapped on the electric light, and they paused, blinking; then collected hammer, pliers, stout nails, some chicken-wire and several pieces of left-over half-inch board.

'Just right,' Stephen said.

'Dad made a new rabbit-hutch last week. Those are the bits.'

'Leave the light on. It'll shine out.'

A shaft of light from the dusty window beamed out into the night. They began cutting chicken-wire and fitting together boards, on the far side of the hen-run where the mink had wriggled its way in.

'Will - see if there's another piece of board in there, about a foot longer than this one.'

'Righto.'

Will crossed the moonlit yard towards the stream of yellow light reaching out from the barn. Behind him the sound of Stephen's hammer rang rhythmically over the still-restless murmur of the hens.

And then the whirling took hold of his mind again, and caught his senses into confusion, and the wind seemed to blow in his face. Tap-tap-tap . . . tap-tap-tap . . . the hammering seemed to change, to a hollow metallic sound as of iron striking iron. Staggering, Will leaned against the wall of the barn. The shaft of light was gone, and the moon. The alteration came with no more warning than that: a time-slip so complete that in an instant he could see no trace of Stephen or James, nor any familiar thing or animal or tree.

The night was darker than it had been. There was a creaking sound that he could not identify. He found he was standing against a wall still, but a wall of different texture; his fingers, which had been touching wood, discovered now large blocks of stone, mortared together. The air was still warm as in his own time. From the other side of the wall, he could hear voices. Two men. And both voices were so familiar to Will, out of the other side of his life that his family had never touched or seen, that the small hairs rose on the back of his neck and joy swelled in his chest like pain.

'Badon, then.' A deep voice, expressionless.

'It will have to be.'

'Do you think you can drive them back?'

'I don't know. Do you?' The second voice was almost as deep, but lightened by a warmth of feeling, like a profound amusement.

'Yes. You will drive them back, my lord. But it will not be forever. These men may be driven back, but the force of nature that they represent has never yet been driven back for long.'

The warm voice sighed. 'You are right. This island is doomed, unless . . . I know you are right, my lion. I have known it since I was a boy. Since a day - '

He stopped. There was a long pause.

The first man said gently, 'Do not think about it.'

'Do you know, then? I have never spoken of it to anyone. Well, of course you must know.' He laughed softly; the sound held affection rather than amusement. 'Were you there, Old One? You? I suppose you must have been.'

'I was there.'

'All the best men of Britain slaughtered. Every one. Three hundred leaders at the one gathering, three hundred! Stabbed, strangled, clubbed, at one sign - I even saw him give the sign, do you know that? I, a boy of seven. . . All dead. My father amongst them. The blood flowed and the grass was red, and the Dark began its rising over Britain - ' He choked on the words.

The deep voice said, grim and cold, 'It shall not rise for ever.'

'No, by heaven it shall not!' He had collected himself again. 'And a few days from now Badon shall show that. Mons Badonicus, mons felix. So let us hope.'

'The gathering is begun, and men come from every corner of your loyal Britain,' said the first. 'And this night the Circle shall be summoned, the Circle of the Old Ones, to meet this great need.'

Will stood straight, as if someone had called his name. He was so deep in this time now that he had no need of calling. There was no thought, even; only awareness. He turned, and saw light glimmering round the doorway in the stone wall; walked forward to the doorway, jumped suddenly at the sight of two figures armed with sword and spear in front of him, at either side of the door. But neither moved; they stood stiff, at attention, staring ahead.

Will reached out to the heavy, thick-woven curtain that hung over the entrance, and pulled it aside. Bright light blazed into his eyes; he brought up his arm to cover them, blinking.

'Ah, Will,' said the deeper voice. 'Come in, come in.'

Will stepped forward, opening his eyes. He stood there, smiling at the tall robed figure with its fierce proud nose and springing shock of white hair. It was a long time since they had met.

'Merriman!' he said. They moved to one another, and embraced.

'How do you, Old One?' the tall man said.

'Well, I thank you.'

'Old One to Old One,' said the other man softly. 'The first and oldest of them, and the last and youngest. And I too greet you, Will Stanton.'

Will looked at the clear blue eyes in the weather-brown face; the short grey beard; the hair still brown but streaked with grey. He went down on one knee, and bent his head. 'My lord.'

The other bent forward in his creaking leather chair and touched Will's shoulder briefly in greeting. 'I am glad to see you. Rise now, and join your master. This part of time is for you two alone, and there is much to do.'

He stood, pushing a short cloak back over one shoulder, and strode to the door, soft-shod feet noiseless on the patterned mosaic floor. Though he was a head short of Merriman's great height, there was an authority in him that towered over any man. 'I will go and hear the new count of men,' he said, turning at the door, over the clatter and scrape of spears as the guards presented arms. 'A night and a day. Be swift, my lion.'

Then he was gone, as if the swirl of the cloak had carried him away.

Will said, 'Those guards didn't challenge me.'

'They had been told to expect your coming,' Merriman said. There was a wry smile on his bleak bony face as he looked down at Will Then suddenly he put his head back with a quick intake of breath and a sigh. 'Eh Will - how is it with you, in the second great rising? For this now, here, is the first, and I tell you it does not go well.'

'I don't understand, you know,' Will said.

'Do you not, Old One? After all my teaching, and the learning of the Book of Grammarye awhile ago, do you still not understand how time must elude the consciousness of men? Perhaps you are still too close to men yourself ... Well.' He sat down abruptly on a long couch with curved arms. There was little furniture in the high square room; on its painted plaster walls bright pictures of country summer glowed, sunshine and fields and harvest gold. 'Within the time of men, Will,' he said, 'there are two great risings of the Dark. One is in the time into which you were human born. One is here and now, fifteen centuries before that, when my lord Arthur must win a victory that can last long enough to detach these invading ravagers from the Dark that drives them on. You and I have a part to play in the defence against each of these two risings. In fact, the same part.'

'But - ' Will said.

Merriman raised one bristling white eyebrow, looking at him sideways. 'If you dare to ask me, you, how it is that someone from the future can take part in something that has in that foolish phrase, already happened . . .'

'Oh no,' Will said. 'I shan't. I remember something you said to me once, a long while ago - ' He screwed up his face, groping in his memory for the right words. 'For all times coexist, you said, and the future can sometimes affect the past, even though the past is a road that leads to the future.'

A small smile of approval flickered in Merriman's grave face. 'And therefore, now, the Circle of the Light must be called, by Will Stanton the Sign-seeker, who once on a time achieved the joining of the Six Signs of the Light into a circle. It must be called, so that from the one and the same calling it may help the men of this world, both in the time of Arthur and in the time from which you come.'

'So,' Will said, 'I must take the Signs from their refuge, through that most complicated spell we laid on them after they had been joined. I only hope I can find the way.'

'So do I,' said Merriman a trifle grimly. 'For if you do not, the High Magic which guards them will take them outside Time, and the only advantage the Light holds in this great matter will be lost forever.'

Will swallowed. He said, 'I must do it from my own century, though. That was when they were joined and hidden.'

'Of course,' Merriman said. 'And that is why my lord Arthur asked us to be swift. Go, Will, and do what you have to do. A night and a day: that is all the time we have, by the measure of the earth.'

He stood and crossed the floor in one swift movement and grasped Will's arm in the old Roman salute. Dark eyes blazed down from the strange craggy face, with its deep lines. 'I shall be with you, but powerless. Take care,' Merriman said.

Will turned away, to the door, and pulled aside the curtain. Outside in the night there still faintly rang out the metallic hammering, the striking of iron upon iron.

'Wayland Smith works long, this day,' said Merriman behind him, softly. 'And not on shoes for horses, in this time, for horses are not yet shod. On swords, and axes, and knives.'

Will shivered, and without a word went out into the black night. His head whirled, a wind blew into his face - and once more the moon was floating like a great pale orange before him in the sky, and in his arms was a wooden board, and the sound of hammering before him was that of a hammer driving nails into wood.

'Ah,' Stephen said, looking up. 'That looks perfect. Thanks.'

Will came forward and gave him the board.

Part One: When the Dark Comes Rising

The Calling

Up in Will's attic bedroom the air was warm and still, furry with summer heat. He lay on his back, listening to the late-night murmur and chink below as the last waking Stantons - his father and Stephen, he thought, from the rumbling voices - made ready for bed. This had been Stephen's bedroom once, and Will had carefully packed up his belongings to let the rightful owner take residence again for the length of his leave. But Stephen had shaken his head. 'Max is away - I'll use his room. I'm a nomad now. Will. It's all yours.'

The last door dosed, the last glimmer of reflected light went out. Will looked at his watch. Midnight had passed; Midsummer Day was here now, a few minutes old. Half an hours wait should be enough. He could see no star through the skylight in his slanting roof, but only a moon-washed sky; its muted brightness filtered down into the room.

The house was muffled in sleep when finally he crept down the stairs in his pyjamas, gingerly treading the furthest comers of those steps that he knew would creak. Outside the door of his parents' room he froze suddenly; his father, snoring in a gentle crescendo, half-woke himself, grunted, turned rustling over and was lost again in soft-breathing sleep.

Will smiled into the darkness. It would have been no great matter, for an Old One, to put the household away into a pause of Time, caught out of reality in a sleep that could not be broken. But he did not want that. There were likely to be enough ways, tonight, in which he would have to play with Time.

Softly down the lower staircase into the front hall he went. The picture he had come to find hung on the wall just inside the big front door, beside the hat-rack and umbrella-stand. Will had brought a small torch with him, but he found he did not need it; the moonlight silvering the air through the hall windows showed him all the familiar figures the picture held.

He had been fascinated by it since he was very small, so small that he had to clamber up on the umbrella-stand to peer inside the dark carved wood of the picture-frame. It was a Victorian print, done all in murky shades of brown; its great attraction was the enormous complicated clarity of its detail. In flowing script it was entitled The Romans at Caerleon, and it showed the construction of some complex building. Everywhere crowds of figures tugged ropes, led oxen straining on sturdy wooden yokes, guided slabs of rock into place. A paved central floor was finished, smooth and elliptical, flanked by columned arches; a wall or staircase seemed to be rising beyond. Roman soldiers, splendidly uniformed, stood over-seeing the bands of men unloading and tugging the neatly cut stones into place.

Will looked for one soldier in particular, a centurion in the far right-hand corner of the foreground, leaning against a pillar. He was the only still figure in the whole panorama of busy construction; his face, drawn in clear detail, was grave and rather sad, and he was gazing out of the picture, into the distance. That sad remoteness was the reason why Will, when small, had always found himself more intrigued by this one odd figure than by all the rest of the scurrying workers put together. It was also the reason why Merriman had chosen the man for the concealing of the Signs.

Merriman. Will sat down on the stairs, chin on hands. He must think hard and deep. It was simple enough to remember the way in which he and Merriman had managed the hiding of the linked circle of six Signs, the most powerful - and vulnerable - weapons of the Light. Back into the time of this Roman they had gone, and there among the stones whose picture hung before him now, he, Will, had slipped the Signs into a place where they could lie safe and unseen, buried by Time. But to remember that was one thing, to reverse it quite another...

He thought: The only way is to live through that all over again. I have to go again, to go once more through everything we did in hiding the Signs - and then, instead of stopping, I shall have to find a way to take them out again.

He was beginning to be excited now. He thought: Merriman can be there but I shall have to do it. I shall be with you, but powerless, he said. So he won't be able to show me the moment when I have to say something, or do something, whatever it is; he may not even know when it comes. Only I can choose it, for the Light. And if I fail, we can go no further forward from here ...

Excitement dwindled beneath the appalling merciless weight of responsibility. There was one key only to the spell that would release the Signs, and only he could find it. But where, when, how?

Where, when, how?

Will stood up. The way out of the spell could be found only by going back into it. So, first he must re-enact the casting of it; turn Time so that once more he could live through the hours, more than a year earlier, when with Will at his side Merriman had -

What had Merriman done? It must be an exact echo.

Putting down his torch. Will stood before the picture on the wall, remembering. He reached out and put one hand on its frame. Then he stood very still, gazing in total concentration at a group of men in the picture's middle distance: men straining at a rope that was pulling a slab of rock towards some point that could not be seen. He emptied his mind of all thought, his senses of all other sight or sound; he gazed and he gazed.

And very gradually, the sound of creaking rope and rhythmic shouts and the grinding of rock against rock began to grow in his ears, and he smelled dust and sweat and dung - and the figures in the picture began to move. And Will's hand was no longer on the wooden picture-frame, but on the wooden side-support of an ox-cart laden with stone, and he stepped forward into the world of the Romans at Caerleon, a boy of that time, cool in a white linen tunic on a warm summer's day, with square stone cobbles uneven beneath his sandalled feet.

'Heave-two-three ,.. heave-two-three ...' The stone inched forward on its rollers. In other rhythms, the same shouts rang through the air from other groups, soldiers and labourers working together, skins olive or dusty pink, hair curly black or lank blonde. Stone crashed and squealed against stone; men and animal grunted with effort. And Merriman said into Will's ear, from behind him, 'You must be ready to slip the link, when the moment comes.'

Looking down, Will saw the six Signs of the Light, joined by links of gold, clasped about the waist of his tunic like a belt. Bright and dark they lay between the gleaming links, each of the six the same shape, a circle quartered by a cross: dull bronze, dark iron, blackened wood; bright gold, glittering flint, and the last that he would never forget, seeing it sometimes even in dreams - the Sign of water, clear crystal, engraved with delicate symbols and patterns like a circle of snowflakes caught in ice.

'Come,' Merriman said.

He swept past Will, tall in a dark blue cloak that fell almost to his feet, and drew level with the pillar beyond the steaming oxen, where a centurion stood watching a team of workmen lace straps and ropes round the topmost slab of granite on the wagon. Will followed, trying to be inconspicuous.

'The work goes well,' Merriman said.

The Roman turned his head, and Will saw that it was the same sombre figure whose image he had passed almost every day of his life. Bright dark eyes regarded Merriman from a lean, long-nosed face.

'Ah,' the man said. 'It is the Druid.'

Merriman inclined his head in a kind of mock-formal greeting. 'Many things to many men,' he said, smiling slightly.

The soldier looked at him reflectively. 'A strange land,' he said, 'Barbarians and magicians, dirt and poetry. A strange land, yours.' Then he snapped suddenly taut; part of his attention had been all the while on the ox-cart. 'Careful, there! You, Sextus, the rope at that end -'

Men scrambled to balance the descending slab, which had tipped perilously to one side; it came down in safety and the man in command of the team saluted, calling his thanks. The centurion nodded and relaxed, though still watching them. Another wagon rumbled past, laden with long beams of wood.

Merriman looked out at the rising structure before them; their wider view now showed that it was a half-built amphitheatre, stone-walled, with tiers of wood-topped seats rising in a great curving sweep from the central arena. 'Rome has many talents,' he said. 'We have some skill with stone, here, and none can match our great stone circles, with their homage to the Light. But the skill of Roman builders for the daily life of men as well as for worship - your villas and viaducts, your pipes and streets and baths .... You are transforming our cities, friend, as you have begun transforming the pattern of our lives.'

The soldier shrugged. "The Empire grows, always.' He glanced at Will, who hovered at Merriman's side watching the team of men swinging the long stone slowly to one side, down from the wagon.

'Your boy?'

'He learns a little of what I know,' Merriman said coolly. 'I have had him a year now. We shall see. He has the old blood in him, from the years before your fathers came.'

'No fathers of mine,' the centurion said. 'I am not Empire-born. I came from Rome seven years back, commissioned into the Second. A long time gone. Rome is the Empire, the Empire is Rome, and yet, and yet...' He smiled suddenly at Will: a kind smile, lightening the severe face. 'You work hard for your master, boy?'

'I try, sir,' Will said. He enjoyed following the formal patterning of the Latin; it came without effort to an Old One, as did any language of the world, but brought somehow a particular pleasure because of the echoes of it in his own native tongue.

The building interests you.'

'Marvellous, it is. The way each piece of stone is cut to fit exactly to the next, or to hold a beam of wood. And the putting them together, so carefully, precisely - they know just what they are doing -'

'It is all planned. Just as anywhere in the Empire. This same amphitheatre has been built in a score of legionary fort towns like this one, from Sparta to Brindisium. Come, I will show you.'

He took Will by the shoulder, with a beckoning glance at Merriman, and led him across the sandy central floor of the arena to a half-finished vaulted arch, one of eight entrances through the rising tiers of seats. 'When my third team brings up that next slab, it will fit here, so - and lock in place, there -'

A column of stone slabs was beginning to rise at the side of the arch. Will peered at the next as it drew close on its rollers, tugged by four sweating soldiers. A grunting, straining team hoisted it into place in the rising arch. It was much larger than the rest: irregular with a large hollow depression in the top, but with one broad, unusually flat surface for the front side. "Will saw the incised letters: COH. X. C. FLAV. JULIAN.

'Built by the tenth cohort, the century of Flavius Julianus,' Merriman said. 'Excellent.' And silently, in the Old Ones' manner of speaking into the mind, he said to Will, 'In there. Now.' At the same moment, he stumbled, knocking clumsily against the centurion's elbow; the Roman turned courteously to catch him.

'Is anything wrong?'

Swiftly Will slipped the belt of linked Signs from his waist and dropped it into the hollow irregularity in the slab's top side over which the next slab of stone would be placed; he pushed earth and stones hastily over it to keep the gleaming metals from view.

'I beg your pardon,' Merriman was saying. 'Foolish - my sandal - '

The soldier turned back; the team came straining up; Will moved quickly aside and the stone slab groaned and squeaked into place. And the Circle of Signs was shut into a coffin of stone, to lie hidden for as long as this work of the Roman Empire should survive.

The detached part of Will's mind, aware of everything as a spell-brought echo of things he and Merriman had done before, came jolting now into his consciousness. Now! it said. What next? For this was as far as those first actions had gone. After this point, on the day of the hiding of the Signs, he had very soon found himself back in his own century, flicked forward in Time with the precious circle hidden safe behind him. So the secret that he must now urgently find, the precious key to their recovery, must lie somewhere in these next moments of Roman time. What could it be?

He looked desperately at Merriman. But the dark eyes over the high curved nose held no expression. This was not Merriman's task, but his own; he must do it alone.

All the same there might be a reason why Merriman was there, for this half of the spell as for the other; even unwittingly, he might have some part to play. It was for Will to discover that part, if it were so, and take hold of whatever might be there for him to take.

Where, when, how?

The centurion shouted commands, and his nearest team of workers swung round and marched back for the next stone.

Watching them, the Roman shivered suddenly, and drew his cloak tighter round his shoulders.

'Britain-born, all of them,' he said wrily to Merriman. 'Like you, they find no horror in this climate.'

Merriman made a formless, murmuring sound of sympathy, and for no reason that he could imagine Will found the small hairs rising on the back of his neck, as if in a warn- ing from senses that had no other speech. He stood tense, waiting.

'These islands,' the Roman said. 'Green, I grant you. Well might they be green. Always the clouds, the mist and damp and rain.' He sighed. 'Ah, my bones ache...'

Merriman said softly, 'And not the bones only ... it must be hard, for one born in the sun.'

The centurion stared out over the wooden seats and stone columns, looking at nothing, and shook his head helplessly.

Will said, in a small clear voice that seemed to him to belong to somebody else, 'What is it like, your home?'

'Rome? A great city. But my home is outside the city, in the country - a quiet life, but good - ' He glanced at Will. 'I have a son who must now be as tall as you. When last I saw him I could throw him in the air and catch him in my hands. Now my wife tells me he has learned to ride like a centaur, and swim like a fish. Swimming now, perhaps, in the river near my land. I wanted him to grow up there, as I did. With the sun hot on the skin, and the air shrill with cicadas, and a line of cypress trees dark against the sky ... the hills silver with olive trees and terraced for the vines, with the grapes filling out, now ...'

The homesickness was a throbbing ache like physical pain, and suddenly Will knew that the answer was here in the air, in this moment of simple unprotected longing with a man's deepest, simplest emotions open and unguarded for strangers to hear and see. This was the road that would carry him.

Here, now, this way!

He let his mind fall into the longing, into the other's pain, as if he were diving into a sea; and like water closing over his head the emotion took him in. The world spun about him, stone and grey sky and green fields, whirling and changing and falling down into place not quite the same as before, and the yearning homesick voice was soft in his ears again; but the voice was a different voice.

The voice was a different voice and the language was changed, to a soft accented English with long slanting vowels. And it was evening now, with a moon-washed silver-dark sky above and shadows all around, shapes and shadows indistinguishable one from the next.

But in the new voice, the ache of longing was exactly the same.

'... it's all sun and sand and sea, that part of Florida. My part. Flowers everywhere. Oleander and hibiscus, and poinsettia in big wild red bushes, not shut up in skinny, little Christmas pots. And down on the beach the wind blows in the coconut palms and the leaves make a little rattling noise, like a shower of rain. I used to swing on those leaves when I was your age, like swinging on a rope. If I were down there now I'd be out fishing with my dad - he's got a forty foot Bertram, a beauty. Called Betsy Girl after Mom. Out through the channel in the mangroves, you go - dark green, like forests in the water. The water's green too till you get way out in the Gulf, and then it's a deep, deep blue. Beautiful. And you swing the outriggers up with the lines over, and ballyho on, and you'll catch bonita or dolphin, or if you're lucky, pompano. The tourists all want sailfish or kingfish. Day before I left home I got a sixty pound king. Ginny, that's my girl, she took a picture of it,'

Will could see him outlined against the sky, bright and dark by turns now as gathering clouds crossed the moon: a lean young man with long hair caught back in a stubby pony-tail. The soft, remembering voice went on.

'Haven't seen Ginny for eight months. Man, that's a long tune. I've got our first day all planned out for when I get home. Keep thinking about it. Long lazy day in the sun, swimming, lying on the beach, surfing maybe. And beer and hamburgers at Pete's. His burgers are just out of this world, big and juicy. Ginny loves them ... She's so pretty. Long blonde hair. Great figure. She writes me every week. Didn't come over here because her old man's got a weak heart and she felt - ah, she's just a great girl.' He paused, and slowly shook his head. 'Hey, I'm sorry. You really got me going. I guess I didn't know how much I'd been missing ... people. It's been fun here on the dig, but I'll sure be glad to get home.'

Behind him, a rounded grassy slope rose as skyline; yet although this seemed totally strange, Will had the conviction that somehow he was in the same place as before. Perhaps it was only that linking emotion, the ache in the American's voice, and yet...

Merriman's voice said in the dim night, cheerful, breaking the mood, 'He seems to have pressed a button, asking you about home. Have you been here a long time?'

'It'll be a year, by the time I'm through. Not so long really, I guess.' The young man became self-consciously brisk. 'Well, hey, let's show you. I wish this wasn't such a quick visit, professor - there's so much you could see better in the morning.'

'Ah well,' Merriman said vaguely. 'I have appointments ... Over here, you said?'

'Just a minute, I'll get a lamp. Better than a torch - ' The American vanished into a boxlike structure that seemed to be a small wooden shed; a light flared in a window, and then he was back again with a hissing hurricane lamp unexpectedly held aloft, casting a bright pool around them in which Will could see grass at their feet, and Wellington boots on Merriman's trousered legs. Beyond, poles and ropes and small drooping marker-flags jutted from an excavation made into the grassy mound that he had thought a natural slope, as if a giant slice had been cut from an earthen cake. At the inside of the excavation, where it cut furthest into the mound, he could see stones. He could see a stone-paved floor like a stretch of square cobbles; the scattered stones of a fallen arch; rising tiers of stones where once wooden benches had stood ...

The whirl of others' emotions cleared from Will's mind, and instead wonder and relief and delight flooded into him like a spring tide, and he knew, looking at the stone, that the secret releasing the Signs from their enchantment had been caught at the proper moment indeed.

'You know the background, of course. Professor Lyon,' the young American said. 'Always the mound was known as King Arthur's Round Table, with absolutely no justification of course. And no one could get permission to dig. Or funds for that matter, until this Ford Foundation deal. And now that we finally get inside it, what do we find inside King Arthur's so-called Round Table but a Roman amphitheatre.'

'You'll find a Mithraeum, too, before you're done, I shouldn't wonder,' Merriman said, in a strange brisk professional voice Will had not heard before. 'Caerleon was a major fort, after all - built for keeping down the barbaric British in their mists and fog.'

The American laughed. 'I don't really mind the mists and fog. It's the rain - and all that mud afterwards. They sure knew how to work with stone, those old Empire-builders. Look, here's the inscribed slab I was telling you about - Centurion Flavius Julianus and his boys.'

The lamp hissed, the shadows danced; he led them to a shoulder-high column of great slabs of rock. Will saw the highest, the largest, with its inscribed letters battered now by age. It was newly excavated; an inch of earth still lay over it, where the stone above had slipped to one side.

Merriman took a small torch from his pocket and shone it, quite unnecessarily Will thought, on the inscribed block of stone. 'Very neat,' he said fussily, 'very neat. Here Will, my boy, have a look.' He handed Will the light.

'We think there were eight entrances,' the American said, 'all vaulted, with this kind of stonework. This must have been one of the two main ones - we only started clearing it this afternoon.'

'Excellent,' Merriman said. 'Now just show me that other inscription you mentioned, would you?' They moved away to one side of the cave-like dig, taking the pool of yellow lamp-light with them. Will stood still. He snapped on the light for a second, to be sure of his step, then turned it off. Putting his hand forward in the darkness of what he knew now was his own time. Midsummer Day a matter of seconds after he had first left it, he reached scrabbling into the earth that had lain since the decay of Rome's Empire, some sixteen centuries before, in the hollow of the big rock of the broken arch. And his fingers met a circle of metal quartered by a cross, and putting down the flashlight to scrabble with both hands in the earth, he drew out the linked circle of Signs.

Very carefully he shook off the dirt, with the circles and their gold links spread wide to keep the metal from rattling. He glanced up. Merriman and the young archaeologist were no more than a glimmer of light, yards away across the excavation. Excitement tight in his throat, Will clipped the belt-like chain of Signs round his waist, tugging his sweater down to cover them. He went forward to the lamplight.

'Ah, well,' Merriman said blandly. 'Time we were going, I'm afraid.'

'It's very exciting' Will said, bright and enthusiastic.

'I'm so glad you stopped by.' The young American led them to a car parked behind a fence. 'It's been a privilege to meet you, Dr Lyon. I only wish the others had been here - Sir Mortimer will be real sorry -'

In a flurry of farewells he handed them into the car, pumping Merriman's arm in a kind of hearty reverence. Will said, 'You made Florida sound lovely. I hope you see it soon.'

But archaeology had driven his earlier emotion quite out of the young American's mind. Nodding, smiling vaguely, he disappeared. Merriman drove slowly down the road. He said, his voice changed utterly, 'You have them?'

'I have them safe,' Will said, and a strong hand clenched his shoulder briefly, hard, and was gone. They were no longer master and boy, nor ever would be again; they were Old Ones only, caught out of Time in a task both were long-destined to fulfil.

'It must be tonight, and quickly,' Will said. 'Here, do you think? Now?'

'I think so. The times are linked, by our presence and by the place. Above all by your good work. I think so.' Merriman stopped, turned the car, and drove back towards the excavation. They got out and stood in silence for a moment.

Then they went together into the darkness, skirting the cleared arch and walls, climbing to the top of the grassy mound. There they stood, under a sky dark now with scudding clouds that hid the moon; and - Will took from his waist the linked belt of crossed circles that was the symbol of the Circle of the Light, and held it up in both hands. And time and space merged as the twentieth and the fourth centuries became for a Midsummer's instant two halves of a single breath, and in a clear soft voice Will said into the night, 'Old Ones! Old Ones! It is time. Now and for always, for the second time and the last, let the Circle be joined. Old Ones, it is time! For the Dark, the Dark is rising!'

His voice ran strong; he held the Signs high, and a glimmer of starlight flashed on the circle of crystal like white fire. And all at once they were no longer alone on the silent grassy mound. From all the world over, from every point of time, the shadowy forms of men and women from every kind and generation crowded there in the night. A great glimmering throng was gathered, the Old Ones of the earth come together for the first time since, six seasons earlier, the Signs had in their presence been ceremonially joined. The darkness rustled; there was a formless murmuring in the place, a communication without speech.

Merriman and Will stood there together on the hill in the night full of beings, and waited for the one last Old One whose presence would weld this great gathering into an ultimate instrument of power, a force to vanquish the Dark.

They waited, and the night grew brighter with starlight; but she did not come.

The glimmering forms murmured and rippled as though the land blurred, and Will's consciousness, at one with the minds of all his fellows there, was filled with unease.

Merriman said, low and husky, 'I was afraid of this.'

'The Lady,' Will said helplessly. 'Where is the Lady?'

'The Lady!' Indistinct as the wind, a long whisper ran through the darkness. 'Where is the Lady?'

Will said softly to Merriman, 'She came at the turn of the year, the year before last, for the Joining. Why does she not come now?'

Merriman said, 'I think she has not the strength. Her power is worn by resisting the Dark - you and I know well how she has spent herself, in the past. And though she managed the effort for the joining of the Signs, you remember that then she had no strength even to take her leave.'

'Yes,' Will said, remembering a small, fragile old figure, delicate as a wren, standing beside him overlooking a great throng of Old Ones as Merriman stood now. 'She simply ... faded. And then she was gone.'

'And it seems that she is gone still. Out of reach. Gone until a helping magic may come from the sum of the centuries of this spell-ridden island, to bring her to our need. For the first time, for the only time, the help of mere creatures is needed for the Lady.'

Merriman drew himself up, a tall shadowy hooded figure in the night, dark as a pillar against the sky. He spoke without effort or great force, yet his voice filled the night and seemed to echo to and fro over the unseen heads of that enormous throng.

'Who knows?' he said. 'Who can tell? Oh all you Circle of the Old Ones, who can tell?'

And one voice came out of the night, a deep beautiful Welsh voice, rich and smooth as velvet, speaking with a rhythm that gave it the lilt of singing.

'Y maent yr mynyddoedd yn canu,' the voice said, 'ac y mae'r arglwyddes yn dod. Which means, being translated, The mountains are singing, and the Lady comes.'

There was a great stir among the aery crowd, and before he could help himself Will let out a cry of joyful recognition at the words. 'The verse! Of course! The old verse from the sea.' He sobered suddenly. 'But what does it mean? We all know that line, Merriman - but what does it mean?'

The question echoed in many voices, whispering and susurrating like the sea when a small breeze rises. The deep Welsh voice said, reflectively, 'When the mountains are singing, the Lady will come. And remember one thing. It is not in the Old Speech, which we all use, that those words have come down to us, but in a younger language - that is nevertheless one of the most ancient used by men.'

Merriman said softly, "Thank you, Dafydd my friend.'

'Welsh,' Will said. 'Wales.' He stared into blank dark space, where clouds once more were drifting over the moon. He said hesitantly, his mind feeling for the right word, the right idea, 'I am to go to Wales. To that part where I have been once before. And there I must find the moment, the right way ... Somewhere in the mountains. Somehow, And the Lady will come.'

'And we shall be complete and singly-bound,' Merriman said. 'And the end of all this questing will begin.'

'Pob hwyl, Will Stanton,' said the rich Welsh voice gently in the darkness. 'Pob hwyl. Good luck ...' And it faded and died into the soft whine of the wind, and all the gathering around them faded too, vanishing away to leave them standing, two lone figures, there in the darkening night on the grass-smooth mound, in the Midsummer Day of the time into which Will had been born.

Will said, 'But for that first time, to which I was called, the rising of the Dark in the time of Arthur ... We are allowed only a night and a day to bring help there. And I cannot keep to that limit now. So what of the great king, and the battle that is to come at Badon? What will - ' He stopped himself, cutting off words that belonged not to Old Ones but to men.

Merriman said, completing it, 'What will happen there? What will happen, what has happened, what is happening? A battle, won for a little while. A respite gained, but not for long. You can see. Will. Things are as they are, and will be. In Arthur's time, we have the Circle to help us, for they have been gathered, and much can therefore be accomplished. But without words from the Lady, the last height of power cannot be reached, and so the peace of Arthur that we shall gain for this island at Badon will be lost, before long, and for a time the world will seem to vanish beneath the shadow of the Dark. And emerge, and vanish again, and again emerge, as it has done through all the length of what men call their history.'

Will said, 'Until the Lady comes.'

'Until the Lady comes,' Merriman said. 'And she will help you to the finding of the sword of the Pendragon, the crystal sword by which the final magic of the light shall be achieved, and the Dark put at last to flight. And there will be five to help you, for from the beginning it was known that six al- together, and six only, must accomplish this long matter. Six creatures more and less of the earth, aided by the six Signs,'

Will said, quoting, 'When the Dark comes rising, six shall turn it back.'

'Aye,' Merriman said. Suddenly he sounded very weary. 'Six, for a hard turning.'

On impulse Will quoted again, a whole verse this time, from the old prophetic rhyme that had come gradually to light - a world ago, it seemed to him - with the growing of his own power as an Old One.

'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 shall return, and one go alone.'

He spoke the last line more slowly, as if he were hearing it for the first time. 'Merriman? That last part, what does it mean? It has never put anything into my mind but a question. Five shall return, and one go alone ... Who?'

Merriman stood there in the quiet night, his face obscured by shadow; his voice was quiet too, and without expression. "Nothing is certain. Old One, even in the prophecies. They can mean one thing, or they can mean another. For after all, men have minds of their own, and can determine their actions, for good or ill, for going outward, or turning in ... I cannot tell who the one may be. None shall know, until the last. Until the ... one ... goes ... alone ...' He gathered himself, and stood straighter, as if pulling them both back out of a dream. "There is a long road to tread before that will come, and a hard one, if we are to triumph at the end of it. I go back now to my lord Arthur, with the Signs, and the power of the Circle which only they can call.'

He held out his hand, barely visible in the star-washed darkness, and Will gave him the linked belt of crossed circles, gold and crystal and stone glittering between dark wood, bronze, iron.

'Go well, Merriman,' he said quietly.

'Go well. Will Stanton,' Merriman said, his voice tight with strain. 'Into your own place, at this Midsummer hour, where affairs will take you in the direction you must go. And we will strive at our separate tasks across the centuries, through the waves of time, touching and parting, parting and touching in the pool that whirls forever. And I shall be with you before long.'

He raised an arm, and he was gone, and the stars spun and the night whirled about, and Will was standing moonlit in the hall of his home, his hand on the frame of a sepia Victorian print that showed the Romans building an amphitheatre at Caerleon.

Part One: When the Dark Comes Rising

Midsummer Day

At a triumphant trot Will mowed the last patch of grass, and collapsed, panting, draped over the lawn-mower handle. Sweat was trickling down the side of his nose, and his bare chest was damp, speckled with tiny cut stems of grass.

'Ouf! It's even hotter than yesterday!'

'Sundays,' James said, 'are always hotter than Saturdays. Especially if you live in a village with a small stuffy church. James Stanton's Law, you can call that.'

'Go on,' said Stephen, passing with his hands full of twine and clippers. 'It wasn't that bad. And for two horrible little boys you still sound pretty angelic in the choir.' He dodged neatly as Will flung a fistful of grass cuttings.

'I shan't be there much longer,' James said, with some pride. 'I'm breaking. Did you hear me croak in the canticle?'

'You'll be back,' Will said. Tenor. Bet you.'

'I suppose so. That's what Paul says too.'

'He's practising. Listen!'

Distant as a fading dream, from inside the house the soft clear tone of a flute rippled up and down in scales and arpeggios; it seemed as much a part of the hot still afternoon as the bees humming in the lupins and the sweet smell of the new-cut grass. Then the scales gave way to a long lovely flow of melody, repeated again and again. Halfway across the lawn Stephen stood caught into stillness, listening.

'My God, he's good, isn't he? What is that?'

'Mozart, First Flute Concerto,' Will said. 'He's playing it with the N.Y.O. this autumn.'

'N.Y.O.?'

'National Youth Orchestra. You remember. He was in it for years, even before he went to the Academy.'

'I suppose I do. I've been away so long ...'

'It's a big honour, that concert,' James said. 'At the Festival Hall, no less. Didn't Paul tell you?'

'You know Paul. Old Modesty. That's a lovely-sounding flute he's got now, too. Even I can tell.'

'Miss Greythorne gave it to him, two Christmases ago,' said Will. 'From the Manor. There's a collection that her father made, she showed us.'

'Miss Greythorne ... Good Lord, that takes me back. Sharp wits, sharp tongue -I bet she hasn't changed a bit.'

Will smiled. 'She never will.'

'She caught me up her almond tree once when I was a kid,' Stephen said, grinning reminiscently. 'I came climbing down and there she was out of nowhere, in her wheelchair. Even though she hated anyone seeing that wheelchair. "Only monkeys eat my nuts, young man," she said -I can still hear her - "and you'll not even make a powder monkey, at your age."'

'Powder monkey?' James said.

'Boys in the Navy in Nelson's day - they used to fetch the powder for the guns.'

'You mean Miss Greythorne knew you were going into the Navy?'

'Of course not, I didn't know myself then.' Stephen looked a little taken aback. 'Funny coincidence though. Never occurred to me before - I haven't given her a thought for years.'

But James's mind had already taken off on a tangent, as it frequently did. 'Will, whatever became of that little hunting horn she gave you, the year she gave Paul the flute? Did you lose it? You never even gave it one good blow.'

'I still have it,' Will said quietly.

'Well, get it out. We could have fun with it.'

'One day.' Will swung the lawn-mower round, shoving its handle at James's unready hands. 'Here - your turn. I've done the front, now you do the back.'

"That's the rule,' said their father, passing with a weed-loaded wheelbarrow. 'Fair's fair. Share the burden.'

'My burden's bigger than his,' James said dolefully.

'Nonsense!' said Mr Stanton.

"Well it is, actually,' Will said. 'We measured, once. The back lawn's five feet wider than the front, and ten feet longer.'

'Got more trees in it,' said Mr Stanton, unclipping the catch-box of grass cuttings from the front of the mower, and emptying it into his barrow.

"That makes more work, not less.' James drooped, more dolefully still. 'Going round them. Trimming afterwards.'

'Go away,' said his father. 'Before I burst into tears.'

Will took the box and clipped it back on the mower. 'Good-bye, James,' he said cheerfully.

'You haven't finished yet, either, matey,' Mr Stanton said. 'Stephen needs some help tying up the roses.'

A muffled curse came from the front garden wall; Stephen, embraced by the sprawling branches of a climbing rose, was sucking his thumb.

'I believe you may be right,' Will said.

Grinning, his father picked up the wheelbarrow and prodded James and the lawn-mower up the driveway; Will was starting over the lawn when his elder sister Barbara came out of the front door.

'Tea's nearly ready,' she said.

'Good.'

'Outside, we're having it.'

'Good, better, best. Come and help Steve fight a rose bush.'

Rambler roses, spilling great swathes and bunches of red blossom, grew along and over the old stone wall that bordered the road. Gingerly they untangled the most wildly sprawling arms, drove stakes into the gravelly earth, and tied the branches to keep the billowing sprays of roses off the ground.

'Ouch!' said Barbara for the fifth time, as a rebellious rose-branch scored a thin red line across her bare back.

'Your own fault' said Will unfeelingly. 'You should have more clothes on.'

'It's a sunsuit. For the sunshine, duckie.'

'Nekkidness,' said her younger brother solemnly, 'be a shameful condition for a yooman bein'. Tain't roight. Tes a disgrace to the neighbour'ood, so 'tes.'

Barbara looked at him. 'There you stand, wearing even less -' she began indignantly; then stopped.

'Slow,' said Stephen. 'Very slow.'

'Oh, you,' Barbara said.

A car passed on the road; slowed suddenly; stopped; then began backing gradually until it was level with them. The driver switched off his engine, hauled himself across the seat and stuck a heavy-jowled red face out of the window.

'Might the biggest of you be Stephen Stanton?' he said with clumsy joviality.

"That's right,' said Stephen from the top of the wall. He gave one last blow to a stake. 'What can I do for you?'

'Name's Moore,' the man said. 'You had a little run-in with one of my boys the other day, I gather.'

'Richie,' said Will.

'Ah,' said Stephen. He jumped down from the wall to stand next to the car. 'How do you do, Mr Moore. I dropped your son into some water, I believe.'

'Green water,' said the man. 'Ruined his shirt.'

'I should be happy to buy him a new one,' Stephen said easily. 'What size is he?'

'Don't talk rubbish,' the man said, expressionless. 'I just wanted to get the rights and wrongs of it, that's all. Wondered why a young man like you should be playing those sort of games with kids.'

Stephen said, 'It wasn't a game, Mr Moore. I simply felt very strongly that your son deserved to be dropped into the water.'

Mr Moore ran one hand over his large glistening forehead. 'Maybe. Maybe. He's a wild kid, that one. They kick him around, he kicks back. What did he do to you?'

'Didn't he tell you?' Will said.

Mr Moore looked across the low wall at Will as though he were something small and irrelevant, like a beetle. 'What Richie told me, it wasn't something that gets people dropped in streams. So like as not it wasn't true. That's what I want to get straight.'

'He was tormenting a young boy,' Stephen said. "There's not much point in going into detail.'

'Having a bit of fun, he said.'

'Not much fun for the other one.'

'Richie said he didn't lay a finger on him,' Mr Moore said.

'He just threw his music-case full of music into the stream, that's all,' Will said shortly.

'We - ell,' Mr Moore said. He paused, tapping the edge of the car window absently. 'It was that Indian kid from the Common, I gather.'

The three Stantons stood looking at him in silence. He stared back, blankly. At length Barbara said, in a small polite voice, 'Does that make a difference?'

Before the man could answer, Mr Stanton said amiably from behind them, 'Good afternoon.'

'Afternoon,' said Mr Moore, turning his head, with a tinge of relief in his tone. 'I'm Jim Moore. We were just -'

'Yes, I heard some of it,' Mr Stanton said. He propped himself against the edge of the wheelbarrow he had just set down, and took out his pipe and matches. 'I must say I thought Steve might have over-reached himself a bit that day. Still -'

'The thing is, you can't always believe these people, you see,' said the man in the car, smiling, confident of agreement.

There was a silence. Mr Stanton lit his pipe. He said, puffing, blowing out the match, 'I don't quite follow, I'm afraid.'

Stephen said coldly, 'It wasn't a case of believing anyone, just of what I happened to see for myself.'

Mr Moore was looking at Mr Stanton with a kind of anxious adult bonhomie. 'Made a lot of fuss about nothing, that kid, I dare say. You know how they are, always on about something.'

True, true,' said Roger Stanton, his round face placid. 'Mine usually are.'

'Oh no, no,' said Mr Moore heartily, 'I'm sure your bunch are very nice. I meant coloureds, not kids.'

He went on, ploughing unawares through the silence that came again, 'I see a lot of them at work. I'm in personnel, you know - Thames Manufacturing. Not much I don't know about Indians and Pakkies, after all these years. Of course I've got nothing against them personally. Very intelligent, well-educated, some of them. Got myself an op from an Indian doctor at the Memorial Hospital last year - clever little chap, he was.'

Barbara said, in the same small polite voice, 'I expect even some of your best friends are Indians and Pakistanis.'

Her father gave her a sharp warning glance, but the words went flickering quite over Mr Moore's stubbly head. He chuckled at Barbara, very much the jovial appreciative male indulging a pretty seventeen-year-old. 'Well no, I wouldn't go that far! I'll be honest with you, I don't think they should be here, them or the West Indians. Got no right, have they? Taking jobs that should go to Englishmen, with the country in the state it is...'

Stephen said quietly, 'We do have unions, Mr Moore, and they aren't exactly helpless. Most of those famous jobs are the ones Englishmen don't want to do - or that the immigrants do better.'

The man looked at Stephen with resentment and dislike, his thick jaw hardening. 'One of those, are you? A bleeding-heart. Don't try and teach me, young man. I've seen too much of the real thing. One Pakkie family rents a two-bed-room house and the next thing you know, they've got sixteen of their friends and relations living there. Like rabbits. And half of them having babies free on the National Health Service, at the British taxpayer's expense.'

'Remember your Indian doctor?' Stephen said, still softly. 'If it weren't for the immigrant doctors and nurses, the National Health Service would fall apart tomorrow.'

Mr Moore made a contemptuous noise. 'Just don't try and tell me about coloured people,' he said. 'I know.'

Stephen leaned back against the wall, twisting a piece of raffia between his fingers. 'Do you know Calcutta, Mr Moore?' he said. 'Have you ever had beggars grabbing at your feet, calling out to you, children half the size of Will here with an arm missing, or an eye, and ribs like xylophones and their legs stinking with sores? If I lived in a place with that kind of despair round me, I think I just might decide to bring up my kids in a country where they'd have a better chance. Specially a country that had exploited my own for about two hundred years. Wouldn't you? Or Jamaica, now. Do you know how many children get to a secondary school there? D'you know the unemployment rate? D'you know what the slums are like in Kingston? Do you know -'

'Stephen,' said his father gently.

Stephen stopped. The raffia string in his hands snapped.

'So what about it? All that stuff?' The man's face had darkened. He leaned belligerently out of the window; his breath came more quickly. 'Let them solve their own problems, not come whining over here! What's all that have to do with us? They don't belong here, none of 'em; they should all be thrown out. And if you think they're so bloody marvellous you'd better go and live in their lousy countries with them!' He caught Mr Stanton's calm eye suddenly and tried visibly to control himself, jerking his head back from the window and sliding across into the driver's seat.

Mr Stanton came close to the wall, where the car stood, and took his pipe from his mouth. 'If your son shares your views, Mr Moore,' he said clearly, 'as I am glad to find my son shares mine, then the stream episode isn't hard to explain, is it? We only have to decide what reparation you'd like.' The pipe went back between his teeth, abruptly.

'Reparation hell!' The man started his engine with a deliberate roar. He leaned over the seat, shouting above the noise. 'You just see what happens to anyone laying a finger on my boy again, for the sake of some snivelling little wog, that's all. Just seel'

He lurched back at the wheel and drove off, gears snarling. They stood looking at the car.

Stephen opened his mouth.

'Don't say it,' said his father, 'don't say it! You know how many there are. You can't convince them and you can't kill 'em. You can only do your best in the opposite direction - which you did.' He looked around, embracing Will and Barbara in a rueful smile. 'Come on. Let's go and have tea.'

Will came last, trailing despondently. From the moment when he had heard the man in the car begin to shout, and seen the look in his eyes, he had been no Stanton at all but wholly an Old One, dreadfully and suddenly aware of danger. The mindless ferocity of this man, and all those like him, their real loathing born of nothing more solid than insecurity and fear... it was a channel. Will knew that he had been gazing into the channel down which the powers of the Dark, if they gained their freedom, could ride in an instant to complete control of the earth. He was filled with a terrible anxiety, a sense of urgency for the Light, and knew that it would remain with him, silently shouting at him, far more vividly than the fading memory of a single bigot like Mr Moore.

'Come on, Tarzan,' said Paul, thumping his bare shoulder as he came past out of the house. So Will came back, slowly, into the other part of his mind.

They all gathered for tea as though the disturbing Mr Moore had never been. By one of those unspoken censorships that come sometimes in close families, those who had seen him made no mention of him to those who had not. Tea was laid out on the orange wicker table, glass-topped, that stood outdoors with its matching chairs in high summer. Will's spirits began to rise. For an Old One with the tastes and appetite of a small boy, it was hard to despair for long over the eternal fallibility of mankind when confronted with home-made bread, farm butter, sardine-and-tomato paste, raspberry jam, scones, and Mrs Stanton's delicious, delicate, unmatchable sponge-cake.

He sat on the grass. His senses were crammed with summer: the persistent zooming of a wasp lured by the jam; the grass-smell of James's partly cut lawn mingling with the scent of a nearby buddleia bush; the dappled light all around him as sunshine filtered through the apple tree overhead, lush in full green leaf now, with small green apples beginning to swell. Many of the apples were fallen already, victims of over-population, never to grow. Will picked up one of the little thick-stemmed oval objects and gazed at it pensively.

'Put it down,' Barbara said. 'This'll taste better.' She was holding out a plate with two scones spread thickly with butter and jam.

'Hey,' said Will. 'Thanks.' It was a small warm kindliness;

in a family as big as the Stantons', self-service was the general rule. Barbara smiled at him briefly, and Will could sense her formless maternal concern that her youngest brother had been upset by the violence of the man in the car. His spirits lifted. The Old One within him thought: The other side. Don't forget. There's always the other side of people too.

"Three and a half more weeks of school,' James said, in a tone that was half delight, half grumble. He looked up at the sky. 'I hope the holiday's all like this.'

'The long-range forecast says it will begin pouring with rain the day you break up,' said Paul seriously, folding a piece of bread-and-butter. He went on, through a mouthful, 'It's due to go on for three weeks without stopping. Except once, for August week-end.'

'Oh no!' said James, in unguarded horror.

Paul looked at him owlishly over his horn-rimmed glasses. 'There may very well be hail. And on the last day of July they're expecting a blizzard.'

James's face relaxed into a grin, as relief twined with shame-faced rage. 'Paul, you swine. I'll -'

'Don't kill him,' Stephen said. 'Too fatiguing. Bad for digestions. Tell me what you're going to do for the holidays, instead.'

'Scout camp, some of the time,' James said happily. 'Two weeks in Devon.'

'Very nice too.'

'I'm doing summer courses at the Academy - and playing in a jazz club at night,' Paul said with a crooked grin.

'Good Lord!'

'Ah, the worm turns. Not exactly your kind of jazz, though.'

'Better nor nowt. What are you going to do. Will?'

'Loaf about, like me,' said Barbara comfortably, from an armchair.

'Well as a matter of fact,' Mrs Stanton said, 'Will has an invitation he hasn't heard about yet. Quite a surprise.' She leaned forward with the teapot and began filling cups. 'Your Aunt Jen telephoned this afternoon from London - she and David are up for a day or two, with some group from Wales. And she wanted to know. Will, if you'd like to spend part of the holidays at the farm - as soon as school ends, if you like.'

Will said slowly, 'That's good.'

'Wow!' said James. 'Don't tell Mary, she'll be livid - she thought she was going to get invited back to Wales this year.'

'Jen said something about Will getting along very well last year with a rather lonely boy who lived there,' Mrs. Stanton said.

'Yes.' Will said. 'Yes, I did. His name was Bran.'

'You'll have to make sure it's a working holiday, you know,' said his father. 'Make yourself useful to your uncle. I know that part of Wales is almost all sheep, but it's a busy time of the year on any farm.'

'Oh yes,' Will said. He picked up another of the small immature apples and twirled it round and round, fast, by its stem. 'Yes. There'll be a lot of work to do.'

Part Two: The Singing Mountains

Five

'Have we been here before?' Barney said. 'I keep feeling -'

'No,' Simon said.

'Not even when you were little, and I was a baby? You might have forgotten.'

'Forgotten this?'

Simon swung one arm rather theatrically to embrace the panorama that lay spread around them, where they sat on the wiry grass halfway up the mountain, among spiny bushes of brilliant yellow gorse. Over all the right-hand half of their view was the blue sea of Cardigan Bay, with its long beaches stretching far into the haze of distance. Directly below them lay the green undulations of Aberdyfi golf course, behind its uneven dunes. To the left, the beaches ran into the broad estuary of the River Dyfi, full and blue now with water at high tide. And beyond, over the flat stretch of marsh on the other side of the river-mouth, the mountain mass of Mid-Wales rolled along the skyline, purple and brown and dull green, its colours shifting and patching constantly as clouds sailed over the summer sky past the sun.

'No,' Jane said. 'We've never been to Wales before, Barney. But Dad's grandmother was born here. Right in Aberdyfi. Perhaps memories can float about in your blood or something.'

'In your blood!' Simon said scornfully. He had recently announced that instead of going to sea, he proposed to become a doctor, like their father, and the side-effects of this weighty decision were beginning to try Jane and Barney's patience.

Jane sighed. 'I didn't mean it like that.' She groped in her shirt pocket. 'Here. Halfway snack time. Have some choco- late before it melts.'

'Good!' said Barney promptly.

'And don't tell me it's bad for our teeth, Simon, because I know it is.'

'Course it is,' said her elder brother with a disarming grin. 'Utter disaster. Where's mine?'

They sat munching fruit-and-nut chocolate for a contented space, gazing out over the estuary.

'I just know I've been here before,' Barney said.

'Don't keep on,' Jane said. 'You've seen pictures.'

'I mean it.'

'If you've been here before,' Simon said, long-suffering, 'you can tell us what we'll see when we get to the top of the ridge.'

Barney turned, flipping his blonde forelock out of his eyes, and stared up the mountain, over the bracken and the green slope. He said nothing.

'Another ridge,' Jane said cheerfully. 'And from that one you'll see another.'

'What'll we see, Barney?' Simon persisted. 'Cader Idris? Snowdon? Ireland?'

Barney looked at him for a long blank moment, his eyes empty. He said at last, 'Someone.'

'Someone? Who?'

'I don't know.' He jumped up suddenly. 'If we sit here all day we'll never find out, will we? Race you!'

He leapt up off the slope, and in an instant Simon was bounding confidently after him. Jane watched them, grinning. In the last year or so, though her younger brother had remained fairly neat and small, Simon seemed to have sprouted legs far too long for his body, like a giraffe. There were very few family races now that he failed to win.

Both boys had disappeared above her. The sun was hot on the back of her neck, as she climbed slowly after them. She stumbled on an outcrop of rock, and paused. Somewhere far away on the mountain a tractor's engine purred; a pipit shrilled overhead. The rocky outcrops led to the top of the ridge here in an erratic progression, through bracken and gorse and billowing piles of heather; hare-bells starred the low sheep-cropped grass, and little creeping white flowers she did not recognise. Far, far below, the road wound like a thread past the dune-fringed golf course, and the first grey roofs of Aberdyfi village. Jane shivered suddenly, with a sense of being very much alone.