'Simon!' she called. 'Barney!'

There was no answer. The birds sang. The sun beat down out of a lightly-hazed blue sky; nothing moved anywhere. Then very faintly Jane heard a strange long musical note. High and clear, it was like the call of a hunting horn, and yet not so harsh or demanding. It came again, closer. Jane found that she smiled as she listened; it was a lovely beckoning sound, and suddenly she was filled with an urgent desire to find out where it came from, what instrument could play so beautiful a note. She went on more swiftly up the hillside, until all at once she was over a last rocky edge and could see before her the first few yards of the ridge of the hill. The long sweet note came again, and on the highest grey granite out-cropping that met the sky, she saw a boy, lowering from his lips the small curved horn with which he had just blown a call over the mountains, out into nowhere. His face was turned away from Jane, and she could see little except that he had longish straight hair. Then as he moved one hand in an automatic swift gesture to push back the hair from his fore-head, she knew suddenly and positively that she had seen that gesture before, and knew who this boy was.

She went forward up the last slope to the rock, and he saw her and stood waiting.

Jane said, 'Will Stanton!'

'Hello, Jane Drew,' he said.

*Oh!' Jane said happily. Then she paused, surveying him. 'I can't think why I'm not more surprised,' she said. "The last time I saw you was when we left you on Platform Four at Paddington Station. A year ago. More. What are you doing on the top of a mountain in Wales, for goodness' sake?'

'Calling,' Will said.

Jane looked at him for a long moment full of remembering, thinking back to a dark adventure in a beleaguered Cornish village, where her Great-Uncle Merriman had brought her and Simon and Barney together with an unremarkable round-faced, straight-haired Buckinghamshire boy - who had seemed to her in the end as alarming and yet as reassuring as Merriman himself.

'Different, I said you were then,' she said.

Will said gently, 'You three are not altogether ordinary, as you very well know.'

'Sometimes,' said Jane. She grinned at him suddenly, reaching back to hitch up the ribbon on her pony-tail. 'Mostly we are. Well. I said I hoped we should see you again some day. Didn't I?''

Will grinned back, and Jane remembered the way his smile had always transformed his rather solemn face. 'And I said I was pretty sure you would.' He came a few paces down the rock, then paused and raised the horn to his lips again. Tilting it to the sky, he blew a string of short staccato notes and then one long one. The sound curved out into the summer air, then down, like an arrow dropping.

That'll bring them,' he said. 'They used to call it the avaunt.'

The note of the horn was still echoing round Jane's head. 'It's a lovely, lovely sound, not a bit like the ones they use for fox-hunts. Not that I've ever heard those except on television. That one - it's just - it's music -' She broke off, flapping one hand wordlessly.

Will held up the small curved horn, looking at it with his head on one side. Though it seemed old and battered, it gleamed like gold in the sunlight. 'Ah,' he said softly. Two occasions there will be, for its using. That much I know. The second is hidden to me. But the first time is now, for the gathering of the Six.'

"The Six?' Jane said blankly.

'We are two,' Will said. She stared at him.

'Jane? Jane!' It was Simon's voice, loud and peremptory, from over the ridge. She turned her head.

'Jane - Oh there you are!' Barney clambered over the rock a few yards away, turning over his shoulder to call, 'Over here!'

Will said in the same tranquil voice, 'And then there were four.'

Both boys' heads swung round in the same instant,

'Will!' Barney's voice was a yelp.

Jane heard the sharp inward gasp of Simon's breath; then he let it out in a long slow hiss. 'Well... I'll... be...'

'Someone,' Barney said. 'Didn't I tell you? Someone. Was that you blowing the horn, Will? Let's see, do let me see!' He was hopping about, reaching, fascinated.

Will handed it over.

Simon said slowly, 'You can't tell me this is a coincidence.'

'No,' Will said.

Barney was standing still now on the rock, holding the small battered horn, watching the sun glint on its golden rim. He looked over it, at Will. 'Something's happening, isn't it?' he said quietly.

'Yes,' said Will.

'Can you tell us?' Jane said.

'Not yet. In a little while. It's the hardest thing of all, and the last thing. And... it needs you.'

'I should have known.' Simon looked at Jane with a small wry smile. 'This morning. You weren't there. Dad happened to mention who it was that suggested we stay at this particular golfing hotel.'

'Well?'

'Great-Uncle Merry,' Simon said.

Will said, 'He will be here before long.'

'It really is serious,' Barney said.

'Of course. I told you. The hardest, and the last.'

'It really had better be the last,' Simon said rather pompously. 'I start boarding school after these holidays.'

Will looked at him. The comer of his mouth twitched.

Simon seemed to hear in his mind the echo of his own words; he looked down, scuffing at the grass with one foot. 'Well I mean,' he said. 'I mean my holidays will be even more different from all the others', so we may not be going to... to the same places all the time. Right, Jane?' He turned in appeal to bis sister; then paused. 'Jane?'

Jane was gazing past him, eyes wide and fixed. She was seeing, now, nothing but a figure on the mountain, a figure standing looking at them, outlined by the blazing light of the high-summer sun. It stood slim and straight. Its hair was like a silver flame. She had a sudden extraordinary sense of great rank, of high natural degree, almost as if she were in the presence of a king. For a moment she resisted a strong irrational impulse to curtsey.

'Will?' she said softly, without turning her head. 'Then there were five. Will?'

Will's voice came strong and casual and eminently normal, snapping the tension. 'Hey Bran! Over here! Bran!' He pronounced the name with a long vowel, Jane noticed, like the sound inside farm, or barn. She had never heard a name like it before. She had never seen anyone like this before.

The boy on the skyline came slowly down towards them. Jane stared at him, hardly breathing. She could see him clearly now. He wore a white sweater and black jeans, with dark glasses over his eyes, and there was no colour in him anywhere. His skin had a strange pale translucence. His hair was quite white; so were his eyebrows. He was not merely blonde, as her brother Barney was blonde, with his mop of yellowish hair falling over a sun-browned face. This boy seemed almost crippled by his lack of colour; its absence hit the eye as hard as if an arm or a leg had been missing. And then he pulled off his glasses as he drew level with them, and she saw that after all the lack was not total; she saw his eyes, and they too were like nothing she had seen before. They were yellow, tawny, flecked with gold, like the eyes of an owl; they blazed at her, bright as new coins. She felt a sense of challenge - and then she was conscious of her staring, and though she would never normally have shaken hands with anyone her own age, in a kind of apology she thrust out her hand towards him.

'Hallo,' she said.

Will said at once, beside her, matter-of-fact. That's Bran Davies. Bran, this is Jane Drew. And Simon, he's the big one, and Barney.'

The white-haired boy took Jane's hand briefly, awkwardly, and nodded at Barney and Simon. 'Pleased to meet you.' He sounded very Welsh.

'Bran lives in one of the houses on my uncle's farm,' Will said.

'You have an uncle down here?' Barney's voice was high with astonishment.

'Well, actually he isn't my real uncle,' Will said cheerfully. 'Adopted. He married my mum's best friend. Comes to the same thing. Like you and Merriman. Or is he your real great-uncle?'

'I've never really known,' Simon said.

'He probably isn't,' Jane said. 'Considering.'

Barney said pertly, 'Considering what?'

'You know perfectly well.' She was uneasily conscious of Bran silently listening.

'Yes,' Barney said. He handed the small gleaming horn back to Will. Instantly Bran's cold golden eyes were on it; then up glaring at Barney, fierce, accusing.

'Was that you blowing the horn?'

Will said quickly, 'No, of course not, it was me. Calling, like I said. Calling you, and them.'

Something in Jane's mind flickered at the note in his voice: a small strange difference, so slight that she could not be sure she was not imagining it. It seemed a kind of respect, that Will did not show even when he spoke to Merriman. Or not respect, but an ... awareness of ... of something ... She glanced quickly, nervously at the white-haired boy and then away again.

Simon said, 'Have you known Will for long?' His tone was carefully neutral.

Bran said calmly, 'Calan Gaeaf last year, I got to know Will. Last Samain. If you can work that out, you'll know how long. You staying at the Trefeddian then, you three?' He pronounced it Trevethian, natural and Welsh; not as they had themselves when they first arrived, Jane painfully remembered.

'Yes,' she said. 'Daddy's playing golf. Mother paints.'

'Is she good?' Bran said.

'Yes,' Barney said. 'Very.' Jane could hear the same wariness in his voice as there had been in Simon's, but without hostility. 'I mean she's a real painter, not just hobby stuff. She has a studio, shows in galleries, all that.'

'You're lucky,' Bran said quietly.

Will was looking at Simon. 'Is it hard to get away?'

'From the A.P.s? Oh no. Mother takes off in the car with her easel, Father's on the golf course all day.' Glancing at Bran, Simon added, 'Sorry - A.P.s - Aged Parents.'

'Believe it or not,' Bran said, 'they teach Dickens in Welsh schools too.'

'Sorry,' Simon said stiffly. 'I didn't mean -'

'That's all right.' Bran smiled suddenly, for the first time. 'We are going to be doing things together, Simon Drew. I think we had better get along. Don't worry. I am not one of those Welshmen with a chip. No fixations about the snotty English, or being a subject race, and all that. No point, is there, when the Welsh are so clearly superior?'

'Bah, humbug,' Will said cheerfully.

Barney said rather hesitantly, looking at Bran, 'You said, We're going to be doing things together ... Are you one of - are you like Great-Uncle Merry and Will?'

'In a way I suppose I am,' Bran said slowly. 'I can't explain. You'll see. But I am not one of the Old Ones, not a part of the Circle of the Light as they are ...' He grinned at Will. 'Not a dewin, a wizard, like that one there, with all his tricks.'

Will shook his round head with only half a smile. 'We need more than tricks, this last time. There is something we have to find, all of us, and I don't even know what it is. All we have is the last line of an old verse, that you three heard, once upon a time, when first we deciphered it. It was in Welsh, which I can't possibly remember, but in English it meant. The mountains are singing, and the Lady comes.'

'Yr mynyddoedd yn canu,' Bran said, 'ac y mae'r arglwyddoes yn dod.'

'Wow,' Barney said.

"The Lady?' Jane said. 'Who is the Lady?'

'The Lady is ... the Lady. One of the great figures of the light.' Unconsciously Will's voice seemed to deepen, taking on an eerie resonance, and Jane felt a prickling along her spine. 'She is the greatest of all, the one essential. But when a little while ago we called the Circle together, all the Old Ones of the earth out of all time, for the beginning of the end of this long battle, the Lady did not come. Something is wrong. Something holds her. And without her we can go no further. So the first thing that I - all of us - must do now is find her. With only four words to help us, that do not mean very much to me. The mountains are singing.'

He stopped abruptly, and looked around at them all.

'We need Great-Uncle Merry,' Barney said gloomily.

'Well, we haven't got him. Yet.' Jane sat down on the nearest rock, playing with a stem of the heather that grew round it in springy mounds of purple and green. Beside her, poking through a clump of dead brown gorse, grew a cluster of the little nodding harebells of the Welsh uplands: delicate pale-blue caps quivering in the slightest breeze. Jane touched one of them gently with her little finger. 'Isn't there any Welsh place name that helps?' she said. 'Nothing that means the Singing Mountain, or anything like that?'

Bran was pacing to and fro, hands in pockets, the dark glasses back again over bis pale eyes. 'No, no,' he said impatiently. 'I have thought and thought, and there is nothing at all like that. Nothing.'

'Well,' said Simon, 'how about any very old places - I mean old old, like Stonehenge? Ruins, or something?'

'I have thought of that too and still there is nothing,' Bran said. 'Like, there is a stone in St Cadfan's Church in Tywyn that has on it the oldest piece of Welsh ever written down - but all that tells is where St Cadfan is buried. Or there is Castell y Bere, a ruined castle, very romantic, right near Cader. But that wasn't built till the thirteenth century, when Prince Llewellyn wanted to make himself a headquarters to rule all of Wales that the English hadn't grabbed.'

'No chip?' Barney said mischievously.

The dark glasses glared at him; then Bran grinned. 'History I am telling you, boy, not comment. Old Llewellyn had the chip... and a fine one too, like Owain Glyndwr later...' The grin faded. 'But none of that takes us anywhere either.'

'Isn't there anything to do with King Arthur?' Barney said.

And he and Jane and even Simon could feel the sudden weight of silence around them like a blanket. Neither Will nor Bran moved; they simply stood looking at Barney. And the emptiness of the mountain, up there on top of the world, was all at once so oppressive that every smallest sound seemed to take on immense significance. The rustle of heather as Barney shifted his feet; the deep distant call of a sheep; the persistent tuneless chirruping of some small unseen bird. Jane and Simon and Barney stood very still; surprised, uncertain.

Will said at last, lightly, 'Why?'

'Barney has a fixation about King Arthur, that's all,' Simon said.

For an instant Will paused still; then he smiled, and the strange oppressiveness fell away as if it had never been there. 'Well,' he said, 'there's the biggest mountain of all, next to Snowdon - Cader Idris. Over there. It means in English "the seat of Arthur."'

'Any good?' said Barney hopefully.

'No,' Will said, glancing at Bran. He offered no explanation for the total finality in his voice. Jane found herself resenting the feeling of exclusion that was growing in her.

Bran said slowly, 'Or there's one other. I hadn't thought about it. Carn March Arthur.'

'What's that mean?'

'It means, the hoof of Arthur's horse. It is not much to look at - just a mark on a stone, up behind Aberdyfi, on the mountain above Cwm Maethlon. Arthur is supposed to have pulled an afanc, a monster, out of a lake up there, and this is the footprint his horse made when he was leaping away.' Bran wrinkled his nose. 'Of course it is all rubbish, so I never gave it a thought. But - the name is there.'

They looked at Will. He spread his hands. 'We have to start somewhere. Why not?'

Barney said hopefully, Today?'

Will shook his head. Tomorrow. It's a long way home from here, for us.'

'Carn March Arthur will be a longish walk,' Bran said. The quickest way from this side is up past the vicarage on a path over the mountain. Not so nice in summer, because of visitors' cars. Still. If you can get to the Square in the morning, perhaps we can too. Depends if we get a lift again, eh, Will?'

Will looked at his watch. Twenty minutes before we meet him. Let's go and ask.'

Jane never could remember, afterwards, the precise manner of the asking, though over and over again she tried. As they slithered and leapt over the grass and heather of the mountain ridge, there was little time for talking, and she felt obscurely that however much breath Will had he would not have explained much more about John Rowlands.

'He's shepherd on my uncle's farm. Among other things. He's ... special. And this week he goes to a big annual market in Machynlleth, up the Dyfi valley. You must have come through it, on the way down.'

'Slate roofs and grey rock,' Jane said. 'Grey, everything grey.'

'That's the one. For the three days of the market now John is driving there every day, through Tywyn and Aberdyfi. That's how we got here today. He dropped us off this morning and he's picking us up now. So perhaps we can persuade him to do the same tomorrow.'

Will slowed on a gentler, grassy slope as they came to a stile, and stood diffidently aside to let Jane climb over first.

'D'you think he will?' she said. 'What's he like?'

'You'll see,' said Will.

But all that Jane saw, when they trotted breathless down the last side road and out on to the main road by the village station, was a waiting Land-Rover with a frowning face in the window. It was a brown, lean face, much lined; dark-eyed, given now a mask of severity by the joined brows and straight unsmiling mouth.

Bran said something penitent-sounding, in Welsh. 'It is not good enough,' John Rowlands said. 'Ten minutes we have been sitting here. I told you five o'clock, and Will has a watch.'

'I'm sorry,' Will said. 'It was my fault. We met some old friends of mine on the mountain. Visiting from London. This is Jane Drew, and Simon, and Barnabas.'

'How d'you do?' John Rowlands said gruffly. The dark eyes flickered over them.

Jane said, before her brothers could speak, 'How d'you do, Mr Rowlands, I'm sorry they're late. We slowed them down, you see, not being so good at running down mountains,' She gave him a small hopeful smile.

John Rowlands looked at her more carefully. 'Hmm,' he said.

Bran cleared his throat. 'It is not the best time to ask, but we wondered if you would bring us in with you again tomorrow. If Mr Evans would let us go.'

'I am not at all sure about that,' John Rowlands said.

'Oh come along now, John.' Unexpectedly a soft, musical voice came from inside the car. 'Of course David Evans will let them go. They have worked hard these last few days - and there is nothing much doing on the farm, except waiting for what comes from market.'

'Hmm,' John Rowlands said again. 'Where will you be going?'

'Up over Cwm Maethlon,' Bran said. 'To show these three Panorama Walk, and all that.'

'Go on, John,' said the soft voice coaxingly.

'Pick up afterwards on time, is it? The lines on the strong dark face were relaxing gradually, as if it had been an effort for them to make a frown in the first place.

'Honest,' Will said. 'Truly.'

'I shall go without you if you're not here. Then you would have to make your own way back.'

'All right.'

'Very well then. I will drop you here at nine, and pick you up at four. If your uncle agrees.'

Will stood on tiptoe to see past him into the car. 'Thank you, Mrs, Rowlands!'

Amusement creased John Rowlands' eyes, and his wife leaned past him, laughing at them. Jane liked her instantly; it was a face like the voice, gentle and warm and beautiful all at once, with a glow of kindliness.

'Enjoying your stay?' Mrs Rowlands said.

'Very much, thank you.'

'Happy Valley and the Bearded Lake tomorrow, then, is it?'

Jane looked at Will. There was barely a fraction of a second's hesitation, and then he said heartily, 'Yes, that's right. Real tourist stuff. But I've never seen them either.'

'Lovely up there,' Mrs Rowlands said warmly. 'John had better drop you in the Square, you can all meet by the chapel.' She smiled at Jane. 'It's a long walk, you know. Take your lunch. And good strong shoes, and jackets in case of rain.'

'Oh, it won't rain,' Simon said confidently, looking up at the hazy blue sky.

'You're in Snowdonia now, boy,' Bran said. 'Mean annual rainfall a hundred and fifty inches, high up. Only place that didn't die of the drought, back in nineteen seventy-six. Bring a raincoat. See you tomorrow.'

He and Will climbed into the back of the car, and the Land-Rover roared away.

'A hundred and fifty inches?' Simon said. That's impossible.'

Barney hopped happily round in a circle, kicking a stone. Things are happening!' he said. Then he paused. 'I wonder if Will should have said where we were going?'

That's all right,' Jane said. 'He said John Rowlands was special.'

'Sounds a touristy kind of place anyway,' Simon said. 'I don't suppose it'll be any help at all.'

Part Two: The Singing Mountains

The Bearded Lake

There was no rain at first, though clouds swirled over the blue sky like billowing smoke. Silent for want of breath, they toiled up the long winding lane that led from the village of Aberdyfi into the hills. The road rose very steeply, climbing out of the broad valley of the Dyfi estuary, so that whenever they paused to look back they could see, spread beneath them, a widening sweep of the coast and hills and the broad sea, with the silver ribbon of the Dyfi River snaking through gleaming acres of brown-gold sand left by the falling tide. Then another bend in the lane cut away all this southern view, and they were left climbing towards the mountains of the north, not yet visible.

High grassy banks enclosed them in the lane, banks as high as their heads, starred with yellow ragwort and hawk-weed, white flat heads of yarrow, and a few late foxgloves. Higher yet above the banks, hedges of hazel and bramble and hawthorn reached to the sky, heavy with half-ripe berries and nuts, and fragrant with invading honeysuckle.

'Keep in,' Will called from the rear. 'Car!'

They pressed themselves against the grass wall of the lane, dodging the prickly embrace of bramble shoots, while a bright red mini whipped past in a tenor snarl of low gear.

'Visitors!' Bran said.

"That's the sixth.'

'We're visitors too,' Jane said.

'Ah, but such a superior brand,' said Barney solemnly.

'At least you are walking on your legs,' Bran said. He resettled the peaked Swedish-type cap he wore over his white hair, and gave it a resigned tug. 'All these cars, they are like flies on a sunny day, this time of year. And because of them, up in the wild places you find not just the sheep and the wind and the emptiness now, but little wooden chalets for people from Birmingham.'

*No way out of it, is there?' Simon said. 'I mean there don't seem to be many ways left of making a living, round here, except tourism.'

'Farming, too,' said Will.

'Not for many.'

'True enough,' Bran said. 'The ones who go away to college after leaving school, they never come back. Nothing for them here.'

Jane said curiously, 'Will you go away?'

'Duw,' Bran said. 'Have a heart. That's years away, anything could happen. Power stations in the estuary. Holiday camps on Snowdon.'

'Watch out!' Simon said suddenly. 'Another one!'

This time the car was pale blue, chugging and coughing past them like a small tank. Two small children could be seen fighting in the back seat. It disappeared round the next bend.

'Cars, cars,' said Will. 'D'you know there's even something on the Machynlleth road called a chaltel? A chaltel! Presumably a cross between a motel and -' He broke off, staring at the road ahead.

'Look at that! Golly!' Barney grabbed Jane's arm, pointing. 'Whatever are they?'

Paused halfway across the lane a few yards ahead of them were two strange sinuous animals, as big as cats but slender-bodied. Their fur was reddish-ginger, like the coat of a red fox; they had cat-like tails, held just above the ground. Their heads were turned, bright-eyed. They stared at the children, Then first one and then the other, deliberately, without haste, turned back and made off in a slinking, undulating motion across the road, apparently disappearing into the bank.

'Stoats!' Simon said.

Barney looked doubtful. 'Weren't they too big?'

'Much too big,' said Bran. 'And these had white only on the muzzle. A stoat has a white belly and chest.'

'What were they, then?'

'Yr ffwlbartau. Polecats. But I've never seen one bright red before.' Bran went forward and peered cautiously at the bank, raising a warning hand as Simon joined him. 'Careful. They are not nice creatures ... There's a rabbit hole. They must have taken it over.'

'Funny the cars don't seem to bother them,' Barney said. 'Or people, for that matter.'

'They are not nice,' Bran said again, looking thoughtfully at the hole. 'Vicious. Not afraid. They even kill for fun.'

'Like the mink,' Will said. His voice was husky. Impatiently, he cleared his throat. Jane noticed with surprise that he seemed to have turned very pale; sweat glistened on his forehead, and one of his hands was tight-clenched.

'Mink?' Bran said. 'Don't have those in Wales.'

'They look like those. Only black. Or brown, I think. They ... enjoy killing, too.' Will's voice still seemed strained. Jane watched him out of the corner of her eye, trying not to appear curious.

'There's a farm just round the comer, that might be why they're about the place in daytime.' Bran seemed to have lost interest in the polecats; he strode off up the lane. 'Come on - it's a long way yet.'

Jane paused to pull up a sock and let the boys pass her; then followed, alone and thoughtful. Above the farm the lane widened a little; the grass banks dropped to a mere foot or so, topped sometimes by wire fencing. The way led more gently upward now, through rock-studded grassland where Welsh Black cattle grazed here and there, or stood contemplatively in the middle of the road. Jane warily skirted a large bullock, and tried to collect the elusive feelings that were running like quicksilver in and out of her mind. What was happening? Why was Will anxious, and why did Bran on the contrary seem to feel nothing, and anyway who was this Bran? She felt a vague formless resentment of the way his presence somehow complicated their relationship with Will: it's not just us any more, she thought, the way it was last time ... And over everything she was beginning to feel a great unease about whatever lay ahead, as if some sense at the back of her mind were trying to tell her something she did not consciously know.

Then walking blindly on she bumped into Barney, and found all the others standing still in sudden silence, and looked up and saw why.

They were on the rim of a magnificent valley. At their feet the hillside dropped away in a sweep of waving green bracken, where a few sheep precariously grazed on scattered patches of grass. Far, far below, among the green and golden fields of the valley floor, a road ran like a wavering thread, past a toy church and a tiny farm. And across the valley, beyond its further side patched blue with cloud-shadows and dark with close-planted fir, there rolled in line after line the massing ancient hills of Wales.

'Oh!' Jane said softly.

'Cwm Maethlon,' Bran said.

'Happy Valley,' said Will.

'Now you see why they call this path Panorama Walk,' Bran said. 'This is what brings the cars. And walkers too, fair play.'

'Wake up, Jane,' Will said lightly.

Jane was standing quite still, staring out over the valley, her eyes wide. She turned her head slowly and looked at Will, but did not smile. 'It's ... it's ... I can't explain. Beautiful. Lovely. But - frightening, somehow.'

'Vertigo,' Simon said confidently. 'You'll feel better in a minute. Don't look over the edge.'

'Come on,' Will said, expressionless, suddenly reminding her of Merriman. He turned and continued up the path along the edge of Happy Valley. Simon followed.

'Vertigo, my foot,' Jane said.

Bran said curtly, 'Frightening, my foot, too. If you start listening to silly feelings, up here, you will never stop. Will has enough to worry about without that.'

Astonished, Jane stared, but he had turned and was plodding up the road again with Simon and Will.

She looked crossly after him. 'Who does he think he is? My feelings are in my head, not his.'

Barney stuck his fingers into the knapsack straps over his shoulders. 'Now perhaps you'll understand what I meant yesterday.'

Jane raised her eyebrows.

'Up on the hill over the sea,' Barney said. "That was sort of frightening too. When I was sure I'd been there before, and you both said rubbish. Only, I've been thinking - it's really more like living inside something that happened before. Without its really having happened at all.'

They went on in silence after the others.

The rain began soon afterwards: a gentle persistent rain, from the low grey clouds that had been growing steadily larger and had begun to merge now into a covering over all the broad sky. They pulled anoraks and raincoats from the rucksacks and went doggedly on along the high moorland road, between open grassy slopes with no shelter anywhere.

One by one, cars came back down the road past them. Round one last bend, the paved road ended at an iron gate, and a footworn earthen track went on instead, past a lone white farmhouse and away over the mountain. Five cars were parked tipsily on the grass before the gate; back down the mountain came a straggle of damp holiday-makers with drooping headscarves and complaining children.

'There's one thing to be said for rain,' Barney said. 'It does wash the people away.'

Simon glanced back. 'Gloomy-looking lot, aren't they?'

"Those two kids from the blue car are still thumping one another. I suppose anyone'd look gloomy with brats like that.'

'You aren't long out of the brat stage yourself, chummy.'

Barney opened and shut his mouth, hunting the right insult; but then glanced at Jane instead. She stood silent, unsmiling, gazing at nothing.

'You aren't still feeling odd, Jane?' Simon peered at her.

'Look at them,' Jane said in a strange small, tight voice. She pointed ahead to Will and Bran, trudging one after the other up the track through the grass: two matching figures in oil-skins rather too big for them, distinguishable only by Bran's cap and the sou'wester pulled low over Will's head. 'Look at them!' Jane said again, miserably. 'It's all mad! Who are they, where are they going, why are we doing what they want to do? How do we know what's going to happen?'

'We don't,' Barney said. 'But then we never have, have we?'

'We ought not to be here,' Jane said. Impatiently she tugged the hood of her anorak closer over her head. 'It's all too ... vague. And it doesn't feel right. And' - the last words burst out defiantly - 'I'm scared.'

Barney blinked at her, out of the folds of an enveloping plastic mackintosh. 'But Jane, it's all right, it must be. Any- thing to do with Great-Uncle Merry -'

'But Gumerry isn't here.'

'No, he's not,' Simon said. 'But Will's here, and that's just about the same.'

Surprise sang through Jane's head. She stared at him. 'But you never liked Will, not really. I mean I know you never said anything, but there was always ...' She stopped. Firm ground seemed to have become suddenly shaky; Simon was now so much bigger than she, as well as being almost a year older, that somehow she had imperceptibly begun to take him more seriously than before, paying attention to his opinions and prejudices even when she disagreed with them herself. It was unnerving to find one of those opinions turning itself upside down.

'Look,' Simon said. 'I don't pretend to understand anything that's ever happened to us with Great-Uncle Merry and Will. But there's not much point in trying, is there? I mean basically it's very simple, it's a matter of - well, there's a good side and a bad, and those two are absolutely without question the good side.'

'Well, of course,' Jane said pettishly.

'Well then. Where's the problem?'

'It's not a problem. It's that Bran. It's just - oh dear, you wouldn't understand.' Jane poked dolefully at a tuft of grass.

"They're waiting for us,' Barney said.

High up on the path beyond the farmhouse, beside another gate, the two small dark figures stood turned, looking back.

'Come on, Jane,' said Simon. He patted her tentatively on the back.

Barney said, in a sudden rush of discovery, 'You know, if you're really scared - it isn't like you - you ought to think whether you're being' - he flapped one hand vaguely - 'being got at.'

'Got at?' said Jane.

'The Dark,' Barney said. 'You remember - the way it makes something wriggle into your mind and say I don't want you, go away .., Makes you feel something terrible is going to happen.'

'Yes,' Jane said. 'Oh yes. I do remember.'

Barney hopped in front of her like some small fierce animal. 'Well, if you fight it, it can't get hold. Push it off, run away from it - ' He grabbed her sleeve. 'Come on. Race you up the hill!'

Jane tried to smile. 'All right!'

They rushed up the path to the waiting figures on the hill, raindrops scattering from their coats as they ran. Simon followed, more slowly. He had been listening with only half his attention. The rest had been caught, while Barney spoke, by two sinuous red animals slinking into the bracken from a thicket of gorse; and then out of the gorse, if he had not been imagining it, two bright pairs of eyes, watching them. But it seemed a bad moment to mention that to Jane.

Bran said, as they watched Barney and Jane running towards them up the path. 'What was that all about, d'you think?'

'They could just have been discussing whether it was time for lunch,' Will said.

Bran pulled his glasses down his nose, and the tawny eyes regarded Will steadily for a moment, between the dark lenses and cap. 'Old One,' Bran said softly. 'You know better than that.' Then he pushed his glasses back and grinned. 'Anyway, it's too early.'

But Will looked soberly down at the approaching figures. 'The Light needs those three. It always has, in this whole long quest. So the Dark must be watching them very hard, now. We must stay close to them. Bran - especially Barney, perhaps.'

Barney came panting up to them, his hood flapping on his shoulders and his yellow hair damp-dark with rain. 'When's lunch?' he said.

Bran laughed. 'Carn March Arthur is just over the next slope.'

'What does it look like?' Without waiting for an answer Barney was gone, trotting up the path, mackintosh flapping.

Bran turned to go after him. But Jane was in his way. She stood there, breathing unevenly, looking coolly at them both in a way Will did not recognise. 'It won't do, you know,' she said. 'We're all marching along as if everything was ordinary but we just can't go on pretending to one another.'

Will looked at her, patience battling urgency in his mind; his head dropped for a moment on to his chest and he let out a short hiss of breath. 'All right then. What do you want us to say?'

'Just something about what we might find, up there,' Jane said, quavering, exasperated. 'About what we're doing here.'

Bran was on the words like a terrier at a bone, before Will could open his mouth. 'Doing? Nothing, girl - you will probably have nothing to do but look at a valley and a lake and say, oh, how pretty. What's the fuss? If you don't like the rain, wrap yourself up and go home. Go on!'

'Bran!' Will said sharply.

Jane stood very still, eyes wide.

Bran said angrily, 'The hell with it! If you have seen the raising of fear, and the killing of love, and the Dark creeping in over all things, you do not ask stupid questions. You do what you are intended to do, and no nonsense. And so that is what we should all be doing now, going on to where we might perhaps find out the next right move.'

'And no nonsense!' said Jane tightly.

Simon came up behind her, silent, listening, but she paid no attention.

'Right!' Bran snapped.

Watching Jane, Will felt suddenly that he was seeing someone he had never met before. Her face was drawn into furious lines of emotion that seemed to belong to someone else.

'You!' Jane said to Bran, pushing her hands fiercely into her pockets. 'You, you think you're so special, don't you, with the white hair and the difference, and the eyes behind those silly glasses. Super-different. You can tell us what we ought to do, you think you're even more special than Will. But who are you, anyway? We never met you at all until yesterday, in the middle of nowhere on a mountain, and why should we get into danger just because you - ' Her voice quivered and dwindled, and she swung away from them, up the hill, towards Barney's small eager vanishing form,

Simon began to go after her and then paused, irresolute. 'Special, is it?' Bran said softly as if to himself. 'Special. That's nice. After all the years of people sneering and muttering about the boy with no colour in his creepy skin. That's lovely. Special. And what is this about the eyes?'

'Yes,' Will said shortly. 'Special. You know it.'

Bran hesitated; he pulled off his glasses and stuffed them in his pocket. 'That is separate. She knows nothing of that. And that is not at all what she meant.'

'No,' Will said. 'But you and I may not forget it for a moment. And you may not... let go, like that.'

'I know,' Bran said. 'I'm sorry.' He looked deliberately at Simon as he spoke, including him in the apology.

Simon said awkwardly, 'I don't know what all this is about, but you shouldn't be bothered by Jane flying off the handle. It doesn't mean anything.'

'Doesn't seem like her,' Will said.

'Well ... now and then she does it, these days. A sort of flare-up ... I think,' Simon said confidingly, 'she's going through a stage.'

'Maybe,' Will said. He was looking at Bran. 'Or maybe it is Jane we should be specially watching?'

'Come on,' Bran said. He brushed raindrops from the brim of his cap. 'Carn March Arthur.'

They climbed on, to the line where the green grassy slope met a grey sky. On the downward sweep of the path on the other side, Jane and Barney were crouched beside a small out- cropping of rock, identical with every other rocky scar on the hill but singled out by a neat slate marker like a label. Will came slowly down the path, his senses open and alert as the ears of a hunting dog, but he felt nothing. Glancing across, he saw the same blankness on Bran's face.

"There's a sort of carved-out circle here that's supposed to be where the hoof of Arthur's horse trod - look, it's marked.' Barney measured the hollow in the rock with his hand. 'And another over there.' He sniffed, unimpressed. 'Pretty small horse.'

They are hoof-shaped, though,' Jane said. Her head was down, her voice slightly husky. 'I wonder what really made them?'

'Erosion,' Simon said. 'Water swirling round.'

'With dirt rubbing,' Bran said.

Jane said hesitantly, 'And frost, cracking the rock.'

'Or the hoof of a magic horse, coming down hard,' Barney said. He looked up at Will. 'Only it wasn't, was it?'

'No,' Will said, smiling. 'Hardly. If Arthur had ridden over every hollow called Arthur's Hoofprint, or sat on every rock called Arthur's Seat, or drunk from every spring called Arthur's Well, he'd have spent his whole life travelling round Britain without a stop.'

'And so would the knights,' Barney said cheerfully, 'To sit round every hill called King Arthur's Round Table.'

'Yes,' Will said. He picked up a small white quartz pebble and rolled it round and round his palm, 'Those too. Some of the names mean ... other things.'

Barney jumped up. 'Where's the lake, the one he's supposed to have taken the monster from?'

'Llyn Barfog,' Bran said. "The Bearded Lake. Over here.'

He led them on, down the path into a hollow between hill-tops, curving round a slope; the rain, which had been gentle, began here to whip at their faces in uneven gusts, as the high wind eddied round the gullied land. The cloud was low over their heads.

'Such a funny name, the Bearded Lake,' Jane said. The words were aimed at Bran, though she walked without looking at him; Will felt a pang of compassion for her groping unspoken apology. 'Bearded. Not exactly romantic.'

'I'll show you why in a minute,' Bran said without rancour. 'Watch where you tread, now, there's boggy patches.' He strode ahead of them all, dodging tussocks of reedy grass that marked wet ground. And then Will looked up, and suddenly there ahead of him through the driving rain he could see the far side of the Happy Valley again, misted and grey. But this time, on this side, on their own steep edge over-hanging the valley, there lay a lake.

It was a strange small reed-edged lake, little larger than a pond; its dark surface seemed curiously patched and patterned. Then Will saw that its open surface was rippled by the wind, but that only a small part of it was open, a triangle at the closest end of the lake. All the rest of its surface, from the end at the edge of the valley to a trailing V-shape in the centre, was covered with the leaves and stems and creamy white bloom of waterlilies. And from a singing in his ears like the sudden rise of waves on a loud sea, he knew too that somewhere up here, after all, was the place to which they were intended to come. Something waited for them here, somewhere up on this rolling rock-strewn mountaintop, between the Happy Valley and the estuary of the Dyfi River.

Through a mist that was not the rain in the air but a blurring inside his mind, he saw with a vague distant surprise that this feeling did not seem to have come to Bran. The white-haired boy stood on the path with Simon and Jane, one hand raised over his eyes against the wind and rain, the other pointing.

'The Bearded Lake - see, it's the weed on the water that gives it the name. Some years when there is not much rain it gets much smaller, and the weed is left all around it like a beard. John Rowlands says perhaps the name is not from that, perhaps long ago there was much more water in the lake and it would spill out over the edge of the mountain and down into the valley in a waterfall. That could be, too. But a long time ago indeed, the way it looks now.'

The little lake lay dark and silent under the shifting grey sky. They could hear the wind whining over the hills, and rustling through their clothes. Down in the valley, far away, a curlew gave its sad ghostly call. Then closer by, somewhere, they heard a muffled shout.

Barney turned his head. 'What's that?'

Bran looked across the lake at the slope that seemed to be the highest part of the mountain on which they stood. He sighed. 'Visitors. Shouting for the echo. Come and see.'

Will lagged behind as they balanced their way one after the other along the muddy, rock-strewn path edging the lake.

He gazed out once more across the water, and its white-starred green carpet of weed, to the far shore where the land fell abruptly away into the valley. The rain blew back into his eyes, the mist whirled over the hills. But nothing came into his consciousness; nothing spoke to him. There was only the strong sense pulsing through his mind that they were in the presence of the High Magic, in some form he did not understand.

So then Will followed the others, along the path and round the next high slope. He found them standing on a bluff over-looking a flat hollow in the hills perhaps fifty yards square, a space much like the one occupied by the Bearded Lake, but here holding only the bright patches of coarse reedy grass that warned of marsh. A man and woman wearing startling orange anoraks stood lower down the slope, with three children of assorted sizes roaming about them shouting across the flat green hollow. A steep cliff-like rock on the opposite side threw an echo back.

'Hey!... Hey ...'

'Ooooo!... Ooooo ...'

'Baa baa black sheep... black sheep ... sheep ...'

'Hey fat face!... face... face...'

Jane said, 'If you listen carefully it's really a double echo, the second very faint.'

'Fat face!' shouted the most raucous of the children again, delighted with himself.

Barney said in a clear precise voice, 'Funny how people can never think of anything intelligent to shout to make an echo.'

'It's like never knowing what to say to find out if a microphone's working,' Will said. Testing testing, one two three.'

"The English master at school has a very rude rhyme he uses for that,' Simon said.

'You can't shout rude rhymes for an echo,' Barney said coldly. 'Echoes are special. People ought to ... to sing to them.'

'Sing!' said Jane. The small children were still screeching at the mountain; she looked at them with distaste.

'Well, why not? Or do some Shakespeare. Simon was Prospero last term - why not a bit of that?'

'Were you really?' Bran looked at Simon with new interest.

'Only because I was the tallest,' Simon said depreciatingly. 'And had the right kind of voice.'

'Fat face!' shouted all the awful children together.

'Oh really!' said Jane, losing patience. 'What's the matter with their stupid parents?' She swung round irritably, and walked a little way back down the slope. The wind seemed less gusty here, and the rain had calmed to a fine mist. Under- brush scratched at her ankles; the slope was thick with heather and low-growing bilberry bushes, studded here and there with tiny blue-black berries among the leaves.

The others' voices receded as she wandered away. She thrust her hands deep into her pockets and hunched her shoulders as if to shake something from her back. Black dog on my shoulder, she thought wryly: it was the family term for a brief bad mood, generally her own these days. Yet somehow this time, Jane felt, there was more than a mood invading her mind; this was a strangeness she could not define, had never known before. A restlessness, a half-fearful anticipation of something part of her seemed to understand and part not,,. Jane sighed. It was like being two people at once: living with someone without having the least idea what the other would do or feel next.

A flash of orange caught her eye through a gap in the hilly skyline; the noisy family was leaving, the mother dragging one rebellious child crossly by the arm. They disappeared behind the slope, heading for the path. But Jane did not go back to the others; she wandered aimlessly still on her own, through the heather and the wet grass, until suddenly the wind was cold on her face again and she found she was back at the Bearded Lake. From behind, she heard a faint laugh and a call from Barney, and then the same call again: a summons for the echo. She stood looking bleakly out over the dark weed-shrouded water, at the distant valley beyond. The wind sang in her ears. The cloud of the heavy grey sky was so low now that it blew ragged over the hilltop in white tails and tatters of mist, whirling down to the lake, curling, blowing away into the valley. The whole world seemed grey, as if all colour had drained from the summer grass.

In an eddy of the wind that brought a sudden stillness after it, Jane heard Simon's voice faintly behind her, a sudden snatch of sound.'... thou earth, thou! Speak! ...' And very faintly indeed, perhaps only in imagining, she heard the echo:'... speak... speak...'

Then some words came in another voice, clear and strange, and she knew that it was Bran calling in Welsh; and again the echo came faintly back, bringing the words to her again, familiar even while meaningless.

The wind flurried, the mist blew in a ragged shroud over the far side of the lake, hiding the Happy Valley. And on the echo of Bran's call, as if following a cue, a third voice came, singing, singing so high and sweet and unearthly that Jane stood without breathing, caught out of movement, feeling every stilled muscle and yet as totally transported as if she had no body at all. She knew it was Will; she could not remember if she had ever heard him sing before; she could not even think, or do anything but hear. The voice soared up on the wind, from behind the hill, distant but clear, in a strange lovely line of melody, and with it and behind it very faint in a following descant came the echo of the song, a ghostly second voice twining with the first.

It was as if the mountains were singing.

And as Jane gazed unseeing at the clouds blowing low over the lake, someone came.

Somewhere in the shifting greyness, a patch of colour began faintly to glow, red and pink and blue merging into one another too fast for the eye to follow. Glimmering soft and warm on the cold mountain, it held Jane's gaze as hypnotically as a flame; then gradually it began to focus itself, and Jane blinked in disbelief as she realised that a form was taking shape around it. Not definite clear shape, but a suggestion, a hint of what might be seen with the right eyes...

The brightness grew more intense until suddenly it was all contained in a glowing rose-coloured stone set into a ring, and the ring on the finger of a slender figure standing before her, leaning a little as if resting on a stick. There was at first such brightness around the figure that Jane could not look directly at it; instead her eyes flickered down to the ground on which it stood, only to realise with a shock that no ground was there. The figure was floating before her, an isolated fragment of whatever world lay there behind the greyness. It was the delicate form of an old lady, she saw now, wearing a long light-coloured robe; the face was fine-boned, kindly yet arrogant, with clear blue eyes that shone strangely young in the old, old cobweb-lined face.

Jane had forgotten the others, forgotten the mountain and the rain, forgotten everything but the face that watched her and now, gently, smiled. But still the old lady did not speak.

Jane said huskily, 'You are the Lady. Will's Lady.'

The Lady inclined her head, a slow graceful nod. 'And since you can see that much, I may speak to you, Jane Drew. It was intended, from the beginning, that you should carry the last message.*

'Message?' Jane's voice came out in a whisper.

'Some things there are that may be communicated only between like and like,' the sweet soft voice said from the mist. 'It is the pattern of a child's game of dominoes. For you and I are much the same, Jane, Jana, Juno, Jane, in clear ways that separate us from all others concerned in this quest. And you and Will are alike in your youth and your vigour, neither of which I share.'

The voice grew fainter, as if with a great weariness; then rallied, and the light glowed more brightly from the rose-coloured ring on the Lady's hand. She drew herself upright, and her robe shone clear white now, bright as a moon over the grey lake.

'Jane,' she said.

'Madam?' Jane said at once, and without any self-consciousness she bowed her head and dipped one knee almost to kneeling, oblivious of her jeans and anorak, as if she were dropping a deep curtsey of respect, out of another age.

The Lady said clearly, 'You must tell him that they must go to the Lost Land, in the moment when it shall show itself between the land and the sea. And a white bone will prevent them, and a flying may-tree will save them, and only the horn can stop the wheel. And in the glass tower among the seven trees, they will find the crystal sword of the Light.'

Her voice wavered, ending in a gasp, as if clutching for some last strength.

Jane said, struggling to hold the words, struggling to hold her image of the Lady, 'In the glass tower among the seven trees. And - a white bone will prevent them, and a flying may-tree save them. And only the - the horn will stop the wheel.'

'Remember,' the Lady said. Her white form was beginning to fade, and the glow dying in the rose of the ring. The voice grew softer, softer. 'Remember, my daughter. And be brave, Jane. Be brave... brave...'

The sound died, the wind whirled; Jane stared desperately out into the grey mist, searching to see the clear blue eyes in the old, lined face as if only they could fix the words in her memory. But she was alone among the dark hills and the lake with the low clouds blowing, and in her ears only the wind and the last imagined thread of a dying voice. And, now, as if it had never left her consciousness from the first instant, there came instead the clear high echo-twined melody of Will's voice, that had seemed to her like the mountains singing.

Suddenly the singing broke off. Will's voice flung through the air in a hoarse, urgent shout. 'Jane! Jane!' The echo followed it'... Jane!... Jane!...' like a whispered warning. In quick instinct Jane swung round towards the voice, but saw only the green slope of the hill.

Then she looked back at the lake, and found that in the brief moment of her turning, such horror had arisen before her that panic engulfed her like ice-cold water. She tried to scream, and brought out only a strangled croak.

Out of the dark water an immense neck rose, swaying before her, dripping, tipped by a small pointed head, open-mouthed, black-toothed. Two horn-like antennae moved sluggishly to and fro on the head, like the horns of a snail; a fringe like a mane began between them and ran down the whole length of the neck, bent to one side by the water that hung from it, dripping slimily into the lake. The neck rose higher and higher, huge, endless. Gazing in motionless terror Jane saw that it was everywhere a dark green, shot with a strange dull iridescence, except on the underside that faced her, a dead silvery-white like the belly of a fish. High over her head the creature towered and swayed, menacing; the air was filled with a stench of weed and marsh-gas and decaying things.

Jane's arms and legs would not move. She stood, staring. The great serpent lunged to and fro towards her, nearer, nearer, blindly searching. Its mouth hung open. Slime dripped from the black jaws. It swung close to her, reeking, dreadful, and seemed to sense her; the head drew back to strike.

Jane screamed, and closed her eyes.

Part Two: The Singing Mountains

Afanc

In the hollow beside the echo rock, all other sound had seemed to die away when Will began to sing. The loud wind dropped, and Simon, Bran and Barney stood motionless, astonished, listening. The music fell through the air like sun-light; a strange, haunting melody, like nothing they had ever heard before. Will sang, standing there unselfconscious and relaxed, with his hands in his pockets, his high clear choir-boy's voice singing words of a tongue none of them could recognise. They knew that this was the music of the Old Ones, shot through with an enchantment that was more than melody. The clear voice soared through the mountains, entwining with its echoes, and listening they stood rapt, caught up out of time.

But then suddenly the song broke off in the middle of a note, and Will reeled back as if he had been struck in the face. They saw his face twisted by horror, and he threw back his head and yelled, in dreadful unboyish warning, 'Jane! Jane!'

The echo threw the words back at them: 'Jane... Jane!'

But before the first echo came. Bran had begun to move. He came rushing past Simon and Barney, as if flung forward by the same urgent impulse that had hold of Will. His cap tumbled off, his white hair blew like a flag as he went leaping over the grass and the rocks, away towards the Bearded Lake, away on a pursuit of something none of them could see.

The monstrous head swung past Jane's face, once, twice, three times; not quite close enough to touch, but each time fanning past her a wave of abominable decay. Jane opened slits of eyes, peering through the shaking hands she held over her face, convinced she was still alive only by feeling a powerful urge to be sick. It was impossible that anything so hideous could exist; yet the creature was there. Her mind clutched for support, wavering beneath an awful awareness of evil. It was wrong, this thing from the lake: malevolent, vicious, full of the festering resentment it had nursed through the centuries of some terrible nightmare sleep. She could feel its will groping for hers, just as the blind head groped through the air before her. And then breaking into her head like a howl, yet not with any sound to be heard with the ears, the voice came.

'Tell!'

Jane shut her eyes tight.

'Tell me!' The command beat at her mind. 'I am the afanc! Tell me the instruction that comes only through you! Tell!'

'No!' Desperately Jane tried to shut off her mind and her memory.

'Tell! Tell!'

She tried to find images to hold as a defence against the hammer-blow demands; she thought of Will's pleasant round face, with the straight brown hair falling sideways; she thought of Merriman's fierce eyes beneath his bristling white brows; of a golden grail and the finding of it. Reaching closer, into the last few days in Wales, she thought of John Rowlands' lean brown face, and the gentle kindly smile of his wife.

But even as she began to find a steadiness, suddenly it shattered, and the high shrieking voice broke again into her mind and beat and beat at her, until she felt she would go mad. She whimpered, staggering, holding both hands to her head.

And all at once, mercifully muffling the high shriek, came another voice, gentle, reassuring: It's all right. Jenny, it's all right, and relief flooded warm through her mind, and after it came only darkness ...

They saw her crumple and fall in a heap on the wet grass, as they came stumbling up from the echo rock. Simon and Barney started forward, but Will seized each of them in an astonishing grip, and even tall Simon was held helpless by the hand clamped like a steel band round his arm. They gasped at the sight of the afanc, thrashing furiously now in the lake with its great neck bending to and fro. And then they saw Bran, upright and bare-headed, standing angry in challenge before it on a tall rock, with his white hair blowing in the wind.

The creature screamed in fury, stirring a foam in the lake, throwing it up to join the gusting ragged cloud and the blowing rain so that all the world seemed one whirling grey mist.

'Go back!' Bran shouted across the lake towards it. 'Go back where you should be!'

From the horned head in the mist a high thin voice came, cold as death; they shuddered at the sound.

'I am the afanc of Llyn Barfog! the high voice cried. 'This place is mine!'

Bran stood unmoving. 'My father cast you from it, away into Lyn Cau. What right had you to return?'

Up on the hillside, Will felt Barney's hand clutch convulsively at his sleeve. The younger boy was looking up at him, very pale. 'His father. Will?'

Will met his gaze, but said nothing.

The water churned, the voice was angry and obstinate. The Dark outlived that lord, the Dark brought me home. The Dark is my master. I must have what the girl will tell!'

'You are a stupid creature,' Bran said, clear and contemptuous.

The afanc roared and screamed and thrashed; its noise was terrifying. But gradually now, they began to realise that it was no more than noise: that in spite of the creature's horrifying bulk, it seemed to have the power only to utter threats. It was a nightmare - but no more than that.

Bran's white hair gleamed like a beacon through the grey mist; his lilting Welsh voice rang out over the lake. 'And your masters are stupid too, to think that the mere force of terror could overcome one of the Six. This girl, she has seen more dreadful sights than you, and stood the test.' His voice hardened into a command, sounding suddenly deeper and more adult; he stood erect, pointing. 'Go, afanc, back to the dark water where you belong! Go back to the Dark, and never come out again! Ewch nol! Ewch y llyn!'

And suddenly there was total silence over the lake, but for the wind whistling and the patter of the rain on their clothes. The huge green neck bowed and coiled in submission, dripping slime and weed; and the horned snail-like head dipped into the water and slowly the creature disappeared. A few large sluggish bubbles broke on the dark surface of the lake, their ripples spreading to be lost in the water-lily leaves. And then there was nothing.

Will let out a yell of exuberant relief, and with Simon and Barney he went slithering and sliding down the grassy slope. Jane was sitting at the bottom of the slope, on the grass edging the reeds that fringed the lake; her face was pale.

Simon crouched beside her. 'Are you all right?'

Jane said, illogically, 'I was watching him.'

'But you didn't hurt yourself? When you fell?'

'Fell?' Jane said.

Will said gently, 'She'll be all right now.'

'Will?' Jane said. She was looking out across the lake, to where Bran still stood motionless on his rock. Her voice shook. 'Will... Who - what - is Bran?'

Simon helped her to her feet, and the four of them stood looking at Bran. The white-haired boy turned slowly away from the lake, pulling his coat closer at the collar, shaking his head dog-fashion to get rid of the rain.

'He is the Pendragon,' Will said simply. 'The son of Arthur. Heir to the same responsibility, in a different age ... When he was born, his mother Guinevere brought him forward in Time, with Merriman's help, because once before she had deceived her lord and she was afraid Arthur would not now believe that Bran was truly his son. And she left him here, so that he grew up in our time in Wales, with a new father who adopted him. So he belongs to this age just as much as we do, yet at the same time he does not ... And sometimes I think he is exactly aware of all this all the time, and other times I think one side of his life is for him no more than a dream ,..' His voice quickened, became more matter- of-fact. 'I can't tell you any more now. Come on.'

They went, each one hesitant, to meet Bran, through the rain that was growing heavier again now. He grinned cheerfully at them, totally without strain, and wrinkled his nose. 'Daro! he said. 'What a nasty!'

'Thank you, Bran,' Jane said.

'0'r gore,' said Bran. 'You're welcome.'

'Will it really never come back ever?' Barney said, looking fascinated at the lake.

'Never,' Bran said.

Simon took a deep breath and let it out again. 'I shan't laugh at stories of the Loch Ness Monster from now on.'

'But this one was a creature of the Dark,' Will said. 'Made out of the stuff of nightmare, in order to break Jane. Because they wanted something that she had.' He looked at her. 'What happened?'

'It was when you sang,' Jane said. 'And the echo sang with you. It sounded... it sounded...'

'The mountains are singing,' Bran said slowly. 'And the Lady comes.'

Jane said, 'And she did come.'

There was silence.

Will said nothing. He stood staring at Jane with a strange medley of emotions crossing his face: blank astonishment, chased by envy, followed by the dawning of an understanding that relaxed into his usual amiable look. He said softly, 'I didn't know.'

"This... Lady -' Simon said. He stopped.

'Well?' said Jane.

'Well... where did she come from? Where is she now?'

'I don't know. Either of those things. She just... appeared. And she said - ' Jane paused, a warmth running through her as she remembered those things the Lady had said for her, Jane, alone. Then she put them aside. 'She said, tell him, that they must go to the Lost Land, when it shows itself between the shore and the sea. She said, a white bone will prevent them, and a - a flying may-tree will save them. And - ' She shut her eyes, trying desperately to remember the right words. 'And only the horn will stop the wheel, she said. And they will find the crystal sword of the Light in the glass tower among the seven trees.'

She let out a quick breath, and opened her eyes. 'That's not perfect, but it's what she said. And then she ... went away. She seemed awfully tired, she just sort of faded out.'

'She is very tired indeed,' Will said soberly. He touched Jane's shoulder briefly. 'You did marvellously. The moment the Dark sensed she had told you, they must have come rushing, sending the afanc to shock you into giving up what she had said. That was their only possible way - they couldn't have heard it for themselves. There is a protection sometimes round the Six, through which the Dark cannot see or hear.'

'But there's only five of us,' Barney said.

Bran chuckled. 'That one is so sharp he will cut himself.'

Barney said hastily, 'I'm sorry - I know. Of course things work just the same whether it's five or six. But where is Great-Uncle Merry?' For a moment his voice dropped unwittingly into the unselfconscious plaint of a small child.

'I don't know,' Will said. 'He'll come, Barney. When he can.'

Simon suddenly gave a gigantic sneeze, ducking his head. Rainwater ran off the edge of his hood in a thin stream. No mist blew over the lake now, and the clouds seemed higher, broken, racing across the sky in a wind they hardly felt, there below. But the rain fell steadily.

'Where is the Lost Land?' said Barney.

'We shall find it,' Will said. 'When the time comes. No question. Come on, let's go down before we all get pneumonia.'

They went single file back over the path edging the lake, hopping over puddles, skirting patches of mud; then trooped through the long wet grass towards the little grey outcrop of Cam March Arthur, and the path back over the ridge. Jane turned for one last look at the lake, but it was hidden by the slope.

'Will,' she said. Tell me something. Just about a second before I saw that - that thing. I heard you shout Jane! Like a warning.'

Barney said promptly, 'Yes, he did. He looked awful - as if he could already see it.' He realised what he had said, and looked thoughtfully at Will.

'Could you?' Jane said.

Will brushed his hand over the top of the slate marking Cam March Arthur, which Bran, ahead of them, had passed without a glance. He walked on in silence. Then he said, 'When the Dark comes, anywhere, we can feel it. It's like, I dunno, like an animal smelling man. So I knew - and I knew you were in danger, so I had to yell.' He glanced back at Jane over his shoulder with a shy half-grin. 'Halloo your name to the reverberate hills,' he said.

'Huh?' said Simon, beside her.

'You aren't the only one who knows a few bits of Shakespeare,' Will said.

'What's that one?'

'Oh - just some speech we had to learn last term.'

'The reverberate hills,' said Jane. She looked back at the hill that rose behind them now, masking the echo rock. Then she frowned. 'Will - if you could sense the Dark, why couldn't you sense the Light?'

'The Lady?' Will shook his head. 'I don't know. That was her doing. For her own reasons. I think - I think perhaps there will be a test for each of us, before all this is done. Each time different and each time unexpected. And maybe the Bearded Lake was yours, Jane, yours on your own.'

'I hope mine isn't like that,' Barney said cheerfully. He pointed. 'Look - the clouds are breaking up.'

Hints of blue were emerging in the sky to the west, among the racing ragged clouds; the rain had dwindled to a fine sprinkle, and was dying altogether now. They went on down the hill, past the small white farm built sturdy as a fort against winter gales; through other gates, over the clanking metal pipes of a cattle grid set to keep the wandering Welsh Black bullocks within bounds. The Happy Valley unfolded far below them again, the last low shreds of mist blowing away past the mountains of its further side. Sunshine flickered now and then through the clouds, and the air grew warmer; jackets were opened, and raincoats shaken free of water. As if to give final proof that the rain was over, a small car came humming up the hill past them, bringing the first of the next flow of visitors to wander the hillside among the sheep-droppings and rabbit holes; to collect feathers, and the tufts of greyish wool that barbed-wire fences grab from sheep, and small rough pebbles of white quartz. Will found himself trying hard to remember that he had no right whatsoever to resent these people wandering through the bracken and the heather, the gorse and the harebells, dropping their cigarette ends on the short, springy grass.

Seagulls keened in the distance. As the track swung round a hill, suddenly there ahead they saw the sea, and the broad estuary of the Dyfi, with the silver thread of the river wandering through glistening stretches of golden low-tide sand.

They all stopped to stand and gaze. Sunshine shafting out from between the clouds sparkled on the river, glimmered on the sandy bar that lay across its entrance to the sea.

'I'm hungry,' Barney said.

'Now that's a good idea,' said Simon. 'Lunch?'

Bran said, 'Rocks to sit on, though - try up here.'

They clambered up the slope edging the track, to the unfenced land where the cattle grazed. Several large black bullocks lumbered reproachfully out of their way. In a few moments they were over the crest of a small ridge, with the track out of sight behind them and the sea and the estuary lying spread below. They perched on humps of slatey rock and fell upon their sandwiches. The wet grass smelt clean, and somewhere a skylark bubbled its long ecstatic song. High overhead a small hawk hung in the air.

Jane said, looking out over the estuary as she munched, 'What an enormous lot of flat land there is on the other side of the river. Miles of it, miles and miles, before the mountains start again.'

'Cors Fochmno,' Bran said, his strange white hair drying fluffy in the sun. 'Bog, most of it - see the drainage channels, all so straight? Some very interesting plants there are, over in that part, if you are a botanist. Which I am not... And old things have been found there, a golden girdle with spikes on it, once, and a gold necklace, and thirty-two gold coins that are in the National Museum now. And there are stumps of drowned trees out there on the sands, near the dunes. Some on this side of the river too, on the sands between Aberdyfi and Tywyn.'

'Drowned trees?' Simon said,

'Sure,' Bran said. He chuckled. 'From the Drowned Hundred, no doubt.'

Barney said blankly, 'Whatever's that?'

'Haven't you heard that old story yet? About where the Bells of Aberdyfi ring, all ghostly out at sea on a summer night, over there?' Masked by the dark glasses that covered his pale eyes once more, Bran got to his feet and pointed out at the mouth of the estuary, all of it sunlit now beneath wider patches of blue. "That was supposed to be Cantr'er Gwaelod, the Lowland Hundred, the lovely fertile land of the King Gwyddno Garanhir, centuries ago. The only trouble was, it was so flat that the seawater had to be kept out by dykes, and one night there was a terrible storm and the sea-wall broke, and all the water came in. And the land was drowned.'

Will stood up and came quietly forward to stand beside him, looking down at the estuary. He tried to keep the excitement from his voice. 'Drowned,' he said. 'Lost...'

The mountain was very quiet. The skylark had finished its song. Very far away once more they heard gulls faintly crying, out over the sea.

Bran stood very still, without turning. 'Dear God,' he said.

The others scrambled to their feet. Simon said, 'The Lost Land?'

'I have known that old story always, as well as I know my own name,' Bran said slowly, 'and yet I never thought...'

'Could that really be it?' Simon said. 'But -'

Barney burst out, 'It has to be! It couldn't be anything else! Isn't that right, Will?'

'I think so,' Will said. He was trying to stop his face from breaking into a broad stupid smile. Confidence was running through him like the warmth of the sun. He could feel again, rapidly growing as strong as before, the sense of the High Magic all around. It was a kind of intoxication, a wonderful expectancy of marvellous things: the feeling of Christmas Eve, or the new-green mist of trees in early spring, or the first summer-holiday sight of the sea. Impulsively he stretched both arms upward, as if to catch a cloud.

'Something - ' he said, talking out of his feelings, without any thought of what he said. 'There's something - ' He whirled about, staring round him on the mountain; delight was singing all through him, he scarcely knew that the others were there. Except one of them.

'Bran?' he said. 'Bran? Do you feel it - do you - ' He flapped one hand impatiently as he found he had no words; but then looked and knew that he needed none, from the rapt astonishment on Bran's pale face. The Welsh boy too turned, looking out over the mountains, out at the sky, as if hunting for something, trying to hear a voice calling. Will laughed aloud, to see the reflection of the same indefinable joy that flooded his own mind.

Jane, behind them, watching, sensed the intensity of their feeling and was afraid of it. Unconsciously she drew closer to Simon, and reached an arm to keep Barney beside her; and chilled by the same instinct Barney did not resist, but stepped slowly backward, away from Will and Bran. The Drews stood there, three together, watching.

And out over the hill, a mile beyond in the blue and gold patterning of the estuary, a flickering of the air came, like the quiver of heat that is over a paved road in high summer. At the same time a whispering music drifted to their ears, very distant and faint, but so sweet that they strained to hear it better, yet could never catch more than a hint of the delicate elusive melody. The quivering air grew bright, brighter, glowing as if it were lit from within by the sun; their eyes dazzled, but through the brightness they seemed to see a changing out in the estuary, a movement of the water.

Although the tide was already low, there seemed to be more sand shining golden now beyond the furthest low-tide mark. The waves had stilled, the water had begun to go back. Further and further the white rim of the blue sea withdrew, and the shore rose out of it; first sand, then the glimmering green of weed. But it was not weed, Jane saw incredulously, it was grass; for after it, as the sea fell back and back, there rose trees, and flowers, and walls and buildings of grey stone, blue slate and glimmering gold. A whole city lay there, growing gradually out of the retreating sea: a live city, with here and there thin strands of smoke rising from unseen fires through the unmoving summer air. Towers and glittering pinnacles reached up like guardians, over the flat fertile land patched green and gold, stretching beside the mountains. And far away at the distant edge of the new land, where the blue of the vanished sea at last began again, they glimpsed a pencil of light standing, a faraway tower gleaming like white fire.

Up on the highest ridge of the slope, looking out over the lost land and the city that seemed to govern it. Will and Bran stood together, outlined against the blue sky. They seemed to Jane to be poised there, expectant, like musicians waiting for the first sweep of the conductor's baton. She saw Will raise his head suddenly and look out to sea. And then the brightness that filled the air began to grow again, dazzling, blinding, so that only the faintest outline of the strange land could be seen through it, and it seemed to Jane as she flinched back, shielding her eyes, that the luminous air drew itself into a shining broad ribbon like a road, stretching from their feet far, far out into the air and over the valley, down beyond the mouth of the Dyfi River.

She heard the sound of the music again, lovely and elusive, and she saw Will and Bran step together on to the bright road of light and move away, over the river, through the air, into the haze and towards the Lost Land.

Her arm tightened across Barney's shoulder, and at her other side she felt Simon's hand touch her own. They stood together in silence.

Then the music dwindled into the sound of gulls crying, far away, and the shining road of light faded, and with it the figures that had been walking upon it. And as brightness fell from the air they saw, looking out over the estuary, no towering city, no new green fields, no thin smoke rising, but only the sea and the river and the low-tide shore just as they had been in the beginning.

Simon and Jane and Barney turned, in silence, and gathered coats and the remnants of picnic lunches into the ruck-sacks, and walked back to the road.

Part Two: The Singing Mountains

Three from the Track

They walked in single file, back along the path over the hills. The wet grass glittered in the sunshine now; raindrops hung sparkling on bracken, heather, the patches of yellow-starred gorse.

Barney said, 'What are we going to say?'

'I don't know,' Jane said.

'We'll have to meet John Rowlands in the Square, where they were going to,' Simon said. 'And say - and say -'

'Better if we don't,' Jane said suddenly. 'Then he'll just think they're late, and go without them. He warned them he would, remember?'

'That won't solve anything for long.'

'Maybe they won't need long.'

They went on in silence. At the turn where the path curved back down towards Aberdyfi, Jane paused and stood gazing ahead over the fields, over to the next ridge of high moorland where they had first encountered Will and Bran.

She pointed. 'Can't we go on over the hills, and down to the hotel from the ridge?'

Simon said doubtfully, "There isn't any footpath.'

'Be a lot quicker than going down to the village,' Barney said. 'And we shouldn't see Mr Rowlands either.'

'There's bound to be a sheep trail at least, after this field,' Jane said.

Simon shrugged. 'I don't care. Go on then.' He seemed detached, indifferent, as though his mind were still half-paralysed. Jane swung open the gate to the first field that would lead them away from the little road, and he followed listlessly.

Barney trotted behind, taking the gate from Jane; but before he could swing it shut again, suddenly ahead of him Jane screamed, a dreadful high muffled sound. She seemed to leap into the air, cannoning sideways into Simon; Simon too yelled, and then he and Jane were flinging themselves at Barney, pushing him back through the gate. And behind them in a horrible hasty flash Barney saw, coming at them from all parts of the field, the red rippling bodies of dozens of polecats like the two they had seen on the road before, on their way up the mountain.

Desperately Simon slammed the gate shut, in a hopeless instinctive clutch at defence. But instantly the animals were after them as before, pouring through the open rails that would have kept out nothing smaller than a sheep. The children kicked out at them; the lithe red creatures slipped aside and were at their heels again in a moment, white teeth glinting, black eyes shining; never biting, always nagging, hovering, chivvying. Driving ... driving, Barney thought suddenly; driving us, as if we were sheep and they were sheep-dogs. He glanced up, and saw that the small hard bodies darting sideways against his ankles were pushing towards the open gate of the farm they had passed earlier that day. Deliberately he turned away, and at once the animals were at his heels, hissing, snapping, making dreadful small yipping sounds, turning him; until in spite of himself Barney turned back to Simon and Jane, and all three of them flung themselves for refuge towards the yard of the farm.

'Slowly, now!' The voice was warm, relaxed, amused; as Jane skidded desperately into the farmyard she glimpsed the figure of a woman ahead, holding out an arm to catch her. The smiling face seemed somehow familiar ... Jane thought no further, but collapsed in exhausted relief against the comforting outstretched arm. Behind her, Barney glanced apprehensively over his shoulder - and saw that every single polecat had disappeared.

'Goodness me now!' The woman's voice was gentle. 'Break your necks you will, tearing in here like that as if the devil were at your heels. What is the trouble, what's wrong?' Then she looked more closely at Jane. 'Why, I know you - you're the children who were with Bran and Will Stanton, yesterday.'

Barney said suddenly, 'You're Mrs Rowlands!'

'Yes indeed.' Blodwen Rowlands' voice sharpened. 'What is wrong, has something happened to the boys?'

They stared at her, unable for a moment to gather enough wit for an answer.

'No no,' Jane said then, stumbling. 'No... they're all right, they ... went down. They said they were going to meet you in the Square.'

"That is right.' Mrs Rowlands' round face cleared. 'Came up here just for John to see

Llew Owen, we did, we were just on our way down now. We did wonder whether we might meet the, boys on the way.' She looked at Jane in concern. 'Your hair is all wet, cariad, that rain must have caught you ... Now why were you three in such a fright?'

'Not a fright really,' Simon said gruffly. Now that every trace of the polecats had gone, he was beginning to feel shame at his panic. 'It was just -'

There were these animals,' Jane said, too exhausted to pretend. 'Polecats, Bran said they were. We'd seen two this morning, near here. And then just now on the path, lots of them just jumped at us out of nowhere - and - and - they were horrible. Their teeth -' She gulped.

'Oh dear me,' Mrs Rowlands said comfortingly, cossetingly, as if to a small child. 'Never you mind now, there's nothing now, they've gone ...' She put her arm round Jane's shoulders and led her towards the farm. Simon made a face at Barney that said: She doesn't believe it. Barney shrugged, and they followed. Before they reached the farmhouse John Rowlands came out of its door; they could see his Land-Rover parked close by. He knew them at once; surprise creased his lean brown face.

'Well well,' he said. Three out of five - and where are my two?'

They went on down,' Barney said, all blithe self-possession now, keeping instinctively as close to the literal truth as Jane had done. 'We thought we'd go across the top and then down to the Trefeddian that way. But there didn't seem to be a path.'

'Hard to find it nowadays,' John Rowlands said, 'since all those new houses down the hill have covered up the path. Gone, it is, the old way we went when I was a boy.' He had cast one sharp look at Jane's pale face, but seemed disinclined to question them further; there was a preoccupied look behind his eyes.

'Come with us,' Mrs Rowlands said. 'Give you a lift, now.' She waved farewell to the farmer's wife emerging inquiringly from the farmhouse, and opened the Land-Rover's back door.

'Yes, of course,' John Rowlands said.

Thank you very much.' They climbed in. Jane peered closely at hedgerow and field as the car turned out into the lane, and saw Barney gazing too, but there was no sign of anything except white fool's parsley, and rose-bay willowherb tall in the grass, and the sweep of the tall green hedges above.

Simon, sitting beside her, saw the strain in her face and brushed a fist gently against her arm. He said, very low, 'But they were there.'

The Land-Rover crept down the last elbow turn of the steep little road and into Chapel Square, there to wait in line while a miniature traffic jam of cars fidgeted in the single tiny one-way street leading to the main road.

'Goodness gracious,' Blodwen Rowlands said. 'Look at them all. I want to call in at Royal House, John, but how you will find a parking place I cannot think.'

'We shall just have to be visitors, and go in the car park,' John Rowlands said, swinging to the right and edging through sweaters and parkas, push-chairs and buckets and spades, their owners all vaguely wandering or gazing out at the sea.

The Land-Rover was left in the park, its square roof looming over its smaller neighbours like a landmark. They threaded their way back along the crowded streets; Mrs Rowlands paused beside a shop-window filled with jerseys and swimsuits and shorts.

'Wyt ti'n dwad i mewn hefyd, cariad?'

'No, I won't come,' John Rowlands said, pulling his pipe from his pocket and peering into its bowl. 'We will be over on the wharf, I dare say. The best place to look out for Bran and Will. No hurry, Blod, take your time.'

He led the children across the road, between a huge black shed labelled Outward Bound Sea School and a cluster of masts, their rigging gently singing in the breeze, where the boats of the Aberdyfi Yacht Club lay in lines on the beach. Sand spilled out over the pavement.

They walked across the wharf and out on to the short dogleg jetty. John Rowlands paused, filling his pipe from an old black leather pouch. 'A different jetty we had here when I was a boy,' he said absently. 'All of wood, great beams of black creosoted timber ... We used to climb all over them at low tide, and fall off where the green weed was slippery, and fish for crabs.'

'Did you live here?' Barney said.

'See over there?' Following John Rowlands' pointing finger, they looked back at the long terrace of stately, narrow, three-storey Victorian houses that stood facing out over the road, over the beach, to the mouth of the Dyfi River and the sea.

'That one in the middle, with the green paint,' John Row- lands said, 'that's where I was born. And my father before me. He was a sailor, and so was his father. My grandfather Captain Evan Rowlands of the schooner Ellen Davies - he built that house. All built by the old captains, they were, the houses along that road, in the days when Aberdyfi was still a real shipping port.'

Jane said curiously, 'Didn't you want to be a sailor too?'

John Rowlands smiled at her through puffs of blue smoke as he lighted his pipe, dark eyes narrowed by the lines of his brown face. 'Once I did, I dare say. But my da was drowned when I was six, you see, and my mother took my brothers and me away from Aberdyfi then, back to her parents' farm near Abergynolwyn. Back in the hills near Cader Idris - behind the valley where you were today. So what with one thing and another, it was sheep for me, not the sea.'

'What a shame,' Simon said.

'Oh, not really. The shipping days have been gone a long time now, and even the fishing too. They were dying already in my father's time.'

Barney said, 'Fancy him drowning. A sailor.'

'A lot of sailors can't swim,' Simon said. 'Even Nelson couldn't. He used to get seasick, too.'

John Rowlands puffed reflectively. 'For a lot of them there was never time to learn, I fancy. The men in those sailing ships - no playing in the sea for them. The sea was their mistress, their mother, their living, their life. But everything serious. Nothing for fun.' He turned slowly back towards the street, his eyes carefully searching - just as, Jane suddenly realised, they had been already searching the wharf and the beach. 'I don't see any sign at all of Bran and Will. How long before you left, was it, that they came down?'

Jane hesitated, and saw Simon open his mouth and shut it again, confused. Barney simply shrugged.

She said, 'About - about half an hour, I suppose.'

'Perhaps they caught a bus?' Barney said helpfully.

John Rowlands stood for a moment, pipe between teeth, his face without expression. He said, 'Have you known Will Stanton for long?'

'We were all on holiday together once,' Jane said. 'About two years ago. In Cornwall.'

'Did anything ... unusual ... happen on that holiday?' The Welshman's voice was casual still, but suddenly he was looking very closely and specifically at Simon, the dark eyes bright and intent.

Simon blinked, taken by surprise. '"Well - yes, I suppose.'

'What sort of thing?'

'Just ... well, just things.' Simon's face was flushed; he floundered, caught between honesty and bewilderment.

Jane saw Barney's face crease in a resentful frown. She said, surprised at the cool self-possession in her voice, 'What do you mean exactly, Mr Rowlands?'

'How much do you three know about Will?' John Rowlands said. His face was unreadable, his voice curt.

'Quite a lot,' said Jane, and her mouth shut sharply like a closing door. She stood looking at him. On either side of her she could feel Simon and Barney rigid and challenging as herself; the three of them arrayed against questions that, they instinctively knew, nobody outside the pattern of their dealings with Merriman and Will should be bothering to ask.

Rowlands was looking at her now: a strange searching uncertain look. 'You are not like him,' he said. 'You three, you are no more than I am, you are not... of that kind.'

'No,' Jane said.

Something seemed to collapse behind John Rowlands' eyes; his face twisted into a kind of taut despair, and Jane was all at once rocked by distress as she saw him gazing at her in open appeal. 'Diawl,' he said, tight and unhappy, 'will you stop mistrusting me, for the love of God? You cannot have seen more of the nature of those two than I have seen, this past year. Those two - for Bran is someone you may know nothing about at all. And there is fear shouting all through me now, about what may be happening to them, about who may have taken hold of them, at a time when they may be in worse danger than they have ever been before.'

Behind Jane's shoulder Barney said suddenly, 'He means it, Jane. And Will did trust him.'

'That's true,' Simon said.

'What did you mean, Mr Rowlands,' Jane said slowly, 'about what you had seen, this past year?'

'Not a year all spread out,' John Rowlands said. 'Last summer it was, when Will came visiting his uncle. As soon as he came to the valley, things ... things began to happen. Forces woke that had been sleeping, and people grew and changed, and the Grey King of Cader Idris rose in his power, and fell again ... it was all a confronting between the Light and the Dark, and I did not understand what it was all about and I did not want to.' He looked at them, grave and intent, his pipe forgotten in his hand. 'I have told Will that, all along,' he said. 'I know he is part of the power called the Light, and Bran Davies perhaps even deeper into the pattern. But that is enough for me. I will help Will Stanton when he needs me, and Bran, too, because I feel for him as if he were my own - only, I do not want to know what it is that they are doing.'

Barney said curiously, 'Why not?'

'Because I am not of their kind,' John Rowlands said sharply. 'And nor are you either, and it is not proper.' For a moment he sounded stem, censorious - and very sure of himself.

Simon said unexpectedly, 'I know just what you mean. I've always felt the same. And anyway we don't really know either.' He looked at Jane. 'Do we?'

She had opened her mouth to protest, but now she paused instead. 'Well... no. Great-Uncle Merry never said anything much. Only that the Dark is rising, or trying to, and must be stopped. Everything we did seemed to be a step on the way to somewhere else. Something else. And we never really have known what.'

'Safer for you that it should be so,' John Rowlands said.

'And for them too, right?' said Simon.

John Rowlands gave his head a small wry shake that was like a shrug; smiled, and began re-lighting his pipe.

Jane said, *I don't think we shall be seeing Will and Bran here, Mr Rowlands. They went away, somewhere. Safe. But ... a long way away.' She looked out at the estuary, where a few white sails tacked to and fro over the blue water. 'I don't know for how long. An hour, a day ,.. They ... they just went.'

'Well,' John Rowlands said, 'we shall just have to wait and see. And I must dream up something to tell to Blodwen, because to this day I do not know whether she has any idea at all of what is in those two boys. I think not, really. She has a warm heart and a wise head, bless her, and she is content to be fond of them for what they seem to be.*

A motor-boat whizzed past on the river behind them, almost drowning his voice. Somewhere the beat of rock music thumped insistently through the warm air; it rose and then retreated, as a group of people carrying a portable radio passed on the wharf. Looking over at the road, Jane saw Blodwen Rowlands emerge from the draper's shop and pause on the crowded pavement; then she was cut out of view, as a large motor-coach crept with difficulty down the village street.

John Rowlands sighed. 'Look at it all,' he said. 'How it has changed, Aberdyfi fach. Of course that had to come, but I remember ... I remember ... in the old days, all the old fishermen used to be in a line over there, leaning on that rail in front of the Dovey Hotel, over the water. And when I was a lad about Barney's age one of my favourite things was to hang around and listen to them, when I was allowed. Lovely it was. They remembered so far back - a hundred years and more, it would be now. Back to the days when nearly all Aberdyfi men were sailors, my taid's time, when the masts bristled thick as a forest along the wharf by here, loading up slate from the quarries. And there were seven yards building ships in the river, seven, building dozens of ships - schooners and brigs, and small boats too...'

His deep Welsh voice made a threnody, recalling and mourning the lost days that even he had not seen, except through others' eyes. They listened in silence, fascinated, until the present sounds and sights of the crowded summer resort seemed to retreat, and they could almost imagine that they saw tall ships coming into the river round the bar, and stacks of cut slate piled around them on a different wharf, built of black wood instead of concrete.

A seagull rose slowly into the air from the end of the jetty, crying out, slow and harsh and sorrowful, and Jane turned her head to follow the flap and sweep of its black-tipped wings. The breeze seemed to feel stronger than before against her cheek. The gull swung sideways past them, close, still crying ...

... and when Jane brought her gaze down again from watching it, she saw the wooden beams of the jetty black beneath her feet, stacked with rows of grey-blue slate, and beyond, on the river, a tall ship coming in close towards land, flapping and creaking as men hauled down her sails.

Jane stood motionless, staring. She heard laughter, and shrill voices, and milling round her on the jetty came a gaggle of small boys, pushing and hopping and thrusting one another aside in perilous clamour along the edge. 'Firsties ... firsties ... get off my foot, Freddie Evans! ... look out! ... don't shove! ...' They were a mixture, clean and grubby, barefoot and booted, and one of them, yellow-haired, bumping and laughing among the rest, was her brother Barney.

Jane could only think, ridiculously, 'But in those days they'd have been speaking Welsh.. ,'

Further along the jetty she could see Simon talking earnestly in a group of two or three boys his own age. They turned to watch the ship draw gradually closer. With a snapping rush of canvas her mainsail came down in a heap, to be seized and furled; she was a brigantine, square-rigged on the foremast and fore-and-aft rigged on the main, and only two foresails now hung billowing to draw her inshore. Her figure-head glinted beneath the jutting bowsprit: a life-size girl, with streaming golden hair. On the bow Jane could read the name now: Frances Amelia.

'Carrying timber,' John Rowlands' deep voice said beside her. 'See some of it stowed there on the deck? Mostly for John Jones the builder, that will be - he has been expecting it. A cargo of yellow pine, from Labrador.'

Jane glanced at him; his face was tranquil, the pipe still clenched between his teeth. But on the hand that reached up to the pipe now there was tattooed between the knuckles a small blue star that she had not seen before, and at his throat he wore the wing collar and high-necked jacket of the nineteenth century. He had become someone else, belonging to this other time, and yet somehow was still himself as well. Jane shivered and closed her eyes for a moment, and did not look down to see how she herself was dressed.

Then there was a flurry and a sudden shriek from the edge of the jetty, where more and more people had gathered. Peering vainly past the heads, Jane could see only that the brigantine had begun to dock, lines flying down from bow and stem to be caught and made fast by darting figures ashore. From the end of the jetty where the small boys had gone running, there came out of a group of women a noisy scolding eruption, and all at once Barney and another boy, both very white in the face, were being dragged back towards Jane by a bustling distressed woman in bonnet and shawl. It was recognisably Blodwen Rowlands, yet a Blodwen Rowlands who did not seem to know Jane as Jane. She spoke to the world at large, scolding, yet in warm concern, 'Always the same it is, this silly game to be the first to touch the ship that comes in, and all of them in the way there hindering the men ...

One day one of them is going to get killed, and it was as near as a whistle for these two today, did you see them? Right on the edge, losing their balance, the side of the boat like to crush them against the jetty if there had been no one there to grab them out of it... aah!' She gave each boy a little exasperated shake. 'Have you forgotten last week, when Ellis Williams fell in?'

'And Freddie Evans the week before,' said the boy with Barney, in a pert, lilting voice. 'And much worse, that, because Evans the Barber was waiting for him with a strap when he got out, and beat him all the way home.'

'Mr Evans to you, young monkey,' said Mrs Rowlands, trying to suppress a smile. She gave Jane a little humorous shrug, released the boys with one finger wagging at them as she turned, and went back to the group of women greeting sailors on the ship.

'I like her,' Barney said cheerfully. 'She probably saved my life, you know that?' And he grinned at Jane and ran off with the other boy, disappearing along the road, behind the great stacks of slate.

Jane turned to call, but no sound came. Beside her, John Rowlands was shouting to one of the men aboard the Frances Amelia. 'Iestyn! Iestyn Davies!'

'Evan boy!' the man called back, white teeth flashing. And even while the name pulled her, Jane thought again of the strangeness that there was no Welsh to be heard, and then suddenly knew that of course all the speaking that she could hear was indeed in Welsh, her own included, with no word of English used anywhere at all.

'After all,' she said shakily, knowing with no reason that Simon was now at her side, and turning to him, 'it's no more odd to understand a language that you don't know, than to be switched into a time before you were born.'

'No,' Simon said, in a voice so reassuringly his own that Jane felt dissolved in relief. 'No, not really odd at all.'

John Rowlands called, beside them, 'What news of the Sarah Ellen?'

The man stared. 'You haven't heard?'

The man on the Frances Amelia paused, put down the line he was coiling, called a few words to someone else on board, and leapt over the gunwale and down to the jetty. He came up to John Rowlands, his face lined with concern. 'Bad news, Evan Rowlands, very bad. I am sorry. The Sarah Ellen foundered off Skye two days ago, with all hands. We heard yesterday.'

'Oh my God,' John Rowlands said. He put out a hand, gropingly, and clutched the man's arm for an instant; then turned and moved away, stumbling, as if he were suddenly old. His face was grey and hurt. Jane longed to go after him, but she could not move. How was it possible to comfort grief that was naked on a living face, and yet had been gone and forgotten for a hundred years? Which was more real: her own bewilderment, or Evan Rowlands' pain looking out of his grandson's eyes?

The man called Iestyn said, looking after John Rowlands, 'And his brother aboard.' He looked round, at the two or three other men who had been standing near, and his face was grave. 'Something is not good. That was the fourth boat built by John Jones Aberdyfi to go down in three months, and all of them new boats too. And it was not a great storm that took the Sarah Ellen, they say, but only a heavy following sea.'

'They are all the same,' one of the men said. 'They dip the stem under. Every one of his vessels does it now, and then there is strain and the leaks come, and down she goes.'

'Not every one,' another man said.

'No, not every one, that is true. John Jones has built some very good boats indeed. But the bad ones...'

'I have heard it suggested,' said the man called Iestyn, 'that it is not in the design but in the building. That it is not John Jones' fault at all, but one of his sawyers. And any work that he handles - '

He broke off, conscious suddenly of Jane's anxious stare, and switched on to his face a broad deliberate smile. 'Waiting as usual, is it, like all the young ones, but too polite to ask?' He reached into one capacious jacket pocket and brought out a square package. 'Here - put some in my pocket for the first of you who would come smiling and begging, I did. And for not asking at all you shall inherit it, little one.'

"Thank you,' said Jane, and for the second time that day startled herself by dropping a little bobbing curtsey. Folded in paper in her hands he had put four enormous wood-hard ship's biscuits.

'Off with you,' said the man amiably. 'Into the oven in a dish, covered with milk, isn't it, and a knob of butter on top, lovely. Lord knows it is good someone enjoys the hard biscuit the way you all do. Not so good half-way across the Atlantic, I can tell you. By then you would swap the lot for a good warm slice of bara brith.'

The others laughed, and suddenly it was as if the last two words had turned a key back again to re-lock a door. For now they were speaking unintelligibly in Welsh together, and Jane knew that the difference was not in the language they used but in her own hearing of it. She had been able to understand it for a short enchanted while; now she could not. She clutched at Simon's unfamiliar stiff sleeve, and drew him away.

'What's happening?'

'I only wish I knew. There's no logic to it. Everything all mixed up.'

'Where are we? And when? And why?'

"The why is the biggest.'

'Let's go and find Barney.'

'I know. All right.' As they walked over the broad-spaced timbers to the street, Jane glanced sideways at her tall brother; somehow in the rough old-fashioned suit he seemed taller than ever, and more controlled. Had he changed too? No, she thought: it's just that I wouldn't normally bother to think what he's like at all...

They were walking up the road, past little cottages gay with roses and snapdragon and sweet-smelling stock; past terraced houses far grander and newer looking than they had seemed in the days that were yet to come; past a resplendent coaching inn with its board hanging newly painted: The Penhelig Arms. Two men walking ahead of them greeted a stumpy sun-tanned figure standing in the doorway of the inn. 'Good day. Captain Edwards.'

Jane thought: We are back in Welsh, again...

'Good day.'

'Did you hear about the Sarah Ellen, then?'

'I did,' said Captain Edwards. 'And I remembered what we spoke of, and I was thinking of paying a call upon John Jones.' He paused. 'And on one of his men, maybe.'

'Perhaps we might go with you,' one of the two men said, and as he turned Jane saw with a shock that it was John Rowlands again. She had not recognised him; not only the clothes were different, but the walk as well.

A sound of hammering came from somewhere below the road, down by the sea, and a high rhythmic screeching that Jane could not identify. At a cautious distance she and Simon followed the three men, to the edge of the road where it overlooked a flat yard just above the high-tide mark.

The shipyard was surprisingly simple: a couple of sheds, with next to them a curious box-like structure, leaking threads of steam. It was perhaps two feet high and wide but very very long, dozens of feet long, and attached to it by a pipe was a big metal boiler. Nearby, the rough skeleton of a boat lay in a wooden cradle: a long keel branched by the bare oaken ribs to which only a few planks had as yet been set. Huge baulks of timber, the yellowish-white colour of pine, lay piled on the ground and beside them gaped a long deep pit, deeper than the height of a man, where sawyers cut the wood into planks. Jane stared, fascinated. A piece of timber lay lengthwise over each pit, supported on small logs set across; one man stood below it and another above, and between them they worked up and down a long saw, set in a frame, which produced the rhythmic shrieking she had heard from a distance. Two other sawyers worked in a similar pit close by. Others were shifting the timber, stacking planks, tending the steaming boiler, beneath which a fire burned so hot as to be almost invisible in the warm summer air.

A boy looked up and saw the three sailors, and gave a kind of salute; he ran to the sawyer working on top of one of the pits, shouting to be heard over the rasp of the saw.

'Captain Humphrey Edwards and Captain Ieuan Morgan, it is, and Captain Evan Rowlands, up aloft there.'

The sawyer signalled to his partner, stilling the long blade before it came down again for the next cut. He stared up. Jane, peeping over the side of the rough rock-edged road, saw a pudgy face topped by astonishingly bright red hair; the man was scowling, with no sign of friendship or welcome.

'John Jones has gone to the wharf,' the red-haired man called. 'To see to a shipment of pine just come in.' He bent down again, dismissively.

'Caradog Lewis,' said the stumpy captain from the inn. He did not raise his voice, but even at normal pitch it was the kind of voice accustomed to being heard above a gale at sea.

The red-haired man jerked up petulantly, hands on hips. 'There is work to do here, Humphrey Edwards, if you please.'

'Aye,' John Rowlands said. 'It is your work we should like to talk to you about.' He stepped over the low rocky wall and went down a flight of rough steps to the sawpits; the others followed him. So, a little later when no one was paying attention, did Simon and Jane.

'What boat is this you are working on, Caradog Lewis?' said Captain Edwards, looking thoughtfully at the graceful curving frame, all ribs and keel, standing skeletal on the stocks.

Lewis looked at him sourly, as if about to snarl, but seemed to change his mind. 'She is the schooner Courage, for Elias Lewis. I should have thought you would have known that. Seventy-five feet, and a month overdue already. And over there - ' he nodded at a half-rigged hull already launched, floating in the dock, 'that is the Jane Kate for Captain Farr. They will be floating her spars over from Ynyslas tomorrow, and high time too.'

'And you had a hand in both of them,' John Rowlands said.

'Well of course, man,' said Lewis irritably. 'I am top sawyer for John Jones, isn't it?'

'And no doubt responsible for much,' said Captain Edwards, stroking his side-whiskers. 'John Jones being a busy man, with a great many keels laid down on one another's tails these last few years.'

'Well?'

'The Integrity was your work too?' John Rowlands said. 'And the Mary Rees? And the Eliza Davies?' Each time Lewis nodded his red head impatiently. Rowlands went on, biting off his words like a child biting a biscuit. 'And the Charity? And the Sarah Ellen?'

Lewis scowled. 'You choose the ships of unfortunate men.'

'Yes I do indeed.'

The sawyer and the other shipyard workers had put down their tools and came drifting close to listen; they stood in a group, restless, eyeing the captains resentfully.

'I have just heard about the Sarah Ellen.' Lewis shrugged, with shallow regret. 'It is a pity, about your brother. But no new thing in this village.'

'No new thing among the ships that you work on,' Humphrey Edwards said.

Caradog Lewis's pale face flushed with anger, and Jane saw his hands tighten into fists. 'Now look here -' he began.

'You look here to us, Caradog Lewis,' said the third man, who had not spoken since they entered the yard. He was a small olive-skinned man with a fringe of grey beard. 'Two of those boats I have watched at sea, keeping company on the Labrador run, and both had the same failing, and that none of John Jones' designing if I know him. Careless he is and a little greedy for work, so that he has not the time to supervise as those builders do who will not work on more than one keel at a time. But it is not his doing, for a boat to dig in her stem and founder in a following sea. That is the work of a man every time giving more length at the stem than there should be, and more than a few times letting planks go by that were steamed too quick and had cracks beginning.'

A rumble of anger came from the listening workers.

The red-haired man was wet at the mouth with rage; he could scarcely speak. 'Prove it, Ieuan Morgan!' he hissed. 'Prove one small part of that! You think you can prove I have deliberately sent men to their deaths?'

'There must be some way to prove it,' John Rowlands said, his voice grim and deep, 'for true it is without a doubt. There is more in you than you show. We have been wondering a long time, we three, and now this loss of the Sarah Ellen is too much. And we are sure.'

'Sure of what?'

'That you are ... different, Caradog Lewis. With loyalties that are not like those of other men. Serving in some dreadful way a cause that is not that of men at all.'

The words had such cold conviction in them that the men near Caradog Lewis shrank unconsciously away from him a little; and Lewis sensed it, and yelled at them in sudden fury so that they dived back at the nearest piece of work. But there was no fury in the way Caradog Lewis looked then at John Rowlands; there was instead an icy arrogant hatred that made Jane shiver, because she had seen it before, once, in a man dedicated to working the will of the Dark. Lewis, with his pasty face and his raw red hair, did not seem to be totally a creature of the Dark, but he was the more frightening as a result; such malice living without apparent reason in an ordinary man was something Jane could hardly bear to contemplate. She could sense anger rising in him like steam in a near-boiling kettle.

Lewis came slowly towards the three men, clear of his sawpit. He said tightly, 'I am a man as you are, Evan Rowlands, and I will show you that I am.' And all at once he seemed to erupt, flinging himself on John Rowlands, his face twisted horribly by snarling rage. Caught off-balance, Rowlands was thrown backwards in a rattling shower of grey slate, and Lewis was after him like a dog, arms flailing, smashing. The two other captains rushed to part them, but now the men from the shipyard had dropped their tools and come deliberately in the way, and there was suddenly a great melee on the ground. Stocky Captain Edwards knocked a man down, with a horrible click of teeth as his knuckles met the man's head; then he disappeared beneath a trio of others, and beside him, shouting and fighting, Ieuan Morgan hauled them away. Caradog Lewis, struggling with Rowlands, stumbled to his feet, gasping with malice, and reached for balance to kick with his hard-booted foot. Jane shrieked, and then Simon was past her in a flurry of arms and legs, clutching at Lewis, crying out as the toe of one heavy boot met his own shin.

Simon was never quite sure precisely what happened then. Fighting to drag Caradog Lewis away from John Rowlands' inert form, he found himself suddenly thrust down towards the sea in Lewis's grip, quite unable to resist. They splashed into the water together, still upright, still struggling, and suddenly Simon felt himself jerking outward, falling, falling, and the water closing cold over his head and no bottom to be felt with his feet beneath the sea. One brief touch of the sand he had with one foot, and then the water was swinging him round, a current catching him, pulling him deeper, deeper, alone. He reached up for air, kicking desperately; caught one breath; was swung around again by an eddy, reached out in frantic efforts to swim, his arms and legs heavy with the weight of the old-fashioned suit. There was a roaring in his ears, a blurring in his eyes; the water whirled him round and around.

Simon fought to keep back panic. He had a secret and terrible fear of deep water, even though he could swim well; three years earlier in a dinghy race on the Thames he had fallen from a capsizing boat and come up underneath the floating mainsail, kept down from the air like a cork in sealed jar. He had panicked then, splashing wildly, only by pure chance reaching the edge of the sail, and then in a desperate gurgling flurry the shore. Now he could feel the same panic rising again in this throat and mind; rising like the waves that whirled him about with only an occasional snatch of breath; rising to blur his brain, to swamp out all thought -

He thrust it away. He fought and fought; fought to keep in his mind the feel of each arm, each leg; to move as he chose to move, to seek the rhythm of swimming instead of the mindless flurrying of horror and despair. So by great effort, he kept from panic.

But still the water was there all around, less violent now, cradling him, and again he was going down. Water pressed in on him, it was in his ears and his eyes and his nose. Now it seemed not frightening but lulling, mothering, as if it were not after all alien, but his own element. It welcomed him, gently, as if he quite naturally breathed water, like a fish. Gentle, gentle, all-enveloping, relaxing, like the feeling of the moment before falling gradually asleep...

Something, someone, seized Simon from behind in a fierce grip, two strong hands on his shoulders, pushing him upward, upward and out into bright air. Light cut into his eyes. Water bit the back of his throat. He gasped, retching, choking. The water swished in his lungs with each gurgling snatch at breath. Simon heard terrible frantic bubbling gasps and realised appalled that he was making them himself.

Then there was solid sand beneath his feet. The swimmer released him. Simon stumbled forward on to his hands and knees, and strong hands laid him on the beach, turned his head sideways and pressed down on his back. Water poured from his nose and mouth; he coughed, retching. The hands gently helped him to sit up. Simon sat with his head on his knees, breathing at last without the dreadful gurgling, without gasping, more slowly. He brushed his wet hair from his eyes, sniffing, and looked up.

First he saw Jane, wide-eyed, white-faced, crouching. Beside her a man was bent on one knee, his great height apparent even while stooped. His dark clothes dripped water. The face frowning in concern into Simon's was angular and craggy, dark eyes shadowed in deep sockets, bristling white eyebrows dripping water down the sides of the beak-like nose. The thick white hair, grey with wetness, lay in a tangle of loops and horns all over his head.

Simon said, in a high weak husky voice that was not his own, 'Oh Gumerry.'

He stopped, feeling a prickling in his eyes. He had not used that pet name for a long tune.

'That was brave,' Merriman said.