And Will thought and suddenly knew.

'Come on!'

Seizing Bran by the arm, he broke into a run and rushed up the steps of the great rock on which the tower stood, away from the mocking Dark, until he was on the top step, so close to the whirling wheel that it seemed likely to cut him in half. The humming shriek of its spinning filled their minds. Gwion was behind them, white teeth flashing in eager delight. Will bent to Bran's baffled, anxious face and said in his ear: 'And what last thing did the Lady say?'

He saw relief break like a wave, and heard the words choke out: 'Only the horn can stop the wheel -'

And Will reached to his belt and took the little gleaming hunting-horn that hung there. He paused, drew in a deep breath, put back his head and blew a single long clear note, high and lovely, singing out like a harmonic over the terrible hum of the spinning sharp wheel. And the wheel spun down at once to a half, as if an immense force were stopping it, while a long howling shriek of rage rose from the Riders of the Dark below. Will and Bran had an instant to see that the wheel had four spokes, quartering the circle, before Gwion was urging the two of them in turn through the nearest quarter, and slipping through after them.

Gwion pressed the bunch of seven twigs that he held into Will's hand, and without looking at him "Will knew now what to do. Seizing the twigs from Bran's hand too, so that he held all three bunches together, he reached out urgently through the spokes of the wheel, where a surge of darkness and fury and menace was streaming towards them up the steps to the tower. With all the force he could manage, he flung the twigs out into the Dark. An immense force like a soundless explosion swept outwards from the tower, and the great wheel began to spin again.

Faster and faster it whirled. The hum rose, the entrance was barred by spinning enchantment with the frustrated Dark screaming in shock and rage below, and Will and Bran and Gwion stood in a soft translucent brightness inside the glass tower of the Lost King.

Part Three: The Lost Land

The King of the Lost Land

They stood staring at one another. Outside the tower the fury of the Dark rose as if the whole world were roaring; Will hunched his shoulders instinctively, feeling the force of it like a blow.

And then suddenly, it was gone. The tumult dropped, vanished altogether; they could hear nothing at all but the faint hum of the wheel whirling outside. The abrupt change was more unnerving even than the noise had been.

'What are they doing?' Bran said. He was taut as a tight-wound spring; Will could see a muscle twitching at the side of his jaw.

'Nothing,' Will said, with a confidence that was not real. 'They can do nothing here. Forget them.' He stared round the square room, filling the length and breadth of the tower, into which they had just come. 'Look!'

Brightness was everywhere: a soft greenish light filtered through the quartz-like walls of the room. It could be a cave of ice, Will thought. But this was a cluttered, busy place, as if someone had left it in a hurry while preoccupied with some great complex matter. Piles of curling manuscript lay on the tables and shelves, and on the thick rush mat that covered the floor; against one wall an enormous heavy table was littered with strips of shining metal and chunks of glass and rock, red and white and greenish-blue, all among an array of delicate gleaming tools which reminded Will of the workshop behind his father's jewellery shop at home. Then his eye was caught by something high on the wall: a plain round shield, made of gleaming gold.

Gwion leapt light-footed up on to a table and took the shield down from the wall. He held it out.

'Take this. Will. Three shields, once in the days of his greatness. King Gwyddno made for the Light, Two of them were taken by the Light to places where danger might come, and the third they left here. I have never known why - but perhaps this moment now is why, and has been all along. Here.'

Will took the round gleaming thing and slid his arm through the holding-straps on the inner side. 'It's beautiful,' he said. 'And - so are the other two that he made. I have seen them, I think. In ... other places. They have never been used.'

'Let us hope this one need not be used either,' Gwion said.

Bran said impatiently, 'Where is the king?' He was looking up at a curving wrought-iron staircase, wonderfully curlicued, which spiralled its way up to disappear through an opening in the high glassy ceiling of the room.

'Yes,' Gwion said. 'Up there. We shall go up, but you must let me lead. We shall come to certain rooms in which you will see no one, and at the last we shall come to the king.'

He set one hand on the curving rail of the staircase, and looked hard at Will. 'Where is the belt of Signs?'

'It is at the Battle of Mount Badon,' Will said wistfully. 'Where Merriman took it to the great king, for as much of the winning as can be achieved there. And it will be at the last encounter too, when the Lady comes and all the power of the Light is joined. But not until then. And then only if -' He stopped.

'Eirias,' Bran said, his voice tight. 'Eirias.'

Gwion said swiftly, 'Do not say the name yet! That must wait. Only in the sword's own presence may it be named by its name, inside this tower. Come.'

They climbed the spiralling staircase, up and up through rooms that were scattered with the impedimenta of living, of eating and sleeping, and yet had, too, the strange deserted look of places left abandoned for a long time. And then Will, last in line, came up to find Bran and Gwion standing silent in a great room unlike any that had gone before. The light filtering through these walls was not cool and icy-green, but dimmer, more subdued, for they stood now inside a great hemisphere, banded in gold and translucent glass so that Will knew it must be the domed top of the tower, from whose peak a golden arrow pointed out at the sea.

The dome was warm, its floor striped with the sunlight that slanted in through the banded roof; and yet it was a strangely gloomy place, bringing a heaviness to the senses. The room held only one square table, set to one side, a carved wooden screen, and a scattering of big high-backed chairs, as sturdy as if they were carved from solid blocks of wood.

'Gwion?' a voice said.

Soft echoes whispered round the dome. It was a husk of a voice, low and without strength. It came from a tall chair facing away from them on the far side of the dome; they could see nothing but the chair's back.

'I am here, my lord,' Gwion said. His eyes were warm, and there was love and patience in his voice, as if he spoke to a troubled child. 'And ... and two from the light are with me.'

There was a long pause, with no sound in it except the faint crying of a distant seagull outside the dome.

The voice said at last, cold and abrupt, 'You betray me. Send them away.'

Gwion crossed the room swiftly and dropped on one knee before the tall carved chair; in the bands of dim light through the roof they saw his lean brindle-bearded face upturned to the unseen king. He said, loving loyalty bright as a flame in his face, 'I betray you, my lord?'

'No, no,' the voice said wearily. 'I know better. But you must send them away, minstrel. In that, you should know better.'

Will said impulsively, coming forward, 'But Majesty, the danger is too great.' He paused just behind the chair; he could see one thin hand lying limp on the chair-arm, wearing on one finger a great dark-stoned ring like Gwion's ring. He said, in as level a voice as he could manage, 'My lord, the Dark is rising, in its last great attempt to take control of the earth from men. And we of the Light cannot prevent that attempt unless we are armed with all the Things of Power made for our purpose. We have all of them but the last, the crystal sword, which long ago you made for us, my lord the king - and which now you guard.'

'I guard nothing,' the voice said listlessly. 'I exist merely.'

Will said, 'But the sword is here, as it has been always since its making.' He eyes were roving round the room in search as he spoke. 'We may not take it unless you give it to us. Give it to us now. Majesty, I beg you.'

'Leave me alone,' the voice said. 'Leave me alone.' It was full of an aching sadness that made Will long to give some comfort; but the urgency of his quest was louder yet in his mind.

"The sword is for the Light,' he said persistently, 'and to the Light it must go.' He was looking at a wonderfully carved wooden screen that stood against the slanting wall of the dome, near where the king sat. Was it there simply as a lovely object to be looked at, or to hide something eke from view?

The voice said with dull petulance, 'You do not say "must" to me. Old One. If Old One is what you are. I have forgotten all .such names.'

Behind Will, Bran said sharply, 'But we must have Eirias!'

The thin hand on the chair tightened briefly into life; the fingers curled, then fell back again. 'Gwion,' said the empty voice, 'I can do nothing for them. Send them away.'

Gwion still knelt, looking up, his face lined with concern. 'You are weary,' he said unhappily, dropping all ceremony. 'I wish you were not always alone.'

'Weary of life, minstrel. Weary of the world.' The voice was a winter leaf blown by the wind: withered, dry. 'No purpose, no savour. Time tosses my mind where it will. And my useless life is the empty cawing of a crow, and any talent I once may have had is dead. Let the toys that it made die with it.'

The slow words came from so deep a despair, like a black pit giving back no sound when a stone is dropped in, that the small hairs crawled on the back of Will's neck. It was like listening to a dead man speak.

Bran said clearly, coldly, 'You speak like the Mari Llwyd, not like a king.'

The fingers of the hand curled in again briefly, and then again lay limp. Into the voice crept the weary contempt of long, long experience faced with the blind ignorant vigour of hope. 'Boy, callow boy, do not speak to me of life that you have not lived. What do you know of the weight that drags down a king who has failed his people, an artist who has failed his gift? This life is a long cheat, full of promises that can never be kept, errors that can never be righted, omissions that can never be filled. I have forgotten as much of my life as I can manage to forget. Go away, so that I may be free to forget the rest.'

As Will stood, speechless, held by the dreadful deep self-loathing in the husky voice, Bran came up level with him. And all Will's senses shouted at him suddenly that a change had begun; that from this moment Bran would no longer be merely the strange albino boy with the tawny eyes, obscure in a North Wales valley where the villagers looked at him sideways and the children mocked his pale face and white hair.

'Gwyddno Garanhir,' Bran said in a quiet command as cold and hard as ice, with the Welshness very strong in his voice, 'I am the Pendragon, and the destiny of the Light is in my hands to be held or lost. I will not countenance despair. Eirias is my birthright, made by you at my father's bidding. Where is the crystal sword?'

Will stood trembling, his fingernails digging into his palms.

Very slowly, the figure in the chair leaned forward a little and turned towards them, and they saw the face of the king just as they had seen it in the rainbow over the fountain in the rose garden, a little and a long while before. It was unmistakable: a thin face with cheekbones high as wings and lines carved deep in the flesh by sadness. Great channels of despair slanted down from nose to jaw, and shadows lay round the eyes like dark mountain pools. The king glanced first at Will, and then he saw Bran. His face changed.

He sat there motionless, dark eyes staring. There was a long moment of silence, and then the king said, whispering, 'But it was a dream.'

Gwion said softly, 'What was a dream. Majesty?'

The king turned his head to Gwion; there was a heart-breaking simplicity in him suddenly, like a small child telling a secret to a friend.

'I dream, endlessly, my minstrel,' he said. 'I live in my dreams - they are the only thing this emptiness has not touched. Oh sometimes they are black and dreadful, night-mares from the pit ... But most of them are wonderful, full of happiness and lost joy, and delight in making and being. Without my dreams, I should have gone mad long ago.'

'Ah,' Gwion said wryly, 'that is true of many men in this world.'

'And I dreamed,' the king said, looking wonderingly again at Bran, 'of a white-headed boy who would come and bring both an end and a beginning. The son of a great father, with all his father's strength in him and more besides. And it seemed to me that I had known the father once, long ago - though I cannot tell where or when, through the mist the emptiness has put in my mind. The white-haired boy ... there was no colour in him anywhere, in my dream. He had a white head, and white brows, and white lashes to his eyes, and he wore dark circles of glass to protect those eyes from the sun, but when the circles were taken away you could see that the eyes were enchanted, the golden eyes of an owl.'

He stood up, shakily supporting his thin frame on one hand against the chair. Gwion lunged forward to help, but the king raised his other hand.

'He came running,' he said, 'he came running to me across the room there, and the sunlight was in his white hair and he laughed at me, and it was the first music of that kind that this castle has heard for so long, so very long.' There was a softening in the grim-set features like a faint glimmer of sunshine in a cloud-grey sky. 'He brought an end, but a beginning. He took away the haunting of this place. He kneeled down before me, in my dream, and he said -'

Bran laughed softly; Will could feel all the angry tension fall away out of him. The white-haired boy took a few quick steps forward and knelt before the king, and said, smiling up at him, 'And he said. There are five barriers to be broken to reach the crystal sword, and they are told in five lines that are written in letters of golden fire over the sword itself. Shall I tell you what they are?'

The king stood looking down at him with a life waking in his eyes that had not been there before. 'And I said. Yes, tell me.'

'And when I have told you,' Bran was looking up into his eyes in a closeness like an embrace, no longer quoting now, 'then that will be a falling away of the fifth barrier, Majesty, is not that so? For we have come through four of them already - the words are witness. And if I can break open your despair, which is the tomb of all your hope, then will you let me take the sword?'

The king said, his eyes fast on Bran, 'Then it will be yours.'

Bran slowly stood up before him, and took a breath, and in the Welsh music of his voice the words came out as a lilting chant.

'I am the womb of every holt,

I am the blaze on every hill,

I am the queen of every hive,

I am the shield for every head,

I am the tomb of every hope -

I am Eirias!'

And King Gwyddno let out a long, long sigh like the sound of a wave of the sea washing over sand, and with a sudden crash the carved wooden screen that stood against the wall of the dome fell apart in two pieces, and lay on the ground. And glowing in golden letters on the banded wall they saw the lines that Bran had just spoken aloud, clearly written, and below them on a slab of slate lay like a bright icicle a crystal sword.

The king moved slowly, stiffly, across the smooth rush-matted floor; on the back of the dark green surcoat he wore over his white robe they saw embroidered in gold the royal crest with its roses and leaping fish. King Gwyddno took the sword in his hand, and turned his melancholy drooping body towards them again. He ran one finger along the chased flat side of the sword blade, wonderingly, as if in disbelief that he could ever have made so lovely a thing. Then taking the sword by the cross-piece of its hilt, so that it hung pointing downwards, he held it out to Bran.

'Let the light go to the Light,' he said, 'and Eirias to its inheritor.'

Bran took the sword by the hilt, turning it carefully so that it pointed now straight upward. Instantly he seemed to Will to grow somehow a little more erect, more commanding; the sunlight blazed in his white hair.

Somewhere outside the tower, from far away, there came a long low rumbling like thunder.

The king said expressionlessly, 'Now let come what may.'

He put his hand up to his head suddenly and rubbed his brow. 'There was ... there was a scabbard. Gwion? I made a scabbard for the sword?'

Gwion's smile lit his face, 'You did, Majesty, of leather and of gold. And there must be a breaking of the emptiness, as you call it, in your mind - or you would not remember that.'

"It was ...' The king's forehead creased, he closed his eyes as if in pain. Then abruptly he opened them again, pointing across the domed room to a plain chest of light-coloured wood, with the figure of a man riding a fish painted in blue on its side.

Gwion went to the chest, and put back the lid. He said after a moment, "There are three things.' A strange note was in his voice, of some emotion Will could not comprehend.

The king said vaguely, 'Three?'

Gwion drew from the chest a scabbard and sword-belt of white leather set with strips of gold. To mask the blaze a little,' he said with a smile, holding it out to Bran.

'Bran,' Will said slowly, listening to deep faint stirrings within his mind. 'I think ... you should not put the sword into the scabbard yet, not for a moment.'

Bran, sword and scabbard in either hand, looked at him with raised eyebrows, and an arrogant tilt to his white head that had not been there before. Then he gave a quick shiver and was Bran again, and said merely, 'All right.'

Gwion said, still at the chest, 'And there is - this.' His voice shook, and his hand too, as he took out a small bright harp. He looked across the room at his king. 'Not a few moments ago, my lord, I was longing to have my harp that I left in the City, so that I could play for you as I did in the old days.'

The king smiled, lovingly. "That too is your harp, minstrel. Long ago I made it for you, in the first days in the tower when I was struggling against despair, struggling still to work,..' He shook his head, wondering. 'I had forgotten, it is so long ... I had chosen to be alone, so that all others were barred from this place by the wheel, yet I missed you and your music so greatly that I made the harp. For my Gwion, for my Taliesin, for my player.'

'And I shall play if for you in a little,' Gwion said.

'You will find it in tune,' the king said, and his smile held an echo of the maker's pride in the thing made.

Gwion put down the harp and reached again into the chest; he brought out a small leather bag gathered at the neck by a cord. 'This is the third thing,' he said, 'but I do not know what it is.'

He pulled open the neck of the bag, and a stream of small blue-green stones tumbled out into his other hand, smooth, shiny, rounded as though by the sea. One of them fell to the floor; Will picked it up and rolled it round his palm, watching the pattern of colour in its sleek irregular shape.

The king glanced at the stones briefly. 'Pretty, but worthless,' he said. 'I do not remember them.'

'You meant to work with them once, perhaps.' Gwion poured the stones back into the bag; Will held out the one that had fallen.

Gwion smiled at him suddenly. 'Keep it,' he said lightly. He picked out another stone and held it to Bran. 'And one for you. Bran. Each of you should have a talisman. A piece of a dream to take away with you, from the Lost Land.'

The king said softly, vacantly, 'Lost... lost.. .'

The distant deep rumbling came again outside, louder than before. All at once the sunlight shafting in through the banded roof faded, and the dome seemed much darker.

Bran looked around. 'What is it?'

'It is the beginning,' the king said. His thin voice was stronger now, more alive as his face was more alive, and though the resigned acceptance in it was very plain, there was no hint now of the dreadful black emptiness of despair.

Will said, on instinct, 'We must not stay under this roof.'

Gwion sighed. He looked at Will with wry affection, and Will never afterwards forgot the look: the humorous wide mouth drawn almost into sadness by the lines of experience running down from nose to jaw; the bright eyes, smiling; the crisp curly grey hair, the odd dark stripe in the grey beard. He said to Gwion in his mind: I like you.

'Come,' Gwion said. With the harp in one crooked arm he went to a part of the curved wall that seemed no different from any other part, reached up, and with one strong pull slid a whole wedge-shaped section of it to one side. The opening gaped like a triangular door. Outside they saw the sky a dark, dark grey.

Gwion stepped out, down to a balcony. Following him, Will saw a golden balustrade, and realised that this too was identical with the balcony that ran round the dome of the Empty Palace, in the City. But as he looked out from the tower all thought dwindled away.

Westward over the sea, a gigantic bank of dark cloud was massing: heavy, mounded, yellowish-grey. It seemed to writhe, growing and swelling as if it were a live thing. Will's fingers curled tightly round the strap of the golden shield that he still held on one arm. Bran came out on to the balcony behind him, and last of all came the king: frail now, supporting himself on the side of the opening in the roof, breathing suddenly faster as though the keener outside air were something his lungs had not felt for a long, long time.

The low, distant rumbling still filled the air, coming in like a mist from the westward horizon, where the great clouds rolled. Yet it was not the rumbling of thunder; it was a deeper, more insistent sound, like nothing Will had heard before.

'Be ready,' Gwion said softly, behind him.

Will turned and found himself looking straight into the smile-creased dark eyes. He saw calm determination there, and self-possession, but beneath all else a flicker of dreadful blank fear.

'What is it?' he whispered.

Gwion took his harp and drew a series of soft beautiful arpeggios from the strings. He said, as lightly as if it were a casual joke, his eyes imploring Will to ignore the terror behind them, 'It is the death of the Lost Land, Old One. It must come, when the time comes.' His fingers began patterning the notes into a gentle melody, and the king, leaning against the shining wall of the dome, murmured with pleasure.

The rumbling from the western horizon rose. A wind blew against their cheeks, and stirred their hair: a strange warm wind. Will raised his head, sniffing; all at once the summer air seemed full of a smell of the sea, of salt and wet sand and green weed. The light was dying, the cloud spreading grey over the sky. He heard a faint sound like creaking over his head, and looked up sharply. On top of the dome the pointing golden arrow, still gleaming even in the murky light, was swinging gently round: turning, turning quite around, until it pointed inland, away from the sea. A brightness in the sky beyond it caught Will's eye, and he gasped, and saw that Bran was staring at it too.

Far away out there, on the far side of the Lost Land, over the roofs of the City still dimly visible in the dwindling light, sudden sprays of light were springing up like fountains, to blaze for a second and vanish again. Like bursting stars, fireworks leapt, splashing the dark sky with brilliant red, green, yellow, blue: erupting over the City in joyous arches of light. There was a wonderful unafraid gaiety in all the sudden brilliance, as if children were flinging blazing branches out from a fire into a looming wild night. Will found himself smiling and yet close to tears; and in the same moment he heard, very faintly over the low roar filling the world now from the west, the high joyous sound of many bells ringing, somewhere out there, somewhere in the City. Gwion softly shifted the tune and the time of his melody so that his harp chimed in with the bells, and Will breathed fast as he stood on the balcony looking all round at the livid menacing sky and the dark sea and the brilliant gay fireworks challenging both. He was filled with a wild exhilaration that was terror and delight in the contemptuous defiance they flung out to their doom.

Sea grew dark as sky; there was a new rumbling now as the waves grew, their angry tops visible far out, gleaming, throwing spray. The wind blew more strongly, whipping the king's thin hair across his face. Will put up his shield as a shelter. Gwion, still playing, moved back slowly towards the opening in the dome of the tower, moving so that the king moved before him, supported by the wall. And then with a great splitting flare of lightning the sky roared, and the sea seemed to cry out, and a huge wall of water came thundering towards them from the sea, over the sand and reedy marsh, swallowing trees and land and the lines of the river, spreading, swirling, wild. Bran gripped Will's arm with one hand, and Will saw, turning, that the sword Eirias was gleaming bluish-white as if from the inner heat of a fire.

In the dark sky over the City the fireworks suddenly ceased, and the sound of the bells became a long jangling confusion, wild over the lilt of Gwion's harp. Then they too abruptly stopped. But Gwion's music went on. The sea struck at the tower somewhere below; they felt it shake beneath their feet. Wave after wave came roaring, the sea rose higher, the king's light voice called out on the warm fierce wind, 'Lost! Lost!' And out of the raging sea came sailing impossibly towards them, slantwise down the great waves, the chunky boat with its black-haired captain and single tight-filled brown sail, and from his place at the tiller the sailor reached out an arm to Will and Bran, beckoning, the deck of his vessel almost level for a moment with the balcony of the tower.

'Go!' Gwion shouted to them; he stood leaning sideways, his shoulder supporting the failing king.

'Not without you!'

'I belong here!' They saw only the last flash of a smile over the shadowy bearded face. 'Go! Bran'! Save Eirias!'

 And the words hit Bran like a spur, and he seized Will and leapt with him into the boat tossing an arm's length away. The boat plunged down the side of a wave; for an instant they heard Gwion's harp sweet and faint through the thundering sea, until one single shattering blinding streak of brilliance came out of the sky and struck the tower, splitting the dome in two, and the golden arrow was driven from the roof as if it were suddenly a live malevolent thing and came hurtling over the waves down towards them. Out of an instinct not his own Will flung up the golden shield with both his arms, and the flashing arrow struck the shield and in a great flare of yellow light both vanished, flinging Will down on his back in the leaping boat.

His head rang, his eyes blurred. He saw Bran standing over him with the sword flaming blue in his hand, he heard the waves roar, he saw the lean dark face of the ferryman twisted with effort, as the man struggled to keep the boat heading away from harm. The world tossed and roared in a dark endless turmoil, with no count of time passing.

And then there was a lurch so violent that Will lost all consciousness, and when he opened his eyes he was in a world of grey light and soft sound, the gentle murmuring of small waves on a beach, and he and Bran were lying on a long stretch of sand, in a clear morning, with a whitish-blue sky overhead. The crystal sword gleamed white in Bran's hand, the scabbard lay at his side. The great beach reached far before them into the estuary of the River Dyfi; green sand-hills glimmered at its far edge, and beyond over the mountains and the grey roofs of Aberdyfi came the first golden edge of the rising sun.

Part Four: The Midsummer Tree

Sunrise

Jane had gone out before five, from the sleeping hotel. She did not wake her brothers. Irrationally but strongly she felt that when Merriman had said, 'Be on the beach at sunrise,' he had meant the words particularly for her. The boys, she thought, could follow in their own time.

So she slipped out alone into the grey morning, and crossed the silent road and railway track, hearing only the surf a distant thunder on the beach beyond. A dozen startled rabbits bounded away from her as she crossed the railway, their white scuds bobbing. Now and then a sheep's deep call floated down from the mountain. The morning was colourless and cold; Jane shivered, in spite of her sweater, and ran over the rolling golf course towards the high dunes. Then she was climbing through long wiry marram grass, with the dew-darkened sand sifting cold through her sandals, until the last step brought her breathless to the top of the tallest dune and the world opened before her in a great sweep of brown sand and grey sea, its flat horizon dissolving into mist where the arms of Cardigan Bay embraced the sea and the sky.

Something lay at her feet on the crest of the dune; looking down, Jane found a small brown rabbit. Its eyes were open and unblinking; it was dead. When she stepped over it she saw with a shock that its stomach had been torn open and the guts ripped out, before the rest of the untouched furry body had been tossed casually aside.

Jane went on down the dune in long sliding steps, more slowly, wondering for the first time what she should expect to see when the sun rose.

She crossed the dry sand above high-water mark, scarred with the footprints of yesterday's holiday-makers and their dogs. Then feeling suddenly vulnerable she went on, out to the vast exposed sweep of sand that fills the Dyfi estuary at low water, and stretches for ten miles and more up the coast on either side. Nothing was before her but the grey sea and sky and the long soft-roaring line of the surf. Through the sandals her feet could feel the hard rippled pattern left on the sand by the waves.

Flocks of roosting gulls rose lazily as she reached the smooth wet sand nearer the sea. Dunlins swooped, piping. Round any tide-left heap of seaweed thousands of sand-hoppers busily leapt, a strange flurrying mist of movement in all the stillness. The record of other flurrying was written already on the hard sand: gouges and claw-marks and empty broken shells, where hungry herring gulls at dawn had seized any mollusc a fraction too slow at burrowing out of reach. Here and there an enormous jellyfish lay stranded, with great slashes torn out of the translucent flesh by the seagulls' greedy beaks. Out over the sea the birds coasted, peaceful, quiet. Jane shivered again.

She veered to the left and walked towards the great jutting comer of sand where the River Dyfi met the sea. A thin sheet of water spread rapidly towards her feet; the tide was coming in, advancing more than a foot. every minute over these long flat sands. On the comer of the estuary Jane paused, isolated far out on the enormous beach, feeling small as a shellfish under the empty sky. She looked inland, to the village of Aberdyfi lying on the river, with the mountains rising on either side, and she saw that the sky over the huddle of grey slate roofs was pink and blue, mounded with reddish clouds. And then, behind Aberdyfi, the sun came up.

In a brilliant yellow-white glare the fierce globe rose out of the land, and Jane swung round again, back towards the sea. All the greyness had gone. Suddenly now the sea was blue, the curling wave tops shone a brilliant white; seagulls gleamed white in the air and in a long roosting line on the golden sandbar in the mouth of the river, where they had not even been visible before. Her shadow lay long and thin before her on the sand, reaching out to sea. Each shell had its own dark clear shadow now, each strand of weed, even the ripples of the sand. Only the mountains across the estuary were dark and obscure, vanishing into cloud; at their feet a long white arm of mist shrouded the river. Overhead in the blue sky high bars of cloud were moving fast inland, row after row, but the wind that she could feel rising down here, cold on her face, was blowing from the land out to the sea.

Now in the sunlight Jane saw clearly the small hieroglyphs written by the feet of birds all round her on the sand: the arrowhead footmarks of gulls, the scutter of sandpipers and turnstones. A black-backed gull swooped overhead, and its yelping, yodelling cry faded into the wind, a long laugh ending in a husky croak. A high piping came from the sea's edge. The water ran in faster, faster, over the flat sand. All at once Jane too began to run, away from the sea, towards the sun. The clouds flew over her head faster than she, rushing eastward; yet into her face the rising wind blew, stronger and stronger, picking up the sand as it rose, in long streamers and trails. It blew into her eyes in a fine stinging mist; she ran more slowly, staggering against it, leaning into it, seeing only the flying streams of bright sand.

Voices called her name; she saw Simon and Barney rushing towards her from the dunes. She thought: they came sooner than I expected... But something drove her to ignore them, to run on; even as they came up level with her she flung herself forward, eastward into the wind, with the boys at her side.

And then they stumbled as ahead of them two figures took shape in the flying sand, against the brilliant sun, like apparitions in a golden mist. The bars of cloud overtook the sun and the blazing light died, all colour dropping away, and before them stood Will and Bran. And bright against his white sweater and jeans Bran carried a gleaming sword.

Barney's yell was pure triumphant delight. 'You've got it!'

'Hey!' said Simon, beaming.

Jane said weakly, 'Oh goodness. Are you all right?' Then she saw the sword. 'Oh Bran!'

The wind whistled softly past them on the beach, chill but more docile now, blowing gritty streamers of sand against their legs. Bran held out the sword toward them, slantwise, turning the two-edged blade so that even beneath the clouding sky its engraved surface glittered and danced. They saw that a thin core of gold ran down the centre of the crystal blade from the handle, a golden handle behind an ornate crosspiece hilt, inlaid with mother-of-pearl.

'Eirias.' Bran said. 'Yes, very beautiful.' He was staring at the sword through narrowed eyes; his dark glasses were gone, and without them his face looked oddly naked and very pale. He turned inland slowly, the sword in his hand turning as if it were leading him. 'Eirias, blazing. Sword of the sunrise.'

'Reaching to the sunrise,' Will said.

"That's right!' Bran looked at him quickly, in a kind of grateful relief. 'It does, it turns to the east, Will. It - pulls, like.' He pointed the sword high towards the glow in the cloud cover behind which the newly risen sun shone.

'The sword knows why it was made,' Will said. He looked deeply tired, Jane thought:-drained, as though strength had run out of him - whereas Bran seemed full of new life, vibrant as a taut wire.

The world brightened and filled with sudden colour as the sun shone out for a moment through a gap in the cloud. The sword gleamed.

'Sheathe it, Bran!' Will said suddenly.

Bran nodded, as if the same quick wariness had struck his own mind, and they watched in astonishment as he seemed to mime the raising and thrusting of the sword into an imaginary scabbard on an imaginary sword belt at his side. But as he thrust the sword down, it disappeared. Jane, staring with her mouth open, found Bran looking at her. 'Ah, Jenny,' he said softly. 'You can't see it now?'

She shook her head.

'So no other ... ordinary person will either, I suppose,' Simon said.

Barney said, 'What about the Dark?'

Jane saw both Bran and Will glance up instinctively, warily, out at the sea. She turned, but saw only the golden bar and the white waves, and the blue sea creeping closer in over the long sands. She thought, what's been happening to them?

As if in answer Will said, 'There's too much to tell. But it's like a race, now.'

'To the east?' Bran said.

'To the east, where the sword leads us. A race against the rising.'

Simon said simply, 'What d'you want us to do?'

Will's straight brown hair was falling over his eyes; his round face was intent, concentrated, as if he were listening and speaking at the same time, repeating some inner voice. 'Go back,' he said, 'and you will find things ... arranged so that other people will not get in the way. And you must do what is arranged.'

'By Great-Uncle Merry?' Barney said hopefully.

'Yes,' Will said.

The sunlight died again, the wind whispered. Far out at sea the clouds were thicker, darker now, massing.

'There's a storm-front building,' Simon said.

'Not building,' Bran said. 'Built, and on its way.'

'One thing,' Will said. 'This now is the hardest time of all, because anything may happen. You have seen the Dark at work, you three. You know that although it may not destroy you, it can put you in the way of destroying yourself. So - your own judgement is all that can keep you on the track.' He was looking at all three of them anxiously.

Simon said, 'We know,' The wind was growing stronger; it began to tug at them again, lashing their legs and faces with sand. The clouds were solid over the place where the sun had disappeared, the light as cold and grey now as when Jane had first come down to the beach.

Sand whirled up in strange clouds from the dunes, flurrying, swirling, and suddenly there was a sound out of the gold-brown mist, a muffled thudding like the sound of a heart beating, but diffused all round them so they could not tell where it began. Jane saw Will's head go up stiff and alert, and Bran too turn in search like a questing dog; suddenly the two of them were standing back to back, covering each direction, watchful and protective. The thudding grew louder, closer, and Bran suddenly swept his arm up holding the sword Eirias, bright with a light of its own. But in the same moment the muffled sound was a thunder all around them, close, close, and out of the whirling sand came a white-robed figure galloping on a tall white horse. The White Rider sent his horse on one thundering pass beside them, the white hood hiding his face, white robe swirling, and at the last instant as they flinched away he leaned swiftly sideways from the saddle, sent Simon sprawling on the sand with one swinging blow, snatched Barney up into his grip, and disappeared.

The wind blew, the sand scurried and leapt, and there was no longer anyone there.

'Barney!' Jane's voice cracked. 'Barney! Will - where is he?'

Will's face was twisted with concern and an intent listening; he looked at her once, blindly, as if not sure who she was. Waving back over the dunes he said hoarsely, 'Go back - we will find him.' Then he was standing with Bran, each of them with one hand on the hilt of the crystal sword. Bran glancing sideways at him as if waiting for instruction; and Will said, Turn,' and without letting go of the sword they disappeared in the blink of an eye as if they had never been there. All that Jane and Simon had was the dark ghost that is left inside the eye by a vanished bright light, for in the last moment they had seen blue-white flame blaze up and down the length of the sword.

'They'll bring him back,' Simon said huskily.

'Oh Simon! What can we do?'

'Nothing. Hope. Do what Will told us. Aaah!' Simon ducked his head, blinking. 'This damn sand!' And as if in retort the wind dropped suddenly down to nothing, and the whirling sand fell to the beach, to lie in utter stillness, with no sign at all of its manic blowing except the telltale little escarpment of sand sloping back from every exposed shell or pebble on the beach.

In silence they tramped back together towards the dunes.

Nothing took shape in Barney's mind but the whirling sense of speed, and then a dim growing awareness of restraint, of his hands tied before him, - and a bandage over his eyes. Then rough hands were moving him, prodding him forward to stumble over stony ground. Once he fell, and cried out as his knee hit a rock; voices spoke impatiently in a strange guttural tongue, but after that a guiding hand was slipped beneath his arm.

He heard military-sounding commands, and the walking grew smoother; doors opened and closed, and then he was stopped and the covering pulled from his eyes. And Barney, blinking, found himself being studied by a weather-beaten dark-bearded face with bright dark eyes: wise eyes, deep-set, that reminded him of Merriman. The man was leaning against a heavy wooden table; he wore trousers and jerkin of leather over a thick woollen shirt. Still gazing at Barney, eyes flicking from his face to his clothes and back again, he said something curtly in the guttural speech.

'I don't understand,' Barney said.

The man's face hardened a little. 'English indeed,' he said. 'The voice to match the hair. Have they reached such a pass that they must use children now as spies?' Barney said nothing, since he felt he was spying indeed, peeping out of the corners of his eyes to discover where he might be. It was a low, dark room with wooden walls and floor and beamed roof; through a window he glimpsed outer walls of grey stone. Men who seemed to be soldiers stood grouped around; they wore only a kind of leathern armour over rough clothes, but each had a knife at his belt, and some carried bows as tall as themselves. They were looking at him with hostility, some with open hatred. Barney shivered suddenly, in fear, at the sight of one man's hand playing restlessly with his knife. He looked up desperately at the dark-eyed man.

'I'm not a spy, truly. I don't even know where I am. I was kidnapped.'

'Kidnapped?' The man frowned, uncomprehending.

'Stolen. Carried on.'

The dark eyes grew colder. 'Stolen, to be brought to my stronghold, in the one part of Wales where no Englishman even of my allies dares set foot? The Marcher Lords are foolish, and do many stupid things in their rivalries, but none is quite as stupid as that. Try again, boy, if you wish to save your life. I can see no reason yet why I should not listen to my men, who are anxious to hang you by the neck in the next five minutes, outside that door.'

Barney's throat was dry; he could scarcely swallow. He said again, whispering, 'I am not a spy.'

From the shadows behind the leader the man with the knife said something roughly, contemptuously, but another laid a hand on his arm and stepped forward, speaking a few soft words: an old man, with a heavily wrinkled brown face and wisping white hair and beard. He was looking closely at Barney.

Suddenly another soldier came hurrying into the room and spoke rapidly in the guttural tongue; the bearded leader let out an angry exclamation. He said a few brief words to the old man, nodding in Barney's direction, then swung preoccupied out of the room with men close around him. Only two soldiers remained, guarding the door.

'And where were you stolen from, boy?' The old man's voice was soft and lisping, with a heavy accent.

Barney said miserably, 'From - from a long way away.'

Bright eyes watched him sceptically through the wrinkles. 'I am Iolo Goch, bard to the Prince, and I know him well, boy. He has had bad news, and it will not help his mood. When he comes back I advise you to tell him the truth.'

'The Prince?' Barney said.

The old man looked at him coldly, as if Barney were questioning the title. 'Owain Glyndwr,' he said with chilly pride. 'Prince, indeed. Owain ap Gruffydd, Lord of Glyndyvrdwy and Sycharth, Yscoed and Gwynyoneth, and now in this great rebellion proclaimed Prince of Wales. And all Wales is with him against the English, and Henry Plantagenet cannot catch him, nor hold even his English castles here or the towns they are pleased to call English burghs. All Wales is rising.' A lilt came into his voice, as if he were singing. 'And the fanners have sold their cattle to buy arms, and the mothers have sent their sons to the mountains, to join Owain. The Welshmen who work in England have come home, bringing English weapons with them, and the Welsh scholars at Oxford and Cambridge have left their books, to join Owain. And we are winning. Wales has a leader again. And Englishmen will no longer own Welsh lands and despise and rule us from Westminster, for Owain ap Gruffydd will lead us to set ourselves free!'

Barney listened helplessly to the passion in the frail voice, his uneasiness growing. He felt very lonely and small.

The door crashed open, and Glyndwr was there again among his men, scowling, silent. He glanced from Barney to Iolo Goch; the old man shrugged.

'Listen to me now, boy,' said Glyndwr, his dark-bearded face grim. "There is a comet in the sky these nights, to show my coming triumph, and on that sign I shall ride. Nothing shall stop me. Nothing - least of all the thought of tearing apart a spy from King Henry who refuses to tell his sending.' His voice rose a little, quivering with control. 'I have just heard that a new English army is camped the other side of Welshpool. You have one minute remaining to tell me who sent you into Wales, and whether that army knows I am here.'

Only one thought sang through the fear loud in Barney's head now: He may belong to the Dark, don't talk, don't tell him who you are...

He said, choking, 'No.'

The man shrugged. 'Very well. I have sent to speak once more with the one who brought you to me. The light-voiced one from Tywyn, with the white horse. And after that -'

He broke off, staring at the door, and as Barney turned his head the whirling seemed to be back, the speed and the turning, turning ...

... and turning, turning. Will and Bran, each holding the gleaming crystal sword, found themselves suddenly still now. A heavy wooden door before them burst open, and inside in a low-roofed dark room they saw a group of armed men. One stood separate, a dark bearded man with an air of authority, and before him was Barney standing very small and tight faced. Several of the men lunged forward in shouting confusion, and the bearded one snapped one sharp word and they fell back instantly like startled dogs, swift but reluctant, looking at their leader with an astonishment that was almost suspicion.

Will's senses as an Old One were vibrating like a harp-string. He stared at the man with the beard, and the man stared back for a moment and then gradually the grim lines of his face were relaxing, changing, becoming a smile. An unspoken greeting in the Old Speech came into Will's mind, and aloud the man said, in halting English, 'You are come to a wild time. Sign-seeker. But welcome, if my men do not take you for another English informer such as we have here.'

'Will,' Barney said huskily, 'he keeps telling me I'm a spy and they want to kill me. Do you know him?'

Will said slowly, 'Greetings, Owain Glyndwr.'

'The greatest Welshman of all.' Bran was gazing in awe at the bearded man. 'The only one ever to unite Wales against the English, through all the quarrelling and feuding.'

Glyndwr was looking at him with narrowed eyes. 'But you ... you ...' He glanced uncertainly at Will's blank expressionless face, and shook his head crossly. 'Ah no, nonsense. No place for dreams in my head, with the last and hardest battle waiting us. And the bloody English coming up like ants in spring.' He turned to Will, waving a hand at Barney. 'Is the boy with you. Old One?'

'Yes,' Will said.

"That explains much,' Glyndwr said. 'But not his stupidity in failing to tell me so.'

Barney said defensively, 'How was I to know you weren't part of the Dark?'

The Welshman put back his head with a curt incredulous laugh, but then straightened, looking with something like respect. 'Well. True. Not badly done. Sais bach. Take him now, Sign-seeker.' He reached out one strong arm and propelled Barney backwards as if he had been a toy. 'And go about your purposes in my land in peace, and I will give you any support you need.'

'There will be great need,' Will said grimly, 'if it is not already too late.' He pointed to the sword that Bran was already holding out before him, in wonder and alarm; the blade was flickering again with blue light, as it had done at the destruction of the Lost Land, as it had done at the rushing descent of the Dark that had carried Barney away.

Glyndwr said abruptly, 'The Dark. But this is my strong-hold - there can be none of the Dark here.'

'There are many,' said a soft voice at the door. 'And by right, since you let the first of them in.'

'Diawl!' Glyndwr sprang upright, instinct pulling a dagger from his belt; for in the doorway, between two armed men frozen helplessly out of movement, stood the White Rider, a robed figure with eyes and teeth gleaming out of the shadows of the white hood.

'You sent for me, Owain of Gwynedd,' the Rider said.

'Sent for you?'

'The light-voiced one from Tywyn, with the white horse,' said the White Rider mockingly. 'Whom your men welcomed so warmly for the gift of a spying English boy.' The voice hardened. 'And who claims in return now another boy, of more significance, and with him the sword he carries.'

'You have no claim over me,' Bran said with contempt, 'The sword brings me into my power and out of your reach, in this time or any other,'

Owain Glyndwr looked at Bran, at Will, and back at Bran: at the white hair and the pale face with its tawny eyes, and the sword-blade flickering with blue flame.

'The sword is two edged,' the White Rider said.

Bran said, 'The sword belongs to the Light.'

'The sword belongs to no one. It is in the possession of the Light only. Its power is the power of the Old Magic that made it.'

'Made it at the command of the Light,' Will said.

'And yet also the tomb of every hope,' said the Rider softly, masked still by the white hood. 'Do you not remember. Old One? It was written. And there was no word as to whose hopes should be entombed.'

'But they shall be your own!' Owain Glyndwr said suddenly, and he snapped some words in Welsh to his men and sprang towards the back wall of the room, reaching for something. Soldiers flung themselves at the white-robed form of the Rider. None managed to touch him; they fell sideways, backwards, colliding with some hard invisible wall, and the Rider lunged forward at Bran. But Bran swept the sword Eirias to and fro before him as if writing in the air, and the sword left a sheet of blue flame hanging and the Rider fell back with a shriek. Even as he moved he seemed to change, to multiply as if suddenly there were a crowd with him; but Owain was calling, urgently and Will dared not wait to see, but followed the rest through a doorway they had not seen before.

Then leather-clad Welsh soldiers were pushing them on to the backs of a string of sturdy grey mountain ponies, and past slate cliffs and stone walls and through green lanes they trotted swiftly and silently where Owain led. The roar and confusion of the Dark rose behind them, and with it the clash of swords and the song of arrows from long bows, and voices shouting in English as well as Welsh. Will said nothing, but he knew that another battle as well as their own was beginning there, the reason for the Dark's choice of this time for their new hostaging, and that Owain was not in the place where he must have ached to be.

Only when they reached a mountain path where the land rose very steeply, and Owain motioned them to dismount and to follow him on foot, did Will look openly back - and saw smoke rising from the grey roofs they had left, and flame leaping.

Owain said, bitterly, 'The Norman rides always on the back of the Dark, as the Saxon did, and the Dane.'

Barney said unhappily, 'And I'm all those things mixed up, I suppose. Norman and Anglo-Saxon and Dane.'

'In what century?' Glyndwr said, pausing to stare ahead up the mountain.

'The twentieth,' Barney said.

The Welshman stopped very still for a moment. He looked at Will. Will nodded.

'Iesu mawr,' Glyndwr said; then he smiled. 'If the Circle spreads that far forward, it is not so bad to find failure here, for a time. Until the last summoning of the Circle, outside all Time.' He looked down at Barney. 'No worry about your race, boy. Time changes the nature of them all, in the end.' Bran said from above them, urgently, 'The Dark is coming!' In his hand Eirias was burning a brighter blue.

Owain looked down the mountain the way they had come, and his mouth tightened. Will turned too, and gasped; a sheet of white flame was moving steadily towards them up through the bracken, without sound or heat, remorseless in its pursuit of those it sought to destroy. A troop of Glyndwr's soldiers stood directly in its path.

'It is not so bad as it seems,' the Welsh leader said, watching Will's face. 'Glyndwr has the tricks of an Old One, be assured.' The white teeth flashed in his dark face, and he clapped Will on the shoulder, pushing him. 'Go,' he said, 'go up that path, and you shall shortly be where you are meant to be. Leave me to take the Dark on a dance into these hills. And if my men and I shall seem to be kept in these hills forever, that will not be such a bad thing, for it will prove to my people that the Lord of the Dark was wrong, and that hope does not lie dead in a tomb but is always alive for the hearts of men.'

He glanced at Bran and raised his dagger in a formal salute. 'Pob hwyl, my brother,' he said gravely. Then he and his men were gone, darting back down the mountain, and Will led the way up the path on which he had been set. It wound between bleak points of grey rock, narrower and narrower, until they came to a sudden turn where the rock over-hung the path and each of them had to bend his head to pass beneath a low natural arch. And at the moment when all three of them were in line, on that piece of the path which lay under the rock, there was a whirling and a turning of the air about them, and a long, strange, husky shrieking in their ears, and when the giddiness went out of their minds they were in a different place and a different time.

Part Four: The Midsummer Tree

The Train

Simon and Jane had left the dunes and crossed the golf course, coming to the wire fence edging the railway track, when they heard the strange noise. It rang out over their heads on the wind: a clear startling metallic clang, like the single blow of a hammer on an anvil.

'What was that?' Jane was very jumpy still.

'Railway signal. Look,' Simon pointed to the lonely pole standing beside the track ahead. 'I never noticed it was there before.'

'Must be a train coming.'

Simon said slowly, 'But the signal's gone to "Stop".'

'Well, the train's already been by, then,' Jane said without interest. 'Oh Simon, I wish we knew what's happening to Barney!' Then she broke off, listening, as a long, shrieking, husky whistle came on the wind, from a long way off towards Tywyn. They were standing close to the railway fence now. The whistle came again, louder. There was a humming in the rails.

"There's the train coming now.'

'But such a funny noise -'

And they saw in the distance, against the growing grey clouds, a long plume of white smoke, and heard the rising roar, closer and closer, of a fast-moving train. Then it came into sight, round the distant bend, and grew clearer, rushing at them, and it was like no train they had ever seen there before.

Simon gave a great whoop of astonished joy. 'Steam!'

Almost at once there was a sudden hissing and groaning and scraping as the train came closer to the signal and the driver flung on his brakes; black smoke belched from the funnel of the enormous green locomotive harnessed to the long train - longer than any normally on that line, a dozen carriages or more, all gleaming as if new in two colours, chocolate brown below and a creamy almost-white above. The train slowed, slowed, its wheels screeching and whimpering on the track; the vast engine came slowly past Simon and Jane standing wide-eyed at the fence, and the driver and fireman, blue-overalled, dusty-faced, grinned and raised hands in greeting. With a last long whish of steam the train stopped, and stood still, hissing gently.

And in the first carriage, a door swung open and a tall figure stood in the doorway, with one hand outstretched, beckoning.

'Come on now! Over the fence, quickly!' 'Great-Uncle Merry!'

They clambered over the wire fence and Merriman hauled them one by one up into the train; from the level of the ground the door was almost as high as their heads. Merriman swung the door shut with a solid crash; they heard the clang of the signal again as its arm went down, and then the locomotive began to stir, a slow heavy chuffing rising in speed and sound, with the dunes slipping past outside, faster and faster, swaying, rocking, clickety-clacking, the wheels beginning to sing.

Jane choked suddenly and clutched at Merriman. 'Barney - they've taken Barney, Gumerry -'

He held her close for a moment. 'Quietly, gently now, Barney is where we are going.'

'Truly?'

'Truly.'

Merriman led them to the first compartment in the swaying train, its long plush seats quite empty. He closed the sliding glass door behind them, and they collapsed on to the padded cushions.

'That engine, Gumerry!' Simon, an expert railway-fancier, was lost in admiring wonder. 'King class, from the old Great Western, ages ago - and this old-fashioned carriage -1 didn't think they even existed any more, outside a museum.'

'No,' Merriman said vaguely. Sitting there he looked the same rumpled figure who had wandered occasionally into their lives for as long as they could remember; his long bony frame wore a nondescript dark sweater and trousers, and his thick white hair was tousled. He was staring out of the window; the little compartment was suddenly dark, lit only by a dim yellow bulb in the ceiling, as the train dived into a succession of short tunnels and came out beyond Aberdyfi, running again along the river. A small station whisked by.

'Is it some special train?' Simon said. 'Not stopping at stations?'

'Where are we going?' said Jane.

'Not too far,' Merriman said. 'Not very far.'

Simon said abruptly, 'Will and Bran have the sword.'

'I know,' Merriman said. He smiled proudly. 'I know. Rest now a little, and wait. And - do not show surprise at meeting anyone on this train. No matter who it may be.'

Before they could wonder what he might mean, a figure stopped in the corridor outside their compartment. The windowed door slid open, and John Rowlands stood there, swaying with the motion of the train. He looked spruce and unfamiliar in a dark and rather baggy suit; he was staring at them in amazement.

'Good day, John Rowlands,' Merriman said.

'Well fancy that now,' John Rowlands said blankly. He smiled slowly at Jane and Simon, and nodded; then he looked at Merriman, a strange look, wary and puzzled. 'Funny places we do meet in,' he said.

Merriman gave an amiable shrug.

'Where are you going, Mr Rowlands?' Jane said.

John Rowlands grimaced. 'Shrewsbury, to the dentist. And for Blod to do a bit of shopping.'

The train's whistle shrieked, and another small station flashed by. They were deep in the hills now, travelling through cuttings, with little to be seen outside the windows but high grassy banks blurred by speed. In the train corridor someone approached John Rowlands; he straightened, standing back.

Simon said politely, 'Hallo, Mrs Rowlands.'

Jane heard the warm Welsh voice.

'Well here is a nice surprise then! I wondered who John was talking to. Not having seen anyone we knew get on the train at Tywyn.'

There was a faint question in the words, but Simon rode over it.

'Isn't it a marvellous train? Steam!'

'Just like in the old days,' John Rowlands said. 'Must be some sort of anniversary, revival, whatever. I thought I was back thirty years when she came into the station.'

'Won't you come and sit in here with us, Mrs Rowlands?' Jane said.

'That would be very nice.' Smiling, Blodwen Rowlands moved into the doorway, so that she could see Jane; her eyes flickered past to Merriman.

'Oh,' said Jane. 'Mrs Rowlands - this is our great-uncle, Professor Lyon.'

'Sut 'dach chi?' said Merriman's deep voice, expressionless.

'How do you do?' said Blodwen Rowlands, nodding, still smiling. She added, to Jane, 'I will just get my bag,' and disappeared along the corridor.

'I didn't know you spoke Welsh,' Simon said.

'On occasion,' Merriman said.

'Like a native,' said John Rowlands. He came into the compartment and sat down next to Simon. Two figures passed in the corridor, then another, without looking in.

'Is the train full?' Jane said, looking after the last retreating back.

'Filling up,' Merriman said. Mrs Rowlands came back with her handbag and hesitated in the doorway.

'Would you like the comer?' said Jane automatically, moving up the seat towards Merriman.

'Thank you, my dear.' Blodwen Rowlands gave her the astonishing smile that made her face glow with warmth, and sat down next to her. 'And where are you all going?' she said.

Jane looked into her eyes, so friendly and close, and paused. A great sense of strangeness swept over her; there seemed to be no light in Blodwen Rowlands' eyes, as if they were not rounded but flat. She thought: Don't be silly; blinked, looked away and said, 'Great-Uncle Merry's taking us out for the day.'

'To the Marches,' Merriman said in the deep unemotional voice he used for strangers. 'The Border country. Where all the battles so often began.'

Blodwen Rowlands took some knitting from her bag, a bright red bundle, and said, 'Very nice.'

The train swayed and sang. A large man passed slowly in the corridor, paused, looked in, and gave a courteous half-bow towards Merriman. They all stared at him. He had indeed a striking appearance; his skin was very black and his thick hair snow-white. Merriman inclined his head gravely in return, and the man moved away. Jane became conscious of a rapid clicking sound; Mrs Rowlands had started knitting very fast.

Simon said in a fascinated hiss, 'Who was that?'

'An acquaintance of mine,' Merriman said.

Down the corridor in the same direction, limping, leaning on a stick, came an elderly lady in an elegant but old-fashioned coat, with a toque-like hat set at a dashing angle on her head and a certain wild wispiness about her pinned up grey hair. She nodded in at Merriman. 'Good day, Lyon,' she said in a resonant, imperious voice.

Merriman said gravely, 'Good day, madam,' and the lady's sharp eyes flickered over them all and then she was gone.

Four small boys ran past, laughing, clattering, boisterous. 'What weird clothes!' said Jane with interest, leaning to peer after them. 'Sort of tunics.'

The train swayed and lurched, roaring round a bend, and she sat back again rather suddenly.

Simon said thoughtfully, 'Some kind of uniform, maybe.'

Mrs Rowlands took out a second ball of wool from her bag, yellow, and began knitting it together with the red.

'A busy train,' John Rowlands said. 'If there were more like this they might not be talking about closing the line.'

Simon stood up, steadying himself against the door jamb. 'Excuse me a moment.'

'Certainly,' Merriman said. He began an amiable conversation with John Rowlands about the necessity for railway services, while Mrs Rowlands listened, rapidly knitting, and Jane watched the purple-brown sweep of the mountains and the close grassy banks alternately flashing by. Simon disappeared for a long time, then stuck his head in the door.

'Show you something,' he said casually to Jane.

She went out with him; he closed the door and drew her to the end of the corridor, where a locked door ended the coach.

'This is the front end of the train,' Simon said in a peculiar voice. "There's nothing this side of our compartment.'

'So?' said Jane.

'So if you think about all those people who've been coming past - '

Jane gasped; it came out as a sort of hiccup. 'They came from this end! All of them! But they couldn't have!'

'But they did,' Simon said. 'And I bet you there'll be more after we go back. The train's pretty full already, as far as I went. With the most peculiar mixture of people, in all different clothes. All kinds and colours and shapes. It's like the United Nations.'

They looked at one another.

Jane said slowly, 'Better go back, I suppose.'

'Look normal,' Simon said. 'Concentrate.'

Jane was trying so hard to concentrate that she went past the door of their compartment to the next. A man sitting in the comer there facing her looked up as she approached, and smiled through the window a sudden warm broad smile of recognition. He was an oldish man with a round, weather-beaten face and wiry grey eyebrows; his hair fluffed out in a grey tonsure round a bald head.

'Captain Toms!' Jane said joyfully, and then she blinked, or the air seemed to blink, and there was no one there.

'What?' Simon said.

'I thought - ' Jane said. 'I thought I saw someone we used to know.' She looked hard at the empty seat; there was nobody in the compartment at all. 'But -I didn't.'

'Normal, now,' Simon said. He opened the sliding door of their own compartment and they went back in.

They sat in silence, while voices eddied round them and Mrs Rowlands' needles furiously clicked. Jane leaned her head back, looking out of the window, letting the rhythm of the wheels carry her mind. They clattered and clacked, merging with the needles' sound; with a twitch of nightmare she felt they were chattering: into the dark, into the dark, into the dark.

Then all at once Jane's mouth was dry, and her fingers clutched at the seat. Like a mist she could see in the fields outside a group of horsemen riding, galloping, leaping hedges, and though the train was rushing at full speed yet they were riding as fast as the train...

In troops and streams they rode, some all in black and some in white. And as the massing grey clouds came rolling in from the west the horsemen were galloping now through the clouds, through the sky, as if the clouds were great grey mountains and hills.

Wide-eyed, Jane hardly dared move. She edged one hand along the seat towards Merriman, and before it reached him his own strong hand was holding hers for a moment.

'Don't be afraid, Jane,' he said in her ear. 'This is the Rising, yes, the last pursuit. And the danger will grow now. But they will not touch this time-train of ours, for we carry on it something of their own.'

The train, thundering, rocked furiously along the track. The compartment grew dim as the sky outside darkened with cloud and rushing figures; the rhythm of Mrs Rowlands' busy needles faltered, and Jane saw the bright colours waver as her fingers slowed. The sound of the train began to change; the beat of its wheels fell off, the pitch of its fast song dropped; there was a sharp muffled report under the wheels somewhere a little way ahead, and then another, and the train began gradually to slow down.

'Maroons!' John Rowlands said in astonishment. 'The old maroons going off, that they used to put on the track for fog warnings.' He looked out of the window. 'And indeed that sky is so grey it might well be fog, now.'

The brakes skirled at the train's wheels; the flying landscape slowed, and suddenly the whirling riders were lost in the cloud; grey cloud was everywhere, and swirling mist. Hissing, rattling, the train slowed to a crawl, and all at once a little station was slipping up to them outside the windows. Simon jumped up, pulling Jane out into the corridor; they peered out. The station seemed to be a single platform in the middle of nowhere, without a name, and only a single arch-like structure indefinite in the mist. Beyond, dimly visible through a gap in the cloud, a long hill rose on the horizon ahead. Then slowly, gradually, three vague forms emerged from the arch.

Simon stared at them. 'Quick! Jane, open the door!' He lunged past her and turned the long handle, thrusting the door outward, reaching down. And Bran and Will and Barney climbed into the train.

'Oh!' Jane said, quite unable to say anything else, and she gave Barney a quick hard hug, and to her surprise Barney hugged her back. The train began to move. In clouds and swirls the mist came swooping round the platform and the dim arch, as if all were dissolving into emptiness, and from the compartment behind them Blodwen Rowlands' musical voice said in pleasure, 'Well Bran, cariad, how lovely! Are the trials in Shrewsbury, then? John never said -'

'I was telling Blodwen yesterday,' John Rowlands' deep careful voice broke in, before Bran could speak, 'about you boys going to help Idris Jones Ty-Bont with getting the sheep to the sheepdog trials. His turn to supply them for the heats, it is, having no dogs of his own entered this year. I think he is chairman, isn't it, Bran?'

'Yes,' Bran said smoothly, as they crowded into the compartment. 'And we had to pick up a few more sheep out here, so no more room for us on the lorry, and Mr Jones put us on the train. A surprise to see you, now.'

'And the little one going too, now there's fun for him,' said Mrs Rowlands, smiling at Barney as if it were the most natural thing in the world for him to be helping herd sheep.

Barney smiled dutifully back, said nothing, but slid into the space beside Simon. The train swayed and sang, rushing at full speed again; the mass of the long low hill was rising ahead now like a wall. The grey clouds swept overhead. Hollow-throated, Jane saw the riders again, crowds and streams of them, flying through the sky. Panic gripped her; where were they riding to, where was the train rushing, where - ?

'Sit by me, lovely,' said Mrs Rowlands to Bran, an affectionate tug at his arm bringing him down abruptly to the seat between her and Jane. Hastily making room, Jane wondered if the sword were still in the scabbard unseen at Bran's side.

Will stood swaying in the doorway, one hand at either side of the door-frame. He said, looking at Merriman as if at a stranger, 'Many people on the train?'

'It is really quite full,' said Merriman with the same stiff politeness.

And suddenly the engine gave a great shriek, and the train dived under the hill. In one gulp a tunnel swallowed it, and darkness was all around, a low roaring close in their ears, the sulphurous train-smell filling the air they breathed. Jane had a quick glimpse of apprehension on Mrs Rowlands' pleasant face. Then she forgot it in the overwhelmingly vivid sense of the way they were driving into the earth, through the mountain, under tons and fathoms of rock, as the train's track carried them inexorably on.

Gradually she began to feel that they were no longer in a train at all, that the bounds of the small boxlike room in which they sat were beginning to fade. Everyone was there still; the figures sitting, and Will surveying them from what had been the doorway; but now a strange glow had begun all around them, as if it were their speed made visible, as if the glow itself were whirling them along. She felt that they were rushing through the earth, riding on some power of their own, and a great company of people with them, all flying helter-skelter eastward. The glow of light around them grew and grew, became bright; they were contained in brightness, as if they rode on a river of light.

Jane saw wonder and incomprehension on John Rowlands' strong weather-lined face. Blodwen Rowlands gave a sudden whimper of fear; she scrambled to her feet, dropping her knitting on the floor, and lurched over to sit by his side. Rowlands put a comforting arm around her, the support of long affection. 'There now, cariad,' he said. 'There now, don't be afraid. Just rest easy, and trust them. Will's Mr Merriman will keep us out of harm.'

But both Will and Merriman now, Jane saw in astonishment, were on their feet and standing before Blodwen Rowlands; both motionless, yet giving an impression of immense silent menace, the menace of accusation. Behind them. Bran stood up slowly, and with the same curious play-acting gesture that Jane remembered from the beach, he drew the invisible sword from the invisible scabbard at his side. And suddenly the sword was there, terrible, naked, gleaming, and the length of its crystal blade was flickering with blue fire. Blodwen Rowlands shrank back, pressing against her husband's side.

'What is it?' said John Rowlands in angry distress, staring up at Merriman's silent towering form.

'Keep them away from me!' Mrs Rowlands cried. 'John!'

John Rowlands could not stand up, with the weight of her pressing him back, but he seemed to grow more upright as he stared up at them, accusing, reproachful.

'Leave her alone now, you people, whatever you are doing. What has she to do with your concerns? She is my wife and I will not have her frightened. Leave her alone!'

Bran stretched out the tip of the sword Eirias, with the blue flames dancing up and down all its length, and held it so that the tip was between Will and Merriman, pointing at Blodwen Rowlands' contorted face.

'Cowardly it is,' he said in a cold adult voice, 'to shelter behind those who love you, without giving love in return. Very clever, of course. Almost as clever as being in the right place to help the growing up of a strange pale boy out of the past - and making sure he never does or says or thinks anything without your knowing all about it.'

'What is the matter with you, Bran?' said John Rowlands in anguished appeal.

The brightness carried them on, singing like the train, hollow in the hill.

Merriman said in his deep voice, expressionless, 'She belongs to the Dark.'

'You're mad!' John Rowlands' hand tightened on his wife's arm.

'Our hostage,' Will said. 'As the White Rider of the Dark took Barney hostage thinking to get Bran and the sword in exchange. A hostage for our safe running, now.'

'Safe running!' Blodwen Rowlands said in a new soft voice, and laughed.

John Rowlands sat very still, and Jane winced at the horrified disbelief beginning to dawn in his eyes.

Mrs Rowlands' laughter was cold, and her voice was all at once oddly different, soft and sibilant but with a new force behind it. Jane could not believe that it was coming from the familiar warm friendly face she could still see.

'Safe running!' said the voice, laughing. 'You run to your destruction, all of you, and the sword will be no saviour. The Dark is massed and waiting, with your hostage here to guide it. Risen and waiting, Lyon, Stanton, Pendragon, risen and waiting. And not all your Things of Power will help you to the tree, when you rush out of the earth in a moment now and the Dark force falls upon you.'

She stood up, John Rowlands' hand dropping limp away from her, to he on the seat like a discarded glove while he sat there appalled and staring. She seemed to Jane taller, gleaming in the misty brightness with a light of her own. Deliberately Blodwen Rowlands moved towards the point of the sword Eirias, and Bran slowly put up the sword, letting the point rise so that it would not touch her, and Will and Merriman moved aside.

'Eirias may not destroy the Lords of the Dark,' Blodwen Rowlands said triumphantly.

'None but the Dark may destroy the Dark,' Will said. "That is a part of the law that we have not forgotten.'

Merriman took one step forward. Suddenly he was the focus of everything around them; of all the Six, of all the power and intention of the Light driving, driving through the stone and the land towards its mysterious goal. He stood tall in the brightness, his white hair gleaming above the long cloak of dark blue that he wore now, and he raised one arm and pointed at Blodwen Rowlands.

'The Light throws you from this stream of Time,' he said, his voice ringing as the song of the train had rung through the hollow land. 'We drive you before us. Out! Out! And save yourself as best you can, when you fly forth ahead of this great progress, and the terrible force of your Dark falls upon you thinking to ambush the Light.' Blodwen Rowlands gave a thin cry of rage, the sound of it clutching Jane by the throat with horror; and she seemed to spin round, and change, and whirl away into the dark space around them as a white-robed form on a galloping white horse. Leaping high, caught up in fury and fear, the White Rider rose out of the brightness in which they travelled and was gone, ahead of them, into a misty darkness where nothing could be seen.

Part Four: The Midsummer Tree

The River

The great formless vehicle of the Light rushed on through the mountain as if it were a vessel carried along by an under-ground river. John Rowlands sat still and silent with a face like stone, and they did not look at him for more than an instant; it was not bearable.

At last Jane said. 'The tree, Gumerry? What did she mean? She said. Not all your Things of Power will help you to the tree.'

Merriman stood tall and imposing in his dark cloak, its hood falling like a cowl over his neck. His white hair gleamed in the brightness all around, and so did Bran's beside him; they looked like two figures from some unknown race.

'The midsummer tree, in the Chiltern Hills of England,' Merriman said. 'The tree of life, the pillar of the world ... Once every seven hundred years it may be seen in this land, and on it the mistletoe that will bear its silver blossom on that one day. And whoever shall cut the blossom, at the moment when it opens fully from the bud, shall turn events and have the right to command the Old Magic and the Wild Magic, to drive all rival powers out of the world and out of Time.'

Barney said, almost whispering, 'And we're going to the tree?'

'That is where we are going,' Merriman said. 'And so is the Dark, following the path it has been planning all along, to make the final moment of its last and greatest rising the moment when the silver is on the tree.'

'But how can you be sure we shall cut the blossom, and not the Dark?' Jane could see nothing but the rushing brightness all around them, but for an instant she had a fierce image of the grey sky filled with riding Lords of the Dark, with Blodwen Rowlands, the White Rider, laughing long cold laughter at their head.

'We have the sword Eirias,' Merriman said, 'and they do not. And although it is two-edged and may be possessed by either Light or Dark, yet it was indeed made at the command of the Light. If Bran can keep the sword safe, and if the Six and the Circle can keep Bran safe, then all will be well. And where the midsummer tree grows tall,' his voice deepened with the lilt of the verse, 'by Pendragon's sword the Dark shall fall.'

Will glanced automatically at the crystal sword, glinting in Bran's hand. The blade was clear now, the blue flickering fire gone. But as he looked, it seemed to him that on the very point of the blade the dancing blue fire again began to grow - very faint and dim at first, but growing, creeping inch by inch up the blade towards the golden hilt. And the movement of the rushing river of light about them began to change; it became more pronounced, as though they were indeed tossing upon a river. They seemed to be in a boat, the six of them and John Rowlands; Will knew it even though he could see nothing tangible around them at all.

His eye came to Barney, and stopped, and he smiled to himself. The younger boy was sitting oblivious to anyone around him, grinning a private grin of pure pleasure in the sensations swirling through his mind. The fear put into him by Glyndwr's men had evaporated, and there was no ounce of nervousness in him now, but only wonder and astonishment and delight.

Barney looked up suddenly as if he knew Will was looking at him; the grin widened and he said, 'It's like the best kind of dream.'

'Yes it is,' said Will. 'But don't... relax into it. You can't trust what will happen.'

'I know,' Barney said equably. 'Honest. I know. But all the same ... woo! It was a head-back, beaming, yelping shout of joyful excitement, spontaneous and startling, and every face turned; their apprehensiveness faded for a moment, and even Merriman, stern for the first instant, laughed aloud. 'Yes!' he said. 'We need that as much as the sword, Barney.'

And then suddenly they were out into the day, into grey skies with a watery sun trying in vain to break through thickening cloud, and they could see that their boat was a long high-prowed deckless vessel set with thwarts, and that there were other boats before and behind them of the same shape, filled with figures who could not properly be seen. The mist hovered about them again, and with it a wavering of the air like the tremor of heat, though there was no heat. Will heard a faint familiar music in the air, delicate and fleeting. He looked out at the water and saw glimmering wavelets and an indistinct shore, with green fields beyond, and the shadowy figures of men and horses. For an instant the mist parted, in drifting tatters, and he saw hills rising behind, and the smoke of fires, and an army gathered there waiting, rank after rank of men, many of them on horseback, on small sturdy muscular animals that looked as tough and dark and determined as the riders they bore. It was a cavalry armed with glinting swords, waiting, tense. Then the mist closed again and there was only grey-white space.

'Who are they?' Simon said hoarsely.

'You saw them, then?' Will glanced round; the three of them were grouped beside him, with Bran and Merriman standing remote in the bow of the boat, and John Rowlands a grim hunched figure in the stem.

'Who are they?' Jane said. All three Drews seemed deeply intent, staring vainly into the mist. Will could see Barney's hands convulsively opening and closing, as if longing to be put to use.

Sounds came out of the greyness suddenly, vague, confused, from every direction at once: the clash of weapons, the neighing of horses, the shouts and screams and triumphant yells of men fighting. Simon spun about, his face twisted with frustration. 'Oh where are they, what is it? Will!' It was a cry for help, pleading.

Merriman's deep voice said from the bow, with an ache of the same desperation, 'You may well yearn towards it. It is the first making and breaking of your land, this long-worked land so many centuries on the anvil. It is Mons Badonicus, the Battle of Badon, where the Dark comes rising and ... How goes the day?' The voice rose into a searching shout, a question asked of no one visible, thrown at random into the grey mist.

And out of the midst as if in answer a long shape loomed: a boat longer and larger than their own, taking shape nearer the bank as they drifted towards it on the stream. It was decked with weapons, filled with armed men, with plain green flags flying at stem and stern; it seemed the boat of a general, rather than a king. But there was the bearing of a king in the figure at its prow: a square-shouldered man with sunburned face and clear blue eyes; brown hair streaked with grey, and a short grey beard. He wore a short blue-green cloak the colour of the sea, and beneath it armour like that of a Roman. And round his neck, half-hidden but glittering with a light like fire, he wore Will's linked circle of Signs.

He looked at Merriman, and raised a hand in triumphant salute. 'We go well, my lion. We have them, now, at last; they will go back to their own lairs and settle, and leave us to live in peace. For a while...'

He sighed. His bright eyes moved to Bran, and softened. 'Show me the sword, my son,' he said.

Bran had been gazing at him, unwavering, since the boat had first appeared. Now without a flicker of change in his intent gaze he drew himself upright, a slim pale figure with his colourless face and white hair, and raised the blue-flaming blade of Eirias in a formal salute.

'And still it flames for the Dark. Still the warning.' The words were another sigh. Bran said fiercely, 'But in this time too we shall drive out the Dark, my lord. We shall come before them to the tree, and then drive them out and away, out of Time."

'Of course. And I must return something that was brought to my aid, and that has served its purpose and must now serve yours.' He put back his cloak and lifted the linked Signs from around his neck. 'Take them. Sign-seeker. With my blessing.'

Will came to the edge of the boat and took the gleaming chain from the strong brown hands; he put it about his own neck, feeling the weight pull at his shoulders. 'Thank you, my lord.'

Mist whirled round the two boats on the grey river; lifted for a moment to give a glimpse of the crowded armada of shades behind and before; then fell again, leaving all indefinite and vague.

'The Circle is complete, but for the one,' Merriman said. 'And the Six are strong together,'

'Indeed they are, and all is well done.' The keen blue eyes flickered over Jane and Simon and Barney, standing silent and awed, and Arthur gave them a nod of greeting. But his head turned again to Bran, as if by compulsion, back to the pale vulnerable figure standing there holding the sword Etnas, his white hair sleek in the mist and the tawny eyes creased a little against the light.

'And when all is done, my son.' The voice was soft now. 'When all is done, will you sail with me in Pridwen, my ship? Will you come with me to the silver-circled castle at the back of the North Wind, where there is peace beneath the stars, and the apple orchards grow?'

'Yes,' said Bran. 'Oh yes!' His pale face was alight with joy and a kind of worship; Will thought, looking at him, that he had never seen him fully alive before.

'And it will be an easier rest than the last, and without end. Unlike the other.' Arthur looked away into the mist, his bearded face sorrowful, looking at the time past from which he spoke to them. 'For our great victory against the Dark at Badon does not last so very long. We British stay untroubled in our own parts of these islands, and the English peaceably in theirs, and the Pax Arturus thrives for a score of years. But then the Saxons come again, those bloody pirates, a trickle and then a flood, battering westward through our land, from Kent to Oxford, from Oxford to the Severn. And the last of the old world is destroyed, our cities and our bridges and our language. All vanishes, all dies.'

There was anguish in the voice now; it was a long aching lament. 'Lost, all lost... The savages bring in the Dark, and the servants of the Dark thrive. Our craftsmen and our builders leave, or die, and none replace them except to deck out barbaric kings. And on our roads, on the old ways, the green grass grows.'

'And men flee westward,' Merriman said gently, out of the bow of their vessel, 'to the last comers of the land where the old tongue lives, for a while. To those places where the Light waits always for the force of the Dark to ebb, so that the grandsons of the invaders may be gentled and tamed by the land their forefathers despoiled. And one of those fleeing men carries a golden chalice called a grail, that bears on its side the message by which a later time will be able better to withstand the last and most menacing rising of the Dark - when it will rise not through the spilling of blood but through the coldness in the hearts of men.'

Arthur bent his head in a kind of apology. The mist blew round him; he seemed fainter now, the sea-blue cloak less bright. 'True, true. And the grail is found, and all the other Things of Power, by the six of you, and the Light thus fortified so that all of us in the Circle may come to its aid at the end. I know, my lion. I do not forget the hope promised by the future, even though I weep for the pain suffered by my land here in the past.'

The river began to swing the boats apart; the sound of battle and of triumphant shouting rose again from the mists around them. Arthur's voice grew distant, rising in a last call.

'Sail the river. Sail on. I shall be with you in a little while.'

And the ship and its flags and armed men were gone into the bright mist, and instead a darkness came whirling around them, on both sides of the gleaming stream, a darkness as deep and vast as the sea, battering at their minds, rising, enveloping.

John Rowlands rose slowly to his feet in the stern of the boat where he had been silently sitting. Will could see him only as a vague shape; he could not tell how much Rowlands saw of what was happening.

Rowlands reached out an arm into the darkness, standing pressed against the gunwale of the boat, and with fear and longing in his voice he called out something in Welsh. And then he called, 'Blodwen! Blodwen!'

Will closed his eyes at the pain in the voice, and tried not to hear or think. But John Rowlands came stumbling up the boat towards them, his head turned for guide towards the blue-flaming blade of the sword in Bran's hand, and when he reached them he put out one hand and grasped Merriman by the shoulder.

Light glimmered round them as if they carried the moon in their vessel, sailing through clouds, yet the light came only from the sword, burning like a cold torch. John Rowlands said, taut with anguish, 'Was she always so? Always... from outside the earth, like yourself?' He was gazing at Merriman like a man begging for his life, pleading. 'Was not one part of it ever real?'

Merriman said unhappily, 'Real?' For the first time since Will had come to know him, his voice was without authority, seeking, lost. 'Real? When we live in your world as you do, John, those of the Light or those of the Dark, we feel and see and hear as you do. If you prick us, we bleed, if you tickle us, we laugh - only, if you poison us we do not die, and there are certain feelings and perceptions in us that are not in you. And these in the last resort have dominion over the others. Your life with your Blodwen was real, it existed, she felt it just like you. But... there was another more powerful side to her nature as well, of which you never had sight.'

John Rowlands flung out one arm and struck the side of the boat a fierce blow that his hand did not seem to feel. 'Lies!' The word was a shout. 'That is all it was, a deceiving, a pretending! Can you deny that? I have been living my life on a lie!'

'All right.' Merriman's broad shoulders drooped for a moment, then slowly straightened. His voice seemed to Will to hold a great weariness. 'I am sorry, John. Do you blame the Light? Would it have been less of a lie if you had never discovered the Dark?'

'The hell with both of them,' John Rowlands said bitterly. He stared coldly at Merriman, at Bran, at Will, and his voice rose in anger and misery. 'The hell with all of you. We were happy, before any of this. Why couldn't you leave us alone?'

And while the words rang in the air, to all of them on the boat a figure appeared immediately out of the whirling misty darkness as if riding on the echoes of the angry voice: a dark shape, riding. Each of them saw it in a different way, this towering figure, cloaked, the hood put back from the arrogant head.

Bran saw the Lord of the Dark who had hounded Will and himself through the Lost Land, in wild pursuit through the City, in wait beside the Castle, in roaring fury at their achieving of the sword.

Jane and Simon and Barney saw a figure they had hoped to forget, from days earlier in their lives when they had been caught up in a search for the grail of the Light: a black- haired, black-eyed man named Hastings, fierce and powerful, and in the end raging with the urge for revenge.

Will saw the Black Rider, riding his black stallion in a whirling cloudy turret of the Dark, with one side of his face turned away out of sight. He caught the glare of a blue eye beneath glinting chestnut hair, and the sweep of a robed arm as the Rider turned in his saddle, pointing at Bran. The tall horse reared up over them, hooves glinting, eyes white and wide. Beside him. Will saw Jane instinctively duck.

'A challenge, Merlion!' the Black Rider called. His voice was clear but faint, as if muffled by the surrounding dark. 'We claim there is no place for the Pendragon, the boy, in this flight and this quest. A challenge! He must go!'

Merriman swung round, turning his back in contemptuous dismissal. But the Rider did not move, but stayed by them, his spinning dark tower of cloud rushing with them down the misty river - yet moving gradually more slowly, slowly, just as the boat on which they themselves travelled, Will realised, was slowing now. Soon it was motionless, resting on the still water. For a moment there came a break in the misty darkness ahead, as if a watery sunlight were breaking through; they saw hints of green fields, of swelling green hillsides and the darker green of trees, all hung still with ragged mist so that nothing was properly distinct.

And then through the mist came flying a pair of swans, their great white wings beating the air so that the wind sang through the feathers. They flapped slowly overhead, now visible, now gone, now bright again, through the patches of mist, and then both dived and came awkwardly down, on either side of the boat, skidding into the river, settling, long necks taking back their peaceful graceful curve. And in the moment of raising his eyes from the two handsome birds, Will saw as if standing high on the prow of their boat the figure of the Lady.

She was neither old nor young, now, her beauty ageless: she stood a straight upright figure with the wind blowing round her the folds of a robe blue as an early morning sky. Will leapt forward, overjoyed, reaching out a hand in welcome, But the Lady's fine-boned face was grave; she looked at Will as if she did not properly see him, and then at Merriman, and then at Bran. Her gaze flickered over the others, with a hint of a pause for Jane, and then came back to Merriman.

'The challenge holds,' she said.

Will could not believe what he heard. There was no emotion in the musical voice; it stated merely, without expression but with utter finality. Merriman took one quick unthinking step forward and then stopped; Will, not daring to look up, could see the long fingers of one gnarled bony hand curve tight into a fist, the nails cutting into the palm.

'The challenge holds,' the Lady said again, a faint quiver in her voice. 'For the Dark has invoked the High Law against the Light, claiming that Bran ap Arthur has no rightful place in this part of Tune, and may therefore not take the journey to the tree. That challenge is their right, and must be heard. For without the hearing, the High Magic will let nothing go further toward in this matter.'

The beauty of her face was a grave sadness, and she reached out one arm, graceful as a bird's wing in the falling folds of the blue robe, and pointed the five fingers of her hand towards Bran. For an instant a breeze blew on the still river, and there was a hint of a delicate music in the air; and then the blue light died out of the blade of Eirias, and in a strange slow movement without a sound the sword fell to the deck of the ship. And Bran stiffened and then stood motionless, upright, his arms at his sides, a slim dark-clad figure with the face almost as white now as the hair, caught out of movement as if out all life. A misty brightness took shape and hovered all about him, like a cage of light, so that he was still in their company and yet kept separate.

The Lady looked out into space at the hovering figure of the Black Rider in the cloudy dark.

'Speak your challenge,' she said.

Part Four: The Midsummer Tree

The Rising

The Black Rider said, 'We challenge the boy Bran, of Clwyd in the Dysynni valley in the kingdom of Gwynedd, called Bran Davies for his father in the world of his growing, called the Pendragon for his father the Pendragon in the world from which he came. We challenge his place in this business. He has not the right.'

'He has the right of birth,' Will said sharply.

'There lies the challenge. Old One. You shall hear.' The Black Rider could not now be seen; his voice came hollowly out of the dark turmoil beyond the mist. Will had the sudden sense of an endless army of unseen forms behind him, out there in the dark; he looked quickly away.

The Lady's clear voice said, overhead, 'Whom do you seek to judge the challenge, Lord of the Dark? For you have the right to choose, as the Light has the right to approve or deny your choice.'

There was a deliberate pause. All at once the Rider was visible again, a distinct figure; his hooded head turned toward Merriman.

'We choose the man, John Rowlands,' he said.

Merriman glanced down at Will; he said nothing, either aloud or in the silent speech of the Old Ones, but Will could feel his indecision. He was filled with the same vague suspicion himself - what are they up to? - but it fell back, like a wave that breaks over a rock, when he thought of John Rowlands and their long reasons for trusting his judgement.

Merriman nodded. He lifted his wild-haired white head. 'That is agreed.' John Rowlands was paying them no attention. He stood in the middle of the boat, with Jane, Barney and Simon grouped beside him on a thwart as if they had drawn close for comfort, though for whose comfort Will would not have cared to tell. Rowlands was gazing at Bran, his lean, lined brown face tight with anxiety. His dark eyes flickered to the tranquil, gleaming form of the Lady and then back to the bright mist enclosing Bran. 'Bran bach,' he said unhappily, 'are you all right?'

But there was no answer, and instead the Lady turned her grave face to Rowlands and he was suddenly very still, looking up at her, a silent awkward figure with the dark formal suit sitting on his lithe frame as if it belonged to someone else.

'John Rowlands,' the cool, musical voice said, 'there will be things said to you now, by the Lords of the Dark and of the Light, and you must listen to each with good attention, and weigh in your own mind the merit of what is said by each. And then you must say which you think is in the right, without fear or favour. And the power of the High Magic, which is present in this place as it is everywhere in the universe, will put its seal on your decision.'

John Rowlands stood there, still looking at her. He seemed caught in awe, but there were spots of colour on his high cheek-bones, and the finely modelled mouth was set in a straight line. Very quietly, he said, 'Must?'

Will flinched, and carefully did not look at the Lady; he heard Merriman hiss softly between his teeth.

But the Lady's voice grew quieter, more gentle.

*No, my friend. This matter holds no compulsion. We ask a favour of you, to make such a judgement. For in this world of men it is the fate of men which is at stake, in the long run, and no one but a man should have the judging of it. Have you not said as much yourself, to the Old Ones, here and elsewhere?'

John Rowlands turned and looked at Will, without expression. Then he said slowly, 'Very well.'

Suddenly Will was conscious of a crowding of the Old Ones, an immense array of shadowy presences, all around him and behind him on the still, misted river; hovering in the unseen vessels like their own that he had glimpsed, just as they had travelled across the miles and years of the island of Britain in the vehicle that had taken the appearance of a train. It was as if he heard the murmuring of a great crowd, as he had heard the whole Circle of the Old Ones gathered twice before in the course of his life; yet there was no sound, he knew, but the whispering of the wind in the trees that edged the river. Holding in his mind the sense of their attendance, and his awareness of Merriman's tall blue-robed form at his side, he looked hard and openly at the whirling black mist of the Dark as he had not dared look before. The voice of the Rider came strong and confident out of it.

'Judge then. You know that the boy Bran was born in a time long past, and brought into the future to grow there. His mother brought him, because she had once in her own time greatly deceived her lord and husband Arthur, and although the boy was his true son she feared that he would not believe that was so.'

John Rowlands said emptily, 'Men may be deceived indeed.'

'But men forgive,' the Rider said swiftly, smoothly. 'And the boy's father would have forgiven, and believed Guinevere, if he had had the chance. But a Lord of the Light took Guinevere through Time, at her asking, and so there was no chance and the boy was taken away.'

Merriman said, soft and deep, 'At her asking.'

'But,' the Rider said, 'and mark this, John Rowlands - but, not to a time of her asking.'

Will felt a coldness creeping into his mind: a dreadful misgiving, like a tiny crack that grows in a great secure dyke holding back the sea. Merriman's robe rustled, beside him.

The Rider's voice was quiet and confident. 'She came to the mountains of Gwynedd, with her child, without thought of the time to which she came. And a man of the twentieth century, called Owen Davies, fell in love with her, and took her and reared her child as his own when she vanished away again. But that century was not of her choosing. She went where the Lord of the Light took her, she did not care. But the Light had great care.'

Suddenly his voice rose, and became harsh and accusing. 'The Light chose, and made sure that Bran ap Arthur, Bran pen Dragon, came to this time to grow into the right place at the right moment for the working of the quest of the Light. Thus all the old prophecies have been fulfilled only by their manipulation of Time. And that is a twisting of the terms of the High Magic, and so we claim that the boy Bran, who is here only through the craft of the Light, should go back to the time in which he belongs.'

John Rowlands said thoughtfully, 'Send him back more than a thousand years? And what language were men speaking here then?'

'Latin,' Will said.

'He has very little Latin,' John Rowlands said, looking out at the dark mist beyond the river.

'You are frivolous,' the voice out of the darkness said, curtly. 'He may be taken out of time merely, as he is now, so long as he plays no part in this present matter.'

'Not frivolous,' John Rowlands said, softly still. 'I am simply wondering how a boy can be said to belong to a time whose language he does not even speak. Just wondering, sir, in order to judge.'

Merriman said, without moving from his place at the stem of the boat, 'Belonging. That is the answer to this challenge. Whether it was the boy's mother or the Light who chose the time into which he came to grow up, or whether the choice was random, nevertheless he has attached himself to that time. He has bound himself by love to those with whom he has lived there, most particularly Owen Davies his adopted father, and Davies' friend - John Rowlands.'

'Yes,' Rowlands said, looking up in the same swift anxiety as before to the strange cage of misty light in which, dimly, they could see Bran held motionless.

'Such loving bonds,' Merriman said, 'are outside the control even of the High Magic, for they are the strongest thing on all this earth.'

But then out of the darkness beside them, over the still water, from no direction that they could tell, a frightened voice cried urgently, 'John! John!'

John Rowlands' head jerked upright, wary and yet longing.

'That's Mrs Rowlands!' Jane whispered.

'Where is she?' Barney swung all round, for the voice had seemed to come out of the air.

'There!' Simon was pointing. His voice trailed away. 'There ...'

They could see only her face, dimly lighted in the churning darkness beside the boat, and her hands, out-stretched. She was gazing imploringly at John Rowlands, and her voice was the soft warm voice they had known in the beginning, and it was full of fear.

'John help me, help -I have no hand in all these things, I am possessed. There is a mind of the Dark that comes into my own, and then ... I say things, and I do things, and I do not know what they are... John, we too have loving bonds of our own. Shoni bach, you must help, they say they will let me go free if you will help them!'

'Help ... them?' John Rowlands seemed to speak with difficulty; his voice sounded slow and rusty.

'Set right the balance,' The Black Rider said curtly. 'Give us the proper decision, that the Light is not entitled to the help of the boy Bran. And we will leave the mind of your wife Blodwen Rowlands, and give her back to you.'

'Oh please, John?' Mrs Rowlands reached out her arms to him, and the appeal in her voice was so poignant that Jane, listening, could hardly bear to keep still. The things she had learned about Blodwen Rowlands vanished totally from her mind; she could hear only the unhappiness and yearning of one human being cut off from another.

'Possession.' There was the same odd creaking quality in John Rowlands' voice, as if he were forcing the words out. 'It is like the possession by demons, you mean, that they used to speak of in the old days?'

The Black Rider gave a low bubbling laugh, a cold sound.

Blodwen Rowlands said eagerly, 'Yes, yes, it is the same. It is the Dark taking over my mind and making me into something else while it is there. Oh John cariad, say what they want, so that we can go home to the cottage and be as happy again as we have been all these years. This is all a terrible dream -I want to go home.'

John Rowlands' fists clenched tight as the plaintive musical voice rose in appeal; he gazed at his wife's face long and closely. Turning, uncertain, he looked up at Merriman and Will, and last of all at the high remote form of the Lady, but each one of them looked back at him expressionless, without any sign of threat or appeal or advice. John Rowlands looked again at Blodwen - and suddenly Jane felt a hollow feeling of shock at the pit of her stomach, for the look that she saw on his face now was like a sad farewell for something that is forever gone.

His voice was low and gentle, and they could barely hear it over the soft whimpering of the breeze on the riverbank.

'I do not believe any power can possess the mind of a man or woman, Blod - or whatever your name should really be. I believe in God-given free will, you see. I think nothing is forced on us, except by other people like ourselves. I think our choices are our own. And you are not possessed therefore, you must be allied to the Dark because you have chosen to be - terrible though that is for me to believe after all these long years. Either that, or you are not human, wholly a creature of the Dark, a different creature whom I have never really known.'

The soft deep voice hung over the misty river, and for a moment there was no sound or movement anywhere, from the indistinct flotilla of the Light or the teeming black emptiness of the dark. Blodwen Rowlands's glimmering face was there still, and the towering figure of the Rider.

John Rowlands' deep whisper went on, as if he were speaking his thoughts to himself. 'And as to Bran, that is a matter of a boy whose choice at first was not his own, but who has lived his own life since then. Which is all that you can say of most of us, in the end. He has indeed made loving bonds for himself with his father - adopted father, if you like. And with me, and with the others who have watched him grow up on Clwyd Farm. Though not with my wife, as I had thought.' His voice husked to nothing, and he swallowed and was silent for a moment.

Jane was watching Blodwen Rowlands' face; she saw it begin gradually to harden. The longing dropped away like a mask, leaving indifference and a cold rage.

'If I am to judge,' John Rowlands said, 'then I judge that Bran Davies belongs to the time in which both he and I live our lives. And that since he is not separate, as I am, but has thrown in his lot with the Light and risked much for them - then there is no reason why he should not be free to help their cause. As .. others ... are free to help the Dark if they choose.'

He looked up at the Lady. 'There's my judgement, then.' His voice seemed deliberately rough and rural, as if he were trying to isolate himself.

The Lady said clearly, 'The High Magic confirms it, and thanks you, John Rowlands. And the Light accepts that this is the law.'

She turned a little towards the bank of the river, to the churning darkness behind the mist; the brightness seemed to grow around her, and her voice rose. 'And the Dark, Rider?'

The wind was rising, tugging at her long blue robe; somewhere far off, faint thunder rolled.

The Black Rider said in quiet fury, 'It is the law.' He came a little way out of his dark refuge, and put back his hood, and his blue eyes glinted in the scarred face. 'You are a fool, John Rowlands! To choose to destroy your home, for the sake of a nameless cause - '

'For the sake of a boy's life,' John Rowlands said.

'He was always a fool, always!' Blodwen Rowlands' voice came out of the darkness, strident, stronger than before; it was again the voice of the White Rider, and suddenly, listening, Will knew that he had always heard the likeness of the two but never thought to add them together, and he saw from Jane's face that she had in her mind the same fearful parallel.

The thunder rumbled again, closer.

'A soft one, yn ffwl mawr!' Blodwen Rowlands cried. 'A shepherd and a harp-player! Fool! Fool!' And her voice rose high into the whine of the rising wind and was carried away into the darkening sky. All around them the mist was darkening now, and the sky above was solid with clouds so dark a grey as to be nearly black.

But the Lady raised her arm and pointed the five fingers of her hand at Bran, where he stood motionless in his cage of bright mist. There was a hint of music in Will's ears, though he did not know if anyone else heard, and then Bran was standing there clear, with the sword Eirias in his hand, and the blade of the sword was flaming with cold blue light.

Bran raised Eirias in the air like a brand. Swelling behind him and all around, Will felt the company of the Light advancing, driving on, and he saw that their boat was moving again, the water lapping past the bow, choppier now, with small waves raised by the rising wind. He knew that the other vessels of their shadowy fleet were moving too. But at the same time the sky was growing darker, darker yet, filled with great billowing clouds.

The wind gusted suddenly higher; he saw the Lady's robe swirl round her slender form and Merriman's dark cloak billow out like a spinnaker over the bow. And then for an instant all light was blotted out around them, as with a roar the whirling tornado of the Dark rose into the sky, travelling over and before them, circling the horizon to collect its final strength.

Only one streak of light still glowed. Standing in the bow of their boat. Bran swept the crystal sword before him in a blue line cutting the air, and the dark mist parted in a ragged, widening gap. They saw green fields rising before them, and suddenly they were all standing on a smooth green slope, on grass, with the river no more than a distant murmur in their ears.

'Stay close, all Six,' Merriman said. He led them up the grassy slope. The chain of Signs rang musically round Will's neck. He could feel the myriad shadowy forms of the Circle all about them, shielding them, pressing them on. John Rowlands moved beside the Lady, blank-faced, as if in a trance. Thunder growled overhead.

Then the last of the mist blew away, and in the dim light beneath the lowering sky they saw a line of trees before them, a wood of beech trees capping a round chalk hill - and, gradually appearing on the slope in front of the wood, a single huge tree. It took shape under their eyes, a shadowy outline becoming steadily more solid and real; it rose and filled out and its broad leaves rustled and tossed in the wind. Its trunk was as thick as ten men, its branches spread wide as a house. It was an oak tree, more vast and ancient than any tree they had ever seen.

Overhead, lightning ripped one of the dark clouds, and the thunder came thumping at them like a huge fist.

Barney said, whispering, 'Silver on the tree...?'

Bran pointed Eirias up into the tree, in a sweeping triumphant gesture. 'See, where the first branch divides - there!'

And through the swaying branches they could see the mistletoe, the strange invading clump of a different green than the green of the oak: the twining stems and the small leaves, growing upon the tree, glimmering a little with a light of their own. Will gazed at the plant and seemed to see it changing, flickering; he blinked in vain to make out something in the middle of the clump.

Merriman's dark cloak blew round him in the rising wind. 'There will be one spray of blossoms only,' he said, his deep voice rough with strain. 'And we shall see each bud break, and when every small bright flower on that spray is in bloom, only then do we cut the spray. Then, and not before and not afterwards, but only in that one moment, does the great spell have force. And in that moment too, he who cuts the mistletoe must be kept from attack by the Six, each with one of the Signs.'

He turned his deep-shadowed eyes on Will, and Will reached to his neck to take off the gold-linked circle of the Signs.

But before he could touch them, white lightning suddenly flashed far closer than before from the dark cloud-base overhead. Will saw Merriman's tall form stiffen, facing the great tree. He too turned, seeking the mistletoe, and saw all at once that a glint of light fierce as fire came from the middle of the strange green clump. The moment was coming; the first bud on the spray of the mistletoe flowers had broken into bloom.

And with it, the Dark came rising.

Will had never, by any enchantment, known what it would be like. Long afterwards, he thought that it must have been like what happens to a mind that goes instantly and totally mad. And worse, for here the world went mad. Like a soundless explosion the immense force of the Dark's power rocked everything round him, rocked his senses; he staggered, reaching blindly for support that was not there. The appearances of things ran wild; black seemed white, green seemed red; all flickering and throbbing as if the sun had swallowed the earth. A great scarlet tree loomed over him against a sky of livid white; the others of the Six, flashing in and out of sight, were like negative images, blurred forms with black teeth and empty white eyes. The endless dull roar of thunder filled his ears and his mind; he felt sick and ill, cold and hot at once, his eyes closing to slits, a constriction growing in his throat.

Unable to move any limb, he saw through leaden eyelids that Simon and Jane and Barney had collapsed to the ground; moving with tremendous effort, as if held down by weights, they struggled in vain to get up. Darkness loomed over them; slowly turning his heavy head, Will saw in sick horror that half the sky, half the world, behind him was filled with the whirling black tornado of the Dark, spinning between cloud and earth, more vast than his senses could comprehend. He saw Bran, staggering, holding up a blue streak of flame as if for support. Bright blue, he thought, I've never seen a brighter blue, except the Lady's eyes. The Lady, where is the Lady? And he could not move to look for her, but crumpled to his knees while the world wove to and fro in his spinning gaze. It was only by simple accident that his feeble hand hit the circle of Signs hanging from his neck.

Then all at once he could see clearly, and wonder caught him as he saw. Down across the storming sky, cleaving the monstrous grey-black clouds, came six horsemen, riding. Three on either side they came, silvery-grey glinting figures on horses of the same strange half-colour: galloping, cloaks flying, with drawn swords in their hands. One of them wore a glinting circlet about his head, but Will could not clearly see his face.

'The Sleepers ride!' Bran called to him. Will saw him leaning back in an intent curve, staring upward, clear against the green grass with his white hair and blue-flaming outflung sword. 'The seven Sleepers, changed now to Riders, just as I said they would be!'

'But still I remember there were six Sleepers,' Will said softly to Merriman, so softly that he knew Bran could not hear. 'Six Sleepers, oldest of the old, that once we woke out of their long sleep beside the lake, with the golden harp.'

Merriman neither moved nor spoke, but stood looking at the terrible sky. And as Will gazed up at the wheeling Riders of the Light, a long brightness began to glow in the east. And like a white sun rising, another figure came leaping across the sky: a different rider of a different shape, like no shape ever born on the earth.

He was a tall man riding a brilliant white-gold horse, but his head was horned like the head of a stag, with shining antlers curving out in seven tines. As Will gazed, he raised his great head, yellow light flashing from tawny round eyes like the eyes of an owl, and he gave a call that was like the halloo a huntsman blows on the horn to call up hounds. And through the sky after him, belling and baying, came flowing an endless pack of huge ghostly white hounds, red-eared, red-eyed, fearsome creatures running inexorable on a trail no living power could turn. They milled round the feet of the Huntsman's horse, high up there in the sky, as he laughed dreadfully over them in delight of the chase; they thronged round the silver-grey horses of the Sleepers waiting restlessly to join their hunt.

And then the Huntsman in a wild shout gave the call to let loose the chase, and he and the ghost-grey swordsmen, seven riders, were leaping through the clouds with the Hounds of Doom flooding after them, red eyes burning, a thousand throats giving tongue like the whickering of migrant geese: the Wild Hunt, in full cry against the Dark for the last time.

The vast storm-cone of the Dark lashed and thrashed about the sky as if in agony, and its tip seemed to split away. A horrible flailing filled the sky, until with one last convulsive lunge that seemed to bring half the clouds in the heavens down to the earth, the huge tornado-like black pillar rushed away and upward, out into nowhere, with the Sleepers and the Wild Hunt in howling merciless pursuit,

But great Herne the Hunter reined in his white-gold mare, leaping high in the heavens with the force of her arrested speed, and he turned seeking through the torn and rushing clouds with his tawny wild eyes. And in sudden new terror Will saw what he sought, the peak of Dark power that would never flee: the two huge figures, indestructible now in their full power, of the Black Rider and the White Rider of the Dark, curving out of the sky on a long rushing lunge down to the grassy Chiltern hill and the enchanted tree.

Will heard Simon shout from beside the tree, the first sound any one of the Six had made in all their breathless watching, and he turned back to see flashing on the tree new small brilliant points of light as more buds on the green patch of mistletoe burst into their magical bloom. His hands went to his neck, in the same instant that he heard Merriman's silent cry of command in his mind, and he tore off the circle of Signs. High in the sky the Riders, grown now to huge size, came rushing closer towards the earth. Will shouted to Simon and Barney and Jane, 'Six Signs shall burn! Take one for each, and circle the tree!'

They were at his side, eager, reaching, and in the gold-linked chain each Sign in turn came easily away from the rest as the gold seemed to melt and vanish like wax. Simon took the smooth black Sign of Iron and rushed with it to the tree, to stand against the gnarled enormous trunk holding it high in challenge; Jane followed with the gleaming Sign of Bronze, Barney with the rowan-born Sign of Wood. There they stood, brave and quivering, staring terrified at the monstrous Riders galloping headlong down from the high clouds, down to consume them. Swiftly Merriman joined them with the brilliant gold Sign of Fire, Bran holding the crystal Sign of Light with the Sword, to leave Will swinging round last of all with his back to the tree, holding up in defiance the glittering black flint Sign of Stone. And the Riders were upon them, with bright lightning and deep thunder that came from no cloud but out of the dark air; their huge horses reared up, screaming, lashing out with wild deadly hooves. Herne's great horned figure rode at the Dark Lords in attack from above, and the force of all the unseen shades of the Circle was holding, barring, wrestling them below, with the Lady as its shining focus, but the strain was near to breaking-point. And in a burst of brilliance, the last flower on the mistletoe burst into bloom.

Bran reached up, his white hair flying, swinging Eirias over his head to cut the spray; but with the Sign of Light in his left hand he had only one arm for the long crystal blade, and his balance would not hold. He cried out in desperation. The Black Rider's eyes blazed blue as sapphires and he lunged forward in triumph, straining to break through the strength of the Circle and reach the shining bloom with his own sword. But suddenly John Rowlands was at Bran's side, pale and grim; he seized the Sign of Light and thrust it out against the rearing attack, the shimmering crystal circle frail in his big brown hand.

And Bran, free now to use both arms, swung the glittering blade of the sword Eirias at the green mistletoe within the oak, and cut the stars of bright blossom from the tree. As the spray parted Merriman turned, tall and triumphant, and caught the blossom before it fell; he swept round, blue cloak billowing, and in a swift breathtaking movement flung it up into the sky. And the mistletoe blossom changed in that instant into a white bird, and the bird flew up into the sky and away, away through the broken white clouds scudding now across the blue, away into the world.

Each of the Signs held there in each of six hands blazed suddenly with a cold light like fire, too bright for eyes to watch, and with two mingling voices crying out in fear and despair the great rearing figures of the Black Rider and the White Rider of the Dark fell backwards out of Time and disappeared. And each of the six hands suddenly was empty, as each Sign burned with its cold fire into nothing and was gone.

Part Four: The Midsummer Tree

One Goes Alone

They stood in silence about the tree, unable to speak.

High up where a last few tatters of storm cloud blew dark across the sun, Herne the antlered Hunter put back his fierce head and gave a long triumphant cry, the gathering call that is lifted up by the horn when the quarry is slain. His white mare leapt across the sky, whinnying high and clear like the singing of the wind on the hill, curving down to a place where a stream of high wind-blown cloud lay like a river across the sky.

Out and down the Hunter leapt, and in the very instant that he seemed to plunge into the river of the sky and disappear, instead they saw sailing out from that same point the great ship Pridwen, graceful and high-prowed, with the green standard of the Lord Arthur rippling out at bow and stem. Closer and closer she came, sailing on the wind, and among the Six beside the tree Will saw Bran slowly raise the sword Eirias and thrust it down into the scabbard visible now at his side. It was a strange reluctant gesture that Will could not interpret. He stared at his friend, at the pale face and the tawny eyes beneath the white hair, but he could see no expression there as Bran watched the long ship sail towards them, down the sky. He found himself reflecting instead, not for the first time, that Bran's golden eyes were curiously like those of the Wild Huntsman, Herne.

And then the ship Pridwen was upon them, and he was looking instead at the blue-grey eyes and weathered, brindle-bearded face of the leader-king, Arthur.

Arthur was looking past him, at the fragile slim blue-robed figure of the Lady, standing a little apart from them all. He stepped from the prow of the boat where he stood, and down to the land, and he knelt on one knee before the Lady and bent his head. 'Madam,' he said, his voice as warm with the pleasure of living as when Will had first heard it, 'your boatman awaits.'

Will stood with his head staging in bewilderment, feeling the baffled awe of the three Drews beside him.

The Lady came forward to the boat, with a beckoning touch on Arthur's arm in the casual closeness of those who belong to the same family. 'It is done,' she said. Suddenly there was a deep weariness in the music of her voice, that spoke of great age in spite of the calm ageless beauty of her fine-boned face. 'Our task is accomplished, and we may leave the last and longest task to those who inherit this world and all its perilous beauty.'

She looked back at them all, and as if in farewell she smiled at Barney, at Simon and more lingeringly at Jane. Then she looked at John Rowlands, standing empty-eyed and stiff beside the broad oak tree, and she moved swiftly to him and took both his hands.

Rowlands looked at her, his dark Welsh face drawn down by lines at nose and mouth that had never seemed so marked before.

'John,' the Lady said softly. 'In all this great matter you have done more for your world than any of us, even before your courage at the end - for you could have retreated into an unseeing happiness of your own and yet gave it up. You are a good and honest man, and for a time now you must be an unhappy man. But - it is only for a time.' She released his hands, but still gazed commandingly into his eyes, and John Rowlands looked back at her without awe or subservience, and shrugged. He said nothing.

'You have made a hard choice,' the Lady said, 'and lost the pattern of your life thereby. I cannot give you back your Blodwen, that ambitious fallen figure. But I can give you another chance gentler than the first. In a moment you will be back in your own world and time, and there you will find that the... appearance of your wife has had some tragic accident, and died. It is for you to decide whether or not, in that moment, you want still to remember all that has happened to you. You may indeed remember the hard truth about the Light and the Dark, and the true nature of your wife, if you wish.'

John Rowlands said, expressionless, half to himself, 'It is very strange, there was one thing she would never tell me. It was a joke with her - she never would tell me where or when she was born.'

The Lady reached out a hand in pity, then let it fall. 'Or,' she said gently, 'instead you may forget. You may, if you wish, forget all that you have seen ever of the Lords of the Dark and the Light, and although you will then have perhaps a deeper grief at the loss of your wife, you will mourn her and remember her as the woman you knew and loved.'

"That would be living a lie,' John Rowlands said.

'No,' Merriman said from behind him, very strong and deep. 'No, John, for you did love her, and all love has great value. Every human being who loves another loves imperfection, for there is no perfect being on this earth - nothing is so simple as that.'

'It is for you to choose,' the Lady said. She moved to the boat and paused beside it, looking back.

John Rowlands stood facing them all, still without visible emotion; then he turned his dark eyes to the Lady and a warmth came into them. 'I cannot choose, this time,' he said with a wry smile. 'Not such a choice as that. Will you by your grace do it for me?'

'Very well,' the Lady said. She raised her arm, pointing 'Walk away from me, John Rowlands, and when you turn you will find a path at your feet. Follow it. In the moment that you pass the one tree, you will be gone from here and instead be on another path in your own valley, that you know far better than this. And whatever is in your mind then will be whatever choice I have made for you. And - we wish you well.'

John Rowlands bent his head for an instant; then looked from one to another of them with a half-smile that held no happiness, but great affection. He looked last at Bran. 'Mi wela'i ti'n hwyrach, bachgen,' he said. Then he turned and walked away towards the immense spreading oak, on a path that no one else could see, and as he drew level with the tree he was no longer there.

The Lady sighed. 'He shall forget,' she said. 'It is better so.'

Arthur put out a hand to her, and she stepped down into the boat. A rising wind blew, rocking Pridwen on the river of the sky, and suddenly Will had the sense once more of a huge throng, and knew that all the Old Ones of the Circle were making their way aboard, to sail with the Lady and the king. At the ship's mainmast now the vast sail rose, square, billowing, marked with the cross within a circle, the Sign of the Light. He heard the cries of sailors; timbers creaked, halyards clattered against spars.

Will glanced at the three Drews beside him, and saw on their faces the beginning anguish of loss, and a long emptiness. But he could not keep his eyes for more than a moment from the great ship. He looked back, and in the ghostly throng of beings on her decks he saw in one quick flash after another the faces of those he had known, on this journey and on other journeys, in this time and other times. A tall burly figure in a smith's apron raised a long hammer in salute; he saw a bright-eyed small man in a green coat wave to him, and an imperious grey-haired lady, leaning on a stick, make him a formal little bow. He had the flash of a smile from a stout brown-faced man with a tonsure of white hair; he saw Glyndwr, and the frail form of the King of the Lost Land; and then with a jerk of his heart he saw Gwion, looking at him, smiling his brilliant smile. Then the wind began to grow stronger out of the clouds, and the sail billowed and flapped as if impatient, and the faces merged into the misty crowd. Arthur stood in the prow, his bearded head outlined against the sky, and held out his hand to Bran. His warm voice rang out, triumphant and welcoming. 'Come, my son!'

Bran came quickly towards him; then paused. He was close to Merriman, his white hair and pale face almost luminous against Merriman's deep-blue cloak. Will looked on sadly, knowing it would be for the last time, seeing in Bran's face a mixture of longing, and determination, and regret.

'Come, my son,' said the warm deep voice again. 'The long task of the Light is over, and the world is freed of the peril of dominion by the Dark. Now it is all a matter for men. The Six have performed their great mission, and we have fulfilled our heritage, you and I. And now we may have rest, in the quiet silver-circled castle at the back of the North Wind, among the apple trees. And those we leave behind may think of us in greeting each night, when the crown of the North Wind, the Corona Borealis, rises above the horizon in its circlet of stars.'

He reached out an arm again. 'Come. There is a tide in this matter which is almost at the full, and I do not sail on the ebb.'

Bran looked at him in yearning, but he said dearly, 'I cannot come, my lord.'

There was a silence, into which only the wind softly sang. Arthur let his arm come slowly down to his side.

Bran said, stumbling, 'It is what Gwion said, when the Lost Land was to be drowned and he would not leave it. I belong here. If it is a matter for men now, as you say, then the men are going to have a hard time of it and perhaps there are things, later, that I might be able to do to help. Even if there are not, still I... belong. Loving bonds, Merriman said. That is what I have, here. And he said' - he was looking up at Merriman, beside him - 'that those bonds are outside the High Magic, even, because they are the strongest thing on the earth.' Merriman stirred; from his mind Will could feel something like awe.

'That is true,' Merriman said. 'But consider well. Bran, If you give up your place in the High Magic, your identity in the time that is outside Time, then you will be no more than mortal, like Jane and Simon and Barney here. You will be the Pendragon no longer, ever. You will remember nothing that has happened, you will live and die as all men do. You must give up all chance of going out of Time with those of the Light - as I shall go before long, and as one day long hence Will will go too. And ... you will never see your high father again.'

Bran turned sharply towards Arthur, and as he watched the two stare at one another. Will saw again the tawny eyes of Herne the Hunter in Bran's face, and yet a look of Arthur too, as if all three were one and the same. He blinked, wondering.

All at once Arthur smiled, proud and loving, and he said softly, 'Go where you feel you should go, my son Bran Davies of Clwyd, and my blessing go with you.' He stepped down over the side of the boat again to the grassy bank, and held his arms open, and Bran ran to him and for a moment they stood close.

Then Arthur stepped back, smiling, and Bran, looking up at him all the while, drew Eirias white and gleaming from the scabbard at his side, slipped the sword-belt over his head, and held out both sword and scabbard to his father. Will heard Merriman sigh gently, as if in release, and found his own fists unwittingly clenched. And Arthur took Eirias in one hand and the scabbard in the other, and sheathed the sword. He looked for a, moment past Bran to Merriman, and his eyes smiled, though his mouth was serious now. T will see you in a little while, my lion,' he said, and Merriman nodded his head.

Then the king stepped back into his ship Pridwen, and the broad sail filled and bellied out, and with all the host of shades of Light looking back, without sign of farewell or any ending, the ship sailed across the sky. Small sunlit clouds lay scattered there, so that the blue sky was like a sea scattered with small islands, and there was no telling whether the ship was in sea or sky when it disappeared.

Bran stood watching until there was no ship to watch, but Will could see no regret on his face.

'That must have been what John Rowlands meant,' Bran said quietly.

'John Rowlands?' said Will.

'In Welsh. When he left. He said to me. See you later, boyo.'

Jane said slowly, 'But - he didn't know you would come back.'

'No,' Bran said.

Merriman said, 'But he knows Bran.'

Bran looked up at him, very young and vulnerable suddenly, with his pale eyes unprotected, and the astonishing burden of the sword Eirias taken from his side. 'Was it the right thing to do?'

Merriman threw back his awesome white-maned head as impulsively as a schoolboy, and let out a hoot of breath that was the most unguarded sound they had ever heard him utter. 'Yes,' he said, sobering suddenly. 'Yes, Bran. It was the right thing, for you and for the world.'

Barney moved at last, from the place on the grassy slope where he and Simon and Jane had been standing close for a long time, watching in a wondering silence. He said anxiously, 'Gumerry? Are you really going away, or will you stay too?'

'Oh Barnabas,' Merriman said, and Jane found herself turning to him in swift motherly concern, there was such weariness in his tone. 'Barnabas, Barnabas, time passes, for the Old Ones even as for you, and though the seasons turn in every year much as in the one before, yet the pattern of the world is different in every year that goes by. My time is done, here, my time and the time of the Light, and there will be other work for us to do elsewhere.'

He paused, and smiled at them, the weariness fading a little from his bony deep-lined face, with the fierce hawk-like nose and the shadowed eyes. 'Here now are the Six,' he said, 'together for the first and last time in the place that was destined for us, on a chalk hill in the Chiltern Hundred of Buckinghamshire, where centuries ago men fleeing from the Dark tried vainly to hide their treasures, and gave prayers to the sky for safety. Look at it now. Look well. Keep a little of it alive.'

So, wondering what he might mean, they looked hard and long, at the slope of smooth green grass with tiny orange-yellow toadflax growing here and there, and small blue butterflies fluttering. They looked at the copse of beech trees capping the hill, and the broad mysterious oak tree standing just below the wood; at the clear blue sky scattered with puffy white clouds.

And then, although Merriman made no move, each of them blinked suddenly as their vision seemed to blur; and they staggered a little, with a singing in their ears and a giddiness taking away their balance. They saw everything about them shiver strangely, as if the air were dancing in the heat of a fire. The outlines of the giant oak wavered, grew dim, and disappeared: the green of the hill darkened, and the shape of its slope was no longer a smooth arc. Though the sun still shone, there were darker patches on the hill now, of yellow-flecked green and brown and purple, where gorse and bracken and heather grew. Other shapes rose in the distance, faraway mountains misted grey and blue on a hazy horizon; and when they turned to look over their shoulders they saw spread below them a broad valley golden with sand, and the winding silver thread of a river making its way out to the immense blue sea. They could hear the erratic aimless calling of sheep, now and then in the silence, basso profundo answered by tenor; somewhere far below them a dog barked. And over their heads, gliding down from the Welsh hillside to the river and the sea, came a single seagull, keening its one repeated melancholy cry.

Merriman took a long gentle breath, and let it out again. He said once more, softly, 'Look well.'

Jane said in a very small voice, looking out at the bar of golden sand that the river had set as guard against the sea, 'Shall we never see you again?'

'No,' Merriman said. 'None of you, except my Will the watchman there. That is the only right way.'

There was a command and a clear strength in his voice that caught each of them into stillness, gazing at him, held by the bright dark eyes and the bleak face.

'For remember,' he said, 'that it is altogether your world now. You and all the rest. We have delivered you from evil, but the evil that is inside men is at the last a matter for men to control. The responsibility and the hope and the promise are in your hands - your hands and the hands of the children of all men on this earth. The future cannot blame the present, just as the present cannot blame the past. The hope is always here, always alive, but only your fierce caring can fan it into a fire to warm the world.'

His voice rang out over the mountain, more impassioned than any of them had ever heard a voice before, and they stood quiet as standing stones, listening.

'For Drake is no longer in his hammock, children, nor is Arthur somewhere sleeping, and you may not he idly expecting the second coming of anybody now, because the world is yours and it is up to you. Now especially since man has the strength to destroy this world, it is the responsibility of man to keep it alive, in all its beauty and marvellous joy.'

His voice grew softer, and he looked at them with the far-away dark eyes that seemed to be looking out into Time. 'And the world will still be imperfect, because men are imperfect. Good men will still be killed by bad, or sometimes by other good men, and there will still be pain and disease and famine, anger and hate. But if you work and care and are watchful, as we have tried to be for you, then in the long run the worse will never, ever, triumph over the better. And the gifts put into some men, that shine as bright as Eirias the sword, shall light the dark comers of life for all the rest, in so brave a world.'

There was a silence, and the small sounds of the mountain drifted back into it: the faint calls of sheep, the humming of a distant car, and far above, the cheerful trilling of a lark.

'We'll try,' Simon said. 'We'll try our best.'

Merriman gave him a quick startling grin. 'Nobody can promise more than that,' he said.

They looked at him mournfully, unable to grin in return, weighed by the melancholy of parting. Merriman sighed, and swept his midnight-blue cloak around him and back across a shoulder.

'Come now,' he said. "The oldest words have it the best - be of good cheer. I go to join our friends, because I am very tired. And none of you will remember more than the things that I have been saying now, because you are mortal and must live in present time, and it is not possible to think in the old ways there. So the last magic will be this - that when you see me for the last time in this place, all that you know of the Old Ones, and of this great task that has been accomplished, will retreat into the hidden places of your minds, and you will never again know any hint of it except in dreams. Only Will, because he is of my calling, must remember - but the rest of you will forget even that. Good-bye now, my five companions. Be proud of yourselves, as I am proud of you.'

He embraced each one of them in turn, a brief hug of farewell. They were grim-faced, and their eyes were wet. Then Merriman went up the mountain, over the springy grass and the outcrops of slate, through the browning bracken and the yellow-starred gorse, and paused only when he was at the very top, outlined against the blue sky. They saw the familiar tall figure, standing very erect, with the fierce-nosed profile and the springing shock of white hair, blowing a little now in the wind that had risen out of nowhere. It was an image that would flicker in and out of their dreams for the rest of their lives, even when they had forgotten all else. Merriman raised his arm, in a salute which none of them could bear to answer, and then in a subtle inflection of movement the arm stiffened, the five fingers spread wide and pointed at them -

And a wind whirled on the hill, and the slope against the sky was empty, and five children stood on the roof of Wales looking out over a golden valley and the blue sea.

'It's a terrific view,' Jane said. 'Worth the climb. But the wind's made my eyes water.'

'It must blow like anything up here,' said Simon. 'Look at the way those trees are all bent inland.'

Bran was gazing at a small blue-green stone in the palm of his hand. 'Found this is in my pocket,' he said to Jane. 'You want it, Jenny-oh?'

Barney said, gazing up over the hill, 'I heard music! Listen - no, it's gone. Must have been the wind in the trees.'

'I think it's time we were starting out,' Will said. 'We've got a long way to go.' -

When the Dark comes rising, six shall turn it back;

Three from the circle, three from the track;

Wood, bronze, iron; water, fire, stone;

Five will return, and one go alone.

Iron for the birthday, bronze carried long;

Wood from the burning, stone out of song;

Fire in the candle-ring, water from the thaw;

Six Signs the circle, and the grail gone before.

Fire on the mountain shall find the harp of gold

Played to wake the Sleepers, oldest of the old;

Power from the green witch, lost beneath the sea;

All shall find the light at last, silver on the tree.

And here ends the sequence named The Dark is Rising

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"The Dark is Rising" series by Susan Cooper

Book 1       Over Sea, Under Stone

Book 2       The Dark is Rising

Book 3       Greenwitch

Book 4       The Grey King

Book 5       Silver on the Tree

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