'Manners, manners,' said Maggie. 'Such a nicely brought-up little boy as you, too.' Her eyes were very bright, peering at Will from the scarf-wrapped head.

 

'Well, good-bye, Maggie,' said Will. 'I've got to get home. Tea's past ready.'

 

'The trouble with nasty dirty tramps, like this one you just bumped into but who isn't bothering you,' Maggie Barnes said softly, without moving, 'the trouble with them is, they steal things. And this one stole something the other day from the farm, young Will, something belonging to me. An ornament. A big goldeny-brown coloured kind of ornament, circle-shaped, that I wore on a chain round my neck. And I want it back. Now!' The last word flicked out viciously, and then she was all soft sweetness again, as if her gentle voice had never changed. 'I want it back, I do. And I do think he might just have slipped it in your pocket when you weren't looking, when you bumped into him. If he saw me coming, that is, as he might well have done in the light of that funny little bonfire I saw burning up here just now. What do you think of all that, young Will Stanton, hey?'

 

Will swallowed. The hair was prickling upright on the back of his neck as he listened to her. There she stood, looking just the same as ever, the rosy-cheeked, uncomplicated farm girl who ran Dawsons' milking-machine and reared the smallest calves; and yet the mind out of which these words were coming could be nothing but the mind of the Dark. Had they stolen Maggie? Or had Maggie always been one of them? If she had, what else could she do?

 

He stood facing her, one hand clutching his parcels, one hand sliding cautiously into his pocket. The bronze Sign was cold, cold to his touch. He summoned up all the power of thought that he could find to drive her away, and still she stood there, smiling coldly at him. He conjured her to leave by all the names of power that he could remember Merriman using: by the Lady, by the Circle, by the Signs. But he knew he did not have the right things to say. And Maggie laughed aloud and moved deliberately forward, looking into his face, and Will found that he could not move a muscle.

 

He was caught, frozen just like the Walker; fixed immobile in a position he could not alter by so much as an inch. He glared furiously at Maggie Barnes, in her smooth red scarf and demure black coat, as she calmly slipped her hand past his into his coat pocket and drew out the bronze Sign. She held it in front of his face, and then rapidly unbuttoned his coat, flicked his belt away from him, and threaded the bronze circle on it to stand next to the iron.

 

'Hold up your trousers, Will Stanton,' she said mockingly.

 

'Oh, dear now, you can't, can you ... But then you don't really wear that belt to keep up your trousers, do you? You wear it to keep this little . . . decoration . . . safe . . .' Will noticed that she held the two Signs as lightly as possible, and winced when she had to touch them with any firmness; the cold that was beating out of them must surely be burning her to the bone.

 

He watched in utter despair. There was nothing he could do. All his effort and questing was coming to an end before it had even properly begun, and there was nothing he could do. He wanted both to shout with rage and to weep. And then, deep down, something stirred in his mind. Some detail of memory flickered, but he could not catch it. He remembered it only at the moment when fresh-faced Maggie Barnes held up his belt before him with the first and second circle threaded there together, dull iron and gleaming bronze side by side. Staring greedily at the two circles, Maggie broke into a low gurgle of sneering laughter that sounded the more evil for the rosy openness of the face from which it came. And Will remembered.

 

... when his circle is on your belt beside the first, I shall come ...

 

At that same moment, fire leaped up out of the fallen elm tree branch that Will had briefly lighted before, and flames cracked down from nowhere in a circle of searing white light all around Maggie Barnes, a circle of light higher than her head. She crouched down suddenly on the snow, cringing, her mouth slack with fear. The belt with the two linked Signs dropped out of her limp hand.

 

And Merriman was there. Tall in the long dark cloak, his face hidden in shadow by the enveloping hood, he was there at the side of the road, just beyond the flaring circle and the cowering girl.

 

'Take her from this road,' he said in a clear loud voice, and the blazing circle of light moved slowly to one side, forcing the girl Maggie to stumble with it, until it hovered on the rough ground next to the road. Then with an abrupt crackling sound it was gone, and Will saw instead a great barrier of light spring up on either side of the road, edging it on both sides with leaping fire, stretching far into the distance in both directions - a great deal further than the length of the track that Will knew as Tramps' Alley. He stared at it, a little frightened. Out in the dimness he could see Maggie Barnes grovelling wretchedly in the snow, her arms shielding her eyes from the light. But he and Merriman and the Walker stood in a great endless tunnel of cold white flame.

 

Will bent and picked up his belt, and in a kind of relieved greeting he grasped the two Signs in his hands, iron in his left hand, bronze in his right Merriman came to his side, raised his right arm so that the cloak swept down from it like the wing of some great bird, and pointed one long finger at the girl. He called out a long strange name, that Will had never heard before and could not keep in his mind, and the girl Maggie wailed aloud.

 

Merriman said, with scorn death-cold in his voice, 'Go back, and tell them that the Signs are beyond their touching. And if you would remain unharmed, do not try again to work your will while you stand on one of our Ways. For the old roads are wakened, and their power is alive again. And this time, they will have no pity and no remorse. He called out the strange name again, and the flames edging the road leaped higher, and the girl screamed high and shrill as if she were in great pain. Then she scuffled away across the snowy field like a small hunched animal.

 

Merriman looked down at Will. 'Remember the two things that saved you,' he said, the light glinting now on his beaked nose and deep-set eyes under the shadowing hood. 'First, I knew her real name. The only way to disarm one of the creatures of the Dark is to call him or her by his real name: names that they keep very secret. Then, as well as the name, there was the road. Do you know the name of this track?'

 

'Tramps' Alley,' Will said automatically.

 

'That is not a real name,' Merriman said with distaste.

 

'Well, no. Mum won't ever use it, and we're not supposed to. It's ugly, she says. But nobody else I know ever calls it anything else. I'd feel silly if I called it Oldway - ' Will stopped suddenly, hearing and tasting the name properly for the first time in his life. He said slowly, 'If I called it by its real name, Oldway Lane.'

 

'You would feel silly,' said Merriman grimly. 'But the name that would make you feel silly has helped to save your life. Oldway Lane. Yes. And it was not named for some distant Mr Oldway. The name simply tells you what the road is, as the names of roads and places in old lands very often do, if only men would pay them more attention. It was lucky for you that you were standing on one of the Old Ways, trodden by the Old Ones for some three thousand years, when you played your little game with fire, Will Stanton. If you had been anywhere else, in your state of untrained power, you would have made yourself so vulnerable that all the things of the Dark that are in this land would have been drawn towards you. As the witch-girl was drawn by the birds. Look hard at this road now, boy, and do not call it by vulgar names again.'

 

Will swallowed and stared at the flame-edged Way stretching into the distance like some noble road of the sun, and on a sudden wild impulse he made it a clumsy little bow, bending from the waist as well as his armful of packages would let him. The flames leapt again, and curved inward, almost as if they were bowing in return. Then they went out.

 

'Well done,' said Merriman, with surprise and a touch of amusement.

 

Will said, 'I will never, never again do anything with the - the power, unless there is a reason. I promise. By the Lady and the old world. But' - he could not resist it - 'Merriman, it was my fire that brought the Walker to me, wasn't it, and the Walker had the Sign.'

 

'The Walker was waiting for you, stupid boy,' said Merriman irritably. 'I told you that he would find you, and you did not remember. Remember now. In this our magic, every smallest word has a weight and a meaning. Every word that I say to you - or that any other Old One may say. The Walker? He has been waiting for you to be born, and to stand alone with him and command the Sign from him, for time past your imagining. You did that well, I will say - it was a problem to bring him to the point of giving up the Sign when the time came. Poor soul. He betrayed the Old Ones once, long ago, and this was his doom.' His voice softened a little.

 

'It has been a hard age for him, the carrying of the second Sign. He has one more part in our work, before he may have rest, if he chooses. But that is not yet.'

 

They both looked at the motionless figure of the Walker, still standing caught in frozen movement at the side of the road as Maggie Barnes had left him.

 

'That's an awfully uncomfortable position,' Will said.

 

'He feels nothing,' said Merriman. 'Not a muscle will even grow stiff. Some small powers the Old Ones and the people of the Dark have in common, and one of them is this catching a man out of Time, for as long as is necessary. Or in the case of the Dark, for as long as they find it amusing.'

 

He pointed a finger at the immobile, shapeless form, and spoke some soft rapid words that Will did not hear, and the Walker relaxed into life like a figure in a moving film that has been stopped and then started again. Staring wide-eyed, he looked at Merriman and opened his mouth, and made a curious dry, speechless sound.

 

'Go,' Merriman said. The old man cringed away, clasping his flapping garments around him, and shambled off at a half-run up the narrow path. Watching him as he went, Will blinked, then peered hard, then rubbed his eyes; for the Walker seemed to be fading, growing strangely thinner, so that you could see the trees through his body. Then all at once he was gone, like a star blotted out by a cloud. Merriman said, 'My doing, not his own. He deserves peace for a while, I think, in another place than this. That is the power of the Old Ways, Will. You would have used the trick to escape from the witch-girl, very easily, if you had known how. You will learn that, and the proper names and much else very soon now.'

 

Will said curiously, 'What is your proper name?'

 

The dark eyes glinted at him from inside the hood. 'Merriman Lyon. I told you when we met.'

 

'But I think that if that had really been your proper name, as an Old One, you would not have told me it,' Will said. 'At any rate, not out loud.'

 

'You are learning already,' Merriman said cheerfully. 'Come, it grows dark.'

 

They set of together down the lane. Will trotted beside the striding, cloaked figure, clutching his bags and boxes. They spoke little, but Merriman's hand was always there to catch him if he stumbled at any hollow or drift. As they came out at the far curve of the track into the greater breadth of Huntercombe Lane, Will saw his brother Max walking briskly towards them.

 

'Look, there's Max!'

 

'Yes,' Merriman said.

 

Max called, gaily waving, and then he was close. 'I was just coming to meet you off this bus,' he said. 'Mum was getting in a bit of a tizz because her baby boy was late.'

 

'Oh, for goodness' sake,' Will said.

 

'Why were you coming that way?' Max waved in the direction of Tramps' Alley.

 

'We were just - ' Will began, and as he turned his head to include Merriman in the remark he stopped, so abruptly that he bit his tongue.

 

Merriman was gone. In the snow where he had been standing a moment before, no mark of any kind was left. And as Will looked back the way they had walked across Huntercombe Lane, and down the top curve of the smaller track, he could see only one line of footprints - his own.

 

He thought he heard a faint silvery music, somewhere in the air, but even as he raised his head to listen, it too was gone.

 

 

 

Part Two: The Learning

Christmas Eve

 

Christmas Eve. It was the day when the delight of Christmas really took fire in the Stanton family. Hints and glimmerings and promises of special things, which had flashed in and out of life for weeks before, now suddenly blossomed into a constant glad expectancy. The house was full of wonderful baking smells from the kitchen, in a corner of which Gwen could be found putting the final touches to the icing of the Christmas cake. Her mother had made the cake three weeks before; the Christmas pudding, three months before that.

 

Ageless, familiar Christmas music permeated the house whenever anyone turned on the radio. The television set was never turned on at all; it had become, for this season, an irrelevance. For Will, the day brought itself into natural focus very early. Straight after breakfast - an even more haphazard affair than usual - there was the double ritual of the Yule log and the Christmas tree.

 

Mr Stanton was finishing the last piece of toast. Will and James stood on either side of him at the breakfast table, fidgeting. Their father held a crust forgotten in one hand as he pored over the sports page of the newspaper. Will too was passionately interested in the fortunes of Chelsea Football Club, but not on Christmas Eve morning.

 

'Would you like some more toast, Dad?' he said loudly.

 

'Mmm,' said Mr Stanton. 'Aaah.'

 

James said, 'Have you had enough tea, Dad?'

 

Mr Stanton looked up, turned his round, mild-eyed head from one to the other of them, and laughed. He put down the paper, drained his teacup, and crammed the piece of toast into his mouth. 'C'mon, then,' he said indistinctly, taking each of them by an ear. They howled happily, and ran for boots and jackets and scarves.

 

Down the road with the handcart they went, Will, James, Mr Stanton, and tall Max, bigger than his father, bigger than anyone, with his long dark hair jutting in a comical fringe out of a disreputable old cap. What would Maggie Barnes think of that, Will wondered cheerfully, when she peeped roguishly as usual round the kitchen curtain to catch Max's eye; and then in the same instant he remembered about Maggie Barnes, and he thought in a rush of alarm: Farmer Dawson is one of the Old Ones, he must be warned about her - and he was distraught that he had not thought of it before.

 

They stopped in Dawsons' yard, old George Smith coming out to meet them with his gaping grin. The going had been easier along the road that morning, since a plough had been through; but everywhere the snow still lay unmoving in a constant, grey, windless cold.

 

'Got you a tree to beat all!' Old George called joyfully. 'Straight as a mast, like Farmer's. Both Royal trees again, I reckon.'

 

'Royal as they come,' said Mr Dawson, pulling his coat tight round him as he came out. He meant it literally, Will knew; every year, a number of Christmas trees were sold from the Crown plantations round Windsor Castle, and several came back in the Dawson farm lorry to the village.

 

'Morning, Frank,' said Mr Stanton.

 

'Morning, Roger,' said Farmer Dawson, and beamed at the boys. 'Hey lads. Round the back with that cart.' His eyes slid impersonally over Will, without so much as a flicker of notice, but Will had deliberately left his jacket swinging open in such a way that-it was plain there were now two crossed-circle Signs on his belt, not one.

 

'Good to see you looking so lively,' said Mr Dawson breezily to them all, as they heaved the handcart round behind the barn; and his hand rested briefly on Will's shoulder with a faint pressure that told him Farmer Dawson had a good idea of what had been happening in the last few days. He thought of Maggie Barnes and searched hastily for words to frame a warning.

 

'Where's your girl friend, Max?' he said, carefully loud and clear.

 

'Girl friend?' said Max indignantly. Being deeply involved with a blonde-tressed student at his London art school, from whom enormous blue-enveloped letters arrived in the post every day, he was totally uninterested in all local girls.

 

'Ho, ho, ho,' said Will, trying hard. 'You know.'

 

Fortunately James was fond of this kind of thing, and joined in with enthusiasm. 'Maggie-maggie-maggie,' he chanted gaily. 'Oh, Maggie the dairymaid's sweet on Maxie the great artist, oooh - oooh ...' Max punched him in the ribs, and he lapsed into snorting giggles.

 

'Young Maggie's had to leave us,' Mr Dawson said coolly. 'Illness in the family. Needed at home. She packed up and went early this morning. Sorry to disappoint you, Max.'

 

'I'm not disappointed,' said Max, turning scarlet. 'It's just these stupid little - '

 

'Oooooh - oooooh,' sang James, dancing about out of arm's length. 'Oooh poor Maxie, lost his Maggie - '

 

Will said nothing. He was satisfied.

 

The tall fir tree, its branches tied down with bands of hairy white string, was loaded on to the handcart, and with it the gnarled old root of a beech tree that Farmer Dawson had cut down earlier that year, split in half, and put aside to make Yule logs for himself and the Stantons. It had to be the root of a tree, not a branch, Will knew, though nobody had ever explained why. At home, they would put the log on the fire tonight in the big brick fireplace in the living-room, and it would burn slowly all the evening until they went to bed. Somewhere stored away was a piece of last year's Yule log, saved to be used as kindling for its successor.

 

'Here,' Old George said, appearing suddenly at Will's side as they all pushed the cart out of the gate. 'You should have some of this.' He thrust forward a great bunch of holly, heavy with berries.

 

'Very good of you, George,' said Mr Stanton. 'But we do have that big holly tree by the front door, you know. If you know anyone who hasn't - '

 

'No, no, you take it.' The old man wagged his finger. 'Not half so many berries on that bush o' yours. Partic'lar holly, this is.' He laid it carefully in the cart; then quickly broke off a sprig and slipped it into the top buttonhole of Will's coat.

 

'And a good protection against the Dark,' the old voice said low in Will's ear, 'if pinned over the window, and over the door.' Then the pink-gummed grin split his creased brown face in a squawk of ancient laughter, and the Old One was Old George again, waving them away. 'Happy Christmas!'

 

'Happy Christmas, George!'

 

When they carried the tree ceremonially through the front door, the twins seized it with cross-boards and screwdrivers, to give it a base. At the other end of the room Mary and Barbara sat in a rustling sea of coloured paper, cutting it into strips, red, yellow, blue, green, and gluing them into interlocked circles for paper-chains.

 

'You should have done those yesterday,' Will said. 'They'll need time to dry.'

 

'You should have done them yesterday,' Mary said resentfully, tossing back her long hair. 'It's supposed to be the youngest's job.'

 

'I cut up lots of strips the other day,' Will said.

 

'We used those up hours ago.'

 

'I did cut them, all the same.'

 

'Besides,' Barbara said peaceably, 'he was Christmas shopping yesterday. So you'd better shut up, Mary, or he might decide to take your present back.'

 

Mary muttered, but subsided, and Will half-heartedly stuck a few paper-chains together. But he kept an eye on the doorway, and when he saw his father and James appear with their arms full of old cardboard boxes, he slipped quietly away after them. Nothing could keep him from the decorating of the Christmas tree.

 

Out of the boxes came all the familiar decorations that would turn the life of the family into a festival for twelve nights and days: the golden-haired figure for the top of the tree; the strings of jewel-coloured lights. Then there were the fragile glass Christmas-tree balls, lovingly preserved for years. Half-spheres whorled like red and gold-green seashells, slender glass spears, spider-webs of silvery glass threads and beads; on the dark limbs of the tree they hung and gently turned, shimmering.

 

There were other treasures, then. Little gold stars and circles of plaited straw; light, swinging silver-paper bells. Next, a medley of decorations made by assorted Stanton children, ranging from Will's infant pipe-cleaner reindeer to a beautiful filigree cross that Max had fashioned out of copper wire in his first year at art school. Then there were strings of tinsel to be draped across any space, and then the box was empty.

 

But not quite empty. Rifling his fingers gingerly through the crumbled handfuls of packing-paper, in an old cardboard container nearly as tall as himself, Will found a small flat box not much larger than his hand. It rattled.

 

'What's this?' he said curiously, trying to open the lid.

 

'Good heavens,' said Mrs Stanton from her central arm-chair. 'Let me see that a moment, love. Is it ... yes it is! Was it in the big box? I thought we'd lost it years ago. Just look at this, Roger. See what your youngest son's found. It's Frank Dawson's box of letters.'

 

She pressed a catch on the lid of the box, so that it flicked up, and Will saw inside a number of ornate little carvings done in some light wood that he could not name. Mrs Stanton held one up: a curved letter S, with the beautifully detailed head and scaly body of a snake, twirling on an almost invisible thread. Then another: an arched M, with peaks like the twin spires of a faery cathedral. The carvings were so delicate that it was quite impossible to see where they joined the threads from which they hung.

 

Mr Stanton came down from the step-ladder, and poked one gentle finger into the box. 'Well, well,' he said. 'Clever old Will.'

 

'I've never seen them before,' said Will.

 

'Well, you have really,' his mother said. 'But so long ago that you wouldn't remember. They disappeared years and years ago. Fancy them being at the bottom of that old box all the time.'

 

'But what are they?'

 

'Christmas-tree ornaments, of course,' Mary said, peering over her mother's shoulder.

 

'Farmer Dawson made them for us,' Mrs Stanton said.

 

'They're beautifully carved, as you see. And exactly as old as the family - on our first Christmas Day in this house Frank made an R for Roger' - she fished it out - 'and an A for me.'

 

Mr Stanton pulled out two letters which both hung together from the same thread. 'Robin and Paul. This pair came a bit later than usual. We hadn't been expecting twins ... Really, Frank was awfully good. I wonder if he has time for anything like this now?'

 

Mrs Stanton was still turning the small wooden curlicues in her thin, strong fingers. 'M for Max, and M for Mary ... Frank was very cross with us for having a repeat, I remember ... Oh, Roger,' she said, her voice suddenly softening. 'Look at this one.'

 

Will stood beside his father to look. It was a letter T, carved like an exquisite little tree spreading two branches wide. 'T?' he said. 'But none of us begins with T.'

 

'That was Tom,' his mother said. 'I don't really know why I've never spoken to you younger ones about Tom. It was just so long ago .. . Tom was your little brother who died. He had something wrong with his lungs, a disease some new babies get, and he only lived for three days after he was born. Frank had the initial already carved for him, because it was our first baby and we had two names chosen; Tom if it was a boy, Tess if it was a girl ...'

 

Her voice sounded slightly muffled, and Will suddenly regretted finding the letters. He patted her shoulder awkwardly. 'Never mind, Mum,' he said.

 

'Oh, gracious,' said Mrs Stanton briskly. 'I'm not sad, love. It was a very long while ago. Tom would have been a grown-up man by now, older than Stephen. And after all' - she gave a comical look round the room, cluttered with people and boxes - 'a brood of nine should be enough for any woman.'

 

'You can say that again,' said Mr Stanton.

 

'It comes of having farming forebears, Mum,' said Paul.

 

'They believed in large families. Lots of free labour.'

 

'Speaking of free labour,' said his father, 'where have James and Max gone?'

 

'Fetching the other boxes.'

 

'Good Lord. Such initiative!'

 

'Christmas spirit,' said Robin from the step-ladder. 'Good Christian men rejoice, and all that. Why doesn't someone turn some music on?'

 

Barbara, sitting on the floor beside her mother, took the little carved wooden T from her hand and added it to a row she had made on the carpet of every initial in order. 'Tom, Steve, Max, Glen, Robin and Paul, me, Mary, James,' she said. 'But where's the W for Will?'

 

'Will's was there with all the rest. In the box.'

 

'It wasn't a W actually, if you remember,' said Mr Stanton. 'It was a kind of pattern. I dare say Frank had got tired of doing initials by then.' He grinned at Will.

 

'But it's not here,' Barbara said. She held the box upside down, then shook it. Then she looked at her youngest brother solemnly. 'Will,' she said, 'you don't exist.'

 

But Will was feeling a growing uneasiness that seemed to come from some very deep faraway part of his mind. 'You said it was a pattern, not a W,' he said casually. 'What sort of pattern, Dad?'

 

'A mandala, as I recall,' said Mr Stanton.

 

'A what?'

 

His father chuckled. 'Pay no attention, I was only showing of. I don't imagine Frank would have called it that. A mandala is a very ancient kind of symbol dating back to sun- worship and that kind of thing - any pattern made of a circle with lines radiating outward or inward. Your little Christmas ornament was just a simple one - a circle with a star inside, or a cross. A cross, I think it was.'

 

'I can't think why it isn't there with the rest,' said Mrs Stanton.

 

But Will could. If there was power in knowing the proper names of the people of the Dark, perhaps the Dark could in its turn work magic over others by using some sign that was a symbol of a name, like a carved initial ... Perhaps someone had taken his own sign in order to try to get power over him that way. And perhaps, indeed, this was why Farmer Dawson had carved him not an initial, but a symbol that nobody of the Dark could use. They had stolen it anyway, to try ...

 

A little while later, Will slipped away from the tree-decorating and went upstairs and pinned a sprig of holly over the door and each of the windows of his room. He tucked a piece into the newly-mended catch of the skylight as well. Then he did the same for the windows of James's room, which he would share for Christmas Eve, and came downstairs and fixed a small bunch neatly over the front and back doors of the house. He would have done the same to all the windows, too, if Gwen hadn't crossed the hall and noticed what he was doing.

 

'Oh, Will,' she said. 'Not everywhere. Put it all along the mantelpiece or somewhere, so it's controllable. I mean, otherwise we shall have holly berries underfoot every time anyone draws the curtains.'

 

A typical female attitude, Will thought in disgust; but he was not inclined to draw attention to his holly by making any great protest. In any case, he reflected as he tried to arrange the holly artistically over the mantel, up here it would be a protection against the only entry into the house that he had forgotten about. Having left his Father Christmas days behind, he had not thought about the chimney. The house was glowing now with light and colour and excitement. Christmas Eve was almost accomplished. But last of all there came the carol-singing.

 

After tea that day, when the Christmas lights had been turned on, and when the last rustling scuttlings of present- wrappings were ending, Mr Stanton stretched back in his battered leather armchair, took out his pipe, and beamed pontifically at them all.

 

'Well,' he said, 'who's going on the trek this year?'

 

'Me,' said James.

 

'Me,' said Will.

 

'Barbara and I,' said Mary.

 

'Paul, of course,' said Will. His brother's flute-case was all ready on the kitchen table.

 

'I don't know whether I shall,' Robin said.

 

'Yes, you will,' said Paul. 'No good without a baritone.'

 

'Oh, all right,' said his twin begrudgingly. This brief exchange had been repeated annually now for three years. Being large, mechanically-minded and an excellent

foot-baller, Robin felt it was not quite proper for him to show eagerness for any activity as lady-like as carol-singing. In fact he was genuinely devoted to music, like the rest of them, and had a pleasant dark-brown voice.

 

'Too busy,' Gwen said. 'Sorry.'

 

'What she means is,' said Mary from a safe distance, 'that she has to wash her hair in case Johnnie Penn might come round.'

 

'What do you mean, might?' said Max from the armchair next to his father's.

 

Gwen made a terrible face at him. 'Well,' she demanded, 'and what about you going carolling?'

 

'Even busier than you,' Max said lazily. 'Sorry.'

 

'And what he means is,' said Mary, now hovering beside the door, 'that he has to sit up in his room and write another enormous long letter to his blonde bird in Southampton.'

 

Max pulled off one of his slippers to hurl, but she was gone.

 

'Bird?' said his father. 'Whatever will the word be next?'

 

'Good grief, Dad!' James looked at him in horror. 'You really do live in the Stone Age. Girls have been birds since the year one. Just about as much brains as birds too, if you ask me.'

 

'Some real birds have quite a lot of brains,' Will said reflectively. 'Don't you think?' But the episode of the rooks had been so effectively removed from James's mind that he took no notice; the words bounced off.

 

'Off you all go,' said Mrs Stanton. 'Boots, thick coats, and back by eight-thirty.'

 

'Eight-thirty?' Robin said. 'If we give Miss Bell three carols, and Miss Greythorne asks us all in for punch?'

 

'Well, nine-thirty at the very outside,' she said.

 

It was very dark by the time they left; the sky had not cleared, and no moon nor even a single star glimmered through the black night. The lantern that Robin carried on a pole cast a glittering circle of light on the snow, but each of them had a candle in one coat pocket just the same. When they reached the Manor, old Miss Greythorne would insist on their coming in and standing in her great stone-floored entrance hall with all the lights turned out, each holding up a lighted candle while they sang.

 

The air was freezing, and their breath clouded out thick and white. Now and then a stray snowflake drifted down from the sky, and Will thought of the fat lady in the bus and her predictions. Barbara and Mary were chattering away as cosily as if they were sitting at home, but behind the chatter the footsteps of all the group rang out cold and hard on the snow-caked road. Will was happy, snug in the thought of Christmas and the pleasure of carol singing; he walked along in a contented dreamy state, clutching the big collecting-box they carried in aid of Huntercombe's small, ancient, famous and rapidly crumbling Saxon church. Then, there ahead of them was Dawsons' Farm with a large bunch of the many-berried holly nailed above the back door, and the carol-singing had begun.

 

On through the village they sang: 'Nowell' for the rector; 'God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen' for jolly Mr Hutton, the enormous businessman in the new mock-Tudor house at the end of the village, who always looked as though he were resting very merry indeed; 'Once in Royal David's City' for Mrs Pettigrew, the widowed postmistress, who dyed her hair with tea-leaves and kept a small limp dog which looked like a skein of grey wool. They sang 'Adeste Fideles' in Latin and 'Les Anges dans nos Campagnes' in French for tiny Miss Bell, the retired village schoolmistress, who had taught every one of them how to read and write, add and subtract, talk and think, before they went on to other schools elsewhere. And little Miss Bell said huskily, 'Beautiful, beautiful,' put some coins that they knew she could not afford into the collecting box, gave each of them a hug, and - 'Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas!' - they were off to the next house on the list.

 

There were four or five more, one of them the home of lugubrious Mrs Horniman, who 'did' for their mother once a week and had been born and bred in the East End of London until a bomb had blown her house to bits thirty years before.

 

She had always given them a silver sixpence each, and so she still did, coolly disregarding changes in the currency. 'Wouldn't be Christmas without sixpences,' Mrs Horniman said. 'I laid a good stock in before we got landed with all them decimals, so I did. So I can go on every Christmas just the way I used to, me ducks, and I reckon my stock'll see me out, until I'm deep in me grave and you're singing to someone else at this here door. Merry Christmas!'  And then it was the Manor, the last stop before home.

 

Here we come a-wassailing among the leaves so green,

Here we come a-wandering, so fair to be seen ...

 

They always began with the old Wassail Song for Miss Greythorne, and this year the bit about the green leaves, Will reflected, was even more inappropriate than usual. The carol bounded its way along, and for the last verse Will and James soared up into the high pealing descant that they did not always use for an ending because it took so much breath.

 

Good master and good mistress while you're sitting by the fire,

Pray think of us poor children who are wandering in the mire...

 

Robin tugged the big metal bell-pull, whose deep clanging always filled Will with an obscure alarm, and as they spiralled up in the last verse the great door opened, and there stood Miss Greythorne's butler, in the tail-coat he wore always on Christmas Eve night. He was not a very grand butler; his name was Bates, a tall, lean, morose man who could often be seen helping the one aged gardener in the vegetable garden near the Manor's back gate, or discussing his arthritis with Mrs Pettigrew at the Post Office.

 

Love and joy come to you

And to you your wassail too . . .

 

The butler smiled and nodded politely at them and held the door wide, and Will all but swallowed his last high note, for it was not Bates; it was Merriman.

 

The carol ended, and they all relaxed, shuffling in the snow. 'Enchanting,' Merriman said gravely, surveying them impersonally, and Miss Greythorne's high imperious tones came ringing past him. 'Bring them in! Bring them in! Don't keep them waiting on the doorstep!'

 

She sat there in the long entrance hall, in the same high-backed chair that they saw every Christmas Eve. She had not been able to walk for years after an accident when she was a young woman - her horse had fallen and rolled on her, the village said - but she flatly refused ever to be seen in a wheel-chair. Thin-faced and bright-eyed, her grey hair always swept up on top of her head in a kind of knot, she was a figure of total mystery in Huntercombe.

 

'How's y'mother?' Miss Greythorne demanded of Paul. 'And y'father?'

 

'Very well, thank you, Miss Greythorne.'

 

'Havin' a good Christmas?'

 

'Splendid, thanks. I hope you are.' Paul, who was sorry for Miss Greythorne, always went to some trouble to be warmly polite; he made sure now that his eyes did not flicker round the high-roofed hall as he spoke. For although the cook-housekeeper and the maid were standing beaming at the back of the hall, and though of course there was the butler who had opened the front door, otherwise in all this great house there was no trace of any visitor, tree, decoration, or any other sign of Christmas festivity, save for one gigantic branch of many-berried holly hanging over the mantel.

 

'An odd season, this,' Miss Greythorne said, looking at Paul pensively. 'So full of a number of things, as that odious little girl in the poem said.' She turned suddenly to Will. 'And are you having a busy time this year, eh, young man?'

 

'I certainly am,' said Will frankly, caught of balance.

 

'A light for your candles,' said Merriman in low respectful tones, coming forward with a box of enormous matches. Hastily they all tugged the candles from their pockets, and he struck a match and moved carefully among them, the light turning his eyebrows into fantastic bristling hedges and the lines from nose to mouth into deep-shadowed ravines. Will looked thoughtfully at his tail-coat, which was cut away at the waist, and which he wore with a kind of jabot at the neck instead of a white tie. He was having some difficulty in thinking of Merriman as a butler.

 

Someone at the back of the hall turned out the lights, leaving the long room lit only by the group of flickering flames in their hands. There was the soft tap of a foot; then they began with the sweet, soft lullaby carol, 'Lullay lullay, thou little tiny child ...' ending it with a last wordless verse played only by Paul. The clear, husky sound of the flute fell through the air like bars of light and filled Will with a strange aching longing, a sense of something waiting far off, that he could not understand. Then for contrast they sang 'God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen'; then 'The Holly and the Ivy'. And then they were back at 'Good King Wenceslas', always a grand finale for Miss Greythorne, and always making Will sorry for Paul, who had once observed that this carol was so totally unsuited to his kind of music that it must have been written by someone who despised the flute.

 

But it was fun being the page, trying to make his voice so exactly match James's that the two of them together sounded like one boy.

 

Sire, he lives a good league hence...

 

... and Will thought: we're really doing well this time, I'd swear James wasn't singing at all if ...

 

Underneath the mountain ...

 

... if it weren't for the fact that his mouth's moving ...

 

Right against the forest fence...

 

... and he glanced through the gloom as he sang, and saw, with a shock as brutal as if someone had thumped him in the stomach, that in fact James's mouth was not moving, nor was any other part of James, nor of Robin or Mary or any of the Stantons. They stood there immobile, all of them, caught out of Time, as the Walker had stood in Oldway Lane when the girl of the Dark enchanted him. And the flames of their candles flickered no longer, but each burned with the same strange, unconsuming pillar of white luminous air that had risen from Will's burning branch that other day. Paul's fingers no longer moved on his flute; he too stood motionless, holding it to his mouth. Yet the music, very much like but even sweeter than the music of a flute, went on, and so did Will, singing in spite of himself, finishing the verse ...

 

By Saint Agnes' fou ... oun ... tain ...

 

... And just as he began to wonder, through the strange sweet accompanying music that seemed to come out of the air, quite how the next verse could be done, unless a boy soprano were expected to sound like good King Wenceslas as well as his page, a great beautiful deep voice rolled out through the room with the familiar words, a great deep voice that Will had never heard employed in song before and yet at once recognised.

 

...Bring me flesh and bring me wine

Bring me pine-logs hither;

Thou and I will see him dine

When we bear them thither ...

 

Will's head swam a little, the room seemed to grow and then shrink again; but the music went on, and the pillars of light stood still above the candle-flames, and as the next verse began Merriman reached casually out and took his hand, and they walked forward, singing together:

 

Page and monarch forth they went,

Forth they went together,

Through the rude wind's wild lament

And the bitter weather.

 

They walked down the long entrance hall, away from the motionless Stantons, past Miss Greythorne in her chair, and the cook-housekeeper, and the maid, all unmoving, alive and yet suspended out of life. Will felt as though he were walking in the air, not touching the ground at all, down the dark hall; no light ahead of them now, but only a glow from behind. Into the dark...

 

Sire, the night is darker now,

And the wind blows stronger;

Fails my heart I know not how,

I can go no longer ...

 

Will heard his voice shake, for the words were right words for what was in his mind.

 

Mark my footsteps, good my page;

Tread thou in them boldly ...

 

Merriman sang; and suddenly more was ahead of Will than the dark.

 

There before him rose the great doors, the great carved doors that he had first seen on a snow-mounded Chiltern hill-side, and Merriman raised his left arm and pointed at them with his five fingers spread wide and straight. Slowly the doors opened, and the elusive silvery music of the Old Ones came swelling up briefly to join the accompaniment of the carol, and then was lost again. And he walked forward with Merriman into the light, into a different time and a different Christmas, singing as if he could pour all the music in the world into these present notes - and singing so confidently that the school choirmaster, who was very strict about raised heads and well-moving jaws, would have fallen mute in astonished pride.

 

 

 

Part Two: The Learning

The Book of Gramarye

 

They were in a bright room again, a room unlike anything Will had ever seen. The ceilings were high, painted with pictures of trees and woods and mountains; the walls were panelled in shiny gold wood, lit here and there by strange glowing white globes. And the room was full of music, their own carol taken up by many voices, in a gathering of people dressed like a brilliant scene from a history book. The women, bare-shouldered, wore long full dresses with elaborately looped and ruffled skirts; the men wore suits not unlike Merriman's, with squared-off tail-coats, long straight trousers, white ruffles or black silk cravats at the neck. Indeed now that Will came to look again at Merriman, he realised that the clothes he wore had never really been those of a butler at all, but belonged totally to this other century, whichever it might be.

 

A lady in a white dress was sweeping forward to meet them, people round her moving respectfully back to make way, and as the carol ended she cried: 'Beautiful! Beautiful! Come in, come in!' The voice was exactly the voice of Miss Greythorne greeting them at the Manor door a little while earlier, and when Will looked up at the face he saw that in a sense this was Miss Greythorne too. There were the same eyes and rather bony face, the same friendly but imperious manner - only this Miss Greythorne was much younger and prettier, like a flower that has unfolded from the bud but not yet been battered by the sun and wind and days.

 

'Come, Will,' she said, and took his hand, smiling down at him, and he went easily to her; it was so clear that she knew him and that those around her, men and women, young and old, all smiling and gay, knew him too. Most of the bright crowd was leaving the room now, couples and chattering groups, in the direction of a delicious cooking smell that clearly signalled supper somewhere else in the house. But a group of a score or so remained.

 

'We were waiting for you,' said Miss Greythorne, and drew him towards the back of the room where a fire blazed warm and friendly in an ornate fireplace. She was looking at Merriman too, including him in the words. 'We are all ready, there are no - hindrances.'

 

'You are sure?' Merriman's voice came quick and deep like a hammer-stroke, and Will glanced up curiously. But the hawk-nosed face was as secret as ever.

 

'Quite sure,' said the lady. Suddenly she knelt down beside Will, her skirt billowing round her like a great white rose; she was at his eye-level now, and she held both his hands, gazing at him, and spoke softly and urgently. 'It is the third Sign, Will. The Sign of Wood. We call it sometimes the Sign of Learning. This is the time for remaking the Sign. In every century since the beginning, Will, every hundred years, the Sign of Wood must be renewed, for it is the only one of the six that cannot keep its nature unchanged. Every hundred years we have remade it, in the way that we were first taught. And now this will be the last time, because when your own century comes you will take it out for all time, for the joining, and there need be no more renewing then.'

 

She stood up, and said clearly, 'We are glad to see you, Will Stanton, Sign-Seeker. Very, very glad.' And there was a general rumble of voices, low and high, soft and deep, all approving and agreeing; it was like a wall, Will thought, you could lean against it and feel support. Very strongly he could feel the strength of friendship that came out of this small group of unfamiliar, handsomely-dressed people; he wondered whether all of them were Old Ones. Looking up at Merriman beside him, he grinned in delight, and Merriman smiled down at him with a look of more open relaxed pleasure than Will had yet seen on the stern, rather grim face.

 

'It is almost time,' Miss Greythorne said.

 

'Some small refreshment for the newcomers first, perhaps,' a man beside them said: a small man, not much taller than Will. He held out a glass. Will took it, glancing up, and found himself staring into a thin, lively face, almost triangular, thickly lined yet not old, with a pair of startlingly bright eyes staring at and somehow into him. It was a disturbing face, with much behind it. But the man had swung away from him, presenting Will only with a neat, green velvet-covered back, and was handing a glass to Merriman.

 

'My lord,' he said deferentially as he did so, and bowed. Merriman looked at him with a comical twist of the mouth, said nothing, but stared mockingly and waited. Before Will had a chance even to begin puzzling over the greeting, the small man blinked and seemed suddenly to collect his wits, like a dreamer abruptly woken. He burst out laughing.

 

'Ah, no,' he said spluttering. 'Stop it. I have had the habit for long years, after all.' Merriman chuckled affectionately, raised the glass to him, and drank; and since he could make no sense of this odd exchange Will drank too, and was filled with astonishment by an unrecognisable taste that was less a taste than a blaze of light, a burst of music, something fierce and wonderful sweeping over all his senses at once.

 

'What is it?'

 

The small man swung round and laughed, his creased face slanting all its lines upwards. 'Metheglyn used to be the nearest name,' he said, taking the empty glass. He blew into it, said unexpectedly, 'An Old One's eyes can see,' and held it out; and staring into the clear base, Will suddenly felt he could see a group of figures in brown robes making whatever it was that he had just drunk. He glanced up to see the man in the green coat watching him closely, with a disturbing expression that was like a mixture of envy and satisfaction. Then the man chuckled and whisked the glass away, and Miss Greythorne was calling for them to come to her; the white globes of light in the room grew dim, and the voices quiet. Somewhere in the house Will thought he could still hear music, but he was not sure.

 

Miss Greythorne stood by the fire. For a moment she looked down at Will, then up at Merriman. Then she turned away from them and looked at the wall. She stared and stared for a long time. The panelling and the fireplace and the over-mantel were all one, all carved from the same golden wood: very plain, with no curves or flourishes, but only a simple four-petalled rose set in a square here and there. She put up her hand to one of these small rose carvings on the top left-hand corner of the fireplace, and she pressed its centre. There was a click, and below the rose, at the level of her waist, a square dark hole in the panelling appeared. Will did not see any panel slide away; the hole was simply, suddenly, there.

 

And Miss Greythorne put in her hand and drew out an object shaped like a small circle. It was the image of the two that he had himself, and he found that his hand, as once before, had already moved of its own accord and was clasping them protectively. There was total silence in the room. From outside the doors Will could certainly hear music now, but could not make out the nature of it.

 

The sign-circle was very thin and dark, and one of its inside cross-arms broke as he watched. Miss Greythorne held it out to Merriman, and a little more fell away into dust. Will could see now that it was wood, roughened and worn, but with a grain running through.

 

'That's a hundred years old?' he said.

 

'Every hundred years, the renewing,' she said. 'Yes.'

 

Will said impulsively, into the silent room, 'But wood lasts much longer than that. I've seen some in the British Museum. Bits of old boats they dug up by the Thames. Prehistoric. Thousands of years old.'

 

'Quercus Britannicus,' Merriman said, severely and abruptly, sounding like a cross professor. 'Oak. The canoes you refer to were made of oak. And further south, the oaken piles on which the present cathedral of Winchester stands were sunk some nine hundred years ago, and are as tough today as they were then. Oh yes, oak lasts a very long time, Will Stanton, and there will come a day when the root of an oak tree will play a very important part in your young life. But oak is not the wood for the Sign. Our wood is one which the Dark does not love. Rowan, Will, that's our tree. Mountain ash. There are qualities in rowan, as in no other wood on the earth, that we need. But also there are strains on the Sign that rowan cannot survive as oak might, or as iron and bronze do. So the Sign must be reborn' - he held it up, between one long finger and a deeply back-curved thumb - 'every hundred years.'

 

Will nodded. He said nothing. He found himself very conscious of the people in the room. It was as if they were all concentrating very hard on one thing, and you could hear the concentration. And they seemed suddenly multiplied, endless, a vast crowd stretching out beyond the house and beyond this century or any other.

 

He did not fully understand what happened next. Merriman jerked his hand forward suddenly, broke the wooden Sign easily in half and tossed it in the fire, where a great single log like their own Yule log was half-way burned down. The flames leapt. Then Miss Greythorne reached out towards the small man in the green velvet coat, took from him the silver jug from which he had poured drinks, and threw the contents of the jug on the fire. There was a great hissing and smoking, and the fire was dead. And she leaned forward in her long white dress and put her arm into the smoke and the smouldering ashes, and brought out a part-burned piece of the big log. It was like a large irregular disc.

 

Holding the lump of wood high so that everyone could see, she began to take blackened pieces from it as though she were peeling an orange; her fingers moved quickly, and the burned edges fell away and the skeleton of the wooden piece was left: a clear, smooth circle, containing a cross.

 

There was no irregularity to it at all, as though it had never before had any other shape than this. And on Miss Greythorne's white hands there was not even a trace of soot or ash.

 

'Will Stanton,' she said, turning to him, 'here is your third Sign. I may not give it to you in this century. Your quest must all along be fulfilled within your own time. But the wood is the Sign of Learning, and when you have done with your own particular learning you will find it. And I can leave in your mind the movements that the finding will take.' She looked hard at Will, then reached up and slipped the strange wooden circle into the dark hole in the panelling. With her other hand, she pressed the carved rose in the wall above it, and with the same sight-defeating flash as before the hole was suddenly no longer there. The wood-panelled wall was smooth and unbroken as if there had been no change at all.

 

Will stared. Remember how it was done, remember ... She had pressed the first carved rose at the top left-hand corner. But now there were three roses in a group at that corner; which one should it be? As he looked more closely, he saw in fearful astonishment that now the whole wall of panelling was covered in squares of carved wood, each containing a single four-petalled rose. Had they grown at this moment, beneath his eyes? Or had they been there all along, invisible because of a trick of the light? He shook his head in alarm and looked round for Merriman. But it was too late. Nobody was close by him. Solemnity had left the air; the lights were bright again, and everybody was cheerfully talking. Merriman was murmuring something to Miss Greythorne, bending almost double to speak close to her ear. Will felt a touch on his arm, and swung round.

 

It was the small man in the green coat, beckoning to him. Near the doors at the other end of the room, the group of musicians who had accompanied the carol began playing again: a gentle sound of recorders and violins and what he thought was a harpsichord. It was another carol they were playing now, an old one, much older than the century of the room. Will wanted to listen, but the man in green had hold of his arm and was drawing him insistently towards a side door. Will stood firm, rebellious, and turned towards Merriman. The tall figure jerked upright instantly, swinging round to look for him; but when he saw what was happening Merriman relaxed, merely raising one hand in assent. Will felt the reassurance put into his mind: go on, it's all right. I'll follow.

 

The small man picked up a lamp, glanced casually about him, then quickly swung the side door open just far enough for Will and himself to slip through. 'Don't trust me, do you?' he said in his sharp, jerky voice. 'Good. Don't trust anyone unless you have to, boy. Then you'll survive to do what you're here for.'

 

'I seem to know about people now, mostly,' Will said. 'I mean, somehow I can tell which ones I can trust. Usually. But you - ' he stopped.

 

'Well?' said the man.

 

Will said: 'You don't fit.'

 

The man shouted with laughter, his eyes disappearing in the creases of his face, then stopped abruptly and held up his lamp. In the circle of wavering light, Will saw what seemed to be a small room, wood-panelled, with no furniture except an armchair, a table, a small step-ladder, and a wall-height glass-fronted bookcase in the centre of each wall. He heard a deep measured ticking and saw, peering through the gloom, that a very large grandfather clock stood in the corner. If the room were dedicated only to reading, as it seemed to be, then it held a timepiece that would give a very loud warning against reading for too long.

 

The small man thrust the lamp into Will's hand. 'I think there's a light over here - ah.' There began an indefinable hissing sound that Will had noticed once or twice in the room next door; then there was the crack of a match lighting and a loud 'Pop!', and a light appeared on the wall, burning at first with a reddish flame and then expanding into one of the great white glowing globes.

 

'Mantles,' he said. 'Still very new in private houses, and most fashionable. Miss Greythorne is uncommonly fashionable, for this century.'

 

Will was not listening. 'Who are you?'

 

'My name is Hawkin,' said the man cheerfully. 'Nothing more. Just Hawkin.'

 

'Well look here, Hawkin,' Will said. He was trying to work something out, and it was making him most uneasy. 'You seem to know what's happening. Tell me something. Here I am brought into the past, a century that's already happened, that's part of the history books. But what happens if I do something to alter it? I might, I could. Any little thing. I'd be making something in history different, just as if I'd really been there.'

 

'But you were,' Hawkin said. He touched a spill to the flame in the lamp Will held.

 

Will said helplessly, 'What?'

 

'You were - are - in this century when it happened. If anyone had written a history recording this party here to-night, you and my lord Merriman would be in it, described. Unlikely, though. An Old One hardly ever lets his name be recorded anywhere. Generally you people manage to affect history in ways that no man ever knows . . .'

 

He touched the burning spill to a three-candle holder on the table beside one of the armchairs; the leather back of the chair shone in the yellow light. Will said, 'But I couldn't - I don't see-'

 

'Come,' Hawkin said swiftly. 'Of course you do not. It is a mystery. The Old Ones can travel in Time as they choose; you are not bound by the laws of the Universe as we know them.'

 

'Aren't you one?' Will said. 'I thought you must be.'

 

Hawkin shook his head, smiling. 'Nay,' he said. 'An ordinary sinful man.' He looked down and smoothed his hand over the green sleeve of his coat. 'But a most privileged one. For like you, I do not belong to this century, Will Stanton. I was brought here only to do a certain thing, and then my Lord Merriman will send me back to my own time.'

 

'Where,' said Merriman's deep voice to the soft click of the closing door, 'they do not have such stuff as velvet, which is why he is taking such particular pleasure in that pretty coat. Rather a foppish coat, by the present standard, I must tell you, Hawkin.'

 

The little man looked up with a quick grin, and Merriman put a hand affectionately on his shoulder. 'Hawkin is a child of the thirteenth century, Will,' he said. 'Seven hundred years before you were born. He belongs there. By my art, he has been brought forward out of it for this one day, and then he will go back again. As few ordinary men have ever done.'

 

Will ran one hand distractedly through his hair; he felt as though he were trying to work out a railway timetable.

 

Hawkin chuckled softly. 'I told you, Old One. It is a mystery.'

 

'Merriman?' Will said. 'Where do you belong?'

 

Merriman's dark, beaked face gazed at him without expression, like some long-carved image. 'You will understand soon,' he said. 'We have another purpose here than the Sign of Wood, we three. I belong nowhere and everywhere, Will. I am the first of the Old Ones, and I have been in every age. I existed - exist - in Hawkin's century. There, Hawkin is my liege man. I am his lord, and more than his lord, for he has been with me all his life, reared as if he were a son, since I took him when his parents had died.'

 

'No son ever had better care,' Hawkin said, rather huskily; he looked at his feet, and tugged the jacket straight, and Will realised that for all the lines on his face Hawkin was not much older than his own brother Stephen.

 

Merriman said, 'He is my friend who serves me, and I have deep affection for him. And hold him in great trust. So great that I have given him a vital part to play in the quest we must all accomplish in this century - the quest for your learning, Will.'

 

'Oh,' Will said weakly.

 

Hawkin grinned at him; then jumped forward and swept him a low bow, deliberately snapping the grave mood. 'I must thank you for being born, Old One,' he said, 'and giving me the chance to scurry like a mouse into another time than my own.'

 

Merriman relaxed, smiling. 'Did you notice, Will, how he loves to light the gas-lamps? In his day, they use smoky, foul-smelling candles that are not candles at all, but reeds dipped in tallow.'

 

'Gas-lamps?' Will looked up at the white globe attached to the wall. 'Is that what they are?'

 

'Of course. No electricity yet.'

 

'Well,' Will said defensively. 'I don't even know what year this is, after all.'

 

'Anno Domini eighteen seventy-five,' Merriman said. 'Not a bad year. In London, Mr Disraeli is doing his best to buy the Suez Canal. More than half the British merchant ships that will pass through it are sailing ships. Queen Victoria has been on the British throne for thirty eight years. In America, the President has the splendid name of Ulysses S. Grant, and Nebraska is the newest of the thirty-four states of the Union. And in a remote manor house in Buckinghamshire, distinguished or notorious in the public eye only for its possession of the world's most valuable small collection of books on necromancy, a lady named Mary Greythorne is holding a Christmas Eve party, with carols and music, for her friends.'

 

Will moved to the nearest bookcase. The books were all bound in leather, mostly brown. There were shiny new volumes with spines glittering in gold leaf; there were fat little books so ancient that their leather was worn down to the roughness of thick cloth. He peered at some of the titles: Demonolatry, Liber Poenitalis, Discoverie of Witchcraft, Malleus Maleficarum - and so on through French, German, and other languages of which he could not even recognise the alphabet. Merriman waved a dismissive hand at them, and at the shelves all around.

 

'Worth a small fortune,' he said, 'but not to us. These are the tales of small people, some dreamers and some madmen. Tales of witchcraft and the appalling things that men once did to the poor simple souls they called witches. Most of whom were ordinary, harmless human beings, one or two of whom truly had dealings with the Dark . . . None of them, of course, had a thing to do with the Old Ones, for nearly every tale that men tell of magic and witches and such is born out of foolishness and ignorance and sickness of mind - or is a way of explaining things they do not understand. The one thing of which they know nothing, most of them, is what we are about. And that is contained, Will, in just one book in this room. The rest are useful now and then as a reminder of what the Dark can accomplish and the black methods it may sometimes use. But there is one book that is the reason why you have come back to this century. It is the book from which you will learn your place as an Old One, and there are no words to describe how precious it is. The book of hidden things, of the real magic. Long ago, when magic was the only written knowledge, our business was called simply Knowing. But there is far too much to know in your day, on all subjects under the sun. So we use a half-forgotten word, as we Old Ones ourselves are half-forgotten. We call it "gramarye".'

 

He moved across the room towards the clock, beckoning them after him. Will glanced at Hawkin, and saw his thin, confident face tight with apprehension.They followed. Merriman stood in front of the great old clock in the corner, which was a full two feet above even his head, took a key from his pocket, and opened the front panel. Will could see the pendulum in there swaying slowly, hypnotically to ... and fro, to ... and fro.

 

'Hawkin,' Merriman said. The word was very gentle, even loving, but it was a command. The man in green, without a word, knelt down at his left side and stayed there, very still.

 

He said in a beseeching half-whisper: 'My lord - ' But Merriman paid no attention. He laid his left hand on Hawkin's shoulder, and stretched his right hand into the clock. Very carefully, he slipped his long fingers back along one side, keeping them as flat as possible to avoid touching the pendulum, and then with a quick flip he pulled out a small black-covered book. Hawkin collapsed into a sitting heap, with a throaty gasp of such terrified relief that Will stared at him in astonishment. But Merriman was drawing him away. He made Will sit down in the room's one chair, and he put the book into his hands. There was no title on the cover.

 

'This is the oldest book in the world,' he said simply. 'And when you have read it, it will be destroyed. This is the Book of Gramarye, written in the Old Speech. It cannot be understood by any except the Old Ones, and even if a man or creature might understand any spell of power that it contains, he could not use their words of power unless he were an Old One himself. So there has been no great danger in the fact of its existence, these many years. Yet it is not good to keep a thing of this kind past the date of its destiny, for it has always been in danger from the Dark, and the endless ingenuity of the Dark would still find a way of using it if they had it in their hands. In this room now, therefore, the book will accomplish its final purpose, which is to bestow on you, the last of the Old Ones, the gift of gramarye - and after that it will be destroyed. When you have the knowledge, Will Stanton, there will no longer be any need of storing it, for with you the circle is complete.'

 

Will sat very still, watching the shadows move on the strong, stern face above him; then he gave his head a shake, as if to wake it, and opened the book. He said, 'But it's in English! You said - '

 

Merriman laughed. 'That is not English, Will. And when we speak to one another, you and I, we do not use English. We use the Old Speech. We were born with it in our tongues. You think you are speaking English now, because your common sense tells you it is the only language you understand, but if your family were to hear you they would hear only gibberish. The same with that book.'

 

Hawkin was back on his feet, -though there was no colour in his face. Breathing unevenly, he leaned against the wall, and Will looked at him in concern.

 

But Merriman, ignoring him, went on, 'The moment you came into your power on your birthday, you could speak as an Old One. And did, not knowing that you were doing so. That was how the Rider knew you, when you met him on the road - you greeted John Smith in the Old Speech, and he therefore had to answer you in the same, and risk being marked as an Old One himself even though the craft of a smith is outside allegiance. But ordinary men can speak it too - like Hawkin here, and others in this house who are not of the Circle. And the Lords of the Dark can speak it too, though never without a certain betraying accent of their own.'

 

'I remember,' Will said slowly. 'The Rider did seem to have an accent, an accent I didn't know. Only of course I thought he was speaking English, and that he must just be someone from another part of the country. No wonder he came after me so soon.'

 

'As simple as that,' Merriman said. He looked at Hawkin for the first time, and laid a hand on his shoulder, but the small man did not stir. 'Listen now, Will. We shall leave you here until you have read the book. It will not be an experience quite like reading an ordinary book. When you have finished, I shall come back. Wherever I may be, I know always when the book is open or when it is closed. Read it now. You are of the Old Ones, and therefore you have only to read it once and it is in you for all Time. After that, we will make an end.'

 

Will said: 'Is Hawkin all right? He looks ill.'

 

Merriman looked down at the small drooping figure in green, and pain crossed his face. 'Too much to ask,' he said incomprehensibly, drawing Hawkin upright. 'But the book, Will. Read it. It has been waiting for you for a long time.'

 

He went out, supporting Hawkin, back to the music and voices of the next room, and Will was left with the Book of Gramarye.

 

 

 

Part Two: The Learning

Betrayal

 

Will was never able afterwards to tell how long he spent with the Book of Gramarye. So much went into him from its pages and changed him that the reading might have taken a year; yet so totally did it absorb his mind that when he came to an end he felt that he had only that moment begun. It was indeed not a book like other books. There were simple enough titles to each page: Of Flying; Of Challenge; Of the Words of Power; Of Resistance; Of Time through the Doors. But instead of presenting him with a story or instruction, the book would give simply a snatch of verse or a bright image, which somehow had him instantly in the midst of whatever experience was involved.

 

He might read no more than one line - I have journeyed as an eagle - and he was soaring suddenly aloft as if winged, learning through feeling, feeling the way of resting on the wind and tilting round the rising columns of air, of sweeping and soaring, of looking down at patchwork-green hills capped with dark trees, and a winding, glinting river between. And he knew as he flew that the eagle was one of the only five birds who could see the Dark, and instantly he knew the other four, and in turn he was each of them . . .

 

He read: ... you come to the place where is the oldest creature that is in this world, and he that has fared furthest afield, the Eagle of Gwernabwy ... and Will was up on a bare crag of rock above the world, resting without fear on a grey- black glittering shelf of granite, and his right side leaned against a soft, gold-feathered leg and a folded wing, and his hand rested beside a cruel steel-hard hooked claw, while in his ear a harsh voice whispered the words that would control wind and storm, sky and air, cloud and rain, and snow and hail - and everything in the sky save the sun and the moon, the planets and the stars.

 

Then he was flying again, at large in the blue-black sky, with the stars blazing timeless around his head, and the patterns of the stars made themselves known to him, both like and unlike the shapes and powers attributed to them by men long ago. The Herdsman passed, nodding, the bright star Arcturus at his knee; the Bull roared by, bearing the great sun Aldebaran and the small group of the Pleiades singing in small melodic voices, like no voices he had ever heard. Up he flew, and outward, through black space, and saw the dead stars, the blazing stars, the thin scattering of life that peopled the infinite emptiness beyond. And when he was done, he knew every star in the heavens, both by name and as charted astronomical points, and again as something much more than either; and he knew every spell of the sun and moon; he knew the mystery of Uranus and the despair of Mercury, and he had ridden on a comet's tail.

 

So, down out of the heavens the Book brought him, with one line.

 

... the wrinkled sea beneath him crawls...

 

And down he came plummeting, down towards the creeping wrinkled blue surface that changed, as he grew closer and closer, into a rearing sequence of great buffeting waves. Then he was in the sea, down out of the turmoil, through the green haze, into an astonishing, clear world of beauty and pitilessness and bleak cold survival. Each creature preyed on another, nothing was safe from all. And the Book taught Will here the patterns of survival against malevolence, and the spells of sea and river and stream, lake and beck and fjord, and showed him how water was the one element that could in  some measure defy all magic; for moving water would tolerate no magic whether for evil or good, but would wash it away as if it had never been made.

 

Through deadly sharp corals the Book sent him swimming, among strange waving fronds of green and red and purple, among rainbow-brilliant fish that swam up to him, stared, flicked a fin or tail and were gone. Past the black unkind spines of sea-urchins, past soft waving creatures that seemed neither plant nor fish; and then up on white sand, splashing through gold-flecked shallows - into trees. Dense bare trees like roots ran down into the sea-water all around him in a kind of leafless jungle, and in a flash Will was out of the tangle and blinking again at a page of the Book of Gramarye.

 

... I am fire-fretted and I flirt with wind ...

 

He was among trees then, spring trees tender with the new matchless green of young leaves, and a clear sun dappling them; summer trees full of leaf, whispering, massive; dark winter firs that fear no master and let no light brighten their woods. He learned the nature of all trees, the particular magics that are in oak and beech and ash. Then, one verse stood alone on a page of the Book:

 

He that sees blowing the wild wood tree,

And peewits circling their watery glass,

Dreams about Strangers that yet may be

Dark to our eyes, Alas!

 

And into Will's mind, whirling him up on a wind blowing through and around the whole of Time, came the story of the Old Ones. He saw them from the beginning when magic was at large in the world; magic that was the power of rocks and fire and water and living things, so that the first men lived in it and with it, as a fish lives in the water. He saw the Old Ones, through the ages of men who worked with stone, and with bronze, and with iron, with one of the six great Signs born in each age. He saw one race after another come attacking his island country, bringing each time the malevolence of the Dark with them, wave after wave of ships rushing inexorably at the shores. Each wave of men in turn grew peaceful as it grew to know and love the land, so that the Light flourished again. But always the Dark was there, swelling and waning, gaining a new Lord of the Dark whenever a man deliberately chose to be changed into something more dread and powerful than his fellows. Such creatures were not born to their doom, like the Old Ones, but chose it. The Black Rider he saw in all times from the beginning.

 

He saw a time when the first great testing of the Light came, and the Old Ones spent themselves for three centuries on bringing their land out of the Dark, with the help in the end of their greatest leader, lost in the saving unless one day he might wake and return again.

 

A hillside rose up out of that time, grassy and sunlit before Will's eyes, with the sign of the circle and cross cut into its green turf, gleaming there huge and white in the Chiltern chalk. Round one arm of the white cross, scraping at it with curious tools like long-bladed axes, he saw a group of figures dressed in green: small men, made smaller still by the width of the great Sign. He saw one of these figures whirl dreamlike out of the group towards him: a man in a green tunic with a short dark-blue cloak, and a hood pulled over his head. The man flung wide his arms, with a short bronze-bladed sword in one hand and a glinting chalice-like cup in the other; spun round, and at once disappeared. Then, caught up by the next page, Will was walking along a path through a thick forest, with some fragrant dark-green herb under his feet; a path that broadened and hardened into stone, a well-worn, undulating stone-like limestone, and led him out of the forest until he was walking along a high, windy ridge under a grey sky, with a dark, mist-filled valley below. And all the while as he walked, though no one walked with him, firmly into his mind in procession came the secret words of power for the Old Ways, and the feelings and signs by which he would know, henceforth, anywhere in the world, where the nearest Old Way ran, either in substance or as the ghost of a road . . .

 

So it went, until Will found that he was almost at the end of the Book. A verse was written before him.

 

I have plundered the fern

Through all secrets I spie;

Old Math ap Mathonwy

Knew no more than I.

 

Facing the cover, on the very last page, was a drawing of the six circled-cross Signs, all joined into one circle. And that was all.

 

Will closed the book, slowly, and sat staring at nothing. He felt as though he had lived for a hundred years. To know so much, now, to be able to do so many things; it should have excited him, but he felt weighed down, melancholy, at the thought of all that had been and all that was to come.

 

Merriman came through the door alone, and stood looking down at him. 'Ah yes,' he said softly. 'As I told you, it is a responsibility, a heaviness. But there it is, Will. We are the Old Ones, born into the Circle, and there is no help for it.' He picked up the book, and touched Will's shoulder. 'Come.'

 

As he crossed the room to the towering grandfather clock, Will followed, and watched him take the key again from his pocket and unlock the front panel. There still was the pendulum, long and slow, swinging like the beat of a heart. But this time, Merriman took no care to avoid touching it. He reached in with the book in his hand, but he moved with an odd jerkiness, like an actor over-playing the part of a clumsy man; and as he pushed the book in, a corner of it brushed the long arm of the pendulum. Will had just the flash of a moment to see the slight break in the swing. Then he was staggering backwards, his hands flying up to his eyes, and the room was filled with something he could never afterwards describe - a soundless explosion, a blinding flare of dark light, a great roar of energy that could not be seen or heard and yet made him feel for an instant that the whole world had blown up. When he took his hands from his face, blinking, he found that he was pressed against the side of the armchair, ten feet from where he had been before. Merriman was spread-eagled against the wall beside him. And where the grandfather clock had been, the corner of the room was empty. There was no damage, nor any sign of violence or explosion. There was simply nothing.

 

'That was it, you see,' Merriman said. 'That was one protection of the Book of Gramarye, since our time began. If the thing protecting it should be so much as touched, it and the book and the man touching it would become - nothing. Only the Old Ones were immune from destruction, and as you see' - he rubbed his arm ruefully - 'even we, in the event, can be bruised. The protection has taken many forms, of course - the clock was simply for this century. So now we have destroyed the Book, by the same means that through all these ages we used to preserve it. That is the only proper manner for using magic, as you have now learned.'

 

Will said shakily, 'Where's Hawkin?'

 

'He was not needed this time,' Merriman said.

 

'Is he all right? He looked - '

 

'Quite all right.' There was a strange tight note in Merriman's voice, like sadness, but none of his new art could tell Will the emotion that put it there.

 

They went back to the gathering in the next room, where the carol that had begun as they left was only now coming to an end, and where nobody behaved as though they had been away for more than a moment or two, or for any real time at all. But then, Will thought, we are not in real time; at least, we are in past time, and even that we seem to be able to stretch as we wish, to make it go fast, or slow...

 

The crowd had grown, and more people were still drifting  back from the supper-room. Will realised now that most of these were ordinary folk, and that only the small group who had remained in the room earlier were Old Ones. Of course, he thought: only they would be able to witness the renewing of the Sign.

There were others, and he was turning to study them when suddenly astonishment and horror caught him up out of all reflection. His eye had caught a face in the very back of the room, a girl, not looking at him but busy in conversation with someone unseen. As he watched, she tossed her head with a bright self-conscious laugh. Then she was bent listening again, and then she was gone, as other guests blocked the group from view. But it had been long enough for Will to see that the laughing girl was Maggie Barnes, Maggie of Dawsons' Farm a century hence. She was not even a foreshadowing, as this Victorian Miss Greythorne was a kind of early echo of the Miss Greythorne that he knew. This was the Maggie he had last seen in his own time.

 

He swung round in consternation, but as soon as he met Merriman's eyes he saw that he already knew. There was no surprise in the hawk-nosed face, but only the beginnings of a kind of pain. 'Yes,' he said wearily. 'The witch-girl is here. And I think you should stay beside me, Will Stanton, for this next while, and watch with me, for I do not greatly care to watch alone.'

 

Wondering, Will stood with him in the corner, unobserved. The girl Maggie was still concealed in the crowd somewhere. They waited; then saw Hawkin, in his dapper green coat, thread his way through the crowd to Miss Greythorne and stand deferentially beside her, in the way of a man accustomed to making himself available for help.

Merriman stiffened slightly, and Will glanced up; the lines of pain had deepened on the strong face, as if Merriman were anticipating some great hurt about to come. He looked across again at Hawkin and saw his gay smile flash at something Miss Greythorne had said; showing no sign now of whatever had afflicted him in the library, the small man had a brightness, like a precious stone, that would bring delight to any gloom. Will could see why he was dear to Merriman. But at the same time he had all at once a dreadful, rushing conviction of hovering disaster.

 

He said huskily, 'Merriman! What is it?'

 

Merriman looked out over the heads at the lively pointed face. He said, without expression, 'It is peril, Will, that is to come to us through my doing. Great peril, through all this quest. I have made the worst mistake that an Old One may make, and the mistake is about to come down on my head fullfold. To put more trust in a mortal man than he has the strength to take - it is something that all of us learned never to do, centuries ago. Long before the Book of Gramarye came into my charge. Yet in foolishness I made that mistake. And now there is nothing that we can do to put it right, but only watch and wait for the result.'

 

'It's Hawkin, isn't it? Something to do with the reason why you brought him here?'

 

'The spell of protection for the Book,' Merriman said pain- fully, 'was in two parts, Will. You saw the first, the protection against men - it was the pendulum, which would destroy them if they were to touch it, but would not destroy me or any Old One. But I wove another part into that spell that was a protection against the Dark. It set down that I could take the Book out past the pendulum only if I were touching Hawkin with my other hand. Whenever the Book was taken out for the last Old One, in whatever century, Hawkin would have to be brought out of his own time in order to be there.'

 

Will said: 'Wouldn't it have been safer to make an Old One part of the spell, not an ordinary man?'

 

'Ah no, the whole purpose was to have a man involved. This is a cold battle we are in, Will, and in it we must sometimes do cold things. This spell was woven around me, as keeper of the Book. The Dark cannot destroy me, for I am an Old One, but it could perhaps by magic have tricked me into taking out the Book. In case that happened, there had to be some way in which the other Old Ones could stop me before it was too late. They too could not destroy me, to stop me from doing the work of the Dark. But a man can be destroyed. If it had come to the worst, and the Dark had forced me by magic to take out the Book for them, then before I could begin, the Light would have killed Hawkin. That would have kept the Book safe forever, for in that case, I could not have worked the spell of release by touching him while taking out the Book. And so I should not have been able to reach the Book. Nor would the Dark, nor anyone else.'

 

'So he risked his life,' Will said slowly, watching Hawkin's sprightly walk as he crossed the floor to the musicians.

 

'Yes,' Merriman said. 'In our service he was safe from the Dark, but his life was in hazard all the same. He agreed because he was my liege man, and proud of it. I wish that I had made sure that he really knew the risk he ran. A double risk, for he might also have been destroyed today, by me, if I had accidentally touched the pendulum. You saw what happened when at the last I did that. You and I, as Old Ones, were merely shaken; but if Hawkin had been there, -under my touch, he would have been killed in a flash, unbodied like the Book itself.'

 

'He must not only be very brave, he must really love you as if he were your son,' said Will, 'to do things like this for you and the Light.'

 

'But still he is only a man,' said Merriman, and his voice was rough and the pain back deep in his face. 'And he loves as a man, requiring proof of love in return. My mistake was in ignoring the risk that this might be so. And as a result, in this room in the next few minutes, Hawkin will betray me and betray the Light and mould the whole course of your quest, young Will. The shock just now of actually risking his life, for me and the Book of Gramarye, was too much for his loyalty. Perhaps you saw his face, in the moment when I held his shoulder and took the Book from its perilous place. It was only in that moment that Hawkin fully understood that I was prepared to let him die. And now that he has understood it, he will never forgive me for not loving him as much - in his terms - as he has loved me, his lord. And he will turn on us.' Merriman pointed across the room. 'See where it begins.'

 

Music struck up brightly, and the guests began forming into couples to dance. One man whom Will had recognised as an Old One moved to Miss Greythorne, bowed, and offered his arm; all around them, couples joined into figures-of-eight for some dance he did not know. He saw Hawkin standing irresolute, moving his head a little to the beat of the music; and then he saw a girl in a red dress appear at his side. It was the witch-girl, Maggie Barnes.

 

She said something to Hawkin, laughing, and dropped him a small curtsey. Hawkin smiled politely, doubtfully, and shook his head. The girl's smile deepened, she shook her hair coquettishly and spoke to him again, her eyes fast on his.

 

'Oh,' Will said. 'If only we could hear!'

 

Merriman regarded him sombrely for a moment, his face absent and brooding.

 

'Oh,' Will said, feeling foolish. 'Of course.' It would take him some time, clearly, to grow accustomed to using his own gifts. He looked again at Hawkin and the girl, and wished to hear them, and could hear.

 

'Truly, Madam,' Hawkin said, 'I have no wish to seem churlish, but I do not dance.'

 

Maggie took his hand. 'Because you are out of your century? They dance here with their legs, just as you do beyond five hundred years. Come.'

 

Hawkin stared at her aghast as she led him into a set of couples. 'Who are you?' he whispered. 'Are you an Old One?'

 

'Not for all the world,' said Maggie Barnes in the Old Speech, and Hawkin turned quite white and stood still. She laughed softly and said in English, 'No more of that. Dance, or people will notice. It's easy enough. Watch the next man, as the music begins.'

 

Hawkin, pale and distressed, stumbled his way through the first part of the dance; gradually he picked up the steps. Merriman said in Will's ear, 'He was told that not one soul here would know of him, and that on pain of death he must not use the Old Speech to any but you.'

 

Then the speaking below began again.

 

'You look well, Hawkin, for a man escaped from death.'

 

'How do you know these things, girl? Who are you?'

 

'They would have let you die, Hawkin. How could you be so stupid?'

 

'My master loves me,' said Hawkin, but there was weakness in it.

 

'He used you, Hawkin. You are nothing to him. You should follow better masters, who would care for your life. And lengthen it through the centuries, not confine it to your own.'

 

'Like the life of an Old One?' Hawkin said, eagerness waking in his voice for the first time. Will remembered the tinge of envy when Hawkin had spoken to him of the Old Ones; now there was a hint of greed as well.

 

'The Dark and the Rider are kinder masters than the Light,' Maggie Barnes said softly in his ear, as the first part of the dance ended. Hawkin stood still again and stared at her, until she glanced round and said clearly: 'I need a cool drink, I believe.' And Hawkin jumped and led her away, so that now, with his attention caught and a chance to talk to him privately, the girl of the Dark would have a willing hearer.

 

Will felt suddenly sickened by the approaching treachery, and listened no more. He found Merriman, beside him, still gazing black into space.

 

'So it will go,' Merriman said. 'He will have a sweet picture of the Dark to attract him, as men so often do, and beside it he will set all the demands of the Light, which are heavy and always will be. All the while he will be nursing his resentment of the way I might have had him give up his life without reward. You can be sure the Dark makes no sign of demanding any such thing - yet. Indeed, its lords never risk demanding death, but only offer a black life ... Hawkin', he said softly, bleakly, 'liege man, how can you do what you are going to do?'

 

Will felt fear suddenly, and Merriman sensed it. 'No more of this,' he said. 'It is clear already how it goes. Hawkin now will be a leak in the roof, a tunnel into the cellar. And just as the Dark could not touch him when he was my liege man, now that he is liege to the Dark, he cannot be destroyed by the Light. He will be the Dark's ear in our midst, in this house that has been our stronghold.' His voice was cold, accepting the inevitable; the pain was gone. 'Though the witch-girl managed to make her way in, she could have accomplished no scrap of magic without being destroyed by the Light. But now whenever Hawkin calls them, the Dark can attack us here as elsewhere. And the danger will grow with the years.'

 

He stood up, fingering his white ruffled cravat; there was a terrible sternness in his fierce-curved profile, and the look that for a moment flared out from the lowering brows made Will's blood run thick and slow. It was a judge's face, implacable, condemning.

 

'And the doom that Hawkin has brought upon himself, by this act, 'Merriman said without expression, 'is a dread matter, which will make him many times wish that he might die.'

 

Will stood dazed, caught in pity and alarm. He did not ask what would happen to small, bright-eyed Hawkin, who had laughed at him and helped him and been for so short a while his friend; he did not want to know. Out on the floor, the music of the second part of the dance jingled to a close, and the dancers made one another laughing courtesies. Will stood motionless and unhappy. Merriman's frozen look softened, and he reached out and turned him gently to face the centre of the room.

 

Will saw there only a gap in the crowd, with beyond it the group of musicians. As he stood there, they struck up once more 'Good King Wenceslas', the carol they had been playing when first he entered the room, through the Doors. Merrily the whole gathering joined in singing, and then the next verse came and Merriman's deep voice was ringing out across the room, and Will realised, blinking, that the verse to come was his.

 

He drew breath, and raised his head.

 

Sire he lives a good league hence,

Underneath the mountain ...

 

And there was no moment of farewell, no moment in which he saw the nineteenth century vanish away, but suddenly with no awareness of change, as he sang he knew that Time had somehow blinked, and another young voice was singing with him, the two of them so nearly simultaneous that anyone who could not see the lips moving would have sworn that it was one boy's voice alone . . .

 

Right against the forest fence,

By St Agnes' fou-ou-ntain...

 

... and he knew that he was standing with James and Mary and the rest, and he and James were singing together, and that the music with their voices was Paul's lone flute. He stood there in the dark entrance-hall, with his hands raised before his chest holding the lighted candle, and he saw that the candle had not burned down one millimetre further than when he had last looked at it.

 

They finished the carol.

 

Miss Greythorne said, 'Very good, very good indeed. Nothing like Good King Wenceslas, it's always been my favourite.'

 

Will peered past his candle-flame to look at her motionless form in the big carved chair; her voice was older, harder, more toughened by the years, and so was her face, but otherwise she was just like - her grandmother, must that younger Miss Greythorne have been? Or her great-grandmother? Miss Greythorne said, 'Huntercombe carol-singers have been singing "Good King Wenceslas" in this house for longer than you or even I can remember, you know. Well now, Paul and Robin and the rest of you, how about a little Christmas punch?' The question was traditional, and so was the answer.

 

'Well,' said Robin gravely, 'thank you, Miss Greythorne. Perhaps just a little.'

 

'Even young Will too, this year,' said Paul. 'He's eleven now, Miss Greythorne, did you know?'

 

The housekeeper was coming forward with a tray of glittering glasses and a great bowl of red-brown punch, and nearly every eye in the room was on Merriman, stepping up to fill the glasses. But Will's gaze was held by the strong, suddenly younger eyes of the figure in the high-backed chair.

 

'Yes,' said Miss Greythorne softly, almost absent-mindedly, 'I did remember. Will Stanton has had a birthday.' She turned to Merriman, who was already moving towards them, and took from him the two glasses in his hands. 'A happy birthday to you, Will Stanton, seventh son of a seventh son,' said Miss Greythorne. 'And success in your every quest.'

 

'Thank you, ma'am,' said Will, wondering. And they held up their glasses solemnly to one another, and drank, just as the Stanton children did for the Christmas toast on the one day of the year when they were all allowed wine at dinner.

 

Merriman was moving round, and now everyone had a glass of punch and was sipping contentedly. The Manor's Christmas punch was always delicious, though no one had ever quite worked out what went into it. As the senior members of the family, the twins strolled dutifully across to chat with Miss Greythorne; Barbara, with Mary in tow, made a beeline for Miss Hampton the housekeeper and Annie the maid, both reluctant members of a village drama group she was trying to force into life. Merriman said to James, 'You and your little brother sing very well.'

 

James beamed. Though plumper, he was no taller than Will, and it was not often that a stranger gratified him by recognising him as a superior older brother. 'We sing in the school choir,' he said. 'And solos at arts festivals. Even one in London last year. The music master's very keen on arts festivals.'

 

'I'm not,' said Will. 'All those mothers, glaring.'

 

'Well, you were top of your class in London,' James said, 'so of course they all hated you, beating their little darlings. I was only fifth in mine,' he said in matter-of-fact tones to Merriman. 'Will has a lot better voice than me.'

 

'Oh come off it,' said Will.

 

'Yes, you have.' James was a fair-minded boy; he genuinely preferred reality to daydreams. 'Till we both break, at any rate. Neither of us might be any good then.'

 

Merriman said absent-mindedly, 'In point of fact you will become a most accomplished tenor. Almost professional standard. Your brother's voice will be baritone - pleasant, but nothing special.'

 

'I suppose that might be possible,' said James, polite but disbelieving. 'Of course, there's no way at all for anyone to tell, yet.'

 

Will said belligerently, 'But he - ' and caught Merriman's dark eye and stopped. 'Mmmm, aaah,' he said, and James looked at him with astonishment.

 

Miss Greythorne called across the room to Merriman, 'Paul would like to see the old recorders and flutes. Take him in, would you?'

 

Merriman inclined his head in a small bow. He said casually to Will and James, 'Care to come too?'

 

'No, thank you,' said James promptly. His eyes were on the far door, through which the housekeeper was advancing with another tray. 'I smell Miss Hampton's mince pies.'

 

Will said, understanding, 'I'd quite like to see.'

 

He moved with Merriman towards Miss Greythorne's chair, where Paul and Robin stood stiff and rather awkward, one at each side, like guardsmen. 'Of with you,' said Miss Greythorne briskly. 'Are you going too, Will? Of course, you're another musical one, I was forgetting. Quite a good little collection of instruments and stuff in there. Surprised you haven't seen them before.'

 

Lulled by the words, Will said thoughtlessly, 'In the library?'

 

Miss Greythorne's sharp eyes glittered at him. 'The library?' she said. You must be mixing us up with someone else, Will. There's no library here. Once there was a small one, with some most valuable books, I believe, but it burned down, almost a century ago. This part of the house was struck by lightning. Did a lot of damage, they say.'

 

'Oh, dear,' said Will in some confusion.

 

'Well, this is no talk for Christmas,' Miss Greythorne said, and waved them of. Glancing back at her, as she turned to Robin with a bright social smile, Will found himself wondering whether the two Miss Greythornes were not one after all.

 

Merriman led him, with Paul, to a side door, and they walked through a strange musty-smelling little passage into a high bright room that Will did not at once recognise. It was only when he caught sight of the fireplace that he realised where he was. There was the wide hearth, and the broad mantel with its square panels and carved Tudor rose emblems. But round the rest of the room the panelling was gone; the walls were instead painted flat white, and brightened here and there by some large improbable-looking seascapes done in lurid blues and greens. In the place where Will had once gone into the little library, there was no longer any door.

 

Merriman was unlocking a tall, glass-fronted cabinet that stood against a side wall.

 

'Miss Greythorne's father was a very musical gentleman,' he said in his butler voice. 'And artistic too. He painted all those pictures on the walls over there. In the West Indies, I believe. These, though' - he lifted out a small beautiful instrument like a recorder, black inlaid with silver - 'he didn't actually play, they say. He just liked to look at them.'

 

Paul was absorbed at once, peering at, into, through the old flutes and recorders as Merriman handed them out of the cupboard. They were both most solemn in their handling; they would put each one carefully back before taking the next out. Will turned to study the panels round the fireplace; then jumped suddenly as he heard Merriman silently calling to him. At the same time he could hear Merriman's voice aloud speaking to Paul; it was an eerie combination.

 

'Quickly, now!' said the voice in his mind. 'You know where to look. Quick, while you have the chance. It is time to take the Sign!'

 

'But-' said Will's mind.

 

'Go on!' Merriman silently roared.

 

Will glanced back quickly over his shoulder. The door through which they had come was still half open, but his ears would surely warn him of anyone coming up the passage between this room and the next. He moved soft-footed to the fireplace, reached up, and put his hand on the panelling.

 

Shutting his eyes for an instant, he appealed to all his new gifts, and the old world from which they came. Which square panel had it been? Which carved rose? He was confused by the loss of the panelled wall all around; the mantel seemed smaller than before. Was the sign lost, bricked up somewhere behind that flat white wall? He pressed every rose that he could see, round the top left-hand corner of the fireplace, but none moved even a fraction of an inch. Then at the last moment he noticed, at the very point of the corner, a rose part-buried in plaster, jutting out of the wall that clearly had been repaired as well as altered in the last hundred years - ten minutes, he thought wildly - since he had last seen it.

 

Hastily Will reached up high and pressed his thumb as hard as he could against the centre of the carved flower, as if it were a bell-push. And as he heard the soft click, he was staring into a black square hole in the wall, exactly on the level of his eyes. He reached in and touched the circle of the Sign of Wood, and as he sighed in relief, his finger closing round the smooth wood, he heard Paul begin to play one of the old flutes.

 

It was very tentative playing: a slow arpeggio first, then a hesitant run; and then, very softly and gently, Paul began playing the melody 'Greensleeves'. And Will stood transfixed, not only by the lovely lilt of the old tune but by the sound of the instrument itself. For though the melody was different, this was his music, his enchantment, the same eerie, faraway tone that he heard always, and then always lost, at those moments in his life that mattered most. What was the nature of this flute that his brother was playing? Was it part of the Old Ones, belonging to their magic, or simply something very like, made by men? He drew his hand back from the gap in the wall, which closed instantly before he could press the rose again, and he was sliding the Sign of Wood into his pocket as he turned, lost in listening. And then he froze.

 

Paul stood playing, across the room, beside the cabinet. Merriman had his back turned and his hands on the glass doors. But now the room held two other figures as well. In the doorway through which they had come stood Maggie Barnes, staring not at Will but at Paul, with a look of dreadful malevolence. And close beside Will, very close, in the spot where the door to the old library had once been, towered the Black Rider. He was within arm's length of Will, though he did not move, but stood transfixed, as if the music had arrested him in mid-stride. His eyes were closed, his lips silently moving; his hands were stretched out pointing ominously towards Paul, as the sweet, unearthly music went on.

 

Will did one thing well, from the instinct of his new learning. Instantly he flung up a wall of resistance round Merriman and Paul and himself, so that the two of the Dark swayed backward from the force of it. But at the same time he shrieked, 'Merriman! And as the music broke off, and both Paul and Merriman swung round in swift horror, he knew what he had done wrong. He had not called as the Old Ones should call one another, through the mind. He had made the very bad mistake of shouting aloud.

 

The Rider and Maggie Barnes vanished, instantly. Paul was striding across the room in concern. 'What on earth's up, Will? Did you hurt yourself?'

 

Merriman said swiftly, smoothly, from behind him, 'He stumbled, I think,' and Will had the wit to crease his face with pain, bend slowly over as if in anguish, and clutch hard at one arm.

 

There was the sound of running feet, and Robin burst into the room from the passage, with Barbara close behind.

 

'What's the matter? We heard the most awful yell- '

 

He looked at Will and slowed to a halt, puzzled. 'You all right, Will?'

 

'Uh,' said Will. 'I - uh - I just banged my funny-bone. Sorry. It hurt.'

 

'Sounded as if someone was murdering you,' Barbara said reproachfully.

 

Shamelessly Will took refuge in rudeness, his fingers curling in his pocket to make sure the third Sign was safe.

 

'Well, I'm sorry to disappoint you,' he said petulantly, 'but really I'm all right. I just banged myself and yelled, that's all. Sorry if you were frightened. I don't see what all the fuss is about.'

 

Robin glared at him. -'Catch me running anywhere to rescue you, next time,' he said witheringly.

 

'Talk about the boy crying Wolf,' Barbara said.

 

'I think,' Merriman said gently, closing the cupboard and turning the key, 'that we should all go and give Miss Greythorne one more carol.' And quite forgetting that he was no more than the butler, they all filed dutifully out of the room in his wake. Will called after him, in proper silence this time: 'But I must speak to you! The Rider was here! And the girl!'

 

Merriman said into his mind, 'I know. Later. They have ways of hearing this kind of talk, remember.' And he moved on, leaving Will twitching with exasperation and alarm. In the doorway, Paul paused, took Will firmly by the shoulder and turned him to look in his face. 'Are you really all right?'

 

'Honest. Sorry about the noise. That flute sounded super.'

 

'Fantastic thing.' Paul let him go, turning to gaze longingly at the cupboard. 'Really. I've never heard anything like it. And of course never played one. You've no idea, Will, I can't describe - it's tremendously old, and yet the condition it's in, it might be almost new. And the tone of it - ' There was an ache in his voice and his face that something in Will responded to with a deep, ancient sympathy. An Old One, he suddenly knew, was doomed always to feel this same formless, nameless longing for something out of reach, as an endless part of life.

 

'I'd give anything,' Paul said, 'to have a flute like that one day.'

 

'Almost anything,' Will said gently. Paul stared at him in astonishment, and the Old One in Will suddenly realised belatedly that this was not perhaps the response of a small boy; so he grinned, stuck out his tongue impishly at Paul, and skipped through the passage, back to the normal relationships of the normal world.

 

They sang 'The First Nowell' as their last carol; they made their farewells; they were out again in the snow and the crisp air, with Merriman's impassive polite smile disappearing behind the Manor doors. Will stood on the broad stone steps and gazed up at the stars. The clouds had cleared at last, and now the stars blazed like pinpricks of white fire in the black hollow of the night sky, in all the strange patterns that had been a complicated mystery to him all his life, but were endlessly significant now. 'See how bright the Pleiades are to-night,' he said softly, and Mary stared at him in amazement and said, 'The what?'

 

So Will brought his attention down out of the fiery black heavens, and in their own small, yellow, torchlit world the Stanton carollers trooped home. He walked among them speechless, as if in a dream. They thought him tired, but he was floating in wonder. He had three of the Signs of Power now. He had, too, the knowledge to use the Gift of Gramarye: a long lifetime of discovery and wisdom, given to him in a moment of suspended time. He was not the same Will Stanton that he had been a very few days before. Now and forever, he knew, he inhabited a different time-scale from that of everyone he had ever known or loved ... But he managed to turn his thoughts away from all these things, even from the two invading, threatening figures of the Dark. For this was Christmas, which had always been a time of magic, to him and to all the world. This was a brightness, a shining festival, and while its enchantment was on the world the charmed circle of his family and home would be protected against any invasion from outside.

 

Indoors, the tree glowed and glittered, and the music of Christmas was in the air, and spicy smells came from the kitchen, and in the broad hearth of the living-room the great twisted Yule root flickered and flamed as it gently burned down. Will lay on his back on the hearth-rug staring into the smoke wreathing up the chimney, and was suddenly very sleepy indeed. James and Mary too were trying not to yawn, and even Robin looked heavy-lidded.

 

'Too much punch,' said James, as his tall brother stretched gaping in an armchair.

 

'Get lost,' said Robin amiably.

 

'Who'd like a mince pie?' said Mrs Stanton, coming in with a vast tray of cocoa mugs.

 

'James has had six already,' said Mary in prim disapproval. 'At the Manor.'

 

'Now it's eight,' said James, a mince pie in each hand.

 

'Yah.'

 

'You'll get fat,' Robin said.

 

'Better than being fat already,' James said, through a mouthful, and stared pointedly at Mary, whose plump form had recently become her most gloomy preoccupation. Mary's mouth drooped, then tightened, and she advanced on him, making a snarling sound.

 

'Ho-ho-ho,' said Will sepulchrally from the floor. 'Good little children never fight at Christmas.' And since Mary was irresistibly close to him, he grabbed her by the ankle. She collapsed on top of him, howling cheerfully.

 

'Mind the fire,' said Mrs Stanton, from years of habit.

 

'Ow,' said Will, as his sister thumped him in the stomach, and he rolled away out of reach. Mary stopped, and sat gazing at him curiously. 'Why on earth have you got so many buckles on your belt?' she demanded.

 

Will tugged his sweater hastily down over his belt, but it was too late; everyone had seen. Mary reached forward and yanked the sweater up again. 'What funny things. What are they?'

 

'Just decoration,' Will said gruffly. 'I made them in metal-work at school.'

 

'I never saw you,' said James.

 

'You never looked, then.'

 

Mary prodded a finger forward at the first circle on Will's belt and rolled back with a howl. 'It burned me!' she shrieked.

 

'Very probably,' said her mother. 'Will and his belt have both been lying next to the fire. And you'll both be on top of it if you go on rolling about like that. Come on, now.

Christmas Eve drink, Christmas Eve mince pie - Christmas Eve bed.'

 

Will scrambled gratefully to his feet. 'I'll get my presents while the cocoa cools off.'

 

'So will I.' Mary followed him. On the stairs she said, 'Those buckle things are pretty. Will you make me one for a brooch next term?'

 

'I might,' Will said, and he grinned to himself. Mary's curiosity was never much to worry about; it always led to the same place.

 

They pounded up to their respective bedrooms, and came down laden with packages to be added to the growing pile beneath the tree. Will had been trying hard not to look at this magical heap ever since they came in from carol-singing, but it was sorely difficult, especially since he could see one gigantic box labelled with a name that clearly began with a W. Who else began with W, after all ...? He forced himself to ignore it, and resolutely piled his own armful in a space at the side of the tree.

 

'You're watching, James!' Mary shrilled, behind him.