The ears of an Old One know that birds do not speak with the precision of words; instead they communicate emotion. There are many kinds and degrees of emotion, and there are many kinds of expression even in the language of a bird. But although Will could tell that the rook was obviously asking him to come and look at something, he could not tell whether or not the bird was being used by the Dark.
He paused, thinking of what the rooks had done; then he fingered the shiny brown chestnut in his hand. “All right, bird,” he said. “One quick look.”
He went back through the gate, and the rook, croaking like an old swinging door, walked clumsily ahead of him up the church path and round the corner. Paul watched, grinning. Then he saw Will suddenly stiffen as he reached the corner; vanish for a moment, and then reappear.
“Paul! Come quick! There’s a man in the snow!”
Paul called the rector, who had just begun pushing his cycle up the road to start it there, and together they came running. Will was bending over a hunched figure, lying in the angle between the church wall and the tower; there was no movement, and the snow had already covered the man’s clothes half an inch thick with its cold, feathery flakes. Mr Beaumont moved Will gently aside and knelt, turning the man’s head and feeling for a pulse.
“He’s alive, thank God, but very cold. The pulse isn’t very good. He must have been here long enough for most men to die of exposure — look at the snow! Let’s get him inside.”
“In the church?”
“Well, of course.”
“Let’s take him to our house,” Paul said impulsively. “It’s only just round the corner, after all. It’s warm, and a lot better, at any rate until an ambulance or something can come.”
“A wonderful idea,” said Mr Beaumont warmly. “Your good mother is a Samaritan, I know. Just until Dr Armstrong can be called . . . we certainly can’t leave the poor fellow here. I don’t think there’s a broken bone. Heart trouble, probably.” He tucked his heavy cycle gloves under the man’s head to keep it from the snow, and Will saw the face for the first time.
He said in alarm, “It’s the Walker!”
They turned to him. “Who?”
“An old tramp who hangs around. . . . Paul, we can’t take him home. Can’t we get him to Dr Armstrong’s surgery?”
“In this?” Paul waved a hand at the darkening sky; the snow was whirling round them, thicker again, and the wind was higher.
“But we can’t take him with us! Not the Walker! He’ll bring back the —” He stopped suddenly, halfway through a yelp. “Oh,” he said helplessly. “Of course, you can’t remember, can you?”
“Don’t worry, Will, your mother won’t mind — a poor man in extremis —” Mr Beaumont was bustling now. He and Paul carried the Walker to the gate, like a muffled heap of ancient clothes. He managed finally to start the motorcycle, and they propped the inert shape on it somehow; then half riding, half pushing, the strange little group made its way to the Stantons’ house.
Will glanced behind him once or twice, but the rook was nowhere to be seen.
* * *
“Well, well,” said Max fastidiously, as he came down into the dining room. “Now I’ve really met a dirty old man.”
“He smelled,” Barbara said.
“You’re telling me. Dad and I gave him a bath. My Lord, you should have seen him. Well, no, you shouldn’t. Put you off your Christmas dinner. Anyway, he’s as clean as a newborn babe now. Dad even washed his hair and his beard. And Mum’s burning his horrible old clothes, when she’s made sure there’s nothing valuable in them.”
“Not much danger of that, I should think,” said Gwen, on her way in from the kitchen. “Here, move your arm, this dish is hot.”
“We should lock up all the silver,” said James.
“What silver?” said Mary witheringly.
“Well, Mum’s jewellery then. And the Christmas presents. Tramps always steal things.”
“This one won’t be stealing much for a time,” said Mr Stanton, coming to his place at the head of the table with a bottle of wine and a corkscrew. “He’s ill. And fast asleep now, snoring like a camel.”
“Have you ever heard a camel snore?” said Mary.
“Yes,” said her father. “And ridden one. So there. When’s the doctor coming, Max? Pity to interrupt his dinner, poor man.”
“We didn’t,” said Max. “He’s out delivering a baby, and they don’t know when he’ll be back. The woman was expecting twins.”
“Oh, Lord.”
“Well, the old boy must be all right if he’s asleep. Just needs rest, I expect. Though I must say he seemed a bit delirious, all that weird talk coming out.”
Gwen and Barbara brought in more dishes of vegetables. In the kitchen their mother was making impressive clattering noises with the oven. “What weird talk?” said Will.
“Goodness knows,” said Robin. “It was when we first took him up. Sounded like a language unknown to human ear. Maybe he comes from Mars.”
“I only wish he did,” Will said. “Then we could send him back.”
But a shout of approval had greeted his mother, beaming over the glossy brown turkey, and nobody heard him.
* * *
They turned on the radio in the kitchen while they were doing the washing-up.
“Heavy snow is falling again over the south and west of England,” said the impersonal voice. “The blizzard which has been raging for twelve hours in the North Sea is still immobilising all shipping on the Southeast coasts. The London docks closed down this morning, due to power failures and transport difficulties caused by heavy snow and temperatures approaching zero. Snowdrifts blocking roads have isolated villages in many remote areas, and British Rail is fighting numerous electrical failures and minor derailments caused by the snow. A spokesman said this morning that the public is advised not to travel by rail except in cases of emergency.”
There was a sound of rustling paper. The voice went on: “The freak storms which have intermittently raged over the South of England for the last few days are not expected to diminish until after the Christmas holiday, the Meteorological Office said this morning. Fuel shortages have worsened in the Southeast, and householders have been asked not to use any form of electrical heating between the hours of nine a.m. and midday, or three and six p.m.”
“Poor old Max,” Gwen said. “No trains. Perhaps he can hitchhike.”
“Listen, listen!”
“A spokesman for the Automobile Association said today that road travel was at present extremely inadvisable on all roads except major motorways. He added that motorists stranded in heavy snowstorms should if possible remain with their vehicles until the snow stops. Unless a driver is quite certain of his location and knows he can reach help within ten minutes, the spokesman said, he should on no account leave his car.”
The voice went on, among exclamations and whistles, but Will turned away; he had heard enough. These storms could not be broken by the Old Ones without the power of the full circle of Signs — and by sending the storms, the Dark hoped to stop him from completing the circle. He was trapped; the Dark was spreading its shadow not only over his quest but over the ordinary world too. From the moment the Rider had invaded his cosy Christmas that morning, Will had watched the dangers grow; but he had not anticipated this wider threat. For days now, he had been too much caught up in his own perils to notice those of the outside world. But so many people were threatened now by the snow and cold: the very young, the very old, the weak, the ill. . . . The Walker won’t have a doctor tonight, that’s certain, he thought. It’s a good job he isn’t dying. . . .
The Walker. Why was he here? There had to be some meaning behind it. Perhaps he had simply been hovering for his own reasons, and been blasted by the attack of the Dark on the church. But if so, why had the rook, an agent of the Dark, brought Will to save him from freezing to death? Who was the Walker, anyway? Why could all the powers of Gramarye tell him nothing about the old man at all?
/> There were carols on the radio again. Will thought bitterly: Happy Christmas, world.
His father, passing, slapped him on the back. “Cheer up, Will. It’s bound to stop tonight, you’ll be tobogganning tomorrow. Come on, time to open the rest of the presents. If we keep Mary waiting any longer she’ll explode.”
Will went to join his cheerful, noisy family. Back in the cosy, brilliant cave of the long room with the fire and the glowing tree, it was untouched Christmas for a while, just as it had always been. And his mother and father and Max had joined to give him a new bicycle, with racing handlebars and eleven gear-speeds.
* * *
Will was never quite sure whether what happened that night was a dream.
In the darkest part of the night, the small chill hours that are the first of the next day, he woke, and Merriman was there. He stood towering beside the bed in a faint light that seemed to come from within his own form; his face was shadowed, inscrutable.
“Wake up, Will. Wake up. There is a ceremony we must attend.”
In an instant Will was standing; he found that he was fully dressed, with the Signs on their belt round his waist. He went with Merriman to the window. It was mounded to half its height with snow, and still the flakes were quietly falling. He said, suddenly desolate, “Isn’t there anything we can do to stop it? They’re freezing half the country, Merriman, people will be dying.”
Merriman shook his white-maned head slowly, heavily. “The Dark has its strongest power of all rising between now and the Twelfth Day. This is their preparing. Theirs is a cold strength, the winter feeds it. They mean to break the Circle forever, before it is too late for them. We shall all face a hard test soon. But not all things go according to their will. Much magic still flows untapped, along the Old Ones’ Ways. And we may find more hope in a moment. Come.”
The window ahead of them flew open, outwards, scattering all the snow. A faint luminous path like a broad ribbon lay ahead, stretching into the snow-flecked air; looking down, Will could see through it, see the snow-mounded outlines of roofs and fences and trees below. Yet the path was substantial too. In one stride Merriman had reached it through the window and was sweeping away at great speed with an eerie gliding movement, vanishing into the night. Will leapt after him, and the strange path swept him too off through the night, with no feeling either of speed or cold. The night around him was black and thick; nothing was to be seen except the glimmer of the Old Ones’ airy way. And then all at once they were in some bubble of Time, hovering, tilted on the wind as Will had learned from his eagle of the Book of Gramarye.
“Watch,” Merriman said, and his cloak swirled round Will as if in protection.
Will saw in the dark sky, or in his own mind, a group of great trees, leafless, towering over a leafless hedge, wintry but without snow. He heard a strange, thin music, a high piping accompanied by the small constant thump of a drum, playing over and over again a single melancholy tune. And out of the deep dark and into the ghostly grove of trees a procession came.
It was a procession of boys, in clothes of some time long past, tunics and rough leggings; they had hair to their shoulders and baglike caps of a shape he had never seen before. They were older than he: about fifteen, he guessed. They had the half-solemn expressions of players in a game of charades, mingling earnest purpose with a bubbling sense of fun. At the front came boys with sticks and bundles of birch twigs; at the back were the players of pipe and drum. Between these, six boys carried a kind of platform made of reeds and branches woven together, with a bunch of holly at each corner. It was like a stretcher, Will thought, except that they were holding it at shoulder height. He thought at first that it was no more than that, and empty; then he saw that it supported something. Something very small. On a cushion of ivy leaves in the centre of the woven bier lay the body of a minute bird: a dusty-brown bird, neat-billed. It was a wren.
Merriman’s voice said softly over his head, out of the darkness: “It is the Hunting of the Wren, performed every year since men can remember, at the solstice. But this is a particular year, and we may see more, if all is well. Hope in your heart, Will, that we may see more.”
And as the boys and their sad music moved on through the sky-trees and yet did not seem to pass, Will saw with a catch in his breath that instead of the little bird, there was growing the dim shape of a different form on the bier. Merriman’s hand clutched at his shoulder like a steel clamp, though the big man made no sound. Lying on the bed of ivy between the four holly tufts now was no longer a tiny bird, but a small, fine-boned woman, very old, delicate as a bird, robed in blue. The hands were folded on the chest, and on one finger glimmered a ring with a huge rose-coloured stone. In the same instant Will saw the face, and knew that it was the Lady.
He cried out in pain, “But you said she wasn’t dead!”
“No more she is,” Merriman said.
The boys walked to their music, the bier with the silent form lying there came close, and then moved away, vanishing with the procession into the night, and the piping sad tune and the drumbeats dwindled after it. But on the very edge of disappearance, the three boys who had been playing paused, put down their instruments, and turned to stand gazing without expression at Will.
One of them said: “Will Stanton, beware the snow!”
The second said: “The Lady will return, but the Dark is rising.”
The third, in a quick sing-song tone, chanted something that Will recognised as soon as it began:
“When the Dark comes rising, six shall turn it back;
Three from the circle, three from the track.
Wood, bronze, iron; water, fire, stone;
Five will return, and one go alone.”
But the boy did not end there, as Merriman had done. He went on:
“Iron for the birthday, bronze carried long;
Wood from the burning, stone out of song;
Fire in the candle-ring, water from the thaw;
Six signs the circle, and the grail gone before.”
Then a great wind came up out of nowhere, and in a flurry of snowflakes and darkness the boys were gone, whirled away, and Will too felt himself whirling backwards, back through Time, back along the shining way of the Old Ones. The snow lashed at his face. The night was in his eyes, stinging. Out of the darkness he heard Merriman calling to him, urgently, but with a new hope and resonance in his deep voice: “Danger rises with the snow, Will — be wary of the snow. Follow the Signs, beware the snow. . . .”
And Will was back in his room, back in his bed, falling into sleep with the one ominous word ringing in his head like the chiming of the deepest church bell over the mounting snow. “Beware . . . beware. . . .”
PART THREE
* * *
The Testing
• The Coming of the Cold • The next day the snow still fell, all day. And the next day too.
“I do wish it would stop,” said Mary unhappily, gazing at the blind white windows. “It’s horrible the way it just goes on and on — I hate it.”
“Don’t be stupid,” said James. “It’s just a very long storm. No need to get hysterical.”
“This is different. It’s creepy.”
“Rubbish. It’s just a lot of snow.”
“Nobody’s ever seen so much snow before. Look how high it is — you couldn’t get out of the back door if we hadn’t been clearing it since it started to fall. We’re going to be buried, that’s what. It’s pushing at us — it’s even broken a window in the kitchen, did you know that?”
Will said sharply, “What?”
“The little window at the back, near the stove. Gwennie came down this morning and the kitchen was cold as ice, with snow and bits of glass all over that corner. The snow had pushed the window in, the weight of it.”
James sighed loudly. “Weight isn’t pushing. The snow gets blown into a drift at that side of the house, that’s all.”
“I don’t care what you say, it’s horrible. As if the snow was tryin
g to get in.” She sounded close to tears.
“Let’s go and see if the Wa — the old tramp’s woken up yet,” Will said. It was time to stop Mary before she came too near the truth. How many other people in the country were being made as frightened as this by the snow? He thought fiercely of the Dark, and longed to know what to do.
The Walker had slept through the previous day, hardly stirring except for occasional meaningless mutterings, and once or twice a small hoarse shout. Will and Mary went up to his room now, carrying a tray, with cereal and toast and milk and marmalade. “Good morning!” Will said loudly and brightly as they went in. “Would you like some breakfast?”
The Walker opened a slit of an eye and peered at them through his shaggy grey hair, longer and wilder than ever now that it was clean. Will held out the tray towards him.
“Faugh!” the Walker croaked. It was a noise like spitting.
Mary said, “Well!”
“D’you want something else instead, then?” said Will. “Or are you just not hungry?”
“Honey,” the Walker said.
“Honey?”
“Honey and bread. Honey and bread. Honey and —”
“All right,” Will said. They took the tray away.
“He doesn’t even say please,” Mary said. “He’s a nasty old man. I’m not going near him any more.”
“Suit yourself,” Will said. Left alone, he found the tail-end of a jar of honey in the back of the larder, rather crystalline round the edges, and spread it lavishly on three hunks of bread. He took this with a glass of milk up to the Walker, who sat up greedily in bed and wolfed the lot. When eating, he was not a pretty sight.
“Good,” he said. He tried to wipe some honey off his beard and licked the back of his hand, peeping at Will. “Still snowing? Still coming down, is it?”
“What were you doing out in the snow?”