by Susan Cooper
“That may be quite right,” Captain Toms said. He parted the books on the nearest shelf, carefully, and slipped his volume back. “And then again it may not be quite right.”
“What do you mean?” Jane said.
“The painting and the other reason may be one and the same thing. The only trouble is,” Captain Toms stared up at his books as if willing them to speak, “I can’t for the life of me work out what that thing is all about.”
* * *
Hour after hour they watched, in turn. At length, after an early supper that might equally have been called a late tea, Jane and Simon sat again in the book-clothed living-room with Captain Toms. He puffed contentedly at a friendly-smelling pipe, grey hair wisping out round his bald head like the tonsure of some genial old monk.
“It’ll be dark soon,” Jane said, looking out at the orange-red sunset sky. “He’ll have to stop painting then.”
“Yes, but he’s still at it,” Simon said, “or Barney would have come down from the eyrie.” He prowled round the room, peering at the pictures that hung between bookcases. “I remember these ships from last year. The Golden Hind . . . the Mary and Ellen . . . the Lottery—that’s a funny name for a ship.”
“So it is,” said Captain Toms. “But suitable. A lottery is a gamble, of sorts—and she was owned by gamblers, of sorts. She was a famous smugglers’ ship.”
“Smugglers!” Simon’s eyes gleamed.
“A regular trade it was in Cornwall, two hundred years ago. Smuggling . . . they didn’t even call it that, they called it fair-trading. Fast little boats they had, beautiful sailors. Many a fair-trader’s boat was built right here in Trewissick.” The old man gazed absently down at his pipe, turning it in his fingers, his eyes distant. “But the tale of the Lottery is a black tale, about an ancestor of mine I sometimes wish I could forget. Though it’s better to remember. . . . Out of Polperro, the Lottery was, a beauty before the wind. Her crew had years of fair-trading, never caught, until one day east of here a Revenue cutter came up with her, both ships fired on one another, and a Revenue man was killed. Well now, killing was a different thing from smuggling. So all the crew of the Lottery became hunted men. Tisn’t hard to escape capture in Cornwall, and for a while they were all safe. And they might have been for longer, but one of the crew, Roger Toms, gave himself up to the Revenue and turned King’s Evidence, telling them it was a shipmate of his called Tom Potter that fired the dire shot.”
“And Roger Toms was your ancestor,” Jane said.
“He was, poor misguided fellow. The folk of Polperro took him and set him on a boat bound for the Channel Isles, so he shouldn’t be able to give evidence against Tom Potter in court. But the Revenue brought him back again, and Tom Potter was arrested, and tried at the Old Bailey in London, and hanged.”
“And wasn’t Potter guilty?” Simon said.
“No-one knows, to this day. Polperro folk claimed he was innocent—some even said Roger Toms fired the shot himself. But they may just have been protecting one of their own, for Tom Potter was born in Polperro, but Roger Toms was a Trewissick man.”
Simon said severely, “He shouldn’t have sneaked on his shipmate, even if Potter did do it. That’s like murder.”
“So it was,” Captain Toms said gently. “So it was. And Roger Toms never dared set foot in Cornwall again, from that day until the day he died. But no-one ever knew his real motives. Some Trewissick folk say that Potter was guilty, and that Toms gave him up for the sake of all the wives and children, thinking it sure that unless the one guilty man were accused, sooner or later all the crew of the Lottery would be taken and hanged. But most think black thoughts of him. He is the town’s shame, not forgotten even yet.” He looked out of the window at the darkening sky, and the blue eyes in the round cherubic face were suddenly hard. “The very best and the very worst have come out of Cornwall. And come into her, too.”
Jane and Simon stared at him, puzzled. Before they could say anything, Barney came into the room.
“Your turn, Simon. Captain, d’you think I could go and get some more of that super cake?”
“Hungry work, watching,” said Captain Toms solemnly. “Of course you may.”
“Thank you.” Barney paused for a moment at the door, glancing round the room. “Watch this,” he said, and he reached for a switch and turned on the lights.
“Goodness!” said Jane, blinking in the sudden brightness. “It’s got really dark. We hadn’t noticed, we were talking.”
“And he’s still sitting out there,” Barney said.
“Still? In the dark? How can he paint in the dark?”
“Well, he is. He may not be painting what’s in front of him, but he’s still putting paint on that canvas, cool as a cucumber. The moon’s up, it’s only a half-moon but it gives enough of a glimmer that you can still see him through the glass. I tell you, he must be stark raving nuts.”
Simon said, “You don’t remember the caravan. He’s not nuts. He’s from the Dark.”
He went out of the room and up the stairs. Shrugging, Barney headed for the kitchen to fetch his cake.
Jane said, “Captain Toms, when will Gumerry be back?”
“When he has found out what he went to find out. Don’t worry. They will come straight to us.” Captain Toms heaved himself to his feet, reaching for his stick. “I think I might perhaps take a look through that telescope too, now, if you’ll excuse me for a moment, Jane.”
“Can you manage?”
“Oh yes, thank you. I just take my time.” He hobbled out, and Jane went to kneel on the window-seat, staring out at the harbour. A wind was rising, out there; she could hear it beginning to whine softly in the window-frames. She thought: he’ll get cold out there soon, the painter from the Dark. Why does he stay there? What’s he doing?
The wind grew. The moon went out. The sky was dark, and Jane could no longer see the pattern of clouds that had been dimly visible before. All at once she realised that she could hear the sea. Normally the soft swish of the waves against the harbour wall made a constant low music that was part of life; being always there, it was scarcely heard. But now the sound of each wave was distinct; she could hear each smack and splash. The sea, like the wind, was rising.
Simon and Captain Toms came back into the room. Jane saw their reflections ghostly in the window, and turned.
“Can’t see him any more,” Simon said. “There’s no light. But I don’t think he’s gone.”
Jane looked at Captain Toms. “What should we do?”
The old sailor’s face was troubled, creased with thinking; he tilted his head, listening to the wind. “I shall wait a little to see what the weather does, for more reasons than you might think. After that—after that, we shall see.”
Barney appeared in the doorway, munching a large piece of bright yellow cake.
“Good gracious,” said Jane brightly, to stop herself listening to the sea, “you must have eaten the whole plateful by now.”
“Mmmmf,” Barney said. He swallowed. “Do you know, he’s still there?”
“What?” They stared at him.
“I haven’t just been stuffing myself in the kitchen. I popped out round the back and crossed the road in front here, to look down from the harbour wall—thought he might see the light if I opened the front door. And he’s still there! Right where he was. He really must be cracked, you know, Simon. Dark or not. I mean he’s sitting there in the darkness at his easel, still painting. Still painting, in the pitch dark! He’s got some sort of light, it’s only by the glow that you can see he’s there. But all the same, really—”
Captain Toms sat down abruptly in an armchair. He said, half to himself, “I don’t like it. It makes no sense. I try to see, and there is only shadow. . . .”
“The wind’s making a lot more noise now,” Jane said. She shivered.
“Out there, you can hear the waves really crashing against the headland,” Barney said cheerfully. He crammed the last of his cake into his mouth.
Simon said, “Is there going to be a storm, captain?”
The old man gave no answer. He sat hunched in his chair, staring into the empty fireplace. Rufus, who had been lying peaceably on the hearth rug, got up and licked his hand, whining. A sudden gust of wind whistled in the chimney, and rattled the front door. Jane jumped.
“Oh dear,” she said. “I hope Gumerry’s all right. I wish we’d arranged for some great big signal to bring him back if we wanted him. Like Indians and smoke signals.”
“Just a fire, you’d need, now it’s dark,” Barney said. “A beacon fire.”
“In these parts,” Captain Toms said abstractedly, “beacon fires date back as far as the men who have always lighted them. A warning, from the beginning of time. . . .” He leaned forwards, his hands clasped together over the top of his carved walking-stick, and he gazed unseeingly in front of him as if he were looking back into endless centuries, oblivious of the room and the children in it. When he spoke again, the voice seemed younger, clearer, stronger, so that they paused in astonishment where they stood.
“And when last the Dark came rising in this land,” Captain Toms said, “it came from the sea, and the men of Cornwall lit beacon fires everywhere to warn of its coming. From Estols to Trecobben to Cam Brea the warning fires sprang, from St Agnes to Belovely and St Bellarmine’s Tor, and on out to Cadbarrow and Rough Tor and Brown Willy. And the last was at Vellan Druchar, and there the Light gave battle to the Dark. The forces of the Dark were driven back to the sea, and might have escaped that way, to attack again. But the Lady brought home a west wind, that threw all their hope of escape dry upon the shore, and so the forces of the Dark were vanquished, for that time. Yet the first of the Old Ones gave prophecy, that once more from that same sea and shore the Dark should one day come rising.”
He stopped abruptly, and they were left staring at him.
Simon said huskily, at last, “Is . . . is the Dark rising now?”
“I don’t know,” Captain Toms said simply, in his normal voice. “I think not, Simon. It is all but impossible for them to rise yet. But in that case, something else is happening that I do not understand at all.” He stood up, leaning on the arm of the chair. “I think perhaps it is time that I went out there, to see what I can see.”
“We’ll come with you,” said Simon at once.
“Are you sure?”
“To tell the truth,” Jane said, “whatever happens out there, I think we’d rather come with you than stay on our own.”
“Too true,” Barney said.
Captain Toms smiled. “Get your jackets, then. Rufus, you stay here. Stay.”
Leaving the red dog resentful on the hearth rug, they went out of the Grey House and crept down the hill, slowly, at the captain’s painful pace. At the bottom, where the downhill road joined the quay, the old man drew them gently into the shadow of a warehouse at the back of the harbour. Standing huddled there, whipped by the wind blowing in from the sea, they could see the painter from the Dark not twenty yards from them, at the edge of the sea; the light around him made him clear.
As Jane looked at him for the first time, she gasped, and heard the same instinctive strangled sound from the others. For the painter had no flashlight to make the pool of brightness that surrounded him. The light came from his painting.
Green and blue and yellow it glowed there in the darkness, in great writhing seething patterns like a nest of snakes. Seeing it now for the first time Jane felt an instant dreadful revulsion from the picture, its shape and colour and mood, yet she could not take her eyes from it. The man was still painting, even now. With the wind grabbing at his clothes, and tilting his easel towards him so that he had to hold it still with one hand, he was yet daubing away frenziedly with a brush full of these strange horrible colours, and to Jane’s bemused eye it seemed that all the colours came from the brush itself without the least pause for taking up new paint.
“It’s horrible!” Barney said violently. He spoke with great force, unthinking, but the wind whipped the words out of his mouth as soon as they were uttered. The painter, standing to windward, would not have heard him even if he had yelled at the top of his lungs.
“Now I see!” Captain Toms suddenly thumped his stick on the ground, staring at the picture. “That’s it! Now I understand! He has painted his spells! Mana and Reck and Lir . . . the power is all in the picture! I had forgotten it could be done. Now I see, now I see . . . but too late. Too late. . . .”
Jane said fearfully into the wind, “Too late?”
And the wind rose howling in their ears, lashing at their faces, flinging salt spray into their eyes. There was no rain, nor any lightning or thunder; they heard only the wind and the crashing of the sea. They staggered backwards against the wall, pinned to it by the gale; out on the quay the painter hunched his broad shoulders forwards, leaning into the wind to hold himself upright. He flung away his brush; paints and papers rushed away from him and were gone on the wind; all that he held was the strange glimmering canvas. He raised it above his head, and shouted some words in a tongue the children did not understand.
And suddenly they heard a sound like nothing they had ever heard from the sea before: a great sucking, hissing noise, echoing from side to side of the little harbour. The wind died away. There was all at once a strong, very strong smell of the sea: a smell not of decay but of foam, and waves, and fish and seaweed and tar and wet sand and shells.
For a second the moon sailed out from behind a broken cloud, and they saw a great sideways impossible wave roll back to each side of the harbour. And up out of the water came a towering dark shape, twice as high as a man, looming over the painter, bringing with it even more overpoweringly the tremendous smell of the sea.
The painter flung up his arms holding the canvas, thrusting it at the great black shape, and cried out in a voice that cracked with strain, “Stay! Stay, I charge you!”
Captain Toms spoke softly, wonderingly, half to himself. “Watch for the Greenwitch,” he said.
CHAPTER NINE
THEY HUDDLED IN THE DARK WAREHOUSE DOORWAY, WATCHING. No wind blew now, and the sudden stillness was unnerving, broken only by the rumbling waves. The. murmur of passing motor-cars came now and then from the main road higher in the village, but the children did not heed them. Nothing in the world seemed to exist but this thing that loomed before them, rising higher each moment out of the swaying sea.
The thing could not be clearly seen. It had no features, no outline, no recognisable shape. They perceived it only as a great mass of black absolute darkness, blotting out all light or star-glimmer, rearing up over the weird glowing patch that marked the man of the Dark. It was, Jane thought suddenly, far larger than the image of leaves and branches that she had seen cast down into the sea from the point of Kemare Head. And yet, she thought again, the Greenwitch had seemed huge in the dark of that night, rearing up, waiting, shadowed by the flickering beacon fire. . . .
The painter said in a loud clear voice, “Greenwitch!”
Simon felt Barney shiver convulsively, and he moved closer to him. A hand briefly, gratefully, clutched his arm.
“Greenwitch! Greenwitch!”
A great voice came out of the towering massive darkness. It seemed to fill all the night; a voice like the sea, full of shifting music. It said, “Why do you call me out?”
The painter lowered his dreadful canvas. The light in it was beginning gradually to fade. “I have need of you.”
“I am the Greenwitch,” the voice said wearily. “I am made for the sea, I am of the sea. I can do nothing for you.”
“I have a small favour to ask,” the painter said: sweetly, ingratiatingly, but with a strain in his voice as if it would crack into a thousand glittering fragments.
The voice said, “You are of the Dark. I feel it. I am not permitted to have any dealings with either the Dark or the Light. It is the Law.”
The painter said quickly, “But you have taken something that the Law does not perm
it you to take. You know it. You have a part of one of the ancient Things of Power, that you should not have, that no creature of the Wild Magic should have. Greenwitch, you must give it to me.”
The sea-voice of the blackness cried out as if in pain, “No! It is mine! It is my secret! My secret!” And Jane flinched, for suddenly it was the voice of her dream: plaintive, crying, a child’s complaint.
The painter said fiercely, “It is not yours.”
“It is my secret!” cried the Greenwitch, and the mass of black darkness seemed to rise and swell. “I guard it, none shall touch it. It is mine, for always!”
At once the painter dropped his tone into gentleness, a soft wheedling. “Greenwitch, Greenwitch, child of Tethys, child of Poseidon, child of Neptune—what need have you of a secret, in the deeps?”
“As much need as you,” the Greenwitch said.
“Your home is in the deeps.” The painter was still gentle, persuasive. “There is no need for such secrets there. That is no place for such a thing, woven of different spells that you know nothing of.”
The huge voice of the darkness said obstinately, almost pettishly, “It is mine. I found it.”
The painter’s voice, shaking, began to rise. “Fool! Wild fool! How dare you play with things of the High Magic!”
The light was fading faster out of his painting now; the children could see nothing around it but the blackness of the Greenwitch against the faint grey glimmer of sky and sea. There were only these two voices, ringing through the empty harbour.
“You are a made creature only, you will do as I say!” Arrogance sharpened the man’s tone, gave it an edge of command. “Give the thing to me, at once, before the Dark shall blast you out of this world!”
The children felt Captain Toms gently but urgently drawing them all back against the wall, into a corner almost cut off from the spot where the two figures confronted one another on the quay. Nervously they moved as they were told.
