Greenwitch

by Susan Cooper

  Down on the quayside, as if they saw nothing that had happened from the beginning, Will and Merriman stood cloaked and still.

  “Gumerry!” Jane shrieked. She could think of nothing but that the fire might reach the cottages. “Gumerry!”

  Then the noise outside in the sky was suddenly gone, altogether gone, and she heard her own voice, and found that what she had felt as a high tremendous scream was no more than a whisper. And as she sat watching, disbelieving, the flames died and disappeared, and the red glow in the sky faded away. There was no more blood, nor any trace of it, and everything in the harbour of Trewissick was as if the red-headed, ravening men from the sea had never come.

  Somewhere, a dog howled into the night.

  Cold, frightened, Jane clutched her dressing-gown tighter around her. She longed to fetch Simon, yet she could not take her eyes from the window. Still unmoving, the dark cloaked figures of Will and Merriman stood over the edge of the sea. They made no sign of having noticed anything that had happened.

  There was a glimmering, glittering sheen on the water of the harbour, and Jane saw that over her head the moon had floated free of clouds. A different light brightened the world, cold but gentler: all was black and white and grey. And into it, out of the air, came a voice. It was not a man’s voice, but thin and unearthly, chanting one sentence three times on one high heart-catching note.

  The hour is come, but not the man.

  The hour is come, but not the man.

  The hour is come, but not the man.

  Jane peered all round the harbour, but could see no-one:

  only the two unmoving figures below.

  Again the dog howled somewhere unseen. Again she felt a strange buzzing, humming sound in the air, and then she began to hear other voices crying far off in the village.

  “The Lottery! The Lottery!” she thought they cried. Then a man’s voice, clearer, “The Lottery is taken!”

  “Roger Toms! Roger Toms!”

  “Hide them!”

  “Bring them to the caves!”

  “The Revenuers are coming!”

  A woman sobbed: “Roger Toms, Roger Toms. . . .”

  The harbour filled with people, milling about, anxiously staring out to sea, scurrying to and fro. This time Jane thought she could see faces in the crowd that were like the faces of Trewissick that she knew: Penhallows, Palks, Hoovers, Tregarrens, Thomases, all anxious, all perplexed, casting fearful glances both to land and sea. They seemed to have no real contact with one another; they were like sleep-walkers, sleep-runners, folk desperately turning about in a bad dream. And a great shriek went up from the whole crowd as the last spectre came rushing at them from the sea.

  It was not horrible, yet it was more heart-stopping than any. It was a ship: a black ship, single-masted, square-rigged, with a dinghy behind. Silent and unnerving it came gliding into the harbour from the sea, scarcely touching the water, skimming the surface of the waves. It carried no crew. Not a single form moved anywhere on its black decks. And when it reached the land, it did not stop, but went on, sailing silently over harbour and rooftops and hill, away out of Trewissick, to the moors.

  And as if the phantom ship had swept away with it all sign of life, the crowd vanished too.

  Jane found she was clutching the edge of the window-sill so hard that her fingers hurt. She thought miserably: this is why he wanted us to sleep. Safe and empty with a blanket over our minds, that’s where he wanted us. And instead lam in the middle of more nightmares than I ever imagined could come in one night, and the worst nightmare of all is that I am awake. . . .

  Nervously she peeped round the curtain again. Merriman and Will strode to the centre of the quay. A third figure, cloaked and hooded, joined them from the other side of the harbour. Standing very tall, facing the village and the hills, Merriman raised both arms in the air. And although nothing could be seen, it was as though a great wave of rage came roaring at them, rearing over them, out of the dark haunted village of Trewissick.

  Jane could stand no more of it. With an unhappy little moan she dived across the room and into her bed. Tight over her head she pulled the covers, and lay there stuffy and shivering. She was not afraid for her own safety; Merriman had promised her that the cottage was protected, and she believed him. Nor was she afraid for those figures down in the harbour; if they had survived so strange a succession of monstrosities, they could survive anything. In any case nothing could harm Merriman. It was another fear that possessed Jane: a dreadful horror of the unknown, of whatever force was sweeping through land and sea, out there. She wanted only to cower into her own corner, animal-like, away from it, safe.

  So this she did, and found, oddly, that because the fear was so large and formless, it proved more ready to go away.

  Gradually Jane stopped shivering; grew warm. Her taut limbs relaxed; she began to breathe slowly and deeply. And then she slept.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  DOWN IN THE HARBOUR WITH WILL AND CAPTAIN TOMS AT either side, shadowy hooded figures, Merriman raised both arms higher in a gesture that was half-appeal, half-command, and he called into the darkness over Trewissick in his deep resonant voice the words of the spell of Mana and the spell of Reck and the spell of Lir.

  From all around, rage beat at them like waves, a great gale of unseen force.

  “No!” cried the great voice of the Greenwitch, thick with fury. “No! Leave me alone!”

  “Come forth, Greenwitch!” Merriman called. “The spells command it.”

  “One coming is all they may command,” the voice roared.

  “And out of the sea I came, they commanded me and I came.

  No more, no more!”

  “Come forth, Greenwitch!” Will’s clear voice sang out through the darkness like a beam of light. “The White Lady bids you hear us. Tethys gave us leave to call you, before you should go to the deep.”

  Fury enveloped them like a tidal wave. At their backs, the sea growled and murmured; the land quivered beneath their feet.

  But then, though they could not see it, the presence was all around them, seething, resentful.

  Merriman said: “The secret is not yours, Greenwitch. You know you should not keep it.”

  “I found it. It was in the sea.”

  “It would not have been there, but for a battle between the Light and the Dark. It fell, it was lost.”

  “It was in the sea, in my mother’s realm.”

  “Come, my friend,” Captain Toms said gently, in his rounded Cornish voice. “You know that it is not of the sea, but is a part of a Thing of Power.”

  The Greenwitch said, “I have no friend. It matters nothing to me what happens between the Light and the Dark.”

  “Ah,” Merriman said. “You will find out that it may matter, if this Thing of Power shall belong fully to the Dark. Half of it they have already, half they seek to have from you. If they gain it, and have the power of the whole, things will go hard with the world of men.”

  The voice around them mumbled, “Men have nothing to do with—”

  “Men have nothing to do with me?” Will’s voice cut light and clear through the night. “Do you believe that, Greenwitch? Men have everything to do with you. Without them, you would not exist. They make you, each year. Each year, they throw you to the sea. Without men, the Greenwitch would never have been born.”

  “They do not make me.” The great voice was bitter. “They serve themselves only, their own needs only. Though they make me in the form of a creature, yet they are making no more than an offering, as once in older days it might have been a slaughtered cock, or sheep, or man. I am an offering, Old Ones, no more. If they thought I had life they would kill me as they killed the cocks and the sheep and the men, to make a sacrifice. Instead they make me as an image, out of branches and leaves. It is a game, a substitute. I am given real life only by the White Lady, life enough to take me down to the deeps. And this once too I have had a different life wake in me, because I was drawn out to the earth,
out of the sea, by. . . .” the voice grew reflective; a note of cunning crept in . . . “by the Dark.”

  “Put that out of your mind,” Merriman said at once. “None is more self-serving than the Dark. Tethys has told you that.”

  “Self-serving!” The bitterness was back in an instant, and far deeper. “You are all self-servers, Light, Dark, men. There is no place for the Wild Magic except its own . . . no care . . . no care. . . .”

  In spite of themselves the three Old Ones swayed backwards as the force of fury rose again abruptly, and the rage of the Greenwitch throbbed all around them like a great heart fiercely beating.

  Staggering, Merriman caught himself upright, sweeping his long cloak around him, the hood falling back to leave his wild white hair glistening in the lamplight. “Has no-one showed care for you, Greenwitch? No-one?”

  “No-one!” The huge voice rang through the village, around the hills, over the moors behind; like distant thunder it rumbled and re-echoed. “No creature! None! Not . . . one. . . .” The fierceness died, the thunder grew less. For a long moment they were listening only to the wash of the uneasy sea against the cliffs, out where the swells broke. Then the Greenwitch said in a whisper, “None except one. None except the child.”

  “The child?” Will said involuntarily. A thin note of raw incredulity tipped his voice; for a moment he thought the Greenwitch meant himself.

  Merriman said softly, ignoring him, “The child who wished you well.”

  “She was up at the headland at the making,” the Greenwitch said. “And they told her of the old saying, that whoever touches the Greenwitch before it be put to cliff, and makes a wish, shall have that wish. So then she could have made any wish she chose.” The voice grew warm, for the first time. “She could have wished for anything, Old Ones, even for the first lost part of your Thing of Power to come back to you. Yet when she touched me she looked at me as if I were human, and she said, ‘I wish you could be happy.’”

  The soft thunder died away; the harbour was silent, bursting with the memory that filled it.

  “I wish you could be happy,” the Greenwitch said softly.

  “So she—” Will began; but stopped, as Merriman’s hand touched his arm. The air around them was growing bright, light, mild; Trewissick, for this one night, would catch every mood of the Greenwitch like a burning-glass. The echoing voice murmured softly to itself, and it seemed to Will that with every moment the earth and sea in that place grew gentler.

  Into the dim-lit spring night a cold voice said, “The girl too is self-serving, just as the rest of them.”

  There was a silence. Then out of the shadows at the back of the quay stepped the painter, the man of the Dark. He stood in a pool of yellow lamplight, facing them, a chunky black silhouette.

  “Self-serving,” he said to the air. “Self-serving.” Then turning to Merriman he said, “I have the mastery of it, not you. The spells that called it from the ocean were mine. The creature is mine to command, Old One, not yours.”

  Will felt a low rumbling around them, and saw the lights faintly quiver.

  Merriman said, “This is not now a matter for command, but for gentleness. The spells that brought it out of the sea can accomplish no more now.”

  The painter laughed scornfully. He swung round in a half-circle, arms outstretched. “Greenwitch!” he shouted. “I have come back for the secret. I give you one last chance, before the wrath of the Dark will descend!”

  The rumbling sound rose into a huge snarl, like a roll of thunder, then died down again.

  “Be careful,” said Captain Toms softly. “Be very careful.” But the command in the voice of the man of the Dark now was like ice; it was the cold absolute arrogance that through centuries past had brought men down to terror and grovelling obedience. “Greenwitch!” the man called into the night. “Give your secret to the Dark! Obey! The Dark is come again, and for the last time, Greenwitch! The hour is come!”

  Will clenched his fists so that the nails cut into his palms; even an Old One could feel the force of such a command bite into the mind. He watched without a breath, wondering; he did not know how such a challenge would touch the Wild Magic, a force neither of the Light nor of the Dark nor of men.

  The air around them sang with the ferocity of the Dark messenger’s will, spinning their wits into uncertainty—and then gradually, subtly, a change began. The force that was in the air faltered, and changed imperceptibly back to the spell-web that had possessed this small part of the earth since the Greenwitch had struck the painter down. The Wild Magic was resisting all challenge, invincible as the Boar Trwyth. Will took a great breath; he began to guess what was to come.

  Standing alone on the quay, the painter whirled round, staggering, groping into the air, as if in search for something he could not see. Out of the darkness, high above the village, a weird clear voice called, as it had called before:

  The hour is come, but not the man.

  The hour is come, but not the man.

  The hour is come, but not the man.

  And into the silence after the ringing words a whispering began, a gradual murmuring of many voices, calling, whispering: Roger Toms! Roger Toms! And shadows came flocking into the harbour, from all sides, all the shades and spirits and hauntings of that one haunted night: the past folk of Trewissick from all the centuries that the little sea-town had ever seen, focused into one black point of time. Roger Toms! Roger Toms! they called, softly at first, growing gradually louder, louder. It was a calling and an accusing and a judgement, and it whispered relentlessly round the harbour and over the sea.

  Silently, unobtrusively, the three Old Ones drew their hoods over their heads and moved together to one side of the harbour, in the shade of the wall, to stand there unseen.

  Out in the centre of the quay, alone, the dark painter turned in a slow circle, incredulously seeing and hearing the past come falling upon him, making him into its long shame. With immense effort he raised his arms, pushing feebly at the air.

  But there was no pushing away the unreasoning rage that the Wild Magic had brought out of the village, to make a scapegoat of its attacker. “Roger Toms! Roger Toms!” the voices called angrily, stronger, more demanding.

  The painter shrieked into the night, “I am not he! You mistake me!”

  “Roger Toms!” came a great triumphant shout.

  “No! No!”

  They were all around him, crying and calling, pointing, just as the villagers of the present had crowded and called and pushed about the Greenwitch, as it was taken newly-made to tumble headlong from the cliff.

  And from out of the night, over the roofs of Trewissick from the dark inland moors, came sailing again the phantom ship of Cornwall, single-masted, square-rigged, with a dinghy behind, that had sailed up out of the midnight sea in the haunting. Silently it skimmed over houses and roads and quayside, and this time it was not empty, but had a figure at the helm. The drowned man, dripping and intent, whom Jane had seen glide up out of the sea, stood high on the deck at the wheel, steering his black dead vessel, looking neither to left nor right. And with a glad shriek all the great crowd of shades rushed on to the ship, dragging with them the struggling painter.

  “Roger Toms! Roger Toms!”

  “No!”

  The phantom sails filled again with a wind that no man alive could feel, and the ship sailed away, out to sea, out into the night, and on Trewissick quay the Old Ones were left alone.

  * * *

  Jane slept deeply at first, but halfway through the night dreams began to edge into her sleep. She saw the painter, painting; she saw again all the fearful things that she had seen from her window that night. She dreamed of Roger Toms and the fair-traders, with the ship called the Lottery fleeing from the Revenue men and the shots ringing out between the two; and in her dream the Lottery became the black phantom ship that had sailed unthinkably up out of the sea and away across the land.

  She thought, as she tossed in her sleep, that she heard voic
es calling Roger Toms! Roger Toms! And then as they faded, gradually into her dream came the Greenwitch. She could not see it, as she had seen it in a dream once before; this time it was obscure, merely a voice, lost in the shadows. It was unhappy. Poor thing, Jane thought, it’s always unhappy.

  She said, “Greenwitch, what are all these horrible things?”

  “It is the Wild Magic,” the Greenwitch said miserably into her dreaming mind. “This is how it besets the minds of men, calling up all the terrors they have ever had, or their forefathers have ever had. All the old hauntings of Cornwall, which men there have always feared, that is what these have been.”

  “But why tonight?” Jane said.

  The Greenwitch sighed, a great gusty sigh like the sea. “Because I was angry. I am never angry, but the man of the Dark made me so. And the rage of those who are part of the Wild Magic is not a good thing to bring out. The village bore it, the village has been possessed. . . .”

  “Is it over now?”

  “It is over now.” The Greenwitch sighed again. “The Wild Magic has carried away the man of the Dark. The messenger of the Dark. He was a creature alone, trying to cheat his masters. So they did not protect him, and so the Wild Magic has taken him to outer Time, from which he may never properly come back. . . .”

  Jane cried, “But he has the grail! What about the grail?”

  “I know nothing of a grail,” the Greenwitch said indifferently.

  “What is a grail?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Jane said, with effort. “Did he take your secret, in the end? Did you give it him?”

  “It is mine,” the Greenwitch said quickly. “I found it. And now no-one will let me keep it.”

  “Did you give it to the Dark?”

  “No,”

  “Thank goodness,” Jane said. “It really is terribly important, Greenwitch. To the Light, to everyone. Really. To the people who made you, to my brothers and me, to all of us.”

  The Greenwitch said, “To you?” Its great melancholy voice echoed round her like waves booming in a cave. “My secret is important to you?”