Greenwitch

by Susan Cooper

“Do be careful,” Jane said.

  “‘Course,” said Barney. He squeezed in round the tilted door, pushing aside something that fell with a crumbling clatter, and disappeared. There was a burst of joyful barking inside the barn, and then Rufus came leaping out through the gap, tongue lolling, tail waving. He pranced up to Captain Toms. He was very dirty; small damp pieces of rotten wood speckled his red coat, and cobwebs clung stickily round his nose.

  Captain Toms patted him absent-mindedly. He was looking at the barn, with a faint puzzled frown on his face. Then he glanced questioningly at Merriman; following his gaze, Jane saw the same look in her great-uncle’s eyes. What was the matter with them? Before she could ask, Barney’s head poked out of the gap in the barn door. His hair was dishevelled and one cheek was smeared grey, but Jane’s attention was caught only by the unsmiling blankness of his face. He looked as though he had had a very bad shock.

  “Come out of there, Barney,” Merriman said. “That roof’s not safe.”

  Barney said, “I’m just coming. But please, Gumerry, could Simon come in here just for a minute first? It’s important.”

  Merriman glanced from Captain Toms to Will and back to Barney. His stern-lined face was tense. “All right. For a moment.”

  Simon slipped past them to wriggle his way through the gap. Behind him Will said diffidently, “Would you mind if I came too?”

  Jane winced, waiting for the inevitable snub; but Simon only said briefly, “Fine. Come on.”

  The two boys wriggled in after Barney. Simon flinched as a splintered edge scraped his arm; the gap was narrower than it looked. Scrambling to his feet, he stood coughing as Will came in after him. The dust was thick on the floor, and it was hard at first to see clearly in the half-light from dirty, overgrown windows.

  Blinking, Simon saw Barney beckoning him.

  “Over here. Look.”

  He followed Barney to one end of the barn, clear of the piled timber and logs that filled much of the floor. And then he stopped.

  Before him, ghostly in the shadows of corner and roof, stood a Gipsy caravan, of exactly the same shape and pattern as the one in which they had met the painter of the Dark. There were the tall outward-sloping sides, the insets of carved wood beneath the eaves of the overhanging wooden roof. There, at the far end, were the shafts for the horse, and at this end the divided door—in two halves, swinging, like a stable door—reached by a wooden stairway-ladder of six steps. And the top step was the step on which, at the end, they had stood. . . .

  But of course it could not be the same. This caravan was not shiny-neat, or newly painted. This caravan had dusty worn sides in which only odd patches of ancient paint remained, flaking away. This caravan had one broken shaft, and the top half of its split door hung from half a hinge. It was old and beaten, unused, unloved; the glass in its windows was long broken. It could not have been moved from its place for the many years since the roof of the old barn had begun to sag, for at the further end of the barn the roof-beams lay rotted with all their remaining weight resting on top of the caravan.

  It was a relic, an antique. Simon stared. It was as if he were meeting the great-great-grandfather of a boy he knew well, and finding that the old man had exactly the same face as the boy, but immensely, impossibly aged.

  He opened his mouth and looked at Barney, but could think of nothing to say.

  Barney said flatly, “It must have been here for years and years and years. Since long before we were born.”

  Will said, “How well do you remember the inside of the painter’s caravan?”

  Simon and Barney both jumped at the sound of his voice; they had forgotten he was there. Now they turned; Will stood near the door of the barn, half-hidden in shadow, only his amiable blank face blinking at them in clear light.

  Barney said, “Fairly well.”

  “And you, Simon?” Will said. Without leaving time for an answer, he went on, “Barney doesn’t remember seeing the grail at all. But you remember everything, from the moment when he first took out the box it was in.”

  “Yes,” Simon said. With a vague, detached interest, he realised that for the first time he was listening to Will as though he were older, without resentment or argument.

  Will said nothing more. He crossed from behind them to the steps at the end of the old caravan, pushing aside with his toe the dust and debris that lay cluttered everywhere. He went up the steps. He took hold of the top loose-hanging half of the caravan door, and it came away in his hands, as the rust-eaten hinge crumbled into dust. Then he tugged sharply at the bottom half of the door, and it swung reluctantly towards him with the slow creak of an old farm gate.

  “Barney,” he said. “Do you mind going inside?”

  “‘Course not,” Barney said boldly, but his steps towards the caravan door were reluctant and slow.

  Simon said nothing to help him. He was looking at Will, whose voice, as once before, had a crispness and certainty that raised inexplicable echoes in his head.

  “Simon,” Will said. “What did the painter say, word for word, when he first directed Barney to the place where he found the grail?”

  Half-closing his eyes, concentrating fiercely, Simon pushed his mind backwards and looked to see what was in it. “We were both about halfway inside,” he said. Like a sleep-walker he went forwards up the ricketty old steps, his hand on Barney’s shoulder gently propelling him, and with Will following, the two of them walked into the little room that made the inside of the van.

  “And the man said, because Barney had said he was thirsty, ‘In that cupboard by your right foot you will find some cans of orange soda. And. . . and you might bring out a cardboard box you’ll find in there too.’ So Barney did that.”

  Barney turned his head and looked nervously at Will, and the Will who was somehow not quite Will beamed encouragingly, as if he were after all no more than the amiable foolish-looking boy they had met at the beginning of this small strange holiday. So Barney looked down at his right foot, and saw beside it a low cupboard with no handle and the clutter of years mounded against its door; and he crouched on his knees and cleared away the rubbish and scrabbled with his fingernails to find enough leverage to open the small door. When at last it swung open, he felt inside and brought out a battered, damp, evil-smelling cardboard box.

  He set it on the floor. All three of them stared at it in silence. Faintly from outside the barn they heard Jane’s light voice cry anxiously, “Are you all right? Hey, do come on out!”

  Will said softly, “Open it.”

  Slowly, reluctantly, Barney took hold of the top of the box. The ancient rotting cardboard came away in his hand, and a brightness was in their eyes, a golden radiance that seemed to fill the decrepit, crumbling remnants of what had once a long time ago been a caravan. And there shining beneath their eyes was the grail.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  IN THE FARMYARD, IN FRONT OF THE HOUSE, A GREAT ROUND piece of granite was set into the ground: an old mill-wheel, worn and grass-fringed. On its bright-flecked grey surface they set the grail, and gathered round as Merriman took from his pocket the battered little cylinder that held the manuscript. He slid out the small roll of parchment, its edges cracked and flaking, and unrolled it to lie on the uneven stone.

  “And this is the second time for looking,” he said.

  The children picked up stones from the grass and laid them gently on the edges to hold the parchment flat. Then instinctively they drew to one side, to let Merriman and Captain Toms study the grail and manuscript together.

  Barney, next to Merriman, suddenly realised that Will was standing quiet and unmoving behind him. He ducked quickly aside. “Here,” he said. “Come on.”

  The golden grail glittered in the sunlight; the engraving on its sides was clear and clean, but the smooth beaten gold of the inside surface, as Simon had said, was blackened and dark. Will looked now at the close, delicate engraving for the first time in his life, seeing the panels filled with vivid scenes of men ru
nning, fighting, crouching behind shields: tunic-clad, strangely-helmeted men brandishing swords and shields. The pictures woke deep memories in him of things he had forgotten he had ever known. He looked closer, at the words and letters interwoven between the figures, and at the last panel on the grail, completely filled with words in this same cipher-language that no living scholar had been able to understand. And like the other two Old Ones, he began methodically to look from the marks on the old manuscript to the marks on the grail, and gradually the interweaving became clear.

  Will found himself breathing faster, as the meaning of the inscription began to take shape in his mind.

  Staring at the manuscript, Merriman said slowly, painfully, as if he were spelling out a hard lesson:

  On the day of the dead, when the year too dies,

  Must the youngest open the oldest hills

  Through the door of the birds, where the breeze breaks.

  There fire shall fly from the raven boy,

  And the silver eyes that see the wind,

  And the Light shall have the harp of gold.

  He stopped, his face tight with concentration. “Not easy,” he said to himself. “The pattern is hard to keep.”

  Captain Toms leaned on his heavy stick, peering at another panel of the grail. He said softly, his accent cradling the words:

  By the pleasant lake the Sleepers lie,

  On Cadfan’s Way where the kestrels call;

  Though grim from the Grey King shadows fall,

  Yet singing the golden harp shall guide

  To break their sleep and bid them ride.

  Will knelt down beside the granite slab and turned the grail again. Slowly he read aloud:

  When light from the lost land shall return,

  Six Sleepers shall ride, six Signs shall burn,

  And where the midsummer tree grows tall

  By Pendragon’s sword the Dark shall fall.

  Merriman stood upright. “And the last line of all will be the spell,” he said, looking hard at Will; the deep-set dark eyes bored into his mind. “Remember. Y maent yr mynyddoedd yn canu ac y mae’r arglwyddes yn dod. The mountains are singing, and the Lady comes. Remember.”

  He leaned down to the rock, moved aside the stone weights and took up the small curling manuscript in one big hand. As if the Drews did not exist at all, he looked down at Will and Captain Toms.

  “You have it all?” he said.

  “Yes,” said Will.

  “Safe remembered,” Captain Toms said.

  In one sharp movement Merriman clenched his fist, and the little roll of stiff, broken-edged parchment crumbled instantly into tiny fragments, small as gravel, light as dust. He opened his long fingers and swung his arm wide, and in a dusty shower the pieces flew away in every direction, into oblivion.

  The children cried out sharply.

  “Gumerry!” Jane stared at him, appalled. “You’ve ruined the whole thing!”

  “No,” Merriman said.

  “But you can’t understand what the grail says, without it, No-one can.” Simon’s face was creased with perplexity. “It’ll be just as much of a mystery as it was before!”

  “Not to us,” Captain Toms said. He eased himself down to sit on the granite slab, and took up the grail, turning it in his fingers so that the sunlight glinted on the engraved sides. “We know, now, what is in the hidden message of the grail. It will shape the next twelve months of our lives, and help us to save men from great terror, very soon, for all time. And now that we have it in our minds, we shall never forget.”

  “I’ve forgotten it already,” Barney said plaintively. “Everything except a bit about a golden harp, and a grey king. How can you have a grey king?”

  “Of course you have forgotten it,” Captain Toms said. “That was the intention.” He smiled at Barney. “And we do not even need an enchantment to help you forget, as our friend from the Dark did. We can rely on the mortality of your memory.”

  “And you don’t have to worry about whether anyone else will remember,” Simon said, slowly understanding, “because no-one else will ever hear or see.”

  Jane said sadly, “It seems a pity that the poor Greenwitch’s secret should just be thrown away.”

  “It has served its purpose,” Merriman said. His deep voice rose a little, gained a hint of ceremony. “Its high purpose, for which it was made so very long ago. It has set us the next great step along the road to keep the Dark from rising, and there is nothing more important than that quest.”

  “That last bit you said, from the grail and the manuscript,” Barney said. “What language was it in?”

  “Welsh,” Merriman said.

  “Is the last part of the quest in Wales?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are we going to be part of it?”

  Merriman said, “Wait and see.”

  * * *

  They lay in variously abandoned attitudes in the sunshine on the beach, recovering from an enormous picnic lunch. Simon and Barney were lazily tossing a ball to and fro, without bothering to stand up. Bill Stanton was eying them, and the nearby cricket bat, with nostalgic optimism.

  “Just wait,” he said to his sun-bathing wife, “we’ll show you just exactly how it’s played, in a little while.”

  “Great,” said Fran Stanton sleepily.

  Jane, lying on her back blinking up at the blue sky, propped herself up on her elbows and looked out to sea. The sand was hot against her skin; it was a beautiful, sunny, breezeless Cornish day, of a rare and special kind.

  “I’m just going for a little walk,” she said to nobody in particular, and over the dry sand she went, across the long golden beach, towards the rocks that glistened with low-tide seaweed at the foot of Kemare Head. The headland reared up above her, grassy slope changing to jagged grey cliff; at the very tip, the cliffs towered in a sheer wall against the sky. Jane’s head was full of memories. She began to walk over the rocks, wincing a little as her bare feet, not yet toughened by summer, pressed against rough rock. Out here, last year, she and Barney and Simon had reached the peak of their adventure, the achieving of the grail that had lain for hundreds of years in a cave, the entrance covered totally by water at all but the lowest tides. Out here, they had fled from the pursuing Dark, with the grail and the little lead case they had found inside it. And out here, she thought as she reached the furthest point of the rocks, with the waves breaking white at her feet, just here, in the flurry of saving the grail, the little lead case had plummeted into the waves and down to the bottom of the sea.

  And the Greenwitch had found it there, and made it a precious secret.

  Jane looked at the deep green water beyond the breaking waves. “Good-by, Greenwitch,” she said softly.

  She unclasped a small silver bracelet that she wore on her wrist, weighed it experimentally in her hand, and drew back her arm to throw it into the sea.

  A voice said gently behind her, “Don’t do that.”

  Jane gasped, and nearly lost her balance; swinging round, she saw Will Stanton.

  “Oh!” she said. “You made me jump.”

  “Sorry,” Will said. He balanced his way forwards to stand beside her; his bare feet looked very white against the dark seaweed patching the rocks.

  Jane looked at his pleasant round face, and then at the bracelet in her hand. “I know it sounds stupid,” she said reluctantly, “but I wanted to give the Greenwitch another secret to keep. Instead of the one we took. In my dream”—she paused, embarrassed, but went gamely on—“in my dream, I said, I will give you another secret, and the Greenwitch said in that big sad booming voice, ‘Too late, too late,’ and just disappeared. . . .”

  She was silent, gazing at the sea.

  “I only said don’t,” Will said, “because I don’t think your bracelet would really do. It’s silver, isn’t it, and the sea-water would turn it all black and dirty-looking.”

  “Oh,” Jane said, forlorn.

  Will shifted his footing on the wet rock, and f
elt in his pocket. He said, glancing briefly at Jane and then away, “I knew you’d want to give the Greenwitch something. I wondered if this would do.”

  Jane looked. Lying on Will’s outstretched palm was the same small green-patched lead case that had held the manuscript, the Greenwitch’s first secret. Will took it and pulled off the cap, shaking out a small object into her hand.

  Jane saw a strip of yellow metal, gleaming, with some words engraved on it very small.

  “It looks like gold,” she said.

  “It is,” said Will. “Low carat, but gold. Last for ever, even down there.”

  Jane read out: “Power from the Greenwitch, lost beneath the sea.”

  “That’s just a line from a poem,” Will said.

  “Is it really? It’s perfect.” She ran her finger along the bright gold. “Where did you get it?”

  “I made it.”

  “You made it?” Jane turned and stared at him with such astonishment that Will laughed.

  “My father’s a jeweller. He’s teaching me to engrave things. I go and help in his shop sometimes after school.”

  “But you must have done this before you came down here, before you ever knew we were going to meet the Greenwitch,” Jane said slowly. “How did you know what to make, what to write?”

  “Just a lucky chance, I suppose,” Will said, and there was a polite finality in his tone that reminded Jane instantly of Merriman: it was the voice that forbade any questioning.

  “Oh,” she said.

  Will put the small golden strip into the case and fitted the cap on tightly. Then he handed it to her.

  “Here’s your secret, Greenwitch,” Jane said, and she flung it into the sea. The little case vanished into the waves, their foam curling round the weed-fringed rocks. In the sunlight the water glittered like shattered glass.

  “Thank you, Will Stanton,” Jane said. She paused, looking at him. “You aren’t quite like the rest of us, are you?”

  “Not quite,” said Will.

  Jane said, “I hope we shall see you again, some day.”