by Susan Cooper
And they were safe. The sky was blue before and above them; the sun blazing, warming Will’s skin. He saw that they had left his Thames Valley behind. Now they were among the curving slopes of the Chiltern Hills, capped with great trees, beech and oak and ash. And running like threads through the snow along the lines of the hills were the hedges that were the marks of ancient fields — very ancient, as Will had always known; more ancient than anything in his world except the hills themselves, and the trees. Then on one white hill, he saw a different mark. The shape was cut through snow and turf into the chalk beneath the soil; it would have been hard to make out if it had not been familiar. But Will knew it. The mark was a circle, quartered by a cross.
Then his hands were jerked away from their tight clutch on the thick mane, and the white mare gave a long shrill whinnying cry that was loud in his ears and then strangely died away into a far distance. And Will was falling, falling; yet he knew no shock of a fall, but knew only that he was lying face down on cold snow. He stumbled to his feet, shaking himself. The white horse was gone. The sky was clear, and the sunshine warm on the back of his neck. He stood on a snow-mounded hill, with a copse of tall trees capping it far beyond, and two black birds drifting tiny to and fro above the trees.
And before him, standing alone and tall on the white slope, leading to nowhere, were two great carved wooden doors.
• The Sign-Seeker • Will thrust his cold hands into his pockets, and stood staring up at the carved panels of the two closed doors towering before him. They told him nothing. He could find no meaning in the zigzag symbols repeated over and over, in endless variation, on every panel. The wood of the doors was like no wood he had ever seen; it was cracked and pitted and yet polished by age, so that you could scarcely tell it was wood at all except by a rounding here and there, where someone had not quite been able to avoid leaving the trace of a knot-hole. If it had not been for signs like those, Will would have taken the doors to be stone.
His eyes slid beyond their outline as he looked, and he saw that all around them was a quivering of things, a movement like the shaking of the air over a bonfire or over a paved road baked by a summer sun. Yet there was no difference in heat to explain it here.
There were no handles on the doors. Will stretched his arms forward, with the palm of each hand flat against the wood, and he pushed. As the doors swung open beneath his hands, he thought that he caught a phrase of the fleeting bell-like music again; but then it was gone, into the misty gap between memory and imagining. And he was through the doorway, and without a murmur of sound the two huge doors swung shut behind him, and the light and the day and the world changed so that he forgot utterly what they had been.
He stood now in a great hall. There was no sunlight here. Indeed there were no real windows in the lofty stone walls, but only a series of thin slits. Between these, on both sides, hung a series of tapestries so strange and beautiful that they seemed to glow in the half-light. Will was dazzled by the brilliant animals and flowers and birds, woven or embroidered there in rich colours like sunlit stained glass.
Images leapt at him; he saw a silver unicorn, a field of red roses, a glowing golden sun. Above his head the high vaulted beams of the roof arched up into shadow; other shadows masked the far end of the room. He moved dreamily a few paces forward, his feet making no sound on the sheepskin rugs that covered the stone floor, and he peered ahead. All at once sparks leapt and fire flared in the darkness, lighting up an enormous fireplace in the far wall, and he saw doors and high-backed chairs and a heavy carved table. On either side of the fireplace two figures stood waiting for him: an old lady leaning on a stick, and a tall man.
“Welcome, Will,” the old lady said, in a voice that was soft and gentle, yet rang through the vaulted hall like a treble bell. She put out one thin hand towards him, and the firelight glinted on a huge ring that rose round as a marble above her finger. She was very small, fragile as a bird, and though she was upright and alert, Will, looking at her, had an impression of immense age.
He could not see her face. He paused where he stood, and unconsciously his hand crept to his belt. Then the tall figure on the other side of the fireplace moved, bent, and lighted a long taper at the fire, and coming forward to the table, began putting the taper to a ring of tall candles there. Light from the smoking yellow flame played on his face. Will saw a strong, bony head, with deep-set eyes and an arched nose fierce as a hawk’s beak; a sweep of wiry white hair springing back from the high forehead; bristling brows and a jutting chin. And though he did not know why, as he stared at the fierce, secret lines of that face, the world he had inhabited since he was born seemed to whirl and break and come down again in a pattern that was not the same as before.
Straightening, the tall man looked at him, across the circle of lighted candles that stood on the table in a frame like the rim of a flat-resting wheel. He smiled slightly, the grim mouth slanting up at its edges, and a sudden fan of lines wrinkling each side of the deep-set eyes. He blew out the burning taper with a quick breath.
“Come in, Will Stanton,” he said, and the deep voice too seemed to leap in Will’s memory. “Come and learn. And bring that candle with you.”
Puzzled, Will glanced around him. Close to his right hand, he found a black wrought-iron stand as tall as himself, rising to three points; two of the points were tipped by a five-pointed iron star and the third by a candlestick holding a thick white candle. He lifted out the candle, which was heavy enough to need both hands, and crossed the hall to the two figures waiting at the other end. Blinking through the light, he saw as he approached them that the circle of candles on the table was not a complete circle after all; one holder in the ring was empty. He leaned across the table, gripping the hard smooth sides of the candle, lighted it from one of the others, and fitted it carefully into the empty socket. It was identical with the rest. They were very strange candles, uneven in width but cold and hard as white marble; they burned with a long bright flame and no smoke, and smelled faintly resinous, like pine trees.
It was only as he leaned back to stand upright that Will noticed the two crossed arms of iron inside the candlestick ring. Here again, as everywhere, was the sign: the cross within the circle, the quartered sphere. There were other sockets for candles within the frame, he saw now: two along each arm of the cross, and one at the central point where they met. But these were still empty.
The old lady relaxed, and sat down in the high-backed chair beside the hearth. “Very good,” she said comfortably in that same musical voice. “Thank you, Will.”
She smiled, her face folding into a cobweb of wrinkles, and Will grinned whole-heartedly back. He had no idea why he was suddenly so happy; it seemed too natural to be questioned. He sat down on a stool which was clearly waiting for him in front of the fire, between the two chairs.
“The doors,” he said, “the great doors I came through. How do they just stand there on their own?”
“The doors?” the lady said.
Something in her voice made Will look back over his shoulder at the far wall from which he had just come: the wall with the two high doors, and the holder from which he had taken the candle. He stared; there was something wrong. The great wooden doors had vanished. The grey wall stretched blank, its massive square stones quite featureless except for one round golden shield, alone, hanging high up and glinting dully in the light from the fire.
The tall man laughed softly. “Nothing is what it seems, boy. Expect nothing and fear nothing, here or anywhere. There’s your first lesson. And here’s your first exercise. We have before us Will Stanton — tell us what has been happening to him, this last day or two.”
Will looked into the urgent flames, warm and welcome on his face in the chill room. It took much effort to wrench his mind back to the moment when he and James had left home for Dawsons’ Farm to collect hay — hay! — the previous afternoon. He thought, bemused, about everything that stood between that moment and his present self. After a while he said
: “The sign. The circle with the cross. Yesterday Mr Dawson gave me the sign. Then the Walker came after me, or tried to, and afterwards they — whoever they are — they tried to get me.” He swallowed, cold at the memory of his night’s fear. “To get the sign. They want it, that’s what everything is about. That’s what today is about too, even though it’s so much more complicated because now isn’t now, it’s some other time, I don’t know when. With everything like a dream, but real . . . They’re still after it. I don’t know who they are, except for the Rider and the Walker. I don’t know you either, only I know you are against them. You and Mr Dawson and John Wayland Smith.”
He stopped.
“Go on,” said the deep voice.
“Wayland?” Will said, perplexed. “That’s an odd name. That’s not part of John’s name. What made me say that?”
“Minds hold more than they know,” the tall man said. “Particularly yours. And what else have you to say?”
“I don’t know,” Will said. He looked down and ran a finger along the edge of his stool; it was carved in gentle regular waves, like a peaceful sea. “Well, yes I do. Two things. One is that there’s something funny about the Walker. I don’t really think he’s one of them, because he was scared stiff of the Rider when he saw him, and ran away.”
“And the other thing?” the big man said.
Somewhere in the shadows of the great room a clock struck, with a deep note like a muffled bell: a single note, a half-hour.
“The Rider,” Will said. “When the Rider saw the Sign, he said: ’So you have one of them already.’ He didn’t know I had it. But he had come after me. Chasing me. Why?”
“Yes,” said the old lady. She was looking at him rather sadly. “He was chasing you. I’m afraid the guess that is in your mind is right, Will. It isn’t the sign they want most of all. It’s you.”
The big man stood up, and crossed behind Will so that he stood with one hand on the back of the old lady’s chair and the other in the pocket of the dark, high-necked jacket he wore. “Look at me, Will,” he said. Light from the burning ring of candles on the table glinted on his springing white hair, and put his strange, shadowed eyes into even deeper shadows, pools of darkness in the bony face. “My name is Merriman Lyon,” he said. “I greet you, Will Stanton. We have been waiting for you for a long time.”
“I know you,” Will said. “I mean . . . you look . . . I felt . . . don’t I know you?”
“In a sense,” Merriman said. “You and I are, shall we say, similar. We were born with the same gift, and for the same high purpose. And you are in this place at this moment, Will, to begin to understand what that purpose is. But first you must be taught about the gift.”
Everything seemed to be running too far, too fast. “I don’t understand,” Will said, looking at the strong, intent face in alarm. “I haven’t any gift, really I haven’t. I mean there’s nothing special about me.” He looked from one to the other of them, figures alternately lit and shadowed by the dancing flames of candles and fire, and he began to feel a rising fear, a sense of being trapped. He said, “It’s just the things that have been happening to me, that’s all.”
“Think back, and remember some of those things,” the old lady said. “Today is your birthday. Midwinter Day, your eleventh Midwinter’s Day. Think back to yesterday, your tenth Midwinter’s Eve, before you first saw the sign. Was there nothing special at all, then? Nothing new?”
Will thought. “The animals were scared of me,” he said reluctantly. “And the birds perhaps. But it didn’t seem to mean anything at the time.”
“And if you had a radio or a television set switched on in the house,” Merriman said, “it behaved oddly whenever you went near it.”
Will stared at him. “The radio did keep making noises. How did you know that? I thought it was sunspots or something.”
Merriman smiled. “In a way. In a way.” Then he was sombre again. “Listen now. The gift I speak of, it is a power, that I will show you. It is the power of the Old Ones, who are as old as this land and older even than that. You were born to inherit it, Will, when you came to the end of your tenth year. On the night before your birthday, it was beginning to wake, and now on the day of your birth it is free, flowering, fully grown. But it is still confused and unchannelled because you are not in proper control of it yet. You must be trained to handle it, before it can fall into its true pattern and accomplish the quest for which you are here. Don’t look so prickly, boy. Stand up. I’ll show you what it can do.”
Will stood up, and the old lady smiled encouragingly at him. He said to her suddenly, “Who are you?”
“The lady —” Merriman began.
“The lady is very old,” she said in her clear young voice, “and has in her time had many, many names. Perhaps it would be best for now, Will, if you were to go on thinking of me as — the old lady.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Will said, and at the sound of her voice his happiness came flooding back, the rising alarm dropped away, and he stood up erect and eager, peering into the shadow behind her chair where Merriman had moved a few paces back. He could see the glint of white hair on the tall figure, but no more.
Merriman’s deep voice came out of the shadow. “Stand still. Look at whatever you like, but not hard, concentrate on nothing. Let your mind wander, pretend you are in a boring class at school.”
Will laughed, and stood there relaxed, tilting his head back. He squinted up, idly trying to distinguish between the dark criss-crossing beams in the high roof and the black lines that were their shadows. Merriman said casually, “I am putting a picture into your mind. Tell me what you see.”
The image formed itself in Will’s mind as naturally as if he had decided to paint an imaginary landscape and were making up the look of it before putting it on paper. He said, describing the details as they came to him: “There’s a grassy hillside, over the sea, like a sort of gentle cliff. Lots of blue sky, and the sea a darker blue underneath. A long way down, right down there where the sea meets the land, there’s a strip of sand, lovely glowing golden sand. And inland from the grassy headland — you can’t really see it from here except out of the corner of your eye — hills, misty hills. They’re a sort of soft purple, and their edges dissolve into a blue mist, the way the colours in a painting dissolve into one another if you keep it wet. And” — he came out of his half-trance of seeing and looked hard at Merriman, peering into the shadow with inquisitive interest — “and it’s a sad picture. You miss it, you’re homesick for wherever it is. Where is it?”
“Enough,” Merriman said hastily, but he sounded pleased. “You do well. Now it is your turn. Give me a picture, Will. Just choose some ordinary scene, anything, and think of the way it looks, as if you were standing looking at it.”
Will thought of the first image that came into his head. It was one which he realised now had been worrying away at the back of his thoughts all this while: the picture of the two great doors, isolated on the snowy hillside, with all their intricate carving, and the strange blur at their edges.
Merriman said at once: “Not the doors. Nothing so close. Somewhere from your life before this winter came.”
For a second Will stared at him, disconcerted; then he swallowed hard, closed his eyes and thought of the jeweller’s shop his father ran in the little town of Eton.
Merriman said, slowly, “The door-handle is of the lever kind, like a round bar, to be pushed downward perhaps ten degrees on opening. A small hanging bell rings as the door moves. You step down a few inches to reach the floor, and the jolt of the drop is startling without being dangerous. There are glass showcases all round the walls, and beneath the glass counter — of course, this must be your father’s shop. With some beautiful things inside it. A grandfather clock, very old, in the back corner, with a painted face and a deep, slow tick. A turquoise necklet in the central showcase with a setting of silver serpents: Zuni work, I think, a very long way from home. An emerald pendant like a great green tear. A small
enchanting model of a Crusader castle, in gold — perhaps a saltcellar — that you have loved, I think, since you were a small boy. And that man behind the counter, short and content and gentle, must be your father, Roger Stanton. Interesting to see him clearly at last, free of the mist. . . . He has a jeweller’s glass in his eye, and he is looking at a ring: an old gold ring with nine tiny stones set in three rows, three diamond chips in the centre and three rubies at either side, and some curious runic lines edging those that I think I must look at more closely one day soon —”
“You even got the ring!” Will said, fascinated. “That’s mother’s ring, Dad was looking at it last time I was in the shop. She thought one of the stones was loose, but he said it was an optical illusion. . . . However do you do it?”
“Do what?” There was an ominous softness in the deep voice.
“Well — that. Put a picture in my head. And then see the one I had there myself. Telepathy, isn’t it called? It’s tremendous.” But an uneasiness was beginning in his mind.
“Very well,” Merriman said patiently. “I will show you in another way. There is a circle of candle flames beside you there on the table, Will Stanton. Now — do you know of any possible way of putting out one of those flames, other than blowing it out or quenching it with water or snuffer or hand?”
“No.”
“No. There is none. But now, I tell you that you, because you are who you are, can do that simply by wishing it. For the gift that you have, this is a very small task indeed. If in your mind you choose one of those flames and think of it without even looking, think of it and tell it to go out, then that flame will go out. And is that a possible thing for any normal boy to do?”
“No,” Will said unhappily.
“Do it,” Merriman said. “Now.”
There was a sudden thick silence in the room, like velvet. Will could feel them both watching him. He thought desperately: I’ll get out of it, I’ll think of a flame, but it won’t be one of those; it’ll be something much bigger, something that couldn’t be put out except by some tremendous impossible magic even Merriman doesn’t know. . . . He looked across the room at the light and shadow dancing side by side across the rich tapestries on the stone walls, and he thought hard, in furious concentration, of the image of the blazing log fire in the huge fireplace behind him. He felt the warmth of it on the back of his neck, and thought of the glowing orange heart of the big pile of logs and the leaping yellow tongues of flame. Go out, fire, he said to it in his mind, feeling suddenly safe and free from the dangers of power, because of course no fire as big as that could possibly go out without a real reason. Stop burning, fire. Go out.
