Silver on the Tree

by Susan Cooper

  “Oh no,” Will said. “I shan’t. I remember something you said to me once, a long while ago—” He screwed up his face, groping in his memory for the right words. “For all times coexist, you said, and the future can sometimes affect the past, even though the past is a road that leads to the future.”

  A small smile of approval flickered in Merriman’s grave face. “And therefore, now, the Circle of the Light must be called, by Will Stanton the Sign-seeker, who once on a time achieved the joining of the Six Signs of the Light into a circle. It must be called, so that from the one and the same calling it may help the men of this world, both in the time of Arthur and in the time from which you come.”

  “So,” Will said, “I must take the Signs from their refuge, through that most complicated spell we laid on them after they had been joined. I only hope I can find the way.”

  “So do I,” said Merriman a trifle grimly. “For if you do not, the High Magic which guards them will take them outside Time, and the only advantage the Light holds in this great matter will be lost forever.”

  Will swallowed. He said, “I must do it from my own century, though. That was when they were joined and hidden.”

  “Of course,” Merriman said. “And that is why my lord Arthur asked us to be swift. Go, Will, and do what you have to do. A night and a day: that is all the time we have, by the measure of the earth.”

  He stood and crossed the floor in one swift movement and grasped Will’s arms in the old Roman salute. Dark eyes blazed down from the strange craggy face, with its deep lines. “I shall be with you, but powerless. Take care,” Merriman said.

  “Yes.”

  Will turned away, to the door, and pulled aside the curtain. Outside in the night there still faintly rang out the metallic hammering, the striking of iron upon iron.

  “Wayland Smith works long, this day,” said Merriman behind him, softly. “And not on shoes for horses, in this time, for horses are not yet shod. On swords, and axes, and knives.”

  Will shivered, and without a word went out into the black night. His head whirled, a wind blew into his face—and once more the moon was floating like a great pale orange before him in the sky, and in his arms was a wooden board, and the sound of hammering before him was that of a hammer driving nails into wood.

  “Ah,” Stephen said, looking up. “That looks perfect. Thanks.”

  Will came forward and gave him the board.

  • The Calling •

  Up in Will’s attic bedroom the air was warm and still, furry with summer heat. He lay on his back, listening to the late-night murmur and chink below as the last waking Stantons—his father and Stephen, he thought, from the rumbling voices—made ready for bed. This had been Stephen’s bedroom once, and Will had carefully packed up his belongings to let the rightful owner take residence again for the length of his leave. But Stephen had shaken his head. “Max is away—I’ll use his room. I’m a nomad now, Will. It’s all yours.”

  The last door closed, the last glimmer of reflected light went out. Will looked at his watch. Midnight had passed; Midsummer Day was here now, a few minutes old. Half an hour’s wait should be enough. He could see no star through the skylight in his slanting roof, but only a moon-washed sky; its muted brightness filtered down into the room.

  The house was muffled in sleep when finally he crept down the stairs in his pyjamas, gingerly treading the furthest corners of those steps that he knew would creak. Outside the door of his parents’ room he froze suddenly; his father, snoring in a gentle crescendo, half-woke himself, grunted, turned rustling over and was lost again in soft-breathing sleep.

  Will smiled into the darkness. It would have been no great matter, for an Old One, to put the household away into a pause of Time, caught out of reality in a sleep that could not be broken. But he did not want that. There were likely to be enough ways, tonight, in which he would have to play with Time.

  Softly down the lower staircase into the front hall he went. The picture he had come to find hung on the wall just inside the big front door, beside the hat-rack and umbrella-stand. Will had brought a small flashlight with him, but he found he did not need it; the moonlight silvering the air through the hall windows showed him all the familiar figures the picture held.

  He had been fascinated by it since he was very small, so small that he had to clamber up on the umbrella-stand to peer inside the dark carved wood of the picture-frame. It was a Victorian print, done all in murky shades of brown; its great attraction was the enormous complicated clarity of its detail. In flowing script it was entitled The Romans at Caerleon, and it showed the construction of some complex building. Everywhere crowds of figures tugged ropes, led oxen straining on sturdy wooden yoks, guided slabs of rock into place. A paved central floor was finished, smooth and elliptical, flanked by columned arches; a wall or staircase seemed to be rising beyond. Roman soldiers, splendidly uniformed, stood overseeing the bands of men unloading and tugging the neatly cut stones into place.

  Will looked for one soldier in particular, a centurion in the far right-hand corner of the foreground, leaning against a pillar. He was the only still figure in the whole panorama of busy construction; his face, drawn in clear detail, was grave and rather sad, and he was gazing out of the picture, into the distance. That sad remoteness was the reason why Will, when small, had always found himself more intrigued by this one odd figure than by all the rest of the scurrying workers put together. It was also the reason why Merriman had chosen the man for the concealing of the Signs.

  Merriman. Will sat down on the stairs, chin on hands. He must think, think hard and deep. It was simple enough to remember the way in which he and Merriman had managed the hiding of the linked circle of six Signs, the most powerful—and vulnerable—weapons of the Light. Back into the time of this Roman they had gone, and there among the stones whose picture hung before him now, he, Will, had slipped the Signs into a place where they could lie safe and unseen, buried by Time. But to remember that was one thing, to reverse it quite another….

  He thought: The only way is to live through that all over again. I have to go again, to go once more through everything we did in hiding the Signs—and then, instead of stopping, I shall have to find a way to take them out again.

  He was beginning to be excited now. He thought: Merriman can be there but I shall have to do it. I shall be with you, but powerless, he said. So he won’t be able to show me the moment when I have to say something, or do something, whatever it is; he may not even know when it comes. Only I can choose it, for the Light. And if I fail, we can go no further forward from here….

  Excitement dwindled beneath the appalling merciless weight of responsibility. There was one key only to the spell that would release the Signs, and only he could find it. But where, when, how?

  Where, when, how?

  Will stood up. The way out of the spell could be found only by going back into it. So, first he must re-enact the casting of it; turn Time so that once more he could live through the hours, more than a year earlier, when with Will at his side Merriman had—

  What had Merriman done? It must be an exact echo.

  Putting down his flashlight, Will stood before the picture on the wall, remembering. He reached out and put one hand on its frame. Then he stood very still, gazing in total concentration at a group of men in the picture’s middle distance: men straining at a rope that was pulling a slab of rock towards some point that could not be seen. He emptied his mind of all thought, his senses of all other sight or sound; he gazed and he gazed.

  And very gradually, the sound of creaking rope and rhythmic shouts and the grinding of rock against rock began to grow in his ears, and he smelled dust and sweat and dung—and the figures in the picture began to move. And Will’s hand was no longer on the wooden picture-frame, but on the wooden side-support of an ox-cart laden with stone, and he stepped forward into the world of the Romans at Caerleon, a boy of that time, cool in a white linen tunic on a warm summer’s day, with square stone co
bbles uneven beneath his sandalled feet.

  “Heave-two-three … heave-two-three….” The stone inched forward on its rollers. In other rhythms, the same shouts rang through the air from other groups, soldiers and labourers working together, skins olive or dusty pink, hair curly black or lank blonde. Stone crashed or squealed against stone; men and animal grunted with effort. And Merriman said into Will’s ear, from behind him, “You must be ready to slip the link, when the moment comes.”

  Looking down, Will saw the six Signs of the Light, joined by links of gold, clasped about the waist of his tunic like a belt. Bright and dark they lay between the gleaming links, each of the six the same shape, a circle quartered by a cross: dull bronze, dark iron, blackened wood; bright gold, glittering flint, and the last that he would never forget, seeing it sometimes even in dreams—the Sign of water, clear crystal, engraved with delicate symbols and patterns like a circle of snowflakes caught in ice.

  “Come,” Merriman said.

  He swept past Will, tall in a dark blue cloak that fell almost to his feet, and drew level with the pillar beyond the steaming oxen, where a centurion stood watching a team of workmen lace straps and ropes round the topmost slab of granite on the wagon. Will followed, trying to be inconspicuous.

  “The work goes well,” Merriman said.

  The Roman turned his head, and Will saw that it was the same sombre figure whose image he had passed almost every day of his life. Bright dark eyes regarded Merriman from a lean, long-nosed face.

  “Ah,” the man said. “It is the Druid.”

  Merriman inclined his head in a kind of mock-formal greeting. “Many things to many men,” he said, smiling slightly.

  The soldier looked at him reflectively. “A strange land,” he said. “Barbarians and magicians, dirt and poetry. A strange land, yours.” Then he snapped suddenly taut; part of his attention had been all the while on the ox-cart. “Careful, there! You, Sextus, the rope at that end—”

  Men scrambled to balance the descending slab, which had tipped perilously to one side; it came down in safety and the man in command of the team saluted, calling his thanks. The centurion nodded and relaxed, though still watching them. Another wagon rumbled past, laden with long beams of wood.

  Merriman looked out at the rising structure before them; their wider view now showed that it was a half-built amphitheatre, stone-walled, with tiers of wood-topped seats rising in a great curving sweep from the central arena. “Rome has many talents,” he said. “We have some skill with stone, here, and none can match our great stone circles, with their homage to the Light. But the skill of Roman builders for the daily life of men as well as for worship—your villas and viaducts, your pipes and streets and baths…. You are transforming our cities, friend, as you have begun transforming the pattern of our lives.”

  The soldier shrugged. “The Empire grows, always.” He glanced at Will, who hovered at Merriman’s side watching the team of men swinging the long stone slowly to one side, down from the wagon.

  “Your boy?”

  “He learns a little of what I know,” Merriman said coolly. “I have had him a year now. We shall see. He has the old blood in him, from the years before your fathers came.”

  “No fathers of mine,” the centurion said. “I am not Empire-born. I came from Rome seven years back, commissioned into the Second. A long time gone. Rome is the Empire, the Empire is Rome, and yet, and yet….” He smiled suddenly at Will: a kind smile, lightening the severe face. “You work hard for your master, boy?”

  “I try, sir,” Will said. He enjoyed following the formal patterning of the Latin; it came without effort to an Old One, as did any language of the world, but brought somehow a particular pleasure because of the echoes of it in his own native tongue.

  “The building interests you.”

  “Marvellous, it is. The way each piece of stone is cut to fit exactly to the next, or to hold a beam of wood. And the putting them together, so carefully, precisely—they know just what they are doing—”

  “It is all planned. Just as anywhere in the Empire. This same amphitheatre has been built in a score of legionary fort towns like this one, from Sparta to Brindisium. Come, I will show you.”

  He took Will by the shoulder, with a beckoning glance at Merriman, and led him across the sandy central floor of the arena to a half-finished vaulted arch, one of eight entrances through the rising tiers of seats. “When my third team brings up that next slab, it will fit here, so—and lock in place, there—”

  A column of stone slabs was beginning to rise at the side of the arch. Will peered at the next as it drew close on its rollers, tugged by four sweating soldiers. A grunting, straining team hoisted it into place in the rising arch. It was much larger than the rest: irregular with a large hollow depression in the top, but with one broad, unusually flat surface for the front side. Will saw the incised letters: COH. X. C. FLAV. JULIAN

  “Built by the tenth cohort, the century of Flavius Julianus,” Merriman said. “Excellent.” And silently, in the Old Ones’ manner of speaking into the mind, he said to Will, “In there. Now.” At the same moment, he stumbled, knocking clumsily against the centurion’s elbow; the Roman turned courteously to catch him.

  “Is anything wrong?”

  Swiftly Will slipped the belt of linked Signs from his waist and dropped it into the hollow irregularity in the slab’s top side over which the next slab of stone would be placed; he pushed earth and stones hastily over it to keep the gleaming metals from view.

  “I beg your pardon,” Merriman was saying. “Foolish—my sandal—”

  The soldier turned back; the team came straining up; Will moved quickly aside and the stone slab groaned and squeaked into place. And the Circle of Signs was shut into a coffin of stone, to lie hidden for as long as this work of the Roman Empire should survive.

  The detached part of Will’s mind, aware of everything as a spell-brought echo of things he and Merriman had done before, came jolting now into his consciousness. Now! it said. What next? For this was as far as those first actions had gone. After this point, on the day of the hiding of the Signs, he had very soon found himself back in his own century, flicked forward in Time with the precious circle hidden safe behind him. So the secret that he must now urgently find, the precious key to their recovery, must lie somewhere in these next moments of Roman time. What could it be?

  He looked desperately at Merriman. But the dark eyes over the high curved nose held no expression. This was not Merriman’s task, but his own; he must do it alone.

  All the same there might be a reason why Merriman was there, for this half of the spell as for the other; even unwittingly, he might have some part to play. It was for Will to discover that part, if it were so, and take hold of whatever might be there for him to take.

  Where, when, how?

  The centurion shouted commands, and his nearest team of workers swung round and marched back for the next stone. Watching them, the Roman shivered suddenly, and drew his cloak tighter round his shoulders.

  “Britain-born, all of them,” he said wrily to Merriman. “Like you, they find no horror in this climate.”

  Merriman made a formless, murmuring sound of sympathy, and for no reason that he could imagine Will found the small hairs rising on the back of his neck, as if in a warning from senses that had no other speech. He stood tense, waiting.

  “These islands,” the Roman said. “Green, I grant you. Well might they be green. Always the clouds, the mist and damp and rain.” He sighed. “Ah, my bones ache….”

  Merriman said softly, “And not the bones only … it must be hard, for one born in the sun.”

  The centurion stared out over the wooden seats and stone columns, looking at nothing, and shook his head helplessly.

  Will said, in a small clear voice that seemed to him to belong to somebody else. “What is it like, your home?”

  “Rome? A great city. But my home is outside the city, in the country—a quiet life, but good—” He gl
anced at Will. “I have a son who must now be as tall as you. When last I saw him I could throw him in the air and catch him in my hands. Now my wife tells me he has learned to ride like a centaur, and swim like a fish. Swimming now, perhaps, in the river near my land. I wanted him to grow up there, as I did. With the sun hot on the skin, and the air shrill with cicadas, and a line of cypress trees dark against the sky … the hills silver with olive trees and terraced for the vines, with the grapes filling out, now….”

  The homesickness was a throbbing ache like physical pain, and suddenly Will knew that the answer was here in the air, in this moment of simple unprotected longing with a man’s deepest, simplest emotions open and unguarded for strangers to hear and see. This was the road that would carry him.

  Here, now, this way!

  He let his mind fall into the longing, into the other’s pain, as if he were diving into a sea; and like water closing over his head the emotion took him in. The world spun about him, stone and grey sky and green fields, whirling and changing and falling down into place not quite the same as before, and the yearning homesick voice was soft in his ears again; but the voice was a different voice.

  The voice was a different voice and the language was changed, to a soft accented English with long slanting vowels. And it was evening now, with a moon-washed silverdark sky above and shadows all around, shapes and shadows indistinguishable one from the next.

  But in the new voice, the ache of longing was exactly the same.

  “… it’s all sun and sand and sea, that part of Florida. My part. Flowers everywhere. Oleander and hibiscus, and poinsettia in big wild red bushes, not shut up in skinny little Christmas pots. And down on the beach the wind blows in the coconut palms and the leaves make a little rattling noise, like a shower of rain. I used to swing on those leaves when I was your age, like swinging on a rope. If I were down there now I’d be out fishing with my dad—he’s got a forty foot Bertram, a beauty. Called Betsy Girl after Mom. Out through the channel in the mangroves, you go—dark green, like forests in the water. The water’s green too till you get way out in the Gulf, and then it’s a deep, deep blue. Beautiful. And you swing the outriggers up with the lines over, and ballyho on, and you’ll catch bonita or dolphin, or if you’re lucky, pompano. The tourists all want sailfish or kingfish. Day before I left home, I got a sixty pound king. Ginny, that’s my girl, she took a picture of it.”