Silver on the Tree

by Susan Cooper

  “No,” Jane said. “We’ve never been to Wales before, Barney. But Dad’s grandmother was born here. Right in Aberdyfi. Perhaps memories can float about in your blood or something.”

  “In your blood!” Simon said scornfully. He had recently announced that instead of going to sea, he proposed to be come a doctor, like their father, and the side-effects of this weighty decision were beginning to try Jane and Barney’s patience.

  Jane sighed. “I didn’t mean it like that.” She groped in her shirt pocket. “Here. Halfway snack time. Have some chocolate before it melts.”

  “Good!” said Barney promptly.

  “And don’t tell me it’s bad for our teeth, Simon, because I know it is.”

  “Course it is,” said her elder brother with a disarming grin. “Utter disaster. Where’s mine?”

  They sat munching fruit-and-nut chocolate for a contented space, gazing out over the estuary.

  “I just know I’ve been here before,” Barney said.

  “Don’t keep on,” Jane said. “You’ve seen pictures.”

  “I mean it.”

  “If you’ve been here before,” Simon said, long-suffering, “you can tell us what we’ll see when we get to the top of the ridge.”

  Barney turned, flipping his blonde forelock out of his eyes, and stared up the mountain, over the bracken and the green slope. He said nothing.

  “Another ridge,” Jane said cheerfully. “And from that one you’ll see another.”

  “What’ll we see, Barney?” Simon persisted. “Cader Idris? Snowdon? Ireland?”

  Barney looked at him for a long blank moment, his eyes empty. He said at last, “Someone.”

  “Someone? Who?”

  “I don’t know.” He jumped up suddenly. “If we sit here all day we’ll never find out, will we? Race you!”

  He leapt up off the slope, and in an instant Simon was bounding confidently after him. Jane watched them, grinning. In the last year or so, though her younger brother had remained fairly neat and small, Simon seemed to have sprouted legs far too long for his body, like a giraffe. There were very few family races now that he failed to win.

  Both boys had disappeared above her. The sun was hot on the back of her neck, as she climbed slowly after them. She stumbled on an outcrop of rock, and paused. Somewhere far away on the mountain a tractor’s engine purred; a pipit shrilled overhead. The rocky outcrops led to the top of the ridge here in an erratic progression, through bracken and gorse and billowing piles of heather; hare-bells starred the low sheep-cropped grass, and little creeping white flowers she did not recognise. Far, far below, the road wound like a thread past the dune-fringed golf course, and the first grey roofs of Aberdyfi village. Jane shivered suddenly, with a sense of being very much alone.

  “Simon!” she called. “Barney!”

  There was no answer. The birds sang. The sun beat down out of a lightly-hazed blue sky; nothing moved anywhere. Then very faintly Jane heard a strange long musical note. High and clear, it was like the call of a hunting horn, and yet not so harsh or demanding. It came again, closer. Jane found that she smiled as she listened; it was a lovely beckoning sound, and suddenly she was filled with an urgent desire to find out where it came from, what instrument could play so beautiful a note. She went on more swiftly up the hillside, until all at once she was over a last rocky edge and could see before her the first few yards of the ridge of the hill. The long sweet note came again, and on the highest grey granite outcropping that met the sky, she saw a boy, lowering from his lips the small curved horn with which he had just blown a call over the mountains, out into nowhere. His face was turned away from Jane, and she could see little except that he had longish straight hair. Then as he moved one hand in an automatic swift gesture to push back the hair from his forehead, she knew suddenly and positively that she had seen that gesture before, and knew who this boy was.

  She went forward up the last slope to the rock, and he saw her and stood waiting.

  Jane said, “Will Stanton!”

  “Hello, Jane Drew,” he said.

  “Oh!” Jane said happily. Then she paused, surveying him. “I can’t think why I’m not more surprised,” she said. “The last time I saw you was when we left you on Platform Four at Paddington Station. A year ago. More. What are you doing on the top of a mountain in Wales, for goodness’ sake?”

  “Calling,” Will said.

  Jane looked at him for a long moment full of remembering, thinking back to a dark adventure in a beleaguered Cornish village, where her Great-Uncle Merriman had brought her and Simon and Barney together with an unremarkable round-faced, straight-haired Buckinghamshire boy—who had seemed to her in the end as alarming and yet as reassuring as Merriman himself.

  “Different, I said you were then,” she said.

  Will said gently, “You three are not altogether ordinary, as you very well know.”

  “Sometimes,” said Jane. She grinned at him suddenly, reaching back to hitch up the ribbon on her pony-tail. “Mostly we are. Well. I said I hoped we should see you again someday. Didn’t I?”

  Will grinned back, and Jane remembered the way his smile had always transformed his rather solemn face. “And I said I was pretty sure you would.” He came a few paces down the rock, then paused and raised the horn to his lips again. Tilting it to the sky, he blew a string of short staccato notes and then one long one. The sound curved out into the summer air, then down, like an arrow dropping.

  “That’ll bring them,” he said. “They used to call it the avaunt.”

  The note of the horn was still echoing round Jane’s head. “It’s a lovely, lovely sound, not a bit like the ones they use for fox-hunts. Not that I’ve ever heard those except on television. That one—it’s just—it’s music—” She broke off, flapping one hand wordlessly.

  Will held up the small curved horn, looking at it with his head on one side. Though it seemed old and battered, it gleamed like gold in the sunlight. “Ah,” he said softly. “Two occasions there will be, for its using. That much I know. The second is hidden to me. But the first time is now, for the gathering of the Six.”

  “The Six?” Jane said blankly.

  “We are two,” Will said. She stared at him.

  “Jane? Jane!” It was Simon’s voice, loud and peremptory, from over the ridge. She turned her head.

  “Jane—? Oh there you are!” Barney clambered over the rock a few yards away, turning over his shoulder to call, “Over here!”

  Will said in the same tranquil voice, “And then there were four.”

  Both boys’ heads swung round in the same instant.

  “Will!” Barney’s voice was a yelp.

  Jane heard the sharp inward gasp of Simon’s breath; then he let it out in a long slow hiss. “Well … I’ll … be….”

  “Someone,” Barney said. “Didn’t I tell you? Someone. Was that you blowing the horn, Will? Let’s see, do let me see!” He was hopping about, reaching, fascinated.

  Will handed it over.

  Simon said slowly, “You can’t tell me this is a coincidence.”

  “No,” Will said.

  Barney was standing still now on the rock, holding the small battered horn, watching the sun glint on its golden rim. He looked over it, at Will. “Something’s happening, isn’t it?” he said quietly.

  “Yes,” said Will.

  “Can you tell us?” Jane said.

  “Not yet. In a little while. It’s the hardest thing of all, and the last thing. And … it needs you.”

  “I should have known.” Simon looked at Jane with a small wry smile. “This morning. You weren’t there. Dad happened to mention who it was that suggested we stay at this particular golfing hotel.”

  “Well?”

  “Great-Uncle Merry,” Simon said.

  Will said, “He will be here before long.”

  “It really is serious,” Barney said.

  “Of course. I told you. The hardest, and the last.”

  “It really h
ad better be the last,” Simon said rather pompously. “I start boarding school after these holidays.”

  Will looked at him. The corner of his mouth twitched.

  Simon seemed to hear in his mind the echo of his own words; he looked down, scuffing at the grass with one foot. “Well I mean,” he said. “I mean my holidays will be even more different from the other’s, so we may not be going to … to the same places all the time. Right, Jane?” He turned in appeal to his sister: then paused. “Jane?”

  Jane was gazing past him, eyes wide and fixed. She was seeing, now, nothing but a figure on the mountain, a figure standing looking at them, outlined by the blazing light of the high-summer sun. It stood slim and straight. Its hair was like a silver flame. She had a sudden extraordinary sense of great rank, of high natural degree, almost as if she were in the presence of a king. For a moment she resisted a strong irrational impulse to curtsey.

  “Will?” she said softly, without turning her head. “Then there were five, Will?”

  Will’s voice came strong and casual and eminently normal, snapping the tension. “Hey Bran! Over here! Bran!” He pronounced the name with a long vowel, Jane noticed, like the sound inside farm, or barn. She had never heard a name like it before. She had never seen anyone like this before.

  The boy on the skyline came slowly down towards them. Jane stared at him, hardly breathing. She could see him clearly now. He wore a white sweater and black jeans, with dark glasses over his eyes, and there was no colour in him anywhere. His skin had a strange pale translucence. His hair was quite white; so were his eyebrows. He was not merely blonde, as her brother Barney was blonde, with his mop of yellowish hair falling over a sun-browned face. This boy seemed almost crippled by his lack of colour; its absence hit the eye as hard as if an arm or a leg had been missing. And then he pulled off his glasses as he drew level with them, and she saw that after all the lack was not total; she saw his eyes, and they too were like nothing she had seen before. They were yellow, tawny, flecked with gold, like the eyes of an owl; they blazed at her, bright as new coins. She felt a sense of challenge—and then she was conscious of her staring, and though she would never normally have shaken hands with anyone her own age, in a kind of apology she thrust out her hand towards him.

  “Hallo,” she said.

  Will said at once, beside her, matter-of-fact, “That’s Bran Davies. Bran, this is Jane Drew. And Simon, he’s the big one, and Barney.”

  The white-haired boy took Jane’s hand briefly, awkwardly, and nodded at Barney and Simon. “Pleased to meet you.” He sounded very Welsh.

  “Bran lives in one of the houses on my uncle’s farm,” Will said.

  “You have an uncle down here?” Barney’s voice was high with astonishment.

  “Well, actually he isn’t my real uncle,” Will said cheerfully. “Adopted. He married my mum’s best friend. Comes to the same thing. Like you and Merriman. Or is he your real great-uncle?”

  “I’ve never really known,” Simon said.

  “He probably isn’t,” Jane said. “Considering.”

  Barney said pertly, “Considering what?”

  “You know perfectly well.” She was uneasily conscious of Bran silently listening.

  “Yes,” Barney said. He handed the small gleaming horn back to Will. Instantly Bran’s cold golden eyes were on it; then up glaring at Barney, fierce, accusing.

  “Was that you blowing the horn?”

  Will said quickly, “No, of course not, it was me. Calling, like I said. Calling you, and them.”

  Something in Jane’s mind flickered at the note in his voice: a small strange difference, so slight that she could not be sure she was not imagining it. It seemed a kind of respect, that Will did not show even when he spoke to Merriman. Or not respect, but an … awareness of … of something…. She glanced quickly, nervously at the white-haired boy and then away again.

  Simon said, “Have you known Will for long?” His tone was carefully neutral.

  Bran said calmly. “Calan Gaeaf last year, I got to know Will. Last Samain. If you can work that out, you’ll know how long. You staying at the Trefeddian then, you three?” He pronounced it Trevethian, natural and Welsh; not as they had themselves when they first arrived, Jane painfully remembered.

  “Yes,” she said. “Daddy’s playing golf. Mother paints.”

  “Is she good?” Bran said.

  “Yes,” Barney said. “Very.” Jane could hear the same wariness in his voice as there had been in Simon’s, but without hostility. “I mean she’s a real painter, not just hobby stuff. She has a studio, shows in galleries, all that.”

  “You’re lucky,” Bran said quietly.

  Will was looking at Simon. “Is it hard to get away?”

  “From the A.P.s? Oh no. Mother takes off in the car with her easel, Father’s on the golf course all day.” Glancing at Bran, Simon added, “Sorry—A.P.s—Aged Parents.”

  “Believe it or not,” Bran said, “they teach Dickens in Welsh schools too.”

  “Sorry,” Simon said stiffly. “I didn’t mean—”

  “That’s all right.” Bran smiled suddenly, for the first time. “We are going to be doing things together, Simon Drew. I think we had better get along. Don’t worry. I am not one of those Welshmen with a chip. No fixations about the snotty English, or being a subject race, and all that. No point, is there, when the Welsh are so clearly superior?”

  “Bah, humbug,” Will said cheerfully.

  Barney said rather hesitantly, looking at Bran, “You said, We’re going to be doing things together…. Are you one of—are you like Great-Uncle Merry and Will?”

  “In a way I suppose I am,” Bran said slowly. “I can’t explain. You’ll see. But I am not one of the Old Ones, not a part of the Circle of the Light as they are….” He grinned at Will. “Not a dewin, a wizard, like that one there, with all his tricks.”

  Will shook his round head with only half a smile. “We need more than tricks, this last time. There is something we have to find, all of us, and I don’t even know what it is. All we have is the last line of an old verse, that you three heard, once upon a time, when first we deciphered it. It was in Welsh, which I can’t possibly remember, but in English it meant, The mountains are singing, and the Lady comes.”

  “Yr mynyddoedd yn canu,” Bran said, “ac y mae’r arglwyddoes yn dod.”

  “Wow,” Barney said.

  “The Lady?” Jane said. “Who is the Lady?”

  “The Lady is … the Lady. One of the great figures of the Light.” Unconsciously Will’s voice seemed to deepen, taking on an eerie resonance, and Jane felt a prickling along her spine. “She is the greatest of all, the one essential. But when a little while ago we called the Circle together, all the Old Ones of the earth out of all time, for the beginning of the end of this long battle, the Lady did not come. Something is wrong. Something holds her. And without her we can go no further. So the first thing that I—all of us—must do now is find her. With only four words to help us, that do not mean very much to me. The mountains are singing.”

  He stopped abruptly, and looked around at them all.

  “We need Great-Uncle Merry,” Barney said gloomily.

  “Well, we haven’t got him. Yet.” Jane sat down on the nearest rock, playing with a stem of the heather that grew round it in springy mounds of purple and green. Beside her, poking through a clump of dead brown gorse, grew a cluster of the little nodding harebells of the Welsh uplands: delicate pale-blue caps quivering in the slightest breeze. Jane touched one of them gently with her little finger. “Isn’t there any Welsh place name that helps?” she said. “Nothing that means the Singing Mountain, or anything like that?”

  Bran was pacing to and fro, hands in pockets, the dark glasses back again over his pale eyes. “No, no,” he said impatiently. “I have thought and thought, and there is nothing at all like that. Nothing.”

  “Well,” said Simon, “how about any very old places—I mean old old, like Stonehenge? Ruins, o
r something?”

  “I have thought of that too and still there is nothing,” Bran said. “Like, there is a stone in St. Cadfan’s Church in Tywyn that has on it the oldest piece of Welsh ever written down—but all that tells is where St. Cadfan is buried. Or there is Castell y Bere, a ruined castle, very romantic, right near Cader. But that wasn’t built till the thirteenth century, when Prince Llewellyn wanted to make himself a headquarters to rule all of Wales that the English hadn’t grabbed.”

  “No chip?” Barney said mischievously.

  The dark glasses glared at him; then Bran grinned. “History I am telling you, boy, not comment. Old Llewellyn had the chip … and a fine one too, like Owain Glyndwr later….” The grin faded. “But none of that takes us anywhere either.”

  “Isn’t there anything to do with King Arthur?” Barney said.

  And he and Jane and even Simon could feel the sudden weight of silence around them like a blanket. Neither Will nor Bran moved; they simply stood looking at Barney. And the emptiness of the mountain, up there on top of the world, was all at once so oppressive that every smallest sound seemed to take on immense significance. The rustle of heather as Barney shifted his feet; the deep distant call of a sheep; the persistent tuneless chirruping of some small unseen bird. Jane and Simon and Barney stood very still; surprised, uncertain.

  Will said at last, lightly, “Why?”

  “Barney has a fixation about King Arthur, that’s all,” Simon said.

  For an instant Will paused still; then he smiled, and the strange oppressiveness fell away as if it had never been there. “Well,” he said, “there’s the biggest mountain of all, next to Snowdon—Cader Idris. Over there. It means in English ‘the seat of Arthur.’”

  “Any good?” said Barney hopefully.

  “No,” Will said, glancing at Bran. He offered no explanation for the total finality in his voice. Jane found herself resenting the feeling of exclusion that was growing in her.