by Susan Cooper
“A refuge,” Gwion said quietly.
Bran pushed his dark glasses down his nose and peered at the carved words. “The beginning of every refuge? What the heck does that mean?”
“That I cannot tell you,” Gwion said. “But I think you should perhaps remember it.” He pointed out through the arch, at the blue coach waiting. “Will you come?”
Will said, as they climbed up the folding step into the coach, “What is that golden crest on the door, with the leaping fish and the roses?”
“A Dyfi salmon, that fish,” Gwion said. “The heralds will call it, later, Azure, a Salmon naiant Or between three Roses Argent seeded and barbed.” He swung himself up over their heads to sit as coachman, gathering up the reins, and the last words came down faintly. “That is the crest of Gwyddno the king.”
Then he flicked the reins and the black horses tossed their plumed heads and they were away, swinging and rattling through the gardens of the broad green park and out into the City’s stone streets. Here and there groups and pairs of people were walking; they lifted their heads, now, as the coach jingled by, and looked after it with surprise and sometimes curiosity. None offered any greeting, but none ignored their passing as before; this time, every head turned.
The coach slowed; they swayed round a bend. Looking out, Will and Bran saw that they were turning in at the arched entrance to a courtyard. High pillared walls rose on all sides, set with tall nine-paned windows; fantastic pointed towers rose above the balustraded line of the roof. Every window was blank; they saw no face anywhere.
The coach stopped; they climbed out. Before them a narrowing stone staircase rose to a square pillared doorway ornamented with carved stone scrolls and figures—and, dominating the rest, a replica of the crest of the leaping fish from the carriage door. Will and Bran glanced at one another, and then ahead. The door stood open. Nothing but darkness was visible within.
Gwion said, behind them, “It is the palace of Gwyddno Garanhir. The Empty Palace, it has been called, since the day when the king retreated to his castle by the sea and never afterward came out. Go inside, the two of you together. And I will meet you in there, if you find your way.”
Will looked back. The splendid coach and the midnight-black horses were quite gone. The great courtyard was empty. Gwion stood at the bottom of the steps, a neat dark figure, his bearded face upturned and sudden lines of anxiety written unaccountably clear upon it. He was tense, waiting.
Will nodded. He turned back to the immense open doorway of the palace. Bran stood there gazing in at the murk. He had not moved since before Gwion spoke. Without turning his white head he said, “Come on, then.”
They went in, side by side. With a long creak and a deep-echoing crash the huge door slammed shut behind them. Instantly the darkness burst into a blaze of white light. Will had a second in which to see Bran recoil, shielding his eyes, before the impact of what lay before them hit him and he gasped aloud.
All around, in an endless fierce glitter, were countless repeated images of himself and Bran. He spun round, staring; the Will-images spun round too, a long chorus-line retreating into space. He shouted, instinctively expecting an infinitely repeated echo to go bouncing to and fro, just as the reflections before him echoed through his sight. But only the one sound rang dully around them, and then died.
It was the sound that somehow gave Will a sense of the shape of the place where they stood: long, narrow.
“Is it a corridor?” he said, bemused.
“Mirrors!” Bran was looking wildly to and fro, eyes screwed into slits even behind the dark glasses. “Mirrors everywhere. It’s made of mirrors.”
Will’s head steadied out of its whirling bewilderment; he began to sort out what he could see. “Mirrors, yes. Except for the floor.” He looked down at glimmering darkness. “And that’s black glass. Look, up and down. It’s a corridor, a long curving corridor all made out of mirrors.”
“I can see too many of me,” Bran said with an uneasy laugh. There was a flash of white at each face as all the endless lines of Bran-images instantaneously laughed—and then sobered, staring.
Will took a few uncertain steps, flinching as the rows of reflected figures moved with him. The curve of the corridor opened before him a little, reflecting nothing but its own brilliance, like a gleaming empty page in a huge book. He reached out and tugged at Bran’s sleeve.
“Hey. Walk alongside me. If there’s someone else to look at, even out of the corner of your eye, all those reflections don’t make you so giddy.”
Bran came with him. He said uncertainly, “You’re right.” But when they had gone forward a little way he stopped suddenly; his face looked pinched and ill. “This is awful,” he said, his voice tight. “The glass, the brightness, all of it pressing in so close. Pressing, pressing, it’s like being in some terrible kind of box.”
“Come on,” Will said, trying to sound confident. “Maybe it opens out round that bend. It can’t go on forever.”
But as they rounded the curve, peopling the glass walls with their endlessly reflected figures, they came only to a pair of sharply angled corners, breaking the reflections into even more wildly repeated lines, where another mirrored corridor crossed the first so that they had now a choice of three forward directions to take.
Bran said unhappily, “Which way?”
“Goodness knows.” Will reached into his pocket and brought out a penny. “Heads we go right or centre, tails we go left.” He spun the coin, caught it, and held out his arm.
“It’s tails,” Bran said. “Left, then.”
“Whoops!” Will had dropped the penny; they heard it roll and spin. “Where is it? Ought to be easy enough to find here…. Funny how there don’t seem to be any joints anywhere in the glass—it’s like being inside a sort of square tube—” He caught sight of the strain on Bran’s face, and was shaken. “Come on—let’s get out of here.”
They went on, up the left-hand turning. But the glass corridor, identical with the first, seemed endless; it stretched on and on, curved sharply to the left, then straightened again. Their footsteps rang out, dropping into immediate silence whenever they paused. At length they came to another crossroads of corridors.
Bran looked round despondently. “Looks just the same as the other one.”
A glitter that was not glass drew Will’s eye to the floor; stooping, he found it was his penny. He straightened, swallowing hard to muffle the sudden hollow feeling in his throat, and held out his hand to Bran.
“It is the same. Look.”
“Duw. We’ve come in a circle.” Bran looked at him, frowning. “You know what? I think we’re in a maze.”
“A maze….”
“A maze of mirrors. Now there’s something to spend your life in.”
“Gwion knew, didn’t he?” Will thought back, to the grey-bearded face looking up at him tense with concern. “Gwion said, I shall meet you, if you find your way….”
“You know anything about mazes?”
“I was in one at Hampton Court once. Hedges. You had to keep turning right on the way in, and left on the way out. But that one had a centre. This one—”
“Those curves.” Bran looked less ill now that he had something to puzzle him. “Think. Think. We went to our right when we started off, and it curved….”
“It curved to the left.”
“And then we came to the crossing, and we took the furthest corridor on the left, and it curved to the left and brought us back to the crossing in a circle.”
Will closed his eyes and tried to visualize the pattern. “So turning left must be wrong. Do we turn right then?”
“Yes, look,” Bran said. His pale face was alight with an idea now. Opening his mouth wide, he breathed a long breath over the mirrored wall of the corridor, and drew with his finger in the patch of mist an upward spiral pattern of a series of loops, rising without touching one another. The curving tops of the loops faced the left. It looked like a drawing of a very loose spring s
tanding on end.
“It has to look like this. See that first loop? That’s the pattern we’ve walked so far. And mazes always repeat themselves, right?”
“So if it goes one loop after another, it’s a spiral,” Will said, watching the mist-drawing gradually fade. “And we wouldn’t have to go round each whole loop, we could just go up that side on the right where each loop crosses itself.”
“By turning right every time. Come on.” Bran slid triumphantly towards the right-hand corridor.
“Wait a minute.” Will breathed at the wall, and drew the spiral again. “We’re facing the wrong way. See? We’ve been all the way round the first loop, so now we’re facing backwards, back the way we first came. And if we turn right now, we shall really be turning left.”
“And just loop the loop again. Sorry, yes. In too much of a hurry, I am.” Bran swung his arms sideways and did a neat jump to turn himself in the other direction. He looked with dislike at the endless reflections of himself that had echoed the jump. “Come on, I hate these mirrors.”
Will looked at him thoughtfully as they followed the curving right-hand corridor. “You really mean that, don’t you? I mean I don’t like them either, they’re creepy. But you—”
“It’s the brightness.” Bran looked round uneasily, and quickened his step. “And more than that. All that reflecting, it does something, it’s like having your mind sucked out of you. Aah!” He shook his head for want of words.
“Here’s the next crossroads. That was a lot quicker.”
“So it should be, if we’ve really got the answer. Turn right again.”
Four times they turned to the right, trooping along with their long, long rows of reflected images keeping endless step.
And then suddenly, curving after the fourth turn, they came face to face with themselves: startled figures staring back out of a blank mirrored wall.
“No!” Will said fiercely, and heard his voice tremble as he saw Bran’s head and shoulders droop in despair.
Bran said quietly, “Dead end.”
“But how could we have gone wrong?”
“Pity knows. But we did. I suppose we have to go back and … start again.” Bran let his knees crumple, and sat down in a heap on the black glass floor.
Will looked at him in the mirror. “I don’t believe it.”
“But there it is.”
“I mean, I don’t believe we have to start again.”
“Oh yes we do.” Bran looked up bleakly at their reflected images: the blue sweater and jeans of the standing figure, the white head and dark glasses of the figure hunched on the floor. “Once this happened to us before, once a long time ago—finding a blank wall stopping us. But that was where your magic as an Old One could help. It can’t here, can it?”
“No,” Will said. “No, not in the Lost Land.”
“Well then.”
“No,” Will said obstinately. He bit at a thumbnail, staring round at the blind mirrored walls that could give back nothing but what they were given to reflect, and that yet, somehow, seemed to hold within them a spacious world of their own. “No. There’s something … there must be something we ought to be remembering….” He looked down at Bran, his eyes not quite seeing him. “Think, What has Gwion said to us in all the time since we first saw him, that seemed to be anything like a message? What has he told us to do?”
“Gwion? He told us to get into the coach….” Bran scrambled to his feet, his pale forehead furrowed, as he thought backwards. “He said he would meet us if we found our way—but that was the very last thing. Before that … there was something he said we should remember, you’re right. What was it? Remember, he said, remember….”
Will stiffened. “Remember. The face of the man in the rainbow, and after that another thing, the writing on the fountain. I think you should perhaps remember….”
Remembering, he stood very straight, stretching out both his arms stiff in front of him, and pointing all ten fingers at the mirrored glass wall that barred their way.
“I am the womb of every holt,” he said, slowly and clearly, in the words that they had read through the muffling grass on the mossy stone of the fountain in the park.
And above their heads on the glass, faintly and gradually, another single line of words began to glow, growing brighter and brighter until their brilliance flashed out dulling any other light around them. They had just time to look at the words and comprehend them: I am the blaze on every hill. And then the light grew for an instant intolerably strong so that they flinched away from it, and with a strange soft sound, like an explosion muffled by many miles’ distance, all the glass walls enclosing them shattered and musically fell.
And they stood free, with the bright words hanging in the darkness before them, and the maze of mirrors gone as if it had never been there.
• The Journey •
The blazing words faded from the air above Will’s head, leaving the imprint of their brightness so that for a few moments the letters still hung ghostly across his vision. Beside him he heard Bran let out a long slow breath of relief.
Gwion’s voice said warmly, from the shadows, “And you did find your way.”
Blinking, Will saw him standing before them, in a high vaulted hall whose white walls were hung with rich tapestries and brilliant paintings. He looked back. There, across the hall, was the great carved door which had slammed behind them when they had first found themselves in the maze. Of the maze itself there was no sign at all.
Bran said, with a quiver still in his voice, “Was it real?” Then he gave a small shaking laugh. “There’s a silly question, now.”
Gwion came forward to them, smiling. “Real is a hard word,” he said. “Almost as hard as true, or now…. Come. Now that you have proved yourselves by breaking the barrier of the City, I may set you on the way to the Castle.”
He pulled back a tapestry curtain on the wall, revealing the entrance to a narrow circular staircase. He beckoned, and in line they went up the stairs: Will followed Gwion’s feet, quiet in their soft leather shoes; the stairs seemed to wind endlessly up and up, in curving sections. On and on they went, for so long a climb that his breath began to rasp and he felt they must be hundreds of feet into the sky.
Then Gwion said, “Hold a moment,” and paused. He took something from his pocket. It was a heavy iron key. In the dim light from one of the narrow opaque windows set into the staircase wall, Will saw that the top of the key was wrought into a decorative pattern: a circle, quartered by a cross. Will stared, motionless. Then he looked up and saw Gwion’s dark eyes glittering enigmatically down at him.
“Ah, Old One,” Gwion said softly. “The Lost Land is full of signs from long ago, but few of its people now remember what the signs mean.”
He opened the small door barring their way, and suddenly sunlight was pouring down on them, washing away the last oppressive memories of the mirrored maze.
Will and Bran came out with their faces up to the blue sky as if they were prisoners emerging from jail. They found themselves behind a balustrade of wrought gold, looking out over the gold and glittering roofs of the City and the mounded green sweep of the park, just as they had done in the very beginning—but from a greater height than before. In a moment or two they saw that the balcony on which they stood was the lower rim of a great curving white and golden roof—and they realized that it was this, the palace of King Gwyddno, the Empty Palace of the Lost Land, which was topped by the marvelous dome, banded in crystal and gold, that they had first seen glittering in the dawn. Craning his neck, Will thought he could just make out the very top where the golden arrow pointed to the western sea.
Gwion came and stood at their backs, pointing in the same direction. Will noticed a ring on his fourth finger, with a dark stone carved into the shape of a leaping fish.
Out along the line of his arm, they saw the roofs of the City end, giving way to a green-gold patchwork of fields stretching into a haze of heat. Far, far away in the distance through
the haze Will thought he could see dark trees, with behind them the purple sweep of mountains and the long glimmer of the sea, but he could not be sure. Only one thing out there seemed distinct: a glowing pencil of light rising out of the hazy green blur where the Lost Land seemed to meet the sea.
“Look at that,” Bran said. For a moment his hand hovered in the air beside Gwion’s, its fingers looking milky-pale and very young beside the lean brown hand with its dark ring. “That, there—we saw it from the mountain, Will, remember? Above Cwm Maethlon.” He glanced ruefully at Will. “Another world, isn’t it? D’you know, I had completely forgotten them? D’you think they are all right?”
“I think so,” Will said slowly. He was staring out still at the hazed horizon, but not seeing it: lost in a concern that had been flickering through his mind since first they came to the Lost Land. “I wish I knew. And I wish I knew where Merriman is. I can’t … reach him, Bran. I can’t reach him, I can’t hear him. Even though I think he meant to be with us, here.”
“So he did, Old One,” Gwion said unexpectedly. “But the enchantment of the Lost Land keeps him away, if he has missed the only moment for breaking it.”
Will turned sharply to him, a deep instinct stirring. “You know him, don’t you? Some time a long way back, you have been close to Merriman.”
“Very close,” Gwion said, with an ache of affection deep in the words. “And one thing I am permitted to say to you, now that you have spoken of him to me. He should have been here to join you, in this palace. But I am beginning to fear that in some way the Dark has held him back, in that other world of yours. And if now he has lost the moment for entering the Lost Land, he cannot now come.”
Will said, “Not at all?”
“No,” Gwion said.
Will suddenly realised how much he had been hoping for Merriman’s strong presence to be there, soon, soon, as a support. He swallowed down panic, and looked at Bran.
“Then we have nothing but what the Lady said. That we shall find the crystal sword in the glass tower, among the seven trees, where the—the horn will stop the wheel.”
