Silver on the Tree

by Susan Cooper

  Will groaned in disappointment. “Salt?”

  “No,” Bran said expressionless. “It’s perfectly good.” He dodged Will’s grinning lunge and they both stretched out on the grassy riverbank and drank thirstily, splashing their hot faces until their hair was wet and dripping. In a gentle patch of water on the lee side of a rock Will caught sight of Bran’s reflection, and was held by it. Only the glint of the tawny eyes was properly like Bran, for the reflected face was darkened by shade and the wet hair seemed streaked dark and light. Yet somehow Will felt a strange flash of recognition of the whole changed image. He said sharply, “I’ve seen you look like that before, somewhere.”

  “Of course you’ve seen me before,” Bran said lazily. He put down his head and blew bubbles into the water, breaking the reflection. The water rippled into a hundred different surfaces, glinting, whirling; there seemed all at once a great deal of white in the pattern. Some small warning note rang in Will’s mind. He rolled over, and saw against the sky, standing over them, the hooded White Rider on his white horse.

  Bran brought his head out of the water, spluttering, pulling a green strand of weed from his mouth. He rubbed the water from his eyes, looked up—and was suddenly very still.

  The White Rider looked down at Will with bright eyes set in a dim white face shadowed by the hood. “Where is your master, Old One?” The voice was soft and sibilant and puzzlingly familiar, though they knew they had not heard it before.

  Will said shortly, “He is not here. As you know.”

  The White Rider’s smile glinted. “And he told you no doubt that something had prevented him from coming, and you were simple enough to believe him. The lord Merriman is more shrewd than you, Old One. He knows the danger that is here, and takes care not to be exposed to it.”

  Will lay back deliberately on his elbows. “And you are more than simple, if you think to afflict me with such talk. The Dark must be in a sad way, to use the tricks of idiots.”

  The White Rider’s back straightened; he seemed indefinably more dangerous than before. “Go back,” said the soft hissing voice coldly. “Go back, while you still can.”

  “You cannot make us go,” Will said.

  “No,” said the White Rider. “But we can make you wish you had never come. Especially …” his gleaming eyes flickered towards Bran … especially the white-haired boy.”

  Will said softly, “You know who he is, Rider. He has a right to a name.”

  “He is not yet in his power,” the White Rider said, “and until then he is nothing. And therefore he will be nothing forever, no more than a child of your century, for without your master you have no hope of gaining the sword. Go back, Old One, go back!” The soft voice rose to a nasal, ringing demand, and the white horse shifted uneasily. “Go back,” the Rider said, “and we will give you safe passage out of the Lost Land to your own time.”

  The horse shifted again. Exclaiming in irritation, the White Rider gave rein and wheeled it round in a wide circle to calm its restlessness.

  “Look!” Bran whispered. He was staring at the ground.

  Will looked down. Under the high fierce sun, his shadow and Bran’s lay short and stumpy together on the uneven grass; but as the White Rider and his horse curved back towards them, the grass beneath the four hooves lay bright and unshaded.

  “Ah yes,” Will said softly. “The Dark casts no shadow.”

  The White Rider said, clear and confident, “You will go back.”

  Will stood up. “We will not go back, Rider. We have come for the sword.”

  “The sword is neither for us nor for you. We shall let you go, in safety, and the sword will stay with its maker.”

  “Its maker made it for the Light,” Will said, “and when we come for it, he will give it to us. And we shall then indeed go away in safety, my lord, whether the Dark allows it or not.”

  The lord in the white cloak looked down at him, his womanish mouth relaxed into a strange, unnerving sneer of relief. “If that is what you expect from the Land,” he said, “then you are such fools that we have nothing to fear from you.”

  And without another word, he turned his horse’s head and trotted away beside the curving river, out of sight behind the trees.

  There was a silence. The water murmured.

  Bran scrambled to his feet, looking uneasily after the Rider. “What did he mean?”

  “I don’t know. But I didn’t like it.” Will shivered suddenly. “The Dark is all around us. Can you feel it?”

  “A little,” Bran said. “Not really, not the way you do. I feel just … this is a sad place.”

  “Home of a sad king.” Will looked around. “Should we follow the river?”

  “Looks like it.” They could see the dome and the golden pointing arrow of the Castle reaching up out of the trees, past the curve round which the river disappeared.

  The riverbank was grassy; there was no path, but no trees or bushes grew out to impede their way. The river itself remained narrow, perhaps twenty feet across, but its bed between the coarse grass of the banks grew broader and broader, a shining expanse of sand. It was clear golden sand now, without the murkiness of mud.

  “Tide’s low,” Bran said, seeing Will look at it. “Like the Dyfi. That sand’ll be covered when the tide starts coming in, and the river will grow twice its size. It’s beginning to, already. Look.”

  He pointed; Will saw the water eddying in the river, as the direction of its flow began to change. The main stream in the centre still flowed out to the sea, but at either side the tidal flow from the sea came creeping in.

  “Couldn’t drink from it now,” Bran said. “Too salt.”

  The river broadened as they walked further, and the incoming tide grew more powerful; on the further bank the trees were smaller and more sparse. They had an occasional glimpse of the broad estuary beyond the scrub and pasture, and the mountains rising far back. Then all at once they saw a square brown sail, and foaming towards them on the tidal current came a boat. Its sail bellied out at right angles to the mast between two sturdy wooden yards; almost at once these clattered to the deck, and the sail came down.

  The boat swung towards the bank beside them. Will peered in astonishment at the figure furling the sail.

  “It’s Gwion!”

  Gwion, lean and black-clad, leapt up nimbly into the bow with a line, and jumped ashore as the boat nudged the bank. He glanced at Will and Bran, his familiar smile breaking above the neat grey beard; then called something in Welsh over his shoulder to the boat. A chunky man with black hair and a red-brown face stood there at the long tiller behind the single stubby mast; it was a broad-beamed boat, not unlike a ship’s lifeboat. The man called back to Gwion. Will looked enquiringly at Bran.

  “About mooring the boat,” Bran said. “And catching the tide, though I—tafla ’r rhaff yna i mi,” he said suddenly to Gwion, reaching for a second line thrown from the boat, and together they moored her fore and aft to a pair of trees, swaying in the river as the tide washed by.

  “Well done to be here safe,” Gwion said, a hand pressing each on the shoulder. “Now then, come on.” He set off at once along the riverbank, at a smart pace.

  Will followed; he felt as though a great knot of tension had been loosed between his shoulder blades.

  “Explain, explain,” said Bran, lengthening his stride to keep up. “How did you get here? Why the boat? How did you know where to find us, and when?”

  Gwion smiled at him. “When you are in your full power, Bran Davies of Clwyd, you will be confident as Will here and not bother to ask such questions. I am simply here, because you will need me. And thus I break the law of the Lost Land, which is to have no dealing with either Light or Dark when they are in conflict. As I shall go on breaking that law, I have no doubt, until the tail-end of Time. Gently, now….” His voice dropped and he slowed his pace, stretching both arms sideways to hold them back.

  They had come to an end of the scattering of wind-curved oak and pine that fr
inged this edge of the river. Before them now was the Castle of the Lost Land, a shining tower rising over a circle of tall trees.

  Gwion was suddenly sober; he dropped his arms, and stood for a moment as if he had forgotten Will, Bran, himself and everything except the sight of the lonely glittering tower there before him.

  “Caer Wydyr,” he said softly, almost whispering. “As beautiful as it has always been. And my great grieving king shut away inside never seeing its beauty. With indeed no one at all, in all the Lost Land, able to see its beauty except the Lords of the Dark.”

  Will looked all around, restlessly. “And they are everywhere, and yet not to be seen.”

  “Everywhere,” Gwion said. “Among the guardian trees. But they cannot harm the trees, just as they cannot touch the king or his castle.”

  The great trees grew round the tower in an irregular circle, lapping it with their leaves and branches; it rose from them like an island from a green sea.

  “Seven trees, the Lady said.” Bran turned to Will. “Seven trees. Just as the seven Sleepers woke over Llyn Mwyngil, once before our eyes, to ride away into tomorrow.” The tawny eyes were glittering in his pale face; he stared all around, unafraid, as if in challenge, caught up for a moment in a feverish confidence Will had not seen before.

  Will said slowly, “But there were six Sleepers.”

  “Seven there will be,” Bran said, “seven at the end. And not then Sleepers by name, but Riders, like the Lords of the Dark.”

  “Here is the first tree,” Gwion said. His voice was without expression, but Will felt he was deliberately turning the talk aside. Facing them, close to the river, was a crowded clump of slender trunks, green-barked, with broad round dancing leaves.

  “Y gwernen,” Bran said. “Alder. Growing with its feet wet, the way it does in our valley too, with John Rowlands cursing it up and down for a weed.”

  Gwion broke three small twigs from an alder branch, taking each at the joint where it would not bend or fray. “A weed-wood sometimes perhaps, but a wood that will neither split nor decay. The tree of fire, is alder. There is in it the power of fire to free the earth from water. And that we may need. Here.” He gave each of them a twig and went on, towards the broad sweeping canopy, slender-branched, long-leafed, of a willow tree. Again he broke off three sprays and held out two.

  “Willow, the enchanter’s tree,” Will said, his mind flickering a long way back to a certain ancient book shown him by Merriman when he was learning how to use the gifts of an Old One. “Strong as a young lion, pliant as a loving woman, and bitter to the taste, as all enchantment in the end must be.” He smiled wrily at Gwion. “They taught me my trees once, a while ago.”

  Gwion said quietly, “So they did indeed. Tell me the next.”

  “Birch,” said Will. A great knotted white tree rose before them, hard catkins dancing from its long thin brown twigs. Beneath the fluttering green leaves it was an old, old tree, with white-spotted scarlet toadstools growing between its roots and the long self-healed split of an ancient wound bringing the first signs of decay to its trunk.

  Bran said in unthinking surprise, “I never saw a birch tree out here before.” Then he looked at Will and grinned, mocking himself. “No—nor a great glass tower either, nor a may-tree growing from a roof.”

  “You say nothing foolish,” said Gwion mildly, giving them twigs from the birch tree. “In this my time it is warmer and drier here in Wales than in yours, and we have forests of alder and birch and pine trees, where you have only oaks and the foreign trees that will be brought in by new men. And those”—he paused for an instant—“not in quite the same place as these trees of my day.”

  A kind of terror caught at Will’s mind for a moment as he realized what Gwion must mean; but the Welshman drew them swiftly on, past the big birch tree, and suddenly the glass tower, Caer Wydyr, was facing them, visible for the first time from bottom to top, and they saw that it rose not from the ground, from the golden sand and green bank of the estuary, but from a great jagged rock. The stone was unfamiliar; it was neither the spangled grey of granite nor the grey-blue of slate, but a deep blue-black, studded here and there with bright slabs of white quartz. And they saw now that the sides of the tower itself were built too of a glassy rocklike quartz, white, translucent, with a strange milky glow. Slits of windows were set into the circling walls, here and there, and the surface was totally smooth.

  “Is there no door?” Bran said.

  Gwion gave no answer, but led them over the long coarse grass towards two other full, massive trees. The first was not tall, but broad and spreading, with the blunt rounded leaves and budding feathery nuts of half the hedges of England and Wales.

  “Hazel for healing,” Gwion said, taking three twigs.

  “And for feeding starving travellers,” said Bran.

  Gwion laughed. “Were they good, then?”

  “Marvellous. And the apples too.”

  Will said, remembering, “Apple is another of the trees.”

  “But first, holly.” Gwion turned to a forbidding dark mound of a tree with a smooth grey trunk, its glossy dark green leaves sharp-spined on the lower branches and mild ovals above. He picked only the twigs with prickled leaves, and again handed them one each.

  “And from the apple,” he said, smiling, “you may take fruit as well. But I must be the one to pluck the twigs, from every tree.”

  “Why?” Bran said, as they went on through the grass.

  “Because otherwise,” Gwion said simply, “the tree would cry out, and the law would come into force, by which neither Light nor Dark may make any move for their own ends within the Lost Land.” He paused for a moment, looking at them intently, fingering the neat dappled grey beard. His voice was grave. “Make no mistake now, the Lost Land is not a gentle place. There is a hardness here, and an indifference to all emotions other than those belonging to the Land, that is another face of the beauty of the rose garden, and the skill of the craftsmen, the makers. Do not underestimate that.”

  Bran said, “But only the Dark really stands in our way.”

  Gwion tilted his chin in a curious arrogant motion, yet with lines of pain clear about the mouth. He said quietly, “Where do you think the Mari Llwyd was called from, to drive you out of your wits almost, Bran Davies? Who do you think devised the mirrored maze? What is it that faces you now in the untasted despair of the task that is almost impossible, the task of reaching the Lost King and his crystal sword? Do you think the Dark has much to do with all this? Oh no. Here the Dark is next to helpless, compared to the powers that belong to this place. It is the Lost Land that you pit yourself against here, with all to win or all to lose.”

  “And that is the Wild Magic,” Will said slowly. “Or something very close.”

  “A form of it,” Gwion said. “And more besides.”

  Bran was standing uncertain, blinking at him. “And you are part of it?”

  “Ah,” Gwion said reflectively. “I am a renegade part, going my own way. And although I love my own land most deeply, no good will come to me here.” He turned his broad smile on Bran suddenly like a beam of warmth, nodding ahead. “Look there—go on, help yourself.”

  An ancient, sprawling apple tree curved to the ground before them like a bent-backed ancient man; it was the only tree that grew low and spreading, and did not tower above their heads. Small yellow apples, and others smaller yet but bright green, studded its dark branches among the sparse leaves. Bran stared. “Last year’s apples as well as this year’s?” He pulled off a yellow apple and bit into its juicy hardness.

  Gwion chuckled. “Two years they hang there sometimes. This is a pippin from a long time before your own, remember. There are many things in your own day that were not dreamed of, except by Old Ones, in this age when the Land was lost. But equally there were once other remarkable things that have vanished forever, lost with the Land.”

  Will said gently, “Forever?” He picked a yellow apple and held it up, his eyes smiling at
Gwion.

  Gwion looked back at him with a strange faraway look on his strong bearded face. “For ever and ever, we say when we are young, or in our prayers. Twice, we say it, Old One, do we not? For ever and ever … so that a thing may be for ever, a life or a love or a quest, and yet begin again, and be for ever just as before. And any ending that may seem to come is not truly an ending, but an illusion. For Time does not die. Time has neither beginning nor end, and so nothing can end or die that has once had a place in Time.”

  Bran stood turning his pale face from one to the other of them, chewing his apple, saying nothing.

  Will said, “And here we stand in a time long gone, that has not yet come. Here.”

  Bran said suddenly, unexpectedly, “I have been here before.”

  “Yes,” Gwion said. “You were born here. Among many trees like this one.”

  Will glanced up quickly, but the white-haired boy said nothing more. Nor did Gwion, but moved forward and broke three blackish gnarled twigs from the old apple tree.

  A voice came from behind their backs instead: a soft voice, with an unidentifiable accent to it. “And the boy who was born here may well find himself staying here—for ever and ever.” A malicious mockery sharpened the tone, flicking like a whip. “And that is a very long time, my friends, however metaphysical we may become about its meaning.”

  Will turned slowly, deliberately, to face the tall dark-cloaked figure seated on the great black stallion. The Black Rider had put back his hood; the sunlight glinted on his thick chestnut hair, with its reddish glitter like the fur of a fox, and his bright eyes blazed like blue coals. Behind him, further away, other mounted figures stood silently waiting, riders all in black or all in white, one beside every tree and others scattered further back than Will could plainly see.

  “There are no more warnings now, Old One,” the Black Rider said. “Now it will be a matter of simple challenge, and threat. And of promise.”

  Gwion said, his voice strong and deep, “Dark promises have no force in this land, my Lord.”

  The Black Rider glanced down at him as he might have glanced at a dog, or a toddling child. He said contemptuously, “It is wiser to fear the word of a Lord of the Dark than to heed that of a minstrel to a lost king.”