Silver on the Tree (12 page)

“Such a funny name, the Bearded Lake,” Jane said. The words were aimed at Bran, though she walked without looking at him; Will felt a pang of compassion for her groping unspoken apology. “Bearded. Not exactly romantic.”

“I'll show you why in a minute,” Bran said without rancour. “Watch where you tread, now, there's boggy patches.” He strode ahead of them all, dodging tussocks of reedy grass that marked wet ground. And then Will looked up, and suddenly there ahead of him through the driving rain he could see the far side of the Happy Valley again, misted and grey.

But this time, on this side, on their own steep edge over-hanging the valley, there lay a lake.

It was a strange small reed-edged lake, little larger than a pond; its dark surface seemed curiously patched and patterned. Then Will saw that its open surface was rippled by the wind, but that only a small part of it was open, a triangle at the closest end of the lake. All the rest of its surface, from the end at the edge of the valley to a trailing V-shape in the centre, was covered with the leaves and stems and creamy white bloom of waterlilies. And from a singing in his ears like the sudden rise of waves on a loud sea, he knew too that somewhere up here, after all, was the place to which they were intended to come. Something waited for them here, somewhere up on this rolling rock-strewn mountain top, between the Happy Valley and the estuary of the Dyfi River.

Through a mist that was not the rain in the air but a blurring inside his mind, he saw with a vague distant surprise that this feeling did not seem to have come to Bran. The white-haired boy stood on the path with Simon and Jane, one hand raised over his eyes against the wind and rain, the other pointing.

“The Bearded Lake—see, it's the weed on the water that gives it the name. Some years when there is not much rain it gets much smaller, and the weed is left all around it like a beard. John Rowlands says perhaps the name is not from that, perhaps long ago there was much more water in the lake and it would spill out over the edge of the mountain and down into the valley in a waterfall. That could be, too. But a long time ago indeed, the way it looks now.”

The little lake lay dark and silent under the shifting grey sky. They could hear the wind whining over the hills, and rustling through their clothes. Down in the valley, far away, a curlew gave its sad ghostly call. Then closer by, somewhere, they heard a muffled shout.

Barney turned his head. “What's that?”

Bran looked across the lake at the slope that seemed to be the highest part of the mountain on which they stood. He sighed. “Visitors. Shouting for the echo. Come and see.”

Will lagged behind as they balanced their way one after the other along the muddy, rock-strewn path edging the lake.

He gazed out once more across the water, and its white-starred green carpet of weed, to the far shore where the land fell abruptly away into the valley. The rain blew back into his eyes, the mist whirled over the hills. But nothing came into his consciousness; nothing spoke to him. There was only the strong sense pulsing through his mind that they were in the presence of the High Magic, in some form he did not understand.

So then Will followed the others, along the path and round the next high slope. He found them standing on a bluff overlooking a flat hollow in the hills perhaps fifty yards square, a space much like the one occupied by the Bearded Lake, but here holding only the bright patches of coarse reedy grass that warned of marsh. A man and woman wearing startling orange anoraks stood lower down the slope, with three children of assorted sizes roaming about them shouting across the flat green hollow. A steep cliff-like rock on the opposite side threw an echo back.

“Hey! …
Hey….”

“Ooooo! …
Ooooo….”

“Baa baa black sheep! …
black sheep … sheep….”

“Hey fat face! …
face … face….”

Jane said, “If you listen carefully it's really a double echo, the second very faint.”

“Fat face!” shouted the most raucous of the children again, delighted with himself.

Barney said in a clear precise voice, “Funny how people can never think of anything intelligent to shout to make an echo.”

“It's like never knowing what to say to find out if a microphone's working,” Will said. “Testing testing, one two three.”

“The English master at school has a very rude rhyme he uses for that,” Simon said.

“You can't shout rude rhymes for an echo,” Barney said
coldly. “Echoes are special. People ought to … to sing to them.”

“Sing!” said Jane. The small children were still screeching at the mountain; she looked at them with distaste.

“Well, why not? Or do some Shakespeare. Simon was Prospero last term—why not a bit of that?”

“Were you really?” Bran looked at Simon with new interest.

“Only because I was the tallest,” Simon said depreciatingly. “And had the right kind of voice.”

“Fat face!” shouted all the awful children together.

“Oh really!” said Jane, losing patience. “What's the matter with their stupid parents?” She swung round irritably, and walked a little way back down the slope. The wind seemed less gusty here, and the rain had calmed to a fine mist. Underbrush scratched at her ankles; the slope was thick with heather and low-growing bilberry bushes, studded here and there with tiny blue-black berries among the leaves.

The others' voices receded as she wandered away. She thrust her hands deep into her pockets and hunched her shoulders as if to shake something from her back.
Black dog on my shoulder,
she thought wryly: it was the family term for a brief bad mood, generally her own these days. Yet somehow this time, Jane felt, there was more than a mood invading her mind; this was a strangeness she could not define, had never known before. A restlessness, a half-fearful anticipation of something part of her seemed to understand and part not…. Jane sighed. It was like being two people at once: living with someone without having the least idea what the other would do or feel next.

A flash of orange caught her eye through a gap in the hilly skyline; the noisy family was leaving, the mother dragging one rebellious child crossly by the arm. They disappeared behind the slope, heading for the path. But Jane did not go back to the others; she wandered aimlessly still on her own, through the heather and the wet grass, until suddenly the
wind was cold on her face again and she found she was back at the Bearded Lake. From behind, she heard a faint laugh and a call from Barney, and then the same call again: a summons for the echo. She stood looking bleakly out over the dark weed-shrouded water, at the distant valley beyond. The wind sang in her ears. The cloud of the heavy grey sky was so low now that it blew ragged over the hilltop in white tails and tatters of mist, whirling down to the lake, curling, blowing away into the valley. The whole world seemed grey, as if all colour had drained from the summer grass.

In an eddy of the wind that brought a sudden stillness after it, Jane heard Simon's voice faintly behind her, a sudden snatch of sound. “…
thou earth, thou! Speak! …”
And very faintly indeed, perhaps only in imagining, she heard the echo: “…
speak … speak….”

Then some words came in another voice, clear and strange and she knew that it was Bran calling in Welsh; and again the echo came faintly back, bringing the words to her again familiar even while meaningless.

The wind flurried, the mist blew in a ragged shroud over the far side of the lake, hiding the Happy Valley. And on the echo of Bran's call, as if following a cue, a third voice came singing, singing so high and sweet and unearthly that Jane stood without breathing, caught out of movement, feeling every stilled muscle and yet as totally transported as if she had no body at all. She knew it was Will; she could not remember if she had ever heard him sing before; she could not even think, or do anything but hear. The voice soared up on the wind, from behind the hill, distant but clear, in a strange lovely line of melody, and with it and behind it very faint in a following descant came the echo of the song, a ghostly second voice twining with the first.

It was as if the mountains were singing.

And as Jane gazed unseeing at the clouds blowing low over the lake, someone came.

Somewhere in the shifting greyness, a patch of colour began faintly to glow, red and pink and blue merging into one another too fast for the eye to follow. Glimmering soft and warm on the cold mountain, it held Jane's gaze as hypnotically as a flame; then gradually it began to focus itself, and Jane blinked in disbelief as she realized that a form was taking shape around it. Not definite clear shape, but a suggestion, a hint of what might be seen with the right eyes….

The brightness grew more intense until suddenly it was all contained in a glowing rose-coloured stone set into a ring, and the ring on the finger of a slender figure standing before her, leaning a little as if resting on a stick. There was at first such brightness around the figure that Jane could not look directly at it; instead her eyes flickered down to the ground on which it stood, only to realize with a shock that no ground was there. The figure was floating before her, an isolate fragment of whatever world lay there behind the greyness. It was the delicate form of an old lady, she saw now, wearing a long light-coloured robe; the face was fineboned, kindly yet arrogant, with clear blue eyes that shone strangely young in the old, old cobweb-lined face.

Jane had forgotten the others, forgotten the mountain and the rain, forgotten everything but the face that watched her and now, gently, smiled. But still the old lady did not speak.

Jane said huskily, “You are the Lady. Will's Lady.”

The Lady inclined her head, a slow graceful nod. “And since you can see that much, I may speak to you, Jane Drew. It was intended, from the beginning, that you should carry the last message.”

“Message?” Jane's voice came out in a whisper.

“Some things there are that may be communicated only between like and like,” the sweet soft voice said from the mist. “It is the pattern of a child's game of dominoes. For you and I are much the same, Jane, Jana, Juno, Jane, in
clear ways that separate us from all others concerned in this quest. And you and Will are alike in your youth and your vigour, neither of which I share.”

The voice grew fainter, as if with a great weariness; then rallied, and the light glowed more brightly from the rose-coloured ring on the Lady's hand. She drew herself upright, and her robe shone clear white now, bright as a moon over the grey lake.

“Jane,” she said.

“Madam?” Jane said at once, and without any self-consciousness she bowed her head and dipped one knee almost to kneeling, oblivious of her jeans and anorak, as if she were dropping a deep curtsey of respect, out of another age.

The Lady said clearly, “You must tell him that they must go to the Lost Land, in the moment when it shall show itself between the land and the sea. And a white bone will prevent them, and a flying may-tree will save them, and only the horn can stop the wheel. And in the glass tower among the seven trees, they will find the crystal sword of the Light.”

Her voice wavered, ending in a gasp, as if clutching for some last strength.

Jane said, struggling to hold the words, struggling to hold her image of the Lady, “In the glass tower among the seven trees. And—a white bone will prevent them, and a flying may-tree save them. And only the—the horn will stop the wheel.”

“Remember,” the Lady said. Her white form was beginning to fade, and the glow dying in the rose of the ring. The voice grew softer, softer. “Remember, my daughter. And be brave, Jane. Be brave … brave….”

The sound died, the wind whirled; Jane stared desperately out into the grey mist, searching to see the clear blue eyes in the old, lined face as if only they could fix the words in her memory. But she was alone among the dark hills and the lake with the low clouds blowing, and in her ears only the wind and the last imagined thread of a dying voice. And, now, as if it had never left her consciousness from the first
instant, there came instead the clear high echo-twined melody of Will's voice, that had seemed to her like the mountains singing.

Suddenly the singing broke off. Will's voice flung through the air in a hoarse, urgent shout. “Jane! Jane!” The echo followed it “…
Jane! … Jane! …”
like a whispered warning. In quick instinct Jane swung round towards the voice, but saw only the green slope of the hill.

Then she looked back at the lake, and found that in the brief moment of her turning, such horror had arisen before her that panic engulfed her like ice-cold water. She tried to scream, and brought out only a strangled croak.

Out of the dark water an immense neck rose, swaying before her, dripping, tipped by a small pointed head, open-mouthed, black-toothed. Two horn-like antennae moved sluggishly to and fro on the head, like the horns of a snail; a fringe like a mane began between them and ran down the whole length of the neck, bent to one side by the water that hung from it, dripping slimily into the lake. The neck rose higher and higher, huge, endless. Gazing in motionless terror Jane saw that it was everywhere a dark green, shot with a strange dull iridescence, except on the underside that faced her, a dead silvery-white like the belly of a fish. High over her head the creature towered and swayed, menacing; the air was filled with a stench of weed and marsh-gas and decaying things.

Jane's arms and legs would not move. She stood, staring. The great serpent lunged to and fro towards her, nearer, nearer, blindly searching. Its mouth hung open. Slime dripped from the black jaws. It swung close to her, reeking, dreadful, and seemed to sense her; the head drew back to strike.

Jane screamed, and closed her eyes.

In the Hollow beside the echo rock, all other sound had seemed to die away when Will began to sing. The loud wind dropped, and Simon, Bran and Barney stood motionless, astonished, listening. The music fell through the air like sunlight; a strange, haunting melody, like nothing they had ever heard before. Will sang, standing there unselfconscious and relaxed, with his hands in his pockets, his high clear choirboy' voice singing words of a tongue none of them could recognize. They knew that this was the music of the Old Ones, shot through with an enchantment that was more than melody. The clear voice soared through the mountains, entwining with its echoes, and listening they stood rapt, caught up out of time.