Silver on the Tree (2 page)

… and all at once, the swan was real, solid, opaque, and Will was no longer looking out of his own time into another. The travellers were gone, out of sight in that other summer day thousands of years before. Will shut his eyes, desperately trying to hold some image of them before it faded from his memory. He remembered a pot glinting with the dull sheen of bronze; a cluster of arrows tipped with sharp black flakes of flint; he remembered the dark skin and eyes of the woman in white, and the bright luminous blue of the string of beads about her neck. Most of all he remembered the sense of fear.

He stood up in the long grass, holding his book; he could feel his legs trembling. Unseen in a tree over his head, a songthrush poured out its trilling twice-over song. Will walked shakily towards the river; James's voice hailed him.

“Will! Over here! Come and see!”

He veered blindly towards the sound. Stephen the purist fisherman stood casting delicately out into the river, his line whispering through the air. James was threading a worm on his hook. He put it down, and triumphantly held up a cluster of three small perch tied through the gills.

“Goodness,” Will said. “That's quick!”

Before he could regret the word, James was raising an eyebrow. “Not specially. You been asleep? Come on, get your rod.”

“No,” said Will, to both question and command. Stephen, glancing round at him, suddenly let his line go slack. He looked hard at Will, frowning.

“Will? Are you all right? You look—”

“I do feel a bit funny,” Will said.

“Sun, I bet. Beating down on the back of your neck, while you were sitting there reading that book.”

“Probably.”

“Even in England it can get pretty fierce, matey. Flaming June. And Midsummer's Eve, at that … go and lie down in the shade for a while. And drink the rest of that lemonade.”

“All of it?” said James indignantly. “What about us?”

Stephen aimed a kick at him. “You catch ten more perch and I'll buy you a drink on the way home. Go on, Will. Under the trees.”

“All right,” said Will.

“I told you that book was daft,” James said.

Will crossed the field again and sat down on the cool grass beneath the sycamore trees, beside the remains of their picnic tea. Sipping lemonade slowly from a plastic cup, he looked uneasily out at the river—but all was normal. The swans had gone. Midges danced in the air; the world was hazy with heat. His head ached; he put aside the cup and lay on his back in the grass, looking up. Leaves danced above him; the branches breathed and swayed, to and fro, to and fro, shifting green patterns against the blue sky. Will pressed his palms to his eyes, remembering the faint hurrying forms that had flickered up to him out of the past; remembering the fear….

Even afterwards, he could never tell whether he fell asleep. The sighing of the breeze seemed to grow louder, more fierce; all at once he could see different trees above him, beech trees, their heart-shaped leaves dancing agitated in a wilder swirl than sycamore or oak. And this now was not a hedge-line of trees stretching unbroken to the river, but a copse; the river was gone, the sound and smell of it, and on either side of him Will could see the open sky. He sat up.

He was high over the wooded valley of the Thames on a curving grassy slope; the cluster of beech trees around him
marked the top of the hill like a cap. Golden vetch grew in the short springy grass at his side; from one of the curled flowers a small blue butterfly fluttered to his hand and away again. There was no more heavy hum of insects in valley fields; instead, high over his head through the stirring of the wind, a skylark's song poured bubbling into the air.

And then, somewhere, Will heard voices. He turned his head. A string of people came hurrying up the hill, each darting from one tree or bush to the next, avoiding the open slope. The first two or three had just reached a curious deep hole sunk into the hill, so closely overgrown by brush that he would not have noticed it if they had not been there, tugging branches aside. They were laden with bundles wrapped in rough dark cloth—but so hastily wrapped that Will could see the contents jutting through. He blinked: there were gold cups, plates, chalices, a great gold cross crusted with jewels, tall candlesticks of gold and silver, robes and cloths of glimmering silk woven with gold and gems; the array of treasure seemed endless. The figures bound each bundle with rope, and lowered one after another into the hole. Will saw a man in the robes of a monk, who seemed to be supervising them: directing, explaining, always keeping a nervous watch out over the surrounding land.

A trio of small boys came hurrying up to the top of the hill, despatched by the pointing arm of the priest. Will stood up slowly. But the boys trotted past him without even a glance, ignoring him so completely that he knew he was in this past time only an observer, invisible, not able even to be sensed.

The boys paused on the edge of the copse, and stood looking out keenly across the valley; they had clearly been sent to keep watch from there. Looking at them huddled nervously together, Will let his mind dwell on hearing them, and in a moment the voices were echoing in his head.

“No one coming this way.”

“Not yet.”

“Two hours maybe, the runner said. I heard him talking to my father, he said there's hundreds of them, terrible, rampaging along the Old Way. They've burned London, he said, you could see the black smoke rising in great clouds—”

“They cut off your ears if they catch you. The boys. The men they slit right open, and they do even worse things to the women and girls—”

“My father knew they'd come. He said. There was blood instead of rain fell in the east last month, he said, and men saw dragons flying in the sky.”

“There's always signs like that, before the heathen devils come.”

“What's the use of burying the treasures? Nobody'll ever come back to get them. Nobody ever comes back when the devils drive them out.”

“Maybe this time.”

“Where are we going?”

“Who knows? To the west—”

Urgent voices called the boys back; they ran. The hiding of bundles in the hole was finished, and some of the figures already scurrying down the hill. Will watched fascinated while the last men heaved over the top of the hole a great flat flint boulder, the largest he had ever seen. They fitted it neatly inside the opening like a kind of lid, then unrolled over the top a section of grassy sod. Branches growing from surrounding bushes were tugged across the top. In a moment there was no sign of any hiding place, no scar on the hillside to show that the hasty work had ever taken place. Crying out in alarm, one of the men pointed across the valley; beyond the next hill a thick column of smoke was rising. At once, in panic, all the group fled down the grass-skinned chalk slope, slipping and leaping, the monkish figure as hasty and helter-skelter as the rest.

And Will was swept by a wave of fear so intense that it turned his stomach. For a moment he knew, as vividly as these fugitives, the animal terror of cruel violent death: of pain, of hurting, of hate. Or of something worse than hate: a
dreadful remote blankness, that took joy only from destruction and tormenting and others' fear. Some terrible threat was advancing, on these people just as on those others, shadowy forms he had seen in a different, distant past a little while before. Over there in the east, the threat was once more rising, roaring down.

“It's coming,” Will said aloud, staring at the column of smoke, trying not to envision what might happen when its makers came over the brow of the hill.
“It's coming—”

James' voice said, full of a curious excitement, “No it isn't, it's not moving at all. Are you awake?
Look!”

Stephen said, “What an extraordinary thing!”

Their voices were above Will's head; he was lying on his back in cool grass. It was a moment before he could recollect himself, and stop shaking. He heaved himself up on to his elbows, and saw Stephen and James standing a few paces away, their hands full of rods and fish and bait pails. They were staring at something in a kind of wary fascination. Will craned his head round to the hot humming meadow, to see what held them. And he gasped, as his mind was half torn apart by a great wave of that same blind terror that had swamped him a moment before, a world and ten centuries and yet no more than a breath away.

Ten yards off in the grass, a small black animal was standing motionless, facing him: a lithe, lean animal perhaps a foot and a half long, with a long tail and sinuous, curving back. It was like a stoat or a weasel and yet it was neither. Its sleek fur was pitch black from nose to tail; its unwinking black eyes were fixed unmistakably on Will. And from it he felt a pulsing ferocity of viciousness and evil so strong that his mind rebelled against believing it could exist.

James made a sudden quick hissing sound.

The black creature did not move. Still it stared at Will. Will sat staring back, caught up in the unreasoning shout of terror that twanged on through his brain. Out of the corner
of his eye he was aware of Stephen's tall form standing at his side, very still.

James said softly, “I know what it is. It's a mink. They've just started turning up round here—I saw it in the paper. Like weasels, only nastier, it said. Look at those eyes—”

Impulsively breaking the tension, he yelled wordlessly at the creature and slashed at the grass with his fishing rod. Swiftly, but without panic, the black mink turned and slid away through the field towards the river, its long back undulating with a strange unpleasant gliding movement like a large snake. James bounded after it, still clasping his rod.

“Be careful!” Stephen called sharply.

James shouted, “I won't touch it. Got my rod….” He disappeared along the riverbank, past a clump of stubby willow.

“I don't like this,” Stephen said.

“No,” Will said. He shivered, looking at the place in the field where the animal had stood, staring at him with its intent black eyes. “Creepy.”

“I don't mean just the mink, if that's what it was.” There was an unfamiliar note in Stephen's voice that made Will abruptly turn his head. He moved to get to his feet, but his tall brother squatted down beside him, arms resting on knees, hands fiddling with the wire leader on a piece of fishing-line.

Stephen wound the line round his finger and back again, round and back again.

“Will,” he said in this strange taut voice. “I've got to talk to you. Now, while James is off chasing that thing. I've been trying to get you alone ever since I came home—I hoped today, only Jamie wanted to fish—”

He floundered, stumbling over his words in a way that filled Will with astonishment and alarm, coming from the cool adult brother who had always been so much his symbol of everything fulfilled, complete, grown-up. Then Stephen brought his head up and stared at Will almost belligerently, and Will stared nervously back.

Stephen said, “When the ship was in Jamaica last year, I sent you a big West Indian carnival head, for a Christmas and birthday present put together.”

“Well of course,” Will said. “It's super. We were all looking at it only yesterday.”

Stephen went on, ignoring him. “I'd got it from an old Jamaican who grabbed me one day in the street, out of no-where, in the middle of Carnival. He told me my name, and he said I was to give the head to you. And when I asked how on earth he knew me, he said,
There is a look that we Old Ones have.
Our families have something of it too.”

“I know about all that,” Will said brightly, swallowing the foreboding that hollowed his throat. “You sent a letter, with the head. Don't you remember?”

“I remember it was a damn funny thing for a stranger to say,” Stephen said. “Old Ones, we Old Ones. With capital letters—you could
hear
them.”

“Oh not really. Surely—I mean, you said he was an old man—”

“Will,” Stephen said, looking at him with cold blue eyes, “the day we sailed from Kingston, that old man turned up at the ship. I don't know how he talked them into it, but someone was sent to fetch me to him. He stood there on the dock, with his black, black face and his white, white hair, and he looked quietly at the rating who'd fetched me, until the boy left, and then he said just one thing.
Tell your brother,
he said,
that the Old Ones of the ocean islands are ready.
Then he went away.”

Will said nothing. He knew there would be more. He looked at Stephen's hands; they were clenched, and one thumb was flicking automatically to and fro over its fist.

“And then,” Stephen said, his voice shaking a little, “we put in at Gibraltar on the way home, and I had half a day ashore, and a stranger said something to me in the street. He was standing beside me, we were waiting for a traffic light—he was very tall and slim, Arab I think. Do you know
what he said?
Tell Will Stanton that the Old Ones of the south are ready.
Then he just disappeared into the crowd.”

“Oh,” Will said.

The thumb abruptly stopped moving on Stephen's hand. He stood up, in one swift movement like a released spring. Will too scrambled to his feet, blinking up, unable to read the suntanned face against the bright sky.

“Either I'm going out of my head,” Stephen said, “or you're mixed up in something very strange, Will. In either case you might have a little more to say to me than
oh.
I told you, I don't like it, not one bit.”

“The trouble is, you see,” Will said slowly, “that if I tried to explain, you wouldn't believe me.”

“Try me,” his brother said.

Will sighed. Of all the nine Stanton children, he was the youngest and Stephen the oldest; there were fifteen long years between them, and until Stephen had left home to join the Navy, a smaller Will had shadowed him everywhere in silent devotion. He knew now that he was at the ending of something he had hoped would never end.