Silver on the Tree (27 page)

The king moved slowly, stiffly, across the smooth rush-matted floor; on the back of the dark green surcoat he wore over his white robe they saw embroidered in gold the royal crest with its roses and leaping fish. King Gwyddno took the sword in his hand, and turned his melancholy drooping body towards them again. He ran one finger along the chased flat side of the sword blade, wonderingly, as if in disbelief that he could ever have made so lovely a thing. Then taking the sword by the cross-piece of its hilt, so that it hung pointing downwards, he held it out to Bran.

“Let the light go to the Light,” he said, “and Eirias to its inheritor.”

Bran took the sword by the hilt, turning it carefully so that it pointed now straight upward. Instantly he seemed to Will to grow somehow a little more erect, more commanding; the sunlight blazed in his white hair.

Somewhere outside the tower, from far away, there came a long low rumbling like thunder.

The king said expressionlessly, “Now let come what may.”

He put his hand up to his head suddenly and rubbed his brow. “There was … there was a scabbard. Gwion? I made a scabbard for the sword?”

Gwion's smile lit his face. “You did, Majesty, of leather and of gold. And there must be a breaking of the emptiness, as you call it, in your mind—or you would not remember that.”

“It was….” The king's forehead creased, he closed his eyes as if in pain. Then abruptly he opened them again, pointing across the domed room to a plain chest of light-coloured wood, with the figure of a man riding a fish painted in blue on its side.

Gwion went to the chest, and put back the lid. He said after a moment, “There are three things.” A strange note was in his voice, of some emotion Will could not comprehend.

The king said vaguely, “Three?”

Gwion drew from the chest a scabbard and swordbelt of white leather set with strips of gold. “To mask the blaze a little,” he said with a smile, holding it out to Bran.

“Bran,” Will said slowly, listening to deep faint stirrings within his mind. “I think … you should not put the sword into the scabbard yet, not for a moment.”

Bran, sword and scabbard in either hand, looked at him with raised eyebrows, and an arrogant tilt to his white head that had not been there before. Then he gave a quick shiver and was Bran again, and said merely, “All right.”

Gwion said, still at the chest, “And there is—this.” His voice shook, and his hand too, as he took out a small bright harp. He looked across the room at his king. “Not a few moments ago, my lord, I was longing to have my harp that I left in the City, so that I could play for you as I did in the old days.”

The king smiled, lovingly. “That too is your harp, minstrel. Long ago I made it for you, in the first days in the
tower when I was struggling against despair, struggling still to work….” He shook his head, wondering. “I had forgotten, it is so long … I had chosen to be alone, so that all others were barred from this place by the wheel, yet I missed you and your music so greatly that I made the harp. For my Gwion, for my Taliesin, for my player.”

“And I shall play it for you in a little,” Gwion said.

“You will find it in tune,” the king said, and his smile held an echo of the maker's pride in the thing made.

Gwion put down the harp and reached again into the chest; he brought out a small leather bag gathered at the neck by a cord. “This is the third thing,” he said, “but I do not know what it is.”

He pulled open the neck of the bag, and a stream of small blue-green stones tumbled out into his other hand, smooth, shiny, rounded as though by the sea. One of them fell to the floor; Will picked it up and rolled it round his palm, watching the pattern of colour in its sleek irregular shape.

The king glanced at the stones briefly. “Pretty, but worthless,” he said. “I do not remember them.”

“You meant to work with them once, perhaps.” Gwion poured the stones back into the bag; Will held out the one that had fallen.

Gwion smiled at him suddenly. “Keep it,” he said lightly. He picked out another stone and held it to Bran. “And one for you, Bran. Each of you should have a talisman. A piece of a dream to take away with you, from the Lost Land.”

The king said softly, vacantly, “Lost … Lost….”

The distant deep rumbling came again outside, louder than before. All at once the sunlight shafting in through the banded roof faded, and the dome seemed much darker.

Bran looked around. “What is it?”

“It is the beginning,” the king said. His thin voice was stronger now, more alive as his face was more alive, and though the resigned acceptance in it was very plain, there was no hint now of the dreadful black emptiness of despair.

Will said, on instinct, “We must not stay under this roof.”

Gwion sighed. He looked at Will with wry affection, and Will never afterwards forgot the look: the humorous wide mouth drawn almost into sadness by the lines of experience running down from nose to jaw; the bright eyes, smiling; the crisp curly grey hair, the odd dark stripe in the grey beard. He said to Gwion in his mind:
I like you.

“Come,” Gwion said. With the harp in one crooked arm he went to a part of the curved wall that seemed no different from any other part, reached up, and with one strong pull slid a whole wedge-shaped section of it to one side. The opening gaped like a triangular door. Outside, they saw the sky a dark, dark grey.

Gwion stepped out, down to a balcony. Following him, Will saw a golden balustrade, and realized that this too was identical with the balcony that ran round the dome of the Empty Palace, in the City. But as he looked out from the tower all thought dwindled away.

Westward over the sea, a gigantic bank of dark cloud was massing: heavy, mounded, yellowish-grey. It seemed to writhe, growing and swelling as if it were a live thing. Will's fingers curled tightly round the strap of the golden shield that he still held on one arm. Bran came out on to the balcony behind him, and last of all came the king: frail now, supporting himself on the side of the opening in the roof, breathing suddenly faster as though the keener outside air were something his lungs had not felt for a long, long time.

The low, distant rumbling still filled the air, coming in like a mist from the westward horizon, where the great clouds rolled. Yet it was not the rumbling of thunder; it was a deeper, more insistent sound, like nothing Will had heard before.

“Be ready,” Gwion said softly, behind him.

Will turned and found himself looking straight into the smile-creased dark eyes. He saw calm determination there, and self-possession, but beneath all else a flicker of dreadful blank fear.

“What is it?” he whispered.

Gwion took his harp and drew a series of soft beautiful arpeggios from the strings. He said, as lightly as if it were a casual joke, his eyes imploring Will to ignore the terror behind them, “It is the death of the Lost Land, Old One. It must come, when the time comes.” His fingers began patterning the notes into a gentle melody, and the king, leaning against the shining wall of the dome, murmured with pleasure.

The rumbling from the western horizon rose. A wind blew against their cheeks, and stirred their hair: a strange warm wind. Will raised his head, sniffing; all at once the summer air seemed full of a smell of the sea, of salt and wet sand and green weed. The light was dying, the cloud spreading grey over the sky. He heard a faint sound like creaking over his head, and looked up sharply. On top of the dome the pointing golden arrow, still gleaming even in the murky light, was swinging gently round: turning, turning quite around, until it pointed inland, away from the sea. A brightness in the sky beyond it caught Will's eye, and he gasped, and saw that Bran was staring at it too.

Far away out there, on the far side of the Lost Land, over the roofs of the City still dimly visible in the dwindling light, sudden sprays of light were springing up like fountains, to blaze for a second and vanish again. Like bursting stars, fireworks leapt, splashing the dark sky with brilliant red, green, yellow, blue: erupting over the City in joyous arches of light. There was a wonderful unafraid gaiety in all the sudden brilliance, as if children were flinging blazing branches out from a fire into a looming wild night. Will found himself smiling and yet close to tears; and in the same moment he heard, very faintly over the low roar filling the world now from the west, the high joyous sound of many bells ringing, somewhere out there, somewhere in the City. Gwion softly shifted the tune and the time of his melody so that his harp chimed in with the bells, and Will breathed fast as he stood on the balcony looking all round at the livid menacing sky and the dark sea and the brilliant gay fireworks challenging
both. He was filled with a wild exhilaration that was terror and delight all in one: terror for the people of the Lost Land, delight in the contemptuous defiance they flung out to their doom.

Sea grew dark as sky; there was a new rumbling now as the waves grew, their angry tops visible far out, gleaming, throwing spray. The wind blew more strongly, whipping the king's thin hair across his face. Will put up his shield as a shelter. Gwion, still playing, moved back slowly towards the opening in the dome of the tower, moving so that the king moved before him, supported by the wall. And then with a great splitting flare of lightning the sky roared, and the sea seemed to cry out, and a huge wall of water came thundering towards them from the sea, over the sand and reedy marsh, swallowing trees and land and the lines of the river, spreading, swirling, wild. Bran gripped Will's arm with one hand, and Will saw, turning, that the sword Eirias was gleaming bluish-white as if from the inner heat of a fire.

In the dark sky over the City the fireworks suddenly ceased, and the sound of the bells became a long jangling confusion, wild over the lilt of Gwion's harp. Then they too abruptly stopped. But Gwion's music went on. The sea struck at the tower somewhere below; they felt it shake beneath their feet. Wave after wave came roaring, the sea rose higher, the king's light voice called out on the warm fierce wind, “Lost! Lost!” And out of the raging sea came sailing impossibly towards them, slantwise down the great waves, the chunky boat with its black-haired captain and single tight-filled brown sail, and from his place at the tiller the sailor reached out an arm to Will and Bran, beckoning, the deck of his vessel almost level for a moment with the balcony of the tower.

“Go!” Gwion shouted to them; he stood leaning sideways, his shoulder supporting the failing king.

“Not without you!”

“I belong here!” They saw only the last flash of a smile over the shadowy bearded face. “Go! Bran! Save Eirias!”

And the words hit Bran like a spur, and he seized Will and leapt with him into the boat tossing an arm's length away. The boat plunged down the side of a wave; for an instant they heard Gwion's harp sweet and faint through the thundering sea, until one single shattering blinding streak of brilliance came out of the sky and struck the tower, splitting the dome in two, and the golden arrow was driven from the roof as if it were suddenly a live malevolent thing and came hurtling over the waves down towards them. Out of an instinct not his own Will flung up the golden shield with both his arms, and the flashing arrow struck the shield and in a great flare of yellow light both vanished, flinging Will down on his back in the leaping boat.

His head rang, his eyes blurred. He saw Bran standing over him with the sword flaming blue in his hand, he heard the waves roar, he saw the lean dark face of the ferryman twisted with effort, as the man struggled to keep the boat heading away from harm. The world tossed and roared in a dark endless turmoil, with no count of time passing.

And then there was a lurch so violent that Will lost all consciousness, and when he opened his eyes he was in a world of grey light and soft sound, the gentle murmuring of small waves on a beach, and he and Bran were lying on a long stretch of sand, in a clear morning, with a whitish-blue sky overhead. The crystal sword gleamed white in Bran's hand, the scabbard lay at his side. The great beach reached far before them into the estuary of the River Dyfi; green sandhills glimmered at its far edge, and beyond over the mountains and the grey roofs of Aberdyfi came the first golden edge of the rising sun.

Jane had gone out before five, from the sleeping hotel. She did not wake her brothers. Irrationally but strongly she felt that when Merriman had said, “Be on the beach at sunrise,” he had meant the words particularly for her. The boys, she thought, could follow in their own time.

So she slipped out alone into the grey morning, and crossed the silent road and railway track, hearing only the surf a distant thunder on the beach beyond. A dozen startled rabbits bounded away from her as she crossed the railway, their white scuds bobbing. Now and then a sheep's deep call floated down from the mountain. The morning was colourless and cold; Jane shivered, in spite of her sweater, and ran over the rolling golf course towards the high dunes. Then she was climbing through long wiry marram grass, with the dew-darkened sand sifting cold through her sandals, until the last step brought her breathless to the top of the tallest dune and the world opened before her in a great sweep of brown sand and grey sea, its flat horizon dissolving into mist where the arms of Cardigan Bay embraced the sea and the sky.

Something lay at her feet on the crest of the dune; looking down, Jane found a small brown rabbit. Its eyes were open and unblinking; it was dead. When she stepped over it she saw with a shock that its stomach had been torn open and the guts ripped out, before the rest of the untouched furry body had been tossed casually aside.

Jane went on down the dune in long sliding steps, more slowly, wondering for the first time what she should expect to see when the sun rose.

She crossed the dry sand above highwater mark, scarred with the footprints of yesterday's holiday-makers and their dogs. Then feeling suddenly vulnerable she went on, out to the vast exposed sweep of sand that fills the Dyfi estuary at low water, and stretches for ten miles and more up the coast on either side. Nothing was before her but the grey sea and sky and the long soft-roaring line of the surf. Through the sandals her feet could feel the hard rippled pattern left on the sand by the waves.