Susan Cooper - The Dark is Rising 5 - Silver on the Tree

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Silver on the Tree

Book 5 of 5 in "The Dark is Rising" series

Scanned September 2002 reader51 v1.0

A Puffin Book Published by Penguin Books

'When the Dark is rising - six shall turn it back,' ran the prophetic rhyme. And in this, the fifth and last

book, the story which began with Will Stanton's discovery that he was the last of the Old Ones, wielders

on Earth of the giant powers of good and evil, is brought to a triumphant climax. But the search for the

crystal sword is a daunting task which leads the chosen six from high summer in England to the dark hills

of Wales and the haunting, magical, lost land between sea and shore.

************************************************

On the day of the dead, when the year too dies,

Must the youngest open the oldest hills

Through the door of the birds, where the breeze breaks.

There fire shall fly from the raven boy,

And the silver eyes that see the wind,

And the Light shall have the harp of gold.

By the pleasant lake the Sleepers lie,

On Cadfan's Way where the kestrels call;

Though grim from the Grey King shadows fall,

Yet singing the golden harp shall guide

To break their sleep and bid them ride.

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When light from the lost land shall return,

Six Sleepers shall ride, six Signs shall burn,

And where the midsummer tree grows tall

By Pendragon's sword the Dark shall fall.

Y maent yr mynyddoedd yn canu,

ac y mae'r arglwyddes yn dod.

***********************************************

Contents

Part One: When the Dark Comes Rising

Midsummer's Eve

BlackM ink

The Calling

Midsummer Day

Part Two: The Singing Mountains

Five

The Bearded Lake

Afanc

Three from the Track

Part Three: The Lost Land

The City

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The Rose-Garden

The Empty Palace

The Journey

The Mari Llwyd

Caer Wydyr

The King of the Lost Land

Part Four: The Midsummer Tree

Sunrise

The Train

The River

The Rising

One Goes Alone

Part One: When the Dark Comes Rising

Midsummer's Eve

Will said, turning a page, 'He liked woad. He says - listen -the decoction of Woad drunken is good

for wounds in bodies of a strong constitution, as of country people, and such as are accustomed to

great labour and hard coarse fare.'

'Such as me, and all other members of Her Majesty's Navy,' Stephen said. With great precision he

pulled a tall, heavy-headed stem of grass out of its sheath, and lay back in the field nibbling it.

'Woad,' said James, wiping a mist of sweat from his plump pink face. 'That's the blue stuff the Ancient

Britons used to paint themselves with.'

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Will said, 'Gerard says here that woad flowers are yellow.'

James said rather pompously, 'Well, I've done a year's more history than you have and I know they used

it for blue.' There was a pause. He added, 'Green walnuts turn your fingers black.'

'Oh, well,' said Will. A very large velvety bee, overloaded with pollen, landed on his book and waddled

dispiritedly across the page. Will blew it gently on to a leaf, pushing back the straight brown forelock that

flopped over his eyes. His glance was caught by a movement on the river beyond the held where they

lay. 'Look! Swans!'

Lazy as the hot summer day, a pair of swans sailed slowly by without a sound; their small wake lapped

at the riverbank.

'Where?' said James, clearly with no intention of looking.

'They like this bit of the river, it's always quiet. The big boats stay over in the main reach, even on a

Saturday.''Who's coming fishing?' said Stephen. But he still lay unmoving on his back, one leg folded over

the other, the slender stem of grass swaying between his teeth.

'In a minute.' James stretched, yawning. 'I ate too much cake.'

'Mum's picnics are as huge as ever.' Stephen rolled over and gazed at the grey-green river. 'When I was

your age, you couldn't fish at all in this part of the Thames. Pollution, then. Some things do improve.'

'A paltry few,' Will said sepulchrally, out of the grass.

Stephen grinned. He reached out and picked a slender green stalk with a tiny red flower; solemnly he

held it up. 'Scarlet pimpernel.Open for sun ,closed for rain, that's the poor man's weathervane .

Grandad taught me that. Pity you never knew him. What does your friend Mr Gerard say about this one,

Will?'

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'Mmm?' Will was lying on his side, watching the weary bumblebee flex its wings.

'Book,' James said. 'Scarlet pimpernel.'

'Oh.' Will turned the crackling pages. 'Here it is. Oh loverly.The juyce purgeth the head by

gargarising or washing the throat therewith; it cures the tooth-ach being snift up into the

nosethrils, especially into the contrary nosethril.'

'The contrary nosethril, of course,' Stephen said gravely.

'He also says it's good against the stinging of vipers and other venomous beasts.'

'Daft,' said James.

'No it's not,' Will said mildly. 'Just three hundred years old. There's one super bit at the end where he

tells you very seriously how barnacle geese are hatched out of barnacles.'

'The Caribbean might have foxed him,' Stephen said. 'Millions of barnacles, but not one barnacle goose.'

James said, 'Will you go back there, after your leave?'

'Wherever their Lordships send us; mate.' Stephen threaded the scarlet pimpernel into the top buttonhole

of his shirt, and unfolded his lanky body. 'Come on. Fish.'

'I'll come in a minute. You two go.' Will lay idly watching as they fitted rods together, tied hooks and

floats. Grass-hoppers skirled unseen from the grass, chirruping their solos over the deep summer insect

hum: it was a sleepy, lulling sound. He sighed with happiness. Sunshine and high summer and, rarer than

either, his eldest brother home from sea. The world smiled on him; nothing could possibly be improved.

He felt his eyelids droop; he jerked them apart again. Again they closed in sleepy content; again he

forced them open. For a flicker of a moment he wondered why he would not let himself fall harmlessly

asleep.

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And then he knew.

The swans were there on the river again, slow-moving white shapes, drifting back upstream. Over Will's

head the trees sighed in the breeze, like waves on distant oceans. In tiny yellow-green bunches the

flowers of the sycamore scattered the long grass around him. Running one of them between his fingers, he

watched Stephen standing tall a few yards off threading his fishing-line through his rod. Beyond, on the

river, he could see one of the swans moving slowly ahead of its mate. The bird passed Stephen.

But as it passed, it did not disappear behind Stephen. Will could see the white form clearly through the

outline of Stephen's body.

And through the outline of the swan, in turn, he could see a steep slope of land, grassy, without trees,

that had not been there before.

Will swallowed.

'Steve?' he said.

His eldest brother was close before him, knotting a leader on his line, and Will had spoken loudly. But

Stephen did not hear. James came past, holding his rod erect but low as he fastened the hook safely into

its cork handle. Will could still see, through him, the forms of the swans as if in a faint mist. He sat up and

stretched out his hand to the rod as James went by, and his fingers moved through the substance of the

wood as if there had been nothing there.

And Will knew, with dread and delight, that a part of his life which had been sleeping was broad awake

once more.

His brothers walked off to the river, moving diagonally across the field. Through their phantom forms

Will could see the only earth that in this elusive patch of time was for him solid and real: the grassy slope,

its edges merging into mistiness. And on it he saw figures, running, bustling, driven by some urgent haste.

If he stared at them too hard, they were not there. But if he gazed with sleepy eyes, not quite focused, he

could see them all, sun-dappled, hurrying.

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They were small, dark-haired. They belonged to a very distant time. They wore tunics of blue, green or

black; he saw one woman in white, with a string of bright blue heads about her neck. They were

gathering bundles of spears, arrows, tools, sticks; packing pots into wrappings of animal skin; putting

together packages of what he supposed was meat, in dry rippled strips. There were dogs with them:

full-haired dogs with short pointed muzzles. Children ran and called, and a dog lifted his head to bay, but

no sound came. For Will's ears, only the grasshoppers chirruped, over the deep insect hum.

He saw no animals but the dogs. These people were travellers; not belonging here, but passing through.

He was not even sure whether the land on which they stood, in their own time, lay in his own part of the

Thames Valley or in some totally different place. But he knew one thing very clearly, suddenly: they were

all very much afraid.

Often they raised their heads, fearfully, and gazed away to the east. They spoke seldom to one another,

but worked on, hastily. Something, someone, was coming, threatening them, driving them on. They were

running away. Will found himself catching the sense of urgency, willing them to hurry, to escape whatever

disaster was on its way. Whatever disaster ... he too stared eastward. But it was hard to tell what he

saw. A strange double landscape lay before him, a firm curving slope visible through the phantom misty

lines of the flat fields and hedges of his own day and the glimmering half-seen Thames. The swans were

still there, and yet not there; one of them dipped its elegant neck to the surface of the water, ghostly as an

image reflected in a window-pane…….

…... 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 song-thrush 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

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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 eye-brow. '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.

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'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

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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

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摘要：

SilverontheTreeSusanCooper©1977Book5of5in"TheDarkisRising"seriesScannedSeptember2002reader51v1.0 APuffinBook PublishedbyPenguinBooks 'WhentheDarkisrising-sixshallturnitback,'ranthepropheticrhyme.Andinthis,thefifthandlastbook,thestorywhichbeganwithWillStanton'sdiscoverythathewasthelastoftheOldOnes,w...

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Susan Cooper - The Dark is Rising 5 - Silver on the Tree

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