Silver on the Tree

  SILVER ON THE TREE

  SUSAN COOPER

  SIMON PULSE

  FOR MARGARET

  AUTHOR’S NOTE: In chapter three, I have taken the liberty of transplanting Sir Mortimer Wheeler’s excavation of the Roman amphitheater at Caerleon from 1928 to the present day. In Part Four, the five lines attached to the sword Eirias are those once proposed by Robert Graves as an envoie to the ancient Irish “Song of Amergin.”

  Non-Welsh readers please note that Aberdyfi is pronounced “Aberduvvy.”

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  SIMON PULSE

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  Copyright © 1977 by Susan Cooper

  Copyright renewed © 2005 by Susan Cooper

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  SIMON PULSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Also available in a Margaret K. McElderry hardcover edition.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  This Simon Pulse edition May 2007

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

  Cooper, Susan.

  Silver on the tree. / Susan Cooper.

  (“The dark is rising sequence.”)

  “A Margaret K. McElderry book.”

  Summary: In this conclusion of a tale begun in “Over Sea, Under Stone,” Will Stanton, the Welsh boy Bran, and the Drew children try to locate the crystal sword that alone can vanquish the strong forces of the Dark.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-689-50088-6 (hc)

  ISBN-10: 0-689-50088-2 (hc)

  eISBN-13: 978-0-689-84918-3

  ISBN 978-1-416-94968-8

  [I. Fantasy. 2. Space and time—Fiction. 3. Wales—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.C7878Si; 1977

  [Fic] 77-5361

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4169-4968-8 (pbk)

  ISBN-10: 1-4169-4968-2 (pbk)

  PRAISE FOR THE DARK IS RISING SEQUENCE

  “[A] thunderous fantasy.”

  —New York Times on The Dark Is Rising, a Newbery Honor Book

  “The excitement, suspense, and imaginative daring of the narrative are matched by the strength and style of the writing.”

  —New York Times on The Grey King, a Newbery Medal Winner

  “One of the best fantasies ever written…. A wondrous book that can be appreciated by lovers of great storytelling, both young and old.”

  —sfreviews.net on The Dark Is Rising

  “A brilliant, imaginative series of fantasies.”

  —Boston Globe

  “These classic fantasies, complex and multifaceted, should not be missed, by child or adult.”

  —Amazon.com

  “Susan Cooper … is the inheritor of strong mythic traditions and a craftsman’s understanding of the English language. With this series she has created a sweeping and beautiful tribute to both.”

  —Washington Post

  “Susan Cooper is one of the few contemporary writers who have the vivid imagination, the narrative powers, and the moral vision that permit her to create the kind of sweeping conflict between good and evil that lies at the heart of all great fantasy. Tolkien had it. So did C. S. Lewis. And Cooper writes in the same tradition.”

  —Psychology Today

  THE DARK IS RISING SEQUENCE

  Over Sea, Under Stone

  The Dark Is Rising

  Greenwitch

  The Grey King

  Silver on the Tree

  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.

  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

  Black Mink

  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

  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

  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.”

  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 field 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 long 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. Granddad taught me that. Pity you never knew him. What does your friend Mr. Gerard say about this one, Will?”

  “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. Grasshoppers 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.

  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 focussed, he could see them all, sun-dappled, hurrying.

  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 beads 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 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.