Greenwitch (19 page)

“And this is the second time for looking,” he said.

The children picked up stones from the grass and laid them gently on the edges to hold the parchment flat. Then instinctively they drew to one side, to let Merriman and Captain Toms study the grail and manuscript together.

Barney, next to Merriman, suddenly realised that Will was standing quiet and unmoving behind him. He ducked quickly aside. “Here,” he said. “Come on.”

The golden grail glittered in the sunlight; the engraving on its sides was clear and clean, but the smooth beaten gold of the inside surface, as Simon had said, was blackened and dark. Will looked now at the close, delicate engraving for the first time in his life, seeing the panels filled with vivid scenes of men
running, fighting, crouching behind shields: tunic-clad, strangely-helmeted men brandishing swords and shields. The pictures woke deep memories in him of things he had forgotten he had ever known. He looked closer, at the words and letters interwoven between the figures, and at the last panel on the grail, completely filled with words in this same cipher-language that no living scholar had been able to understand. And like the other two Old Ones, he began methodically to look from the marks on the old manuscript to the marks on the grail, and gradually the interweaving became clear.

Will found himself breathing faster, as the meaning of the inscription began to take shape in his mind.

Staring at the manuscript, Merriman said slowly, painfully, as if he were spelling out a hard lesson:

He stopped, his face tight with concentration. “Not easy,” he said to himself. “The pattern is hard to keep.”

Captain Toms leaned on his heavy stick, peering at another panel of the grail. He said softly, his accent cradling the words:

Will knelt down beside the granite slab and turned the grail again. Slowly he read aloud:

Merriman stood upright. “And the last line of all will be the spell,” he said, looking hard at Will; the deep-set dark eyes bored into his mind. “Remember.
Y maent yr mynyddoedd yn canu ac y mae'r arglwyddes yn dod.
The mountains are singing, and the Lady comes. Remember.”

He leaned down to the rock, moved aside the stone weights and took up the small curling manuscript in one big hand. As if the Drews did not exist at all, he looked down at Will and Captain Toms.

“You have it all?” he said.

“Yes,” said Will.

“Safe remembered,” Captain Toms said.

In one sharp movement Merriman clenched his fist, and the little roll of stiff, broken-edged parchment crumbled instantly into tiny fragments, small as gravel, light as dust. He opened his long fingers and swung his arm wide, and in a dusty shower the pieces flew away in every direction, into oblivion.

The children cried out sharply.

“Gumerry!” Jane stared at him, appalled. “You've ruined the whole thing!”

“No,” Merriman said.

“But you can't understand what the grail says, without it, No-one can.” Simon's face was creased with perplexity. “It'll be just as much of a mystery as it was before!”

“Not to us,” Captain Toms said. He eased himself down to sit on the granite slab, and took up the grail, turning it in his fingers so that the sunlight glinted on the engraved sides. “We know, now, what is in the hidden message of the grail. It will
shape the next twelve months of our lives, and help us to save men from great terror, very soon, for all time. And now that we have it in our minds, we shall never forget.”

“I've forgotten it already,” Barney said plaintively. “Everything except a bit about a golden harp, and a grey king. How can you have a grey king?”

“Of course you have forgotten it,” Captain Toms said. “That was the intention.” He smiled at Barney. “And we do not even need an enchantment to help you forget, as our friend from the Dark did. We can rely on the mortality of your memory.”

“And you don't have to worry about whether anyone else will remember,” Simon said, slowly understanding, “because no-one else will ever hear or see.”

Jane said sadly, “It seems a pity that the poor Greenwitch's secret should just be thrown away.”

“It has served its purpose,” Merriman said. His deep voice rose a little, gained a hint of ceremony. “Its high purpose, for which it was made so very long ago. It has set us the next great step along the road to keep the Dark from rising, and there is nothing more important than that quest.”

“That last bit you said, from the grail and the manuscript,” Barney said. “What language was it in?”

“Welsh,” Merriman said.

“Is the last part of the quest in Wales?”

“Yes.”

“Are we going to be part of it?”

Merriman said, “Wait and see.”

*   *   *

They lay in variously abandoned attitudes in the sunshine on the beach, recovering from an enormous picnic lunch. Simon
and Barney were lazily tossing a ball to and fro, without bothering to stand up. Bill Stanton was eying them, and the nearby cricket bat, with nostalgic optimism.

“Just wait,” he said to his sun-bathing wife, “we'll show you just exactly how it's played, in a little while.”

“Great,” said Fran Stanton sleepily.

Jane, lying on her back blinking up at the blue sky, propped herself up on her elbows and looked out to sea. The sand was hot against her skin; it was a beautiful, sunny, breezeless Cornish day, of a rare and special kind.

“I'm just going for a little walk,” she said to nobody in particular, and over the dry sand she went, across the long golden beach, towards the rocks that glistened with low-tide seaweed at the foot of Kemare Head. The headland reared up above her, grassy slope changing to jagged grey cliff; at the very tip, the cliffs towered in a sheer wall against the sky. Jane's head was full of memories. She began to walk over the rocks, wincing a little as her bare feet, not yet toughened by summer, pressed against rough rock. Out here, last year, she and Barney and Simon had reached the peak of their adventure, the achieving of the grail that had lain for hundreds of years in a cave, the entrance covered totally by water at all but the lowest tides. Out here, they had fled from the pursuing Dark, with the grail and the little lead case they had found inside it. And out here, she thought as she reached the furthest point of the rocks, with the waves breaking white at her feet, just here, in the flurry of saving the grail, the little lead case had plummeted into the waves and down to the bottom of the sea.

And the Greenwitch had found it there, and made it a precious secret.

Jane looked at the deep green water beyond the breaking waves. “Good-by, Greenwitch,” she said softly.

She unclasped a small silver bracelet that she wore on her
wrist, weighed it experimentally in her hand, and drew back her arm to throw it into the sea.

A voice said gently behind her, “Don't do that.”

Jane gasped, and nearly lost her balance; swinging round, she saw Will Stanton.

“Oh!” she said. “You made me jump.”

“Sorry,” Will said. He balanced his way forwards to stand beside her; his bare feet looked very white against the dark seaweed patching the rocks.

Jane looked at his pleasant round face, and then at the bracelet in her hand. “I know it sounds stupid,” she said reluctantly, “but I wanted to give the Greenwitch another secret to keep. Instead of the one we took. In my dream”—she paused, embarrassed, but went gamely on—“in my dream, I said, I
will give you another secret,
and the Greenwitch said in that big sad booming voice,
‘Too late, too late,'
and just disappeared. . . .”

She was silent, gazing at the sea.

“I only said don't,” Will said, “because I don't think your bracelet would really do. It's silver, isn't it, and the sea-water would turn it all black and dirty-looking.”

“Oh,” Jane said, forlorn.

Will shifted his footing on the wet rock, and felt in his pocket. He said, glancing briefly at Jane and then away, “I knew you'd want to give the Greenwitch something. I wondered if this would do.”

Jane looked. Lying on Will's outstretched palm was the same small green-patched lead case that had held the manuscript, the Greenwitch's first secret. Will took it and pulled off the cap, shaking out a small object into her hand.

Jane saw a strip of yellow metal, gleaming, with some words engraved on it very small.

“It looks like gold,” she said.

“It is,” said Will. “Low carat, but gold. Last for ever, even down there.”

Jane read out:
“Power from the Greenwitch, lost beneath the sea.”

“That's just a line from a poem,” Will said.

“Is it really? It's perfect.” She ran her finger along the bright gold. “Where did you get it?”

“I made it.”

“You made it?” Jane turned and stared at him with such astonishment that Will laughed.

“My father's a jeweller. He's teaching me to engrave things. I go and help in his shop sometimes after school.”

“But you must have done this before you came down here, before you ever knew we were going to meet the Greenwitch,” Jane said slowly. “How did you know what to make, what to write?”

“Just a lucky chance, I suppose,” Will said, and there was a polite finality in his tone that reminded Jane instantly of Merriman: it was the voice that forbade any questioning.

“Oh,” she said.

Will put the small golden strip into the case and fitted the cap on tightly. Then he handed it to her.

“Here's your secret, Greenwitch,” Jane said, and she flung it into the sea. The little case vanished into the waves, their foam curling round the weed-fringed rocks. In the sunlight the water glittered like shattered glass.

“Thank you, Will Stanton,” Jane said. She paused, looking at him. “You aren't quite like the rest of us, are you?”

“Not quite,” said Will.

Jane said, “I hope we shall see you again, some day.”

Will said, “I'm pretty sure you will.”

*   *   *

Mr and Mrs Penhallow stood waving from the steps of the cottage, as they left: Merriman to put the four children on the London train, the Stantons on a visit to Truro for the day.

“Good-by!”

“Good journey to you! Good-by!”

The cars disappeared across the quay; overhead, sea gulls wheeled and cried.

“Perfessor did find what he came for, this time, I do believe,” Mr Penhallow said, sucking pensively at his pipe.

“That liddle gold cup from last year, that was stole in London? Aye. But there was more, I fancy.” Mrs Penhallow gazed at the point where Merriman's car had rounded the corner, with speculation in her eyes.

“More of what?”

“'Twas no accident he came down here at Greenwitch time. He've never done that before. This was Cap'n Toms' first Greenwitch makin' at home for a good many years, too. . . . I don't know, Walter, I don't know. But something strange has been going on.”

“You'm dreaming,” Mr Penhallow said indulgently.

“That I'm not. But that young Jane was, one night. That same night everyone was dreaming, the night the whole village was hilla-ridden. . . . Such talk there was next morning, of things best forgotten. . . . And that morning, I was right near the bedrooms, going about my business, when young Jane woke up. And she let out such a hoot, and was out of her room like a wild thing running to her brothers.”

“So she'd been dreaming, sure,” Mr Penhallow said. “A bad 'un, by the sound of it. What of that?”

“Twasn't her dreaming that stays with me.” Mrs Penhallow looked out at the quiet harbour, and the drifting gulls. “‘Twas her room. Clean as a pin it was the night before, she'm a neat little maid. But everywhere in that room, that morning, there
was a great mess of little twigs and leaves, hawthorn leaves, and rowan. And everywhere a great smell of the sea.”

*   *   *

 

 

Here ends G
REENWITCH,
third book of the sequence named T
HE DARK IS RISING.
The next book will be called T
HE GREY KING.
There will be five books.

 

PICK UP THE NEXT SPELLBINDING CHAPTER OF SUSAN COOPER'S THE DARK IS RISING SEQUENCE:

—THE GREY KING—

 

 

David Evans dropped Will at a small newsagent's shop, where he could buy postcards, and chugged off to leave the Land-Rover at a garage. Will bought a card showing a sinister dark lake surrounded by very Welsh-looking mountains, wrote on it “I
GOT HERE
! Everyone sends their love,” and sent it off to his mother from the Post Office, a solemn and unmistakable red brick building on a corner of Tywyn High Street. Then he looked about him, wondering where to go next.

Choosing at random, hoping to see the sea, he turned right up the narrow curving High Street. Before long he found that there would be no sea this way: nor anything but shops, houses, a cinema with an imposing Victorian front grandly labelled
ASSEMBLY ROOMS,
and the slate-roofed lychgate of a church.