Silver on the Tree (6 page)

He looked desperately at Merriman. But the dark eyes over the high curved nose held no expression. This was not Merriman's task, but his own; he must do it alone.

All the same there might be a reason why Merriman was there, for this half of the spell as for the other; even unwittingly, he might have some part to play. It was for Will to discover that part, if it were so, and take hold of whatever might be there for him to take.

Where, when, how?

The centurion shouted commands, and his nearest team of workers swung round and marched back for the next stone. Watching them, the Roman shivered suddenly, and drew his cloak tighter round his shoulders.

“Britain-born, all of them,” he said wrily to Merriman. “Like you, they find no horror in this climate.”

Merriman made a formless, murmuring sound of sympathy, and for no reason that he could imagine Will found the small hairs rising on the back of his neck, as if in a warning from senses that had no other speech. He stood tense, waiting.

“These islands,” the Roman said. “Green, I grant you. Well might they be green. Always the clouds, the mist and damp and rain.” He sighed. “Ah, my bones ache….”

Merriman said softly, “And not the bones only … it must be hard, for one born in the sun.”

The centurion stared out over the wooden seats and stone columns, looking at nothing, and shook his head helplessly.

Will said, in a small clear voice that seemed to him to belong to somebody else. “What is it like, your home?”

“Rome? A great city. But my home is outside the city, in the country—a quiet life, but good—” He glanced at Will. “I have a son who must now be as tall as you. When last I saw him I could throw him in the air and catch him in my hands. Now my wife tells me he has learned to ride like a centaur, and swim like a fish. Swimming now, perhaps, in the river near my land. I wanted him to grow up there, as I did. With the sun hot on the skin, and the air shrill with cicadas, and a line of cypress trees dark against the sky … the hills silver with olive trees and terraced for the vines, with the grapes filling out, now….”

The homesickness was a throbbing ache like physical pain, and suddenly Will knew that the answer was here in the air, in this moment of simple unprotected longing with a man's deepest, simplest emotions open and unguarded for strangers to hear and see. This was the road that would carry him.

Here, now, this way!

He let his mind fall into the longing, into the other's pain, as if he were diving into a sea; and like water closing over his head the emotion took him in. The world spun about him, stone and grey sky and green fields, whirling and changing and falling down into place not quite the same as
before, and the yearning homesick voice was soft in his ears again; but the voice was a different voice.

The voice was a different voice and the language was changed, to a soft accented English with long slanting vowels. And it was evening now, with a moon-washed silverdark sky above and shadows all around, shapes and shadows indistinguishable one from the next.

But in the new voice, the ache of longing was exactly the same.

“… it's all sun and sand and sea, that part of Florida. My part. Flowers everywhere. Oleander and hibiscus, and poinsettia in big wild red bushes, not shut up in skinny little Christmas pots. And down on the beach the wind blows in the coconut palms and the leaves make a little rattling noise, like a shower of rain. I used to swing on those leaves when I was your age, like swinging on a rope. If I were down there now I'd be out fishing with my dad—he's got a forty foot Bertram, a beauty. Called
Betsy Girl
after Mom. Out through the channel in the mangroves, you go—dark green, like forests in the water. The water's green too till you get way out in the Gulf, and then it's a deep, deep blue. Beautiful. And you swing the outriggers up with the lines over, and ballyho on, and you'll catch bonita or dolphin, or if you're lucky, pompano. The tourists all want sailfish or kingfish. Day before I left home, I got a sixty pound king. Ginny, that's my girl, she took a picture of it.”

Will could see him outlined against the sky, bright and dark by turns now as gathering clouds crossed the moon: a lean young man with long hair caught back in a stubby pony tail. The soft, remembering voice went on.

“Haven't seen Ginny for eight months. Man, that's a long time. I've got our first day all planned out for when I get home. Keep thinking about it. Long lazy day in the sun, swimming, lying on the beach, surfing maybe. And beer and hamburgers at Pete's. His burgers are just out of this world, big and juicy on a homemade bun, with this special sour pickle relish. Ginny loves them…. She's so pretty. Long
blonde hair. Great figure. She writes me every week. Didn't come over here because her old man's got a weak heart and she felt—ah, she's just a great girl.” He paused, and slowly shook his head. “Hey, I'm sorry. You really got me going. I guess I didn't know how much I'd been missing … people. It's been fun here on the dig, but I'll sure be glad to get home.”

Behind him, a rounded grassy slope rose as skyline; yet although this seemed totally strange, Will had the conviction that somehow he was in the same place as before. Perhaps it was only that linking emotion, the ache in the American's voice, and yet….

Merriman's voice said in the dim night, cheerful, breaking the mood, “He seems to have pressed a button, asking you about home. Have you been here a long time?”

“It'll be a year, by the time I'm through. Not so long really, I guess.” The young man became self-consciously brisk. “Well, hey, let's show you. I wish this wasn't such a quick visit, professor—there's so much you could see better in the morning.”

“Ah well,” Merriman said vaguely. “I have appointments…. Over here, you said?”

“Just a minute, I'll get a lamp. Better than a flashlight—” The American vanished into a boxlike structure that seemed to be a small wooden shed; a light flared in a window, and then he was back again with a hissing hurricane lamp unexpectedly held aloft, casting a bright pool around them in which Will could see grass at their feet, and Wellington boots on Merriman's trousered legs. Beyond, poles and ropes and small drooping marker-flags jutted from an excavation made into the grassy mound that he had thought a natural slope, as if a giant slice had been cut from an earthen cake. At the inside of the excavation, where it cut furthest into the mound, he could see stones. He could see a stone-paved floor like a stretch of square cobbles; the scattered stones of a fallen arch; rising tiers of stones where once wooden benches had stood….

The whirl of others' emotions cleared from Will's mind, and instead wonder and relief and delight flooded into him like a spring tide, and he knew, looking at the stone, that the secret releasing the Signs from their enchantment had been caught at the proper moment indeed.

“You know the background, of course, Professor Lyon,” the young American said. “Always the mound was known as King Arthur's Round Table, with absolutely no justification of course. And no one could get permission to dig. Or funds for that matter, until this Ford Foundation deal. And now that we finally get inside it, what do we find inside King Arthur's so-called Round Table but a Roman amphitheatre.”

“You'll find a Mithraeum, too, before you're done, I shouldn't wonder,” Merriman said, in a strange brisk professional voice Will had not heard before. “Caerleon was a major fort, after all—built for keeping down the barbaric British in their mists and fog.”

The American laughed. “I don't really mind the mists and fog. It's the rain—and all that mud afterwards. They sure knew how to work with stone, those old Empire-builders. Look, here's the inscribed slab I was telling you about—Centurion Flavius Julianus and his boys.”

The lamp hissed, the shadows danced; he led them to a shoulder-high column of great slabs of rock. Will saw the highest, the largest, with its inscribed letters battered now by age. It was newly excavated; an inch of earth still lay over it, where the stone above had slipped to one side.

Merriman took a small flashlight from his pocket and shone it, quite unnecessarily Will thought, on the inscribed block of stone. “Very neat,” he said fussily, “very neat. Here Will, my boy, have a look.” He handed Will the light.

“We think there were eight entrances,” the American said, “all vaulted, with this kind of stonework. This must have been one of the two main ones—we only started clearing it this afternoon.”

“Excellent,” Merriman said. “Now just show me that
other inscription you mentioned, would you?” They moved away to one side of the cave-like dig, taking the pool of yellow lamplight with them. Will stood still. He snapped on the light for a second, to be sure of his step, then turned it off. Putting his hand forward in the darkness of what he knew now was his own time, Midsummer Day a matter of seconds after he had first left it, he reached scrabbling into the earth that had lain since the decay of Rome's Empire, some sixteen centuries before, in the hollow of the big rock of the broken arch. And his fingers met a circle of metal quartered by a cross, and putting down the flashlight to scrabble with both hands in the earth, he drew out the linked circle of Signs.

Very carefully he shook off the dirt, with the circles and their gold links spread wide to keep the metal from rattling. He glanced up. Merriman and the young archaeologist were no more than a glimmer of light, yards away across the excavation. Excitement tight in his throat, Will clipped the belt-like chain of Signs round his waist, tugging his sweater down to cover them. He went forward to the lamplight.

“Ah, well,” Merriman said blandly. “Time we were going, I'm afraid.”

“It's very exciting,” Will said, bright and enthusiastic.

“I'm so glad you stopped by.” The young American led them to a car parked behind a fence. “It's been a privilege to meet you, Dr. Lyon. I only wish the others had been here—Sir Mortimer will be real sorry—”

In a flurry of farewells he handed them into the car, pumping Merriman's arm in a kind of hearty reverence. Will said, “You made Florida sound lovely. I hope you see it soon.”

But archaeology had driven his earlier emotion quite out of the young American's mind. Nodding, smiling vaguely, he disappeared.

Merriman drove slowly down the road. He said, his voice changed utterly, “You have them?”

“I have them safe,” Will said, and a strong hand clenched
his shoulder briefly, hard, and was gone. They were no longer master and boy, nor ever would be again; they were Old Ones only, caught out of Time in a task both were long-destined to fulfill.

“It must be tonight, and quickly,” Will said. “Here, do you think? Now?”

“I think so. The times are linked, by our presence and by the place. Above all by your good work. I think so.” Merriman stopped, turned the car, and drove back towards the excavation. They got out and stood in silence for a moment.

Then they went together into the darkness, skirting the cleared arch and walls, climbing to the top of the grassy mound. There they stood, under a sky dark now with scudding clouds that hid the moon; and Will took from his waist the linked belt of crossed circles that was the symbol of the Circle of the Light, and held it up in both hands. And time and space merged as the twentieth and the fourth centuries became for a Midsummer's instant two halves of a single breath, and in a clear soft voice Will said into the night, “Old Ones! Old Ones! It is time. Now and for always, for the second time and the last, let the Circle be joined. Old Ones, it is time! For the Dark, the Dark is rising!”

His voice ran strong; he held the Signs high, and a glimmer of starlight flashed on the circle of crystal like white fire. And all at once they were no longer alone on the silent grassy mound. From all the world over, from every point of time, the shadowy forms of men and women from every kind and generation crowded there in the night. A great glimmering throng was gathered, the Old Ones of the earth come together for the first time since, six seasons earlier, the Signs had in their presence been ceremonially joined. The darkness rustled; there was a formless murmuring in the place, a communication without speech.

Merriman and Will stood there together on the hill in the night full of beings, and waited for the one last Old One whose presence would weld this great gathering into an ultimate instrument of power, a force to vanquish the Dark.

They waited, and the night grew brighter with starlight; but she did not come.

The glimmering forms murmured and rippled as though the land blurred, and Will's consciousness, at one with the minds of all his fellows there, was filled with unease.

Merriman said, low and husky, “I was afraid of this.”

“The Lady,” Will said helplessly. “Where is the Lady?”

“The Lady!”
Indistinct as the wind, a long whisper ran through the darkness.
“Where is the Lady?”

Will said softly to Merriman, “She came at the turn of the year, the year before last, for the Joining. Why does she not come now?”

Merriman said. “I think she has not the strength. Her power is worn by resisting the Dark—you and I know well how she has spent herself, in the past. And though she managed the effort for the joining of the Signs, you remember that then she had no strength even to take her leave.”

“Yes,” Will said, remembering a small, fragile old figure, delicate as a wren, standing beside him overlooking a great throng of Old Ones as Merriman stood now. “She simply … faded. And then she was gone.”

“And it seems that she is gone still. Out of reach. Gone until a helping magic may come from the sum of the centuries of this spell-ridden island, to bring her to our need. For the first time, for the only time, the help of mere creatures is needed for the Lady.”

Merriman drew himself up, a tall shadowy hooded figure in the night, dark as a pillar against the sky. He spoke without effort or great force, yet his voice filled the night and seemed to echo to and fro over the unseen heads of that enormous throng.