Silver on the Tree (21 page)

“A maze….”

“A maze of mirrors. Now there's something to spend your life in.”

“Gwion knew, didn't he?” Will thought back, to the grey-bearded face looking up at him tense with concern. “Gwion said,
I shall meet you, if you find your way….”

“You know anything about mazes?”

“I was in one at Hampton Court once. Hedges. You had to keep turning right on the way in, and left on the way out. But that one had a centre. This one—”

“Those curves.” Bran looked less ill now that he had something to puzzle him. “Think. Think. We went to our right when we started off, and it curved….”

“It curved to the left.”

“And then we came to the crossing, and we took the furthest corridor on the left, and
it
curved to the left and brought us back to the crossing in a circle.”

Will closed his eyes and tried to visualize the pattern. “So turning left must be wrong. Do we turn right then?”

“Yes, look,” Bran said. His pale face was alight with an idea now. Opening his mouth wide, he breathed a long breath over the mirrored wall of the corridor, and drew with his finger in the patch of mist an upward spiral pattern of a series of loops, rising without touching one another. The curving tops of the loops faced the left. It looked like a drawing of a very loose spring standing on end.

“It has to look like this. See that first loop? That's the pattern we've walked so far. And mazes always repeat themselves, right?”

“So if it goes one loop after another, it's a spiral,” Will said, watching the mist-drawing gradually fade. “And we wouldn't have to go round each whole loop, we could just go up that side on the right where each loop crosses itself.”

“By turning right every time. Come on.” Bran slid triumphantly towards the right-hand corridor.

“Wait a minute.” Will breathed at the wall, and drew the spiral again. “We're facing the wrong way. See? We've been all the way round the first loop, so now we're facing backwards, back the way we first came. And if we turn right now, we shall really be turning left.”

“And just loop the loop again. Sorry, yes. In too much of a hurry, I am.” Bran swung his arms sideways and did a neat jump to turn himself in the other direction. He looked with dislike at the endless reflections of himself that had echoed the jump. “Come on, I
hate
these mirrors.”

Will looked at him thoughtfully as they followed the curving right-hand corridor. “You really mean that, don't you? I mean I don't like them either, they're creepy. But you—”

“It's the brightness.” Bran looked round uneasily, and quickened his step. “And more than that. All that reflecting, it
does
something, it's like having your mind sucked out of you. Aah!” He shook his head for want of words.

“Here's the next crossroads. That was a lot quicker.”

“So it should be, if we've really got the answer. Turn right again.”

Four times they turned to the right, trooping along with their long, long rows of reflected images keeping endless step.

And then suddenly, curving after the fourth turn, they came face to face with themselves: startled figures staring back out of a blank mirrored wall.

“No!” Will said fiercely, and heard his voice tremble as he saw Bran's head and shoulders droop in despair.

Bran said quietly, “Dead end.”

“But how could we have gone wrong?”

“Pity knows. But we did. I suppose we have to go back
and … start again.” Bran let his knees crumple, and sat down in a heap on the black glass floor.

Will looked at him in the mirror. “I don't believe it.”

“But there it is.”

“I mean, I don't believe we have to start again.”

“Oh yes we do.” Bran looked up bleakly at their reflected images: the blue sweater and jeans of the standing figure, the white head and dark glasses of the figure hunched on the floor. “Once this happened to us before, once a long time ago—finding a blank wall stopping us. But that was where your magic as an Old One could help. It can't here, can it?”

“No,” Will said. “No, not in the Lost Land.”

“Well then.”

“No,” Will said obstinately. He bit at a thumbnail, staring round at the blind mirrored walls that could give back nothing but what they were given to reflect, and that yet, somehow, seemed to hold within them a spacious world of their own. “No. There's something … there must be something we ought to be remembering….” He looked down at Bran, his eyes not quite seeing him. “Think, What has Gwion said to us in all the time since we first saw him, that seemed to be anything like a message? What has he
told
us to do?”

“Gwion? He told us to get into the coach….” Bran scrambled to his feet, his pale forehead furrowed, as he thought backwards. “He said he would meet us if we found our way—but that was the very last thing. Before that … there was something he said we should remember, you're right. What was it? Remember, he said, remember….”

Will stiffened. “Remember. The face of the man in the rainbow, and after that another thing, the writing on the fountain.
I think you should perhaps remember….”

Remembering, he stood very straight, stretching out both his arms stiff in front of him, and pointing all ten fingers at the mirrored glass wall that barred their way.

“I am the womb of every holt,”
he said, slowly and
clearly, in the words that they had read through the muffling grass on the mossy stone of the fountain in the park.

And above their heads on the glass, faintly and gradually, another single line of words began to glow, growing brighter and brighter until their brilliance flashed out dulling any other light around them. They had just time to look at the words and comprehend them:
I am the blaze on every hill.
And then the light grew for an instant intolerably strong so that they flinched away from it, and with a strange soft sound, like an explosion muffled by many miles' distance, all the glass walls enclosing them shattered and musically fell.

And they stood free, with the bright words hanging in the darkness before them, and the maze of mirrors gone as if it had never been there.

The blazing words faded from the air above Will's head, leaving the imprint of their brightness so that for a few moments the letters still hung ghostly across his vision. Beside him he heard Bran let out a long slow breath of relief.

Gwion's voice said warmly, from the shadows, “And you did find your way.”

Blinking, Will saw him standing before them, in a high vaulted hall whose white walls were hung with rich tapestries and brilliant paintings. He looked back. There, across the hall, was the great carved door which had slammed behind them when they had first found themselves in the maze. Of the maze itself there was no sign at all.

Bran said, with a quiver still in his voice, “Was it real?” Then he gave a small shaking laugh. “There's a silly question, now.”

Gwion came forward to them, smiling.
“Real
is a hard word,” he said. “Almost as hard as
true,
or
now….
Come. Now that you have proved yourselves by breaking the barrier of the City, I may set you on the way to the Castle.”

He pulled back a tapestry curtain on the wall, revealing the entrance to a narrow circular staircase. He beckoned, and in line they went up the stairs: Will followed Gwion's feet, quiet in their soft leather shoes; the stairs seemed to wind endlessly up and up, in curving sections. On and on they went, for so long a climb that his breath began to rasp and he felt they must be hundreds of feet into the sky.

Then Gwion said, “Hold a moment,” and paused. He took something from his pocket. It was a heavy iron key. In the dim light from one of the narrow opaque windows set into the staircase wall, Will saw that the top of the key was wrought into a decorative pattern: a circle, quartered by a cross. Will stared, motionless. Then he looked up and saw Gwion's dark eyes glittering enigmatically down at him.

“Ah, Old One,” Gwion said softly. “The Lost Land is full of signs from long ago, but few of its people now remember what the signs mean.”

He opened the small door barring their way, and suddenly sunlight was pouring down on them, washing away the last oppressive memories of the mirrored maze.

Will and Bran came out with their faces up to the blue sky as if they were prisoners emerging from jail. They found themselves behind a balustrade of wrought gold, looking out over the gold and glittering roofs of the City and the mounded green sweep of the park, just as they had done in the very beginning—but from a greater height than before. In a moment or two they saw that the balcony on which they stood was the lower rim of a great curving white and golden roof—and they realized that it was this, the palace of King Gwyddno, the Empty Palace of the Lost Land, which was topped by the marvelous dome, banded in crystal and gold, that they had first seen glittering in the dawn. Craning his neck, Will thought he could just make out the very top where the golden arrow pointed to the western sea.

Gwion came and stood at their backs, pointing in the same direction. Will noticed a ring on his fourth finger, with a dark stone carved into the shape of a leaping fish.

Out along the line of his arm, they saw the roofs of the City end, giving way to a green-gold patchwork of fields stretching into a haze of heat. Far, far away in the distance through the haze Will thought he could see dark trees, with behind them the purple sweep of mountains and the long glimmer of the sea, but he could not be sure. Only one thing out there seemed distinct: a glowing pencil of light rising out
of the hazy green blur where the Lost Land seemed to meet the sea.

“Look at that,” Bran said. For a moment his hand hovered in the air beside Gwion's, its fingers looking milky-pale and very young beside the lean brown hand with its dark ring. “That, there—we saw it from the mountain, Will, remember? Above Cwm Maethlon.” He glanced ruefully at Will. “Another world, isn't it? D'you know, I had completely forgotten them? D'you think they are all right?”

“I think so,” Will said slowly. He was staring out still at the hazed horizon, but not seeing it: lost in a concern that had been flickering through his mind since first they came to the Lost Land. “I wish I knew. And I wish I knew where Merriman is. I can't … reach him, Bran. I can't reach him, I can't hear him. Even though I think he meant to be with us, here.”

“So he did, Old One,” Gwion said unexpectedly. “But the enchantment of the Lost Land keeps him away, if he has missed the only moment for breaking it.”

Will turned sharply to him, a deep instinct stirring. “You know him, don't you? Some time a long way back, you have been close to Merriman.”

“Very close,” Gwion said, with an ache of affection deep in the words. “And one thing I am permitted to say to you, now that you have spoken of him to me. He should have been here to join you, in this palace. But I am beginning to fear that in some way the Dark has held him back, in that other world of yours. And if now he has lost the moment for entering the Lost Land, he cannot now come.”

Will said, “Not at all?”

“No,” Gwion said.

Will suddenly realised how much he had been hoping for Merriman's strong presence to be there, soon, soon, as a support. He swallowed down panic, and looked at Bran.

“Then we have nothing but what the Lady said. That we shall find the crystal sword in the glass tower, among the seven trees, where the—the horn will stop the wheel.”

Bran said, “And a white bone will prevent us, and a flying may-tree will save us. Whatever that may mean.”

“The glass tower,” Will said again. His eyes went back to the gleaming pencil on the horizon.

Gwion said, “That is Caer Wydyr, out there where you are looking. The Castle of the Lost Land, with its glass tower. Where my master sits, wrapped in a deathly melancholy that none can take away.” His voice was bleak and sad.

Will said hesitantly, “May we know more than that?”

“Oh yes,” Gwion said sombrely. “There are things I must tell you, of the Land and of the sword, for Merlion's sake. As much as I can.” He came to the edge of the golden balustrade and gripped its rim with both hands, looking out over the city. His beard jutted, and the strong nose was outlined against the sky; he looked like a profiled head from a coin.

He said, “The Land is neither of the Dark nor the Light, nor ever was. Its enchantment was of a separate kind, the magic of the mind and the hand and the eye, that owes no allegiance because it is neither good nor bad. It has no more to do with the behaviour of men, or the great absolutes of the Light and the Dark, than does the blossom of a rose or the curving leap of a fish. Yet our craftsmen, the greatest ever in Time or out of it, did not … care to work for the Dark. They did their most marvellous work for the Lords of the Light. They wove tapestries, carved thrones and chests, forged candlesticks of silver and gold. They wrought four of the six great Signs of the Light.”

Will looked up quickly.

Gwion smiled at him. “Ah, Sign-seeker,” he said gently. “Long long ago in the Lost Land, forgotten by all its people now, there was the beginning of that gold-linked chain of yours, iron and bronze and water and fire…. And at the last, a craftsman of this land made the great sword Eirias for the Light.”

Bran said, tense, “Who made it?”

“It was made by one who was close to the Light,” Gwion said, “but who was neither a Lord of the Light nor one of the Old Ones—there are none such, bred in this land…. He was the only one who had the skill to make so great a wonder. Even here, where many are skilled. A great craftsman, unparallelled.” He spoke with a slow reverence, shaking his head in wonder, remembering. “But the Riders of the Dark, they could roam freely through the land, since we had neither desire nor reason to keep any creature out—and when they heard that the Light had asked for the sword, they demanded that it should not be made. They knew, of course, that words already long written foretold the use of Eirias, once it was forged, for the vanquishing of the Dark.”