Silver on the Tree (30 page)

“I know,” Merriman said. He smiled proudly. “I know. Rest now a little, and wait. And—do not show surprise at meeting anyone on this train. No matter who it may be.”

Before they could wonder what he might mean, a figure stopped in the corridor outside their compartment. The windowed door slid open, and John Rowlands stood there, swaying with the motion of the train. He looked spruce and unfamiliar in a dark and rather baggy suit; he was staring at them in amazement.

“Good day, John Rowlands,” Merriman said.

“Well fancy that now,” John Rowlands said blankly. He smiled slowly at Jane and Simon, and nodded; then he looked at Merriman, a strange look, wary and puzzled. “Funny places we do meet in,” he said.

Merriman gave an amiable shrug.

“Where are you going, Mr. Rowlands?” Jane said.

John Rowlands grimaced. “Shrewsbury, to the dentist. And for Blod to do a bit of shopping.”

The train's whistle shrieked, and another small station
flashed by. They were deep in the hills now, travelling through cuttings, with little to be seen outside the windows but high grassy banks blurred by speed. In the train corridor someone approached John Rowlands; he straightened, standing back.

Simon said politely, “Hallo, Mrs. Rowlands.”

Jane heard the warm Welsh voice.

“Well here is a nice surprise then! I wondered who John was talking to. Not having seen anyone we knew get on the train at Tywyn.”

There was a faint question in the words, but Simon rode over it.

“Isn't it a marvelous train? Steam!”

“Just like in the old days,” John Rowlands said. “Must be some sort of anniversary, revival, whatever. I thought I was back thirty years when she came into the station.”

“Won't you come and sit in here with us, Mrs. Rowlands?” Jane said.

“That would be very nice.” Smiling, Blodwen Rowlands moved into the doorway, so that she could see Jane; her eyes flickered past to Merriman.

“Oh,” said Jane. “Mrs. Rowlands—this is our great-uncle, Professor Lyon.”

“Sut 'dach chi?”
said Merriman's deep voice, expressionless.

“How do you do?” said Blodwen Rowlands, nodding, still smiling. She added, to Jane, “I will just get my bag,” and disappeared along the corridor.

“I didn't know you spoke Welsh,” Simon said.

“On occasion,” Merriman said.

“Like a native,” said John Rowlands. He came into the compartment and sat down next to Simon. Two figures passed in the corridor, then another, without looking in.

“Is the train full?” Jane said, looking after the last retreating back.

“Filling up,” Merriman said.

Mrs. Rowlands came back with her handbag and hesitated in the doorway.

“Would you like the corner?” said Jane automatically, moving up the seat towards Merriman.

“Thank you, my dear.” Blodwen Rowlands gave her the astonishing smile that made her face glow with warmth, and sat down next to her. “And where are you all going?” she said.

Jane looked into her eyes, so friendly and close, and paused. A great sense of strangeness swept over her; there seemed to be no light in Blodwen Rowlands' eyes, as if they were not rounded but flat. She thought:
Don't be silly;
blinked, looked away and said, “Great-Uncle Merry's taking us out for the day.”

“To the Marches,” Merriman said in the deep unemotional voice he used for strangers. “The Border country. Where all the battles so often began.”

Blodwen Rowlands took some knitting from her bag, a bright red bundle, and said, “Very nice.”

The train swayed and sang. A large man passed slowly in the corridor, paused, looked in, and gave a courteous half-bow towards Merriman. They all stared at him. He had indeed a striking appearance; his skin was very black and his thick hair snow-white. Merriman inclined his head gravely in return, and the man moved away. Jane became conscious of a rapid clicking sound; Mrs. Rowlands had started knitting very fast.

Simon said in a fascinated hiss, “Who was that?”

“An acquaintance of mine,” Merriman said.

Down the corridor in the same direction, limping, leaning on a stick, came an elderly lady in an elegant but old-fashioned coat, with a toque-like hat set at a dashing angle on her head and a certain wild wispiness about her pinned-up grey hair. She nodded in at Merriman. “Good day, Lyon,” she said, in a resonant, imperious voice.

Merriman said gravely, “Good day, madam,” and the lady's sharp eyes flickered over them all and then she was gone.

Four small boys ran past, laughing, clattering, boisterous.

“What weird clothes!” said Jane with interest, leaning to peer after them. “Sort of tunics.”

The train swayed and lurched, roaring round a bend, and she sat back again rather suddenly.

Simon said thoughtfully, “Some kind of uniform, maybe.”

Mrs. Rowlands took out a second ball of wool from her bag, yellow, and began knitting it together with the red.

“A busy train,” John Rowlands said. “If there were more like this they might not be talking about closing the line.”

Simon stood up, steadying himself against the door jamb. “Excuse me a moment.”

“Certainly,” Merriman said. He began an amiable conversation with John Rowlands about the necessity for railway services, while Mrs. Rowlands listened, rapidly knitting, and Jane watched the purple-brown sweep of the mountains and the close grassy banks alternately flashing by. Simon disappeared for a long time, then stuck his head in the door.

“Show you something,” he said casually to Jane.

She went out with him; he closed the door and drew her to the end of the corridor, where a locked door ended the coach.

“This is the front end of the train,” Simon said in a peculiar voice. “There's nothing this side of our compartment.”

“So?” said Jane.

“So if you think about all those people who've been coming past—”

Jane gasped; it came out as a sort of hiccup. “They came from this end! All of them! But they couldn't have!”

“But they did,” Simon said. “And I bet you there'll be more after we go back. The train's pretty full already, as far as I went. With the most peculiar mixture of people, in all different clothes. All kinds and colours and shapes. It's like the United Nations.”

They looked at one another.

Jane said slowly, “Better go back, I suppose.”

“Look normal,” Simon said. “Concentrate.”

Jane was trying so hard to concentrate that she went past
the door of their compartment to the next. A man sitting in the corner there facing her looked up as she approached, and smiled through the window a sudden warm broad smile of recognition. He was an oldish man with a round, weather-beaten face and wiry grey eyebrows; his hair fluffed out in a grey tonsure round a bald head.

“Captain Toms!” Jane said joyfully, and then she blinked, or the air seemed to blink, and there was no one there.

“What?” Simon said.

“I thought—” Jane said. “I thought I saw someone we used to know.” She looked hard at the empty seat; there was nobody in the compartment at all. “But—I didn't.”

“Normal, now,” Simon said. He opened the sliding door of their own compartment and they went back in.

They sat in silence, while voices eddied round them and Mrs. Rowlands' needles furiously clicked. Jane leaned her head back, looking out of the window, letting the rhythm of the wheels carry her mind. They clattered and clacked, merging with the needles' sound; with a twitch of nightmare she felt they were chattering:
into the dark, into the dark, into the dark—

Then all at once Jane's mouth was dry, and her fingers clutched at the seat. Like a mist she could see in the fields outside a group of horsemen riding, galloping, leaping hedges, and though the train was rushing at full speed, yet they were riding as fast as the train….

In troops and streams they rode, some all in black and some in white. And as the massing grey clouds came rolling in from the west the horsemen were galloping now through the clouds, through the sky, as if the clouds were great grey mountains and hills.

Wide-eyed, Jane hardly dared move. She edged one hand along the seat towards Merriman, and before it reached him his own strong hand was holding hers for a moment.

“Don't be afraid, Jane,” he said in her ear. “This is the Rising, yes, the last pursuit. And the danger will grow now.
But they will not touch this time-train of ours, for we carry on it something of their own.”

The train, thundering, rocked furiously along the track. The compartment grew dim as the sky outside darkened with cloud and rushing figures; the rhythm of Mrs. Rowlands' busy needles faltered, and Jane saw the bright colours waver as her fingers slowed. The sound of the train began to change; the beat of its wheels fell off, the pitch of its fast song dropped; there was a sharp muffled report under the wheels somewhere a little way ahead, and then another, and the train began gradually to slow down.

“Maroons!” John Rowlands said in astonishment. “The old maroons going off, that they used to put on the track for fog warnings.” He looked out of the window. “And indeed that sky is so grey it might well be fog, now.”

The brakes skirled at the train's wheels; the flying landscape slowed, and suddenly the whirling riders were lost in the cloud; grey cloud was everywhere, and swirling mist. Hissing, rattling, the train slowed to a crawl, and all at once a little station was slipping up to them outside the windows. Simon jumped up, pulling Jane out into the corridor; they peered out. The station seemed to be a single platform in the middle of nowhere, without a name, and only a single arch-like structure indefinite in the mist. Beyond, dimly visible through a gap in the cloud, a long hill rose on the horizon ahead. Then slowly, gradually, three vague forms emerged from the arch.

Simon stared at them. “Quick! Jane, open the door!” He lunged past her and turned the long handle, thrusting the door outward, reaching down. And Bran and Will and Barney climbed into the train.

“Oh!”
Jane said, quite unable to say anything else, and she gave Barney a quick hard hug, and to her surprise Barney hugged her back. The train began to move. In clouds and swirls the mist came swooping round the platform and the dim arch, as if all were dissolving into emptiness, and from the compartment behind them Blodwen
Rowlands' musical voice said in pleasure, “Well Bran,
cariad,
how lovely! Are the trials in Shrewsbury, then? John never said—”

“I was telling Blodwen yesterday,” John Rowlands' deep careful voice broke in, before Bran could speak, “about you boys going to help Idris Jones Ty-Bont with getting the sheep to the sheepdog trials. His turn to supply them for the heats, it is, having no dogs of his own entered this year. I think he is chairman, isn't it, Bran?”

“Yes,” Bran said smoothly, as they crowded into the compartment. “And we had to pick up a few more sheep out here, so no more room for us on the lorry, and Mr. Jones put us on the train. A surprise to see you, now.”

“And the little one going too, now there's fun for him,” said Mrs. Rowlands, smiling at Barney as if it were the most natural thing in the world for him to be helping herd sheep.

Barney smiled dutifully back, said nothing, but slid into the space beside Simon. The train swayed and sang, rushing at full speed again; the mass of the long low hill was rising ahead now like a wall. The grey clouds swept overhead. Hollow-throated, Jane saw the riders again, crowds and streams of them, flying through the sky. Panic gripped her; where were they riding to, where was the train rushing, where—?

“Sit by me, lovey,” said Mrs. Rowlands to Bran, an affectionate tug at his arm bringing him down abruptly to the seat between her and Jane. Hastily making room, Jane wondered if the sword were still in the scabbard unseen at Bran's side.

Will stood swaying in the doorway, one hand at either side of the door-frame. He said, looking at Merriman as if at a stranger, “Many people on the train?”

“It is really quite full,” said Merriman with the same stiff politeness.

And suddenly the engine gave a great shriek, and the train dived under the hill. In one gulp a tunnel swallowed it, and darkness was all around, a low roaring close in their ears, the sulphurous train-smell filling the air they breathed.
Jane had a quick glimpse of apprehension on Mrs. Rowlands' pleasant face. Then she forgot it in the overwhelmingly vivid sense of the way they were driving into the earth, through the mountain, under tons and fathoms of rock, as the train's track carried them inexorably on.

Gradually she began to feel that they were no longer in a train at all, that the bounds of the small boxlike room in which they sat were beginning to fade. Everyone was there still; the figures sitting, and Will surveying them from what had been the doorway; but now a strange glow had begun all around them, as if it were their speed made visible, as if the glow itself were whirling them along. She felt that they were rushing through the earth, riding on some power of their own, and a great company of people with them, all flying helter-skelter eastward. The glow of light around them grew and grew, became bright; they were contained in brightness, as if they rode on a river of light.

Jane saw wonder and incomprehension on John Rowlands' strong weather-lined face. Blodwen Rowlands gave a sudden whimper of fear; she scrambled to her feet, dropping her knitting on the floor, and lurched over to sit by his side. Rowlands put a comforting arm around her, the support of long affection. “There now,
cariad,”
he said. “There now, don't be afraid. Just rest easy, and trust them. Will's Mr. Merriman will keep us out of harm.”

But both Will and Merriman now, Jane saw in astonishment, were on their feet and standing before Blodwen Rowlands; both motionless, yet giving an impression of immense silent menace, the menace of accusation. Behind them, Bran stood up slowly, and with the same curious play-acting gesture that Jane remembered from the beach, he drew the invisible sword from the invisible scabbard at his side. And suddenly the sword was there, terrible, naked, gleaming, and the length of its crystal blade was flickering with blue fire.