Free The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper Page A

Lane, and beyond it, a little way up the road, a glimpse of his own house. The Manor railings were before them, somewhat shortened by the deep snow; Merriman stepped stiff-legged over, Will crept through his usual gap, and they were standing on the snow-banked road.
    Merriman put back his hood again, and lifted his white-maned head as if to sniff the air of this newer century. “You see, Will,” he said, “we of the Circle are planted only loosely within Time. The doors are a way through it, in any direction we may choose. For all times co-exist, and the future can sometimes affect the past, even though the past is a road that leads to the future. . . . But men cannot understand this. Nor will you for a while yet. We can travel through the years in other ways too — one of them was used this morning to bring you back through five centuries or so. That is where you were — in the time of the Royal Forests, that stretched over all the southern partof this land from Southampton Water up to the valley of the Thames here.”
    He pointed across the road to the flat horizon, and Will remembered how he had seen the Thames twice that morning: once among its familiar fields, once buried instead among trees. He stared at the intensity of remembering on Merriman’s face.
    â€œFive hundred years ago,” Merriman said, “the kings of England chose deliberately to preserve those forests, swallowing up whole villages and hamlets inside them, so that the wild things, the deer and the boars and even the wolves, might breed there for the hunt. But forests are not biddable places, and the kings were without knowing it establishing a haven too for the powers of the Dark, which might otherwise have been driven back then to the mountains and remotenesses of the North. . . . So that is where you were until now, Will. In the forest of Anderida, as they used to call it. In the long-gone past. You were there in the beginning of the day, walking through the forest in the snow; there on the empty hillside of the Chilterns; still there when you had first walked through the doors — that was a symbol, your first walking, for your birthday as one of the Old Ones. And there, in that past, is where we left the Lady. I wish that I knew where and when we shall see her again. But come she will, when she can.” He shrugged, as if to shake away the heaviness again. “And now you can go home, for you are in your own world.”
    â€œAnd you are in it too,” said Will.
    Merriman smiled. “Back again. With mixed feelings.”
    â€œWhere will you go?”
    â€œAbout and roundabout. I have a place in this present time, just as you do. Go home now, Will. The next stage in the quest depends on the Walker, and he will find you. And when his circle is on your belt beside the first, I shall come.”
    â€œBut —” Will suddenly wanted to clutch at him, to beg him not to go away. His home no longer seemed quite the unassailable fortress it had always been.
    â€œYou will be all right,” Merriman said gently. “Take things as they come. Remember that the power protects you. Do nothing rash to draw trouble towards you, and all will be well. And we shall meet soon, I promise you.”
    â€œAll right,” Will said uncertainly.
    An odd gust of wind eddied round them, in the still morning, and gobbets of snow spattered down from the roadside trees. Merriman drew his cloak around him, its bottom edge swirling a pattern in the snow; he gave Will one sharp look, of warning and encouragement mixed, pulled his hood forward over his face, and strode off down the road without a word. He disappeared round the bend beside Rooks Wood, on the way to Dawsons’ Farm.
    Will took a deep breath, and ran home. The lane was silent in the deep snow and the grey morning; no birds moved or chirped; nothing stirred anywhere. The house too was utterly quiet. He shed his outdoor clothes, went up the silent