The Hollow Hills - Mary Stewart [146]
"Cabal! Cabal!"
The call echoed loudly across the water, swam up the high crags, and died. There was no sign of either hound or stag. He bent to his oars again, sending the light boat leaping through the water.
Its bottom grated on shingle. He jumped out. He pulled it up and trod up through the narrow verge of grass. The light was stronger now as the sun rose higher, reflecting from white mist and white water. Over the shore the boughs of birch and rowan reached low, still heavy with moisture. The rowan berries were red as flame, and glossy. The turf was powdered with daisies and speedwell and small yellow pimpernel. Late foxgloves crowded down the banks, their spires thrusting through the trails of blackberry. Meadowsweet, rusting over with autumn, filled the air with its thick honey-scent.
The boy thrust the hanging boughs aside, plunged through the bramble trails, and stood squarely on the flowery turf, narrowing his eyes at the crags above him. He called again, and again the sound echoed away emptily, and died. The mist was lifting faster now, rolling upwards towards the tops, showing the lower reaches of rock bathed in a clear but swimming light. Suddenly he stiffened, gazing upwards. Midway up the crags, along what looked no more than a seam in the rock, the white stag cantered easily, light as a drift of the mist that wreathed away to air below it.
Arthur ran forward up the slope. His footsteps on the thick turf made no sound. He brushed waist-high through brakes of yellowing fern, sending the bright drops scattering, and came out at the foot of the cliff.
He paused again, looking about him. He seemed held by the same awe that had touched him earlier. He looked, not afraid, but as a man looks who knows that by a movement he may start something of which he cannot see the end. He craned his neck, searching the towering crags above him. There was no sign of the white stag, but the rocks looked more than ever like a castle crowned with the sun.
He took a breath, shaking his head as if he came out of water, then he spoke again, but quietly. "Cabal? Cabal?"
From somewhere very near him, bursting the awed silence, came the baying of the hound. There was something in it of excitement, something of fear. It came from the cliff. The boy looked round him, sharply. Then, behind the green curtain of the trees, he saw the cave. As he started forward Cabal bayed again, not in fear or pain, but like a beast questing.
With no more hesitation, Arthur plunged into the darkness of the cave.
***
He could never say afterwards how he found his way. I think he must have picked up the torch and flint I had left there, and lit it, but he remembers nothing of that. Perhaps what he does remember is the truth: there seemed, he said, to be everywhere some faintly diffused and swimming light, as if reflected from the burnished surface of the pool deep in the pillared cave.
There, beyond the shining pool, the sword lay on its table. From the rock above a trickle of water had run and dripped, the lime on it hardening through the years until the oiled leather of the wrappings, though proof enough to keep the metal bright, had hardened under the dripping till it felt like stone. In this the thing had rested, the crust of lime forming to hide all but its shape, the long slenderness of the weapon and the hilt formed like a cross.
It still looked like a sword, but a stone one, some random accident of dripping limestone. Perhaps he remembered the other hilt he had grasped in the Green Chapel, or perhaps for a moment he, too, saw the future break open in front of him. With an action too quick for thought, and too instinctive to prevent, he laid his hand to the hilt.
***
He spoke to me, as if I stood beside him. Indeed, I suppose I was as near to him, and as real, as the white hound that crouched, whining at the pool's edge.
"I pulled at it, and it came clear of the stone. It is the most beautiful sword in the world. I shall call it Caliburn."
***
The mist had gone from the forest now, sucked up by the sun. But it still