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A light breeze stirred the leaves of the great beeches that stood guard at the wood’s edge. Away across the valley the sun was rising, its low rays casting gold over the tops of the trees.
A hundred years and more had changed England almost beyond imagining, but this place was surely timeless. Apart from the whispering wind—a constant presence, this high up and on the exposed side of the wood—and the distant sound of a cock crowing, it was entirely still and entirely silent. Indeed, the man stood so unmoving, and blended into his background so well, that anyone who chanced to walk up through the meadow that morning could easily have passed by without seeing him at all.
He might have been a farmer, or a gamekeeper—in any case, he was of a type peculiar to the countryside; he wore a faded green jacket, corduroy trousers and wellington boots, and leaned slightly upon a walking stick. His age, to look at him at least, might have been anything between thirty and sixty. Standing at the highest point of the hill, beneath the spreading boughs of the old beeches, gazing towards the far side of the valley with an expression at once calm and alert, he looked as though he was waiting for something. Miss Willowes, who lived down in the village, was in the habit of walking up through this wood of a morning, and on occasion this man would have a pleasant chat with her here; but this morning she was asleep in her bed, and the patient watcher did not expect anyone to disturb the meeting he anticipated.
Presently a figure appeared over the crest of the hill, keeping a steady pace through the waving grass and tall flowers. His clothes were of a similar style to the first man’s, but they were in rather better condition and were entirely black in colour. His long hair was just as black, and he carried his coat over one shoulder so that it trailed behind him as he walked; the general impression was of a great black bird beating its wings ponderously over the meadow. When he reached the edge of the wood he turned and looked back, regarding the view across the valley with a look as of quiet satisfaction.
‘A fine country,’ he said, apparently addressing no one in particular. The gamekeeper, if that was what he was, stood a few yards away, but neither of them had acknowledged the other.
‘I didn’t think you would turn up here, you know,’ the gamekeeper said after a while. ‘You have come down from the north for a holiday?’
‘Something like that,’ the other said. His accent was indeed northern, though of a strange sort—it sounded, somehow, a little out of place in the twentieth century.
This might have been thought a strange way to begin a conversation, but perhaps it was not so strange with them. Old allies have, after all, less need of the diplomatic forms to which they might have kept in earlier times, and these two were old allies indeed. ‘Of course,’ the man in green said at last, ‘I don’t imagine you’ve been spending very much time there of late. It has been more than a hundred years since I have heard anything of you—anything more than unfounded speculation, that is.’
Now the man in black looked at him, rather sharply. ‘I have my duties,’ he said, ‘and I do not neglect them, even now.’
‘I wasn’t suggesting it.’
‘In any case, England has its magicians—and it has you, I hope.’
The gamekeeper laughed. ‘I have my own kingdom to rule as well; you know that.’
‘And you take its subjects from here, do you not? You were always more thorough than the fairies.’
‘Perhaps. But it’s been as you said; they have been quieter here of late. I hardly have to do anything to keep the land safe against your old enemies. As for’—here he spoke a word, evidently a name, in another language—‘your man seems to be keeping order well enough there; he is almost as successful as you were. I have to say I am surprised at how well things seem to have turned out for you.’
‘Is it so surprising that my plans for England have gone as I said they would? A king has obligations to his people.’ After a moment he added, ‘You have no such duty, however—and yet you agreed to it.’
The sun had risen clear of the distant hills, and the stronger light of a summer’s day was on the valley. The lazy heads of vetch and cranesbill nodded back and forth at their feet in the breeze.
Eventually the man in green replied, ‘I have my place, as you have yours. As for why I agreed to it… I think it was because England is stronger than you know. You can set all the doors open and vanish into the rain, but they will keep finding ways to close them again, no matter how much magic you leave behind you in the ground—’
‘You think I do not know that?’ His tone was still mild.
‘I think,’ said the huntsman, ‘that you have not been here for more than a hundred years. And never mind what words you leave them, what magic written against the sky, they would all be shut away from them in the end…’ Here he glanced over at the other man as if to assess his reaction (his expression was as inscrutable as it generally was), and then finished, ‘…but for me.’
More silence. After some moments the huntsman went on, in a conversational tone, ‘There’s a woman down in the village whose people—well, I won’t subject you to the whole story of what they did to her, but the Willoweses are as keen on magic as most people are these days. England always stands ready to help such as them. But she is mine now.’
The man in black listened to this in a steady silence, and when he replied it was with his customary quiet manner. ‘You are more benevolent than I ever knew you before; such concern for the poor people! But I think that a hundred years have made you too complacent. This land is not yours, and there is more in it than you know. You would do well to remember that.’
The huntsman gave him a rather mocking smile. ‘I’m not so pure-hearted as all that,’ he said, ‘and you cannot throw open all the doors as easily as you would like, King. I think that was why you left the first time. But you can’t cast the whole thing down, not from that throne. You need me, and England always will. Ever since the dark tower upon my borders…’
The king—we may as well give him his proper title also—met the other’s smile with another unreadable look. ‘So that was it?’ he said. ‘I thought it was something of the sort, when you first came here. You have found a good way of getting your prey. I congratulate you. In the meantime, I think you had better stop thinking so much of my motives. I gave you a task to carry out in my absence; you have carried it out, and will keep doing so; let that be an end of it.’
By now the sun had fully risen. It was going to be a hot day, though here up on the hillside the constant breeze would afford a little relief. Perhaps in the afternoon some villager would wander up here with a packed lunch, in search of rest and solitude; it would be hard to find a better spot for it.
‘You don’t think of returning to Agrace in any hurry, I suppose?’ the man in green said, after a while. ‘It’s getting dreadfully bleak and dusty without you. I shall have to find a new tenant, if this goes on for many more hundreds of years.’
If he was hoping to draw out from his companion any information as to where he had been since they had last met, he was unsuccessful. ’Perhaps,’ said the man in black. ‘Perhaps I shall see you there. Is this Miss Willowes of yours a good magician?’
‘Oh, I think so. She doesn’t interest herself very much in the showy sorts of magic anymore, but she understands how to speak to the land. Very much your sort of thing; you’d like her, I think, but of course you shan’t stop here to meet her.’
‘That is gratifying.’
They spoke for a few more minutes of such trivial matters. Then the man in green said that he had better be going about his work, and the man in black smiled and bade him goodbye, and they walked away in opposite directions, the king striding back across the meadow whence he had come, the huntsman turning and disappearing into the woods.