The Grey King Read online

  Behind him, a deep voice chuckled. Will’s attention was caught by a face he had not seen before.

  “Will, this is John Rowlands. The best man with sheep in Wales.”

  “And with the harp, too,” Aunt Jen said.

  It was a lean face, with cheekbones carved high in it, and many lines everywhere, creased upward now round the eyes by smiling. Dark eyes, brown as coffee; thinning dark hair, streaked with grey at the sides; the well-shaped, modelled mouth of the Celt. For a moment Will stared, fascinated; there was a curious indefinable strength in this John Rowlands, even though he was not at all a big man.

  “Croeso, Will,” said John Rowlands. “Welcome to Clwyd. I heard about you from your sister, last spring.”

  “Good heavens,” said Will in unthinking astonishment, and everyone laughed.

  “Nothing bad,” Rowlands said, smiling. “How is Mary?”

  “She’s fine,” Will said. “She said she had a marvellous time here, last Easter. I was away too, then. In Cornwall.”

  He fell silent for a moment, his face suddenly abstracted and blank; John Rowlands looked at him swiftly, then sat down at the table where Rhys was already poised over bacon and eggs. Will’s uncle came in, carrying a batch of papers.

  “Cwpanaid o de, cariad?” said Aunt Jen, when she saw him.

  “Diolch yn fawr,” said David Evans, taking the cup of tea she held out to him. “And then I must be off to Tywyn. You want to come, Will?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “We may be a couple of hours.” The sound of his words was very precise always; he was a small, neatly-made man, sharp-featured, but with an unexpectedly vague, reflective look sometimes in his dark eyes. “I have to go to the bank, and to see Llew Thomas, and there will be the new tyre for the Land-Rover. The car that jumped up in the air and got itself a puncture.”

  Rhys, with his mouth full, made a strangled noise of protest. “Now, Da,” he said, swallowing. “I know how it sounded, but really I am not mad, there was nothing that could have made her swerve over to the side like that and hit the rock. Unless the steering rod is going.”

  “There is nothing wrong with the steering of that car,” David Evans said.

  “Well, then!” Rhys was all elbows and indignation. “I tell you she just lurched over for no reason at all. Ask Will.”

  “It’s true,” Will said. “The car did just sort of jump sideways and hit that rock. I don’t see what could have made it jump, unless it had run over a loose stone in the road—but that would have had to be a pretty big stone. And there was no sign of one anywhere.”

  “Great allies, you two, already, I can see,” said his uncle. He drained his teacup, gazing at them over the top; Will was not sure whether or not he was laughing at them. “Well, well, I will have the steering checked anyway. John, Rhys, now that extra fencing for the fridd—”

  They slid into Welsh, unthinking. It did not bother Will. He was occupied in trying to scorn away a small voice at the back of his mind, an irrational small voice with an irrational suggestion. “If they want to know what made the car jump,” this part of his mind was whispering at him, “why don’t they ask Caradog Prichard?”

  David Evans dropped Will at a small newsagent’s shop, where he could buy postcards, and chugged off to leave the Land-Rover at a garage. Will bought a card showing a sinister dark lake surrounded by very Welsh-looking mountains, wrote on it “I GOT HERE! Everyone sends their love,” and sent it off to his mother from the Post Office, a solemn and unmistakable red brick building on a corner of Tywyn High Street. Then he looked about him, wondering where to go next.

  Choosing at random, hoping to see the sea, he turned right up the narrow curving High Street. Before long he found that there would be no sea this way: nor anything but shops, houses, a cinema with an imposing Victorian front grandly labelled ASSEMBLY ROOMS, and the slate-roofed lychgate of a church.

  Will liked investigating churches; before his illness had overtaken him, he and two friends from school had been cycling all round the Thames Valley to make brass rubbings. He turned into the little churchyard, to see if there might be any brasses here.

  The church porch was low-roofed, deep as a cave; inside, the church was shadowy and cool, with sturdy white painted walls and massive white pillars. Nobody was there. Will found no brasses for rubbing, but only monuments to unpronounceable benefactors, like Gruffydd ap Adda of Ynysy-maengwyn Hall. At the rear of the church, on his way out, he noticed a strange long grey stone set up on end, incised with marks too ancient for him to decipher. He stared at it for a long moment; it seemed like an omen of some kind, though of what significance he had not the least idea. And then, in the porch on his way out, he glanced idly up at the notice-board with its scattering of parish news, and he saw the name: Church of St. Cadfan.

  The whirling came again in his ears like the wind; staggering, he collapsed onto the low bench in the porch. His mind spun, he was back suddenly in the roaring confusion of his illness, when he had known that something, something most precious, had slipped or been taken away from his memory. Words flickered through his consciousness, without order or meaning, and then a phrase surfaced like a leaping fish: “On Cadfan’s Way where the kestrels call . . .” His mind seized it greedily, reaching for more. But there was no more. The roaring died away; Will opened his eyes, breathing more steadily, the giddiness draining gradually out of him. He said softly, aloud, “On Cadfan’s Way where the kestrels call . . . On Cadfan’s Way . . .” Outside in the sunshine the grey slate tombstones and green grass glimmered, with jewel-glints of light here and there from droplets of rain still clinging to the longest stems from the day before. Will thought, “On the day of the dead . . . the Grey King. . . there must have been some sort of warning about the Grey King . . . and what is Cadfan’s Way?”

  “Oh,” he said aloud in sudden fury, “if only I could remember!”

  He jumped up and went back to the newsagent’s shop. “Please,” he said, “is there a guide to the church, or to the town?”

  “Nothing on Tywyn,” said the red-cheeked girl of the shop, in her sibilant Welsh lilt. “Too late in the season, you are . . . but Mr. Owen has a leaflet for sale in the church, I think. And there is this, if you like. Full of lovely walks.” She showed him a Guide to North Wales, for thirty-five pence.

  “Well,” said Will, counting out his money rather reluctantly. “I can always take it home afterwards, I suppose.”

  “It would make a very nice present,” said the girl earnestly. “Got some beautiful pictures, it has. And just look at the cover!”

  “Thank you,” said Will.

  When he peered at the little book, outside, it told him that the Saxons had settled Tywyn in 516 A.D., round the church built by St. Cadfan of Brittany and his holy well, and that the inscribed stone in the church was said to be the oldest piece of written Welsh in existence, and could be translated: “The body of Cyngen is on the side between where the marks will be. In the retreat beneath the mound is extended Cadfan, sad that it should enclose the praise of the earth. May he rest without blemish.” But it said not a word about Cadfan’s Way. Nor, when he checked, did the leaflet in the church.

  Will thought: It is not Cadfan I want, it is his Way. A way is a road. A way where the kestrels call must be a road over a moor, or a mountain.

  It pushed even the seashore out of his mind, when later he walked absentmindedly for a while among the breakwaters of the windy beach. When he met his uncle for the ride back to the farm, he found no help there either.

  “Cadfan’s Way?” said David Evans. “You pronounce it Cadvan, by the way; one f is always a v sound in Welsh . . . Cadfan’s Way. . . . No. It does sound a bit familiar, you know. But I couldn’t tell you, Will. John Rowlands is the one to ask about things like that. He has a mind like an encyclopedia, does John, full of the old things.”

  John Rowlands was out somewhere on the farm, busy, so for the time being Will had to content himself with a much-folded map. He
went out with it that afternoon, alone in the sunlit valley, to walk the boundaries of the farm; his uncle had roughly pencilled them in for him. Clwyd was a lowland farm, stretching across most of the valley of the Dysynni River; some of its land was marshy, near the river, and some stretched up the soaring scree-patched side of the mountain, green and grey and bracken-brown. But most was lush green valley land, fertile and friendly, part of it left new-ploughed since the harvest of this year’s crops, and all the rest serving as pasture for square, sturdy Welsh Black cattle. On the mountain land, only sheep grazed. Some of the lower slopes had been ploughed, though even they looked so steep to Will that he wondered how a tractor ploughing them could have kept from rolling over. Above those, nothing grew but bracken, groups of wind-warped scrubby trees, and grass; the mountain reared up to the sky, and the deep aimless call of a sheep came now and then floating down into the still, warm afternoon.

  It was by another sound that he found John Rowlands, unexpectedly. As he was walking through one of the Clwyd fields towards the river, with a high wild hedge on one side of him and the dark ploughed soil on the other, he heard a dull, muffled thudding somewhere ahead. Then suddenly at a curve in the field he saw the figure, moving steadily and rhythmically as if in a slow, deliberate dance. He stopped and watched, fascinated. Rowlands, his shirt half-open and a red kerchief tied round his neck, was making a transformation. He moved gradually along the hedge, first chopping carefully here and there with a murderous tool like a cross between an axe and a pirate’s cutlass, then setting this down and hauling and interweaving whatever remained of the long, rank growth. Before him, the hedge grew wild and high, great arms groping out uncontrolled in all directions as the hazel and hawthorn did their best to grow into full-fledged trees. Behind him, as he moved along his relentless swaying way, he left instead a neat fence: scores of beheaded branches bristling waist-high like spears, with every fifth branch bent mercilessly down at right angles and woven in along the rest as if it were part of a hurdle.

  Will watched, silent, until Rowlands became aware of him and straightened up, breathing heavily. He pulled the red kerchief loose, wiped his forehead with it and retied it loosely round his neck. In his creased brown face, the lines beside the dark eyes turned upwards just a little as he looked at Will.

  “I know,” he said, the velvet voice solemn. “You are thinking, here is this wonderful healthy hedge full of leaves and hawthorn berries, reaching up to the heavens, and here is this man hacking it down like a butcher jointing a sheep, taming it into a horrid little naked fence, all bones and no grace.”

  Will grinned. “Well,” he said. “Something like that, yes.”

  “Ah,” said John Rowlands. He squatted down on his haunches, resting his axe head down on the ground between his knees and leaning on it. “Duw, it’s a good job you came along. I cannot go so fast as I used to. Well, let me tell you now, if we were to leave this lovely wild hedge the way it is now, and has been for too long, it would take over half the field before this time next year. And even though I am cutting off its head and half its body, all these sad bent-over shoots that you see will be sending up so many new arms next spring that you will hardly notice any difference in it at all.”

  “Now that you come to mention it,” said Will, “yes, of course, the hedging is just the same at home, in Bucks. It’s just that I never actually watched anyone doing it before.”

  “Had my eye on this hedge for a year,” John Rowlands said. “It was missed last winter. Like life it is, Will—sometimes you must seem to hurt something in order to do good for it. But not often a very big hurt, thank goodness.” He got to his feet again. “You look more healthy already, bachgen. The Welsh sun is good for you.”

  Will looked down at the map in his hand. “Mr. Rowlands,” he said, “can you tell me anything about Cadfan’s Way?”

  The Welshman had been running one tough brown finger along the edge of his mattock; there was a second’s pause in the movement, and then the finger moved on. He said quietly, “Now what put that into your head, I wonder?”

  “I don’t really know. I suppose I must have read it somewhere. Is there a Cadfan’s Way?”

  “Oh, yes, indeed,” John Rowlands said. “Llwybr Cadfan. No secret about that, though most people these days have forgotten it. I think they have a Cadfan Road in one of the new Tywyn housing estates instead. . . . St. Cadfan was a kind of missionary, from France, in the days when Brittany and Cornwall and Wales all had close ties. Fourteen hundred years ago he had his church in Tywyn, and a holy well—and he is supposed to have founded the monastery on Enlli, that is in English Bardsey, as well. You know Bardsey Island, where the bird-watchers go, out there off the tip of North Wales? People used to visit Tywyn and go on to Bardsey—and so, they say, there is an old pilgrims’ road that goes over the mountain from Machynlleth to Tywyn, past Abergynolwyn. And along the side of this valley, no doubt. Or perhaps higher up. Most of the old ways go along high places, they were safer there. But nobody knows where to find Cadfan’s Way now.”

  “I see,” said Will. It was more than enough; he knew that now he would be able to find the Way, given time. But increasingly he felt that there was very little time left; that it was urgent for this quest, so oddly lost by his memory, to be accomplished very soon. On the day of the dead. . . . And what was the quest, and where, and why? If only he could remember . . .

  John Rowlands turned towards the hedge again. “Well—”

  “I’ll see you later,” Will said. “Thank you. I’m trying to walk all round the edge of the farm.”

  “Take it gently. That is a long walk for a convalescent, the whole of it.” Rowlands straightened suddenly, pointing a finger at him in warning. “And if you go up the valley and get to the Craig yr Aderyn end—that way—make sure you check the boundaries on your map, and do not go off your uncle’s land. That is Caradog Prichard’s farm beyond, and he is not kind with trespassers.”

  Will thought of the malicious, light-lashed eyes in the sneering face he had seen from the Land-Rover with Rhys. “Oh,” he said. “Caradog Prichard. All right. Thanks. Diolch yn fawr. Is that right?”

  John Rowlands’s face broke into creases of laughter. “Not bad,” he said. “But perhaps you should stick to just diolch.”

  The gentle thud of his axe dwindled behind Will and was lost in the insect-hum of the sunny afternoon, with the scattered calls of birds and sheep. The way that Will was going led sideways across the valley, with the grey-green sweep of the mountain rising always before him; it blocked out more and more of the sky as he walked on. Soon he was beginning to climb, and then the bracken began to come in over the grass in a rustling knee-high carpet, with clumps here and there of spiky green gorse, its yellow flowers still bright among the fierce prickling stalks. No hedge climbed the mountain, but a slate-topped drystone wall, curving with every contour, broken now and then by a stile-step low enough for men but too high for a sheep.

  Will found himself losing breath far more quickly than he would normally have done. As soon as he next came to a humped rock the right size for sitting, he folded thankfully into a panting heap. While he waited for his breath to come properly back, he looked at the map again. The Clwyd farmland seemed to end about halfway up the mountain—but there was, of course, nothing to guarantee that he would come across the old Cadfan’s way before he reached the boundary. He found himself hoping a little nervously that the rest of the mountain above was not Caradog Prichard’s land.

  Stuffing the map back into his pocket, he went on, higher, through the crackling brown fronds of the bracken. He was climbing diagonally now, as the slope grew steeper. Birds whirred away from him; somewhere high above, a skylark was pouring out its rippling, throbbing song. Then all at once, Will began to have an unaccountable feeling that he was being followed.

  Abruptly he stopped, swinging round. Nothing moved. The bracken-brown slope lay still beneath the sunshine, with outcrops of white rock glimmering here and there. A car hummed
past on the road below, invisible through trees; he was high above the farm now, looking out over the silver thread of the river to the mountains rising green and grey and brown behind, and at last fading blue into the distance. Further up the valley the mountainside on which he stood was clothed dark green with plantations of spruce trees, and beyond those he could see a great grey-black crag rising, a lone peak, lower than the mountains around it yet dominating all the surrounding land. A few large black birds circled its top; as he watched, they merged together into a shape of a long V, as geese do, and flew unhurriedly away over the mountain in the direction of the sea.

  Then from somewhere close, he heard one short sharp bark from a dog.

  Will jumped. No dog was likely to be on the mountain alone. Yet there was no sign of another human being anywhere. If someone was nearby, why was he hiding himself?

  He turned to go on up the slope, and only then did he see the dog. He stood stone-still. It was poised directly above him, alert, waiting: a white dog, white all over with only one small black patch on its back, like a saddle. Except for the curious pattern of colouring, it looked like a traditional Welsh sheepdog, muscular and sharp-muzzled, with feathered legs and tail: a smaller version of the collie. Will held out his hand. “Here, boy,” he said. But the dog bared its teeth, and gave a low, threatening growl deep in its throat.

  Will took a few tentative steps up the slope, diagonally, in the direction he had been going before. Crouching on its stomach, the dog moved with him, teeth glittering, tongue lolling. The attitude was odd and yet familiar, and suddenly Will realised that he had seen it the evening before in the two dogs on his uncle’s farm that had been helping Rhys bring in the cows to be milked. It was the movement of control—the watchful crouch from which a working sheepdog would spring, to bring to order the animals it was driving in a particular direction.

  But where was this dog trying to drive him?