The Grey King Read online

  “Stop it,” said Bran, spluttering. “Get educated, man. Now while your tongue is there, blow round the sides of it. Both sides at once.”

  Will blew.

  “That’s right. Now, say the word lan but give a bit of a blow before you bring it out. Like this: llan, llan.”

  “Llan, llan,” said Will, feeling like a steam engine, and stopped in astonishment. “Hey, that sounds Welsh!”

  “Pretty good,” said Bran critically. “You’ll have to practise. Actually when a Welshman says it, his tongue isn’t like that and the whole sound comes out from the sides of his mouth, but that’s no good for a Sais. You’ll do all right. And if you get fed up with trying, you can take the other English way out and say ll like thl.”

  “Enough,” said Will. “Enough.”

  “Just try one more,” Bran said. “You wouldn’t believe the way some people say this one. Well, yes you would, because you did too.” He wrote: Machynlleth.

  Will groaned, and took a deep breath. “Well—there’s the y— and the ll—”

  “And the ch is sort of breathy, the way the Scots say loch. At the back of your throat, like.”

  “Why do you people make everything so complicated? Mach . . . un . . . lleth.”

  “Machynlleth.”

  “Machynlleth.”

  “Not bad at all.”

  “But mine doesn’t really sound like yours. Yours sounds wetter. Like German. Achtung! Achtung!” Will yelled suddenly at the top of his voice, and Cafall jumped up and barked, tail waving.

  “Do you speak German?”

  “Good Lord, no! I heard that in some old film. Achtung! Machynlleth!”

  “Machynlleth,” said Bran.

  “You see, yours does sound wetter. Sploshier. I expect all Welsh babies dribble a lot.”

  “Get out of here,” said Bran, and grabbed at him as Will dodged away. They ran down the mountain, laughing, in a wild zigzag, with Cafall bounding joyously alongside.

  But halfway, Will stumbled and slowed down; without warning, he felt giddy, his legs weak and unreliable. He staggered to a nearby wall and leaned against it, panting. Bran yelled cheerfully over his shoulder as he ran, satchel flying; then slowed, stopped, looked more carefully and came back.

  “Are you all right, then?”

  “I think so. Head hurts. It’s my stupid legs though, they give out too easily. I suppose I’m still getting better, really—I was ill, for a while—”

  “I knew, and I ought to have remembered.” Bran stood fidgeting, cross with himself. “Your friend Mr. Merriman said you’d been even more ill than anyone realised.”

  “But he wasn’t there,” Will said. “Well. Not that that means a thing, of course.”

  “Sit down,” Bran said. “Put your head down on your knees.”

  “I’m okay. Really. Just have to get my breath back.”

  “We’re very close to home, or we should be. Just a few hundred yards over that way—” Bran scrambled up on the high dry stone wall to give himself a better view.

  But while he stood there, suddenly a great angry yell came from the other side of the wall, and the barking of dogs. Will saw Bran draw himself up tall and straight where he stood on the wall, looking down haughtily. He heaved himself upright to peep over the slate-topped edge, past Bran’s feet, and saw a man approaching at a half-run, shouting, and waving one arm angrily; in the other arm he carried what looked like a shotgun. When he came closer, he began calling to Bran in Welsh. Will did not recognise him at first, for he wore no hat, and the tousled head of raw red hair was unfamiliar. Then he saw that it was Caradog Prichard.

  When the farmer paused for breath, Bran said clearly, pointedly using English, “My dog does not chase sheep, Mr. Prichard. And anyway he is not on your land, he is over this side of the wall.”

  “I tell you that he is a rogue dog, and he has been worrying my sheep!” Prichard said furiously; his English was sibilant, heavily accented, thickened by rage. “Him and that damn black hound of John Rowlands. I will shoot them both if I catch them at it, you be sure I will. And you and your little English friend there had better keep off my land too, if you know what’s good for you.” The small eyes in his flushed, pudgy face glared maliciously at Will.

  Will said nothing. Bran did not move; he stood there looking down at the angry farmer. He said softly, “Bad luck you would have, if you shot Cafall, Caradog Prichard.” He ran one hand through his white hair, pushing it back, in a gesture that seemed to Will oddly affected. “You want to look more closely at those sheep,” Bran said, “before you go blaming dogs for what is foxes’ work.”

  “Foxes!” said Prichard contemptuously. “I know a fox’s killing when I see it, and I know a rogue dog too. Keep away from my land, both of you.” But he was not meeting Bran’s eyes now, nor looking at Will; he swung round without another word and strode off across the pasture, with his dogs trotting at his heels.

  Bran climbed down from the wall.

  “Bah!” he said. “Worrying sheep! Cafall is a match for any working dog in this valley; he would never in the world go wild after any sheep, let alone on Caradog Prichard’s land.” He looked at the vanishing Prichard, and then at Will, and smiled. It was a strange sly smile; Will was not sure that he liked it.

  “You will find out,” Bran said, “that people like him are a bit afraid of me, deep down. It is because I am albino, you see. The white hair, and funny eyes, and not much pigment in the skin—a bit of a freak, you might say.”

  “I shouldn’t,” Will said mildly.

  “Maybe not,” Bran said without much belief, acid in his tongue. “But it is said often enough at school . . . and outside too, by nice men like Mr. Prichard. You see, all good Welshmen are dark, dark of hair and dark of eyes, and the only fair-skinned creatures in Wales, in the old days, were the Tylwyth Teg. The old spirits, the little people. Anyone as fair as me must have something to do with the Tylwyth Teg. . . . Nobody believes in such things any more, oh no, of course not, but in the middle of the winter night when the wind is blowing dark and the old television is not on, I bet you half the people in this valley would not like to swear that I could not bring the Evil Eye on them.”

  Will scratched his head. “There was certainly something . . . fidgety . . . in the way that man looked at you, when you said—” He shook his shoulders, like a dog coming out of water. He did not look at Bran; he disliked the shadows of crafty arrogance that this talking had put over the other boy’s face. It was a pity, it shouldn’t be necessary; one day he would take it away. . . . He said, “Caradog Prichard isn’t dark. He has red hair. Like carrots.”

  “His family is from Dinas Mawddwy way,” Bran said. “His mother, anyway. There was supposed to be a whole tribe of villains up there once, all red-haired, real terrors. Anyway there are still redheads come from Dinas today.”

  “Would he really shoot Cafall?”

  “Yes,” Bran said shortly. “Caradog Prichard is very strange. There is a saying that anyone who spends the night alone up on Cader will come down next morning either a poet, or mad. And my father says that once when he was young, Caradog Prichard did spend the night alone up on Cader, because he wanted to be a great bard.”

  “It can’t have worked.”

  “Well. Perhaps it worked in one way. He is not much of a poet, but he often acts as if he were more than a little bit mad.”

  “What is Cader?”

  Bran stared at him. “Don’t know much about Wales, do you? Cader Idris, over there.” He pointed to the line of blue-grey peaks across the valley. “One of the highest mountains in Wales. You should know about Cader. After all it comes in your verse.”

  Will frowned. “No, it doesn’t.”

  “Oh, yes. Not by name, no—but it’s important in that second part. That’s where he lives you see, up on Cader. The Brenin Llwyd. The Grey King.”

  Grey Fox

  Nobody else could feel it, Will knew. As far as outward appearances went, there was no reason why
anybody should feel the least unease. The skies were a gentle light blue; the sun shone with unseasonable warmth, so that Rhys sat up on the tractor bare-backed as he ploughed the last stubbly fields, singing a clear tenor over the roar of the machine. The earth smelled clean. Yarrow and ragwort starred the hedgerows white and yellow, with the red berries of the hawthorn thick above them; the sweeping slopes where the valley began to rise were golden-brown with bracken, dry as tinder in this strange Indian-summer sun. Hazy on the horizon all around, the mountains lay like sleeping animals, their muted colours changing with every hour of the day from brown to green to purple and softly back again.

  Yet behind all this autumnal gentleness, as he roamed the fields and the gorse-starred mountain, Will could feel tension mounting everywhere, advancing like a slow relentless flood from the high peaks brooding over the end of the valley. Enmity was beginning to push at him. Slowly but irresistibly, the pressure of malevolence was building up to the point where it could break and overwhelm him. And nobody else knew. Only the hidden senses of an Old One could feel the working of the Dark.

  Aunt Jen was delighted with the change in Will’s appearance. “Look at you—only a few days, but you have colour in your cheeks now, and if this sun goes on you will be getting brown. I was writing to Alice last night, I said, you wouldn’t know him, he looks like a different boy—”

  “Very nice sun, indeed,” Will’s Uncle David said. “But a little too much, for this time of year, thank you. The pastures are getting dry, and the bracken on the mountain—we could do with a bit of rain, now.”

  “Hark at you,” Aunt Jen said, laughing. “Rain is one thing we are never short of here.”

  But still the sunny skies smiled, and Will went off with John Rowlands and his dogs to fetch a flock of yearling sheep that was to be wintered at Clwyd Farm. The hill farmer who owned them had already driven them down halfway to another farm at the head of the valley. As he looked at the milling off-white chaos of woolly backs, bobbing and shoving, eighty or so lusty young ewes bleating and baahing in earsplitting chorus, Will could not imagine how they could possibly be brought intact to Clwyd. When just one sheep broke away from the rest and pranced sideways towards him, where he stood in the field, he could not persuade it back to its fellows even by yelling and pushing and whacking its broad woolly sides. “Baaaa,” said the sheep, in a deep stupid baritone, as if he had not been there, and it wandered off and began chewing at the hedge. Yet the instant that Tip, John Rowlands’s sheepdog, trotted purposefully in its direction, the sheep turned dutifully round and bobbed back to the rest.

  Will could not see how John Rowlands communicated with his dogs. There were two: the dappled Tip, named for the splashes of white on his muzzle and the very end of his waving tail, and a bigger, more formidable-looking dog called Pen, with a black, long-haired coat and a crooked ear, torn in some fight long ago. Rowlands needed to do no more than look at them, a smile creasing his lean brown face, with a soft word in Welsh, or a quick whistle, and they would be off on some complicated maneuvre that the average man could have understood only after ten minutes of detailed explanation.

  “Walk at the front,” he called to Will through the deep, unnerving chorus of baaas, as he opened the gate and the sheep poured through into the road like milk. “Well forward, to wave at any cars coming and stop them at the side.”

  Will blinked in alarm. “But how do I keep the sheep back? They’ll all run past me!”

  John Rowlands’s grin flashed white in the dark Welsh face. “Don’t worry, Pen will see to them.”

  And so Pen did; it was as if he had a rope tied round the front of the herd of sheep to keep it in a neat tight curve. Trotting, darting, slinking on his belly, moving always forward, sometimes persuading an errant sheep in the right direction with a curt single bark, he kept them all moving obediently along the road. And Will, clutching the stick John Rowlands had given him, strode ahead bursting with confident pride, feeling as if he had been a real shepherd since time began.

  They met only two cars, in fact, all the way down the valley road, but directing even those two to pull in beside the hedge was enough pleasure, with the sheep crowding by in a rippling grey flood. Will was enjoying his job so much that perhaps, he thought afterwards, he let his deeper watchfulness falter. For when the attack came, he had no sense of warning at all.

  They were on a lonely part of the road, with barren moorland on one side of the road and dark tree-clad mountainside rising at the other. No fields were cultivated here. Bracken and rocks fringed the roadside as if it were a track over the open mountain. Suddenly Will became aware of a change in the sound of the sheep behind him: a higher note of alarm in their bleating, a flurry of scuffling hooves. He thought at first that it must be John Rowlands and Tip, heading off a runaway; but then he heard a sharp, piercing whistle that in a moment had Pen swinging round at the sheep, growling, barking, threatening them to a standstill. And he heard John Rowlands calling: “Will! Quick! Will!”

  He ran back, skirting the frightened bleating sheep; then jerked to a halt. Halfway past the flock, at the edge of the road, there was a great splash of red at the throat of a single tottering animal, smaller than the rest. Will saw a flicker of movement in the bracken as some unseen creature fled. Away it went towards the mountain, and the fronds waved and then were still. Will watched horrified as the wounded sheep staggered sideways and fell. Its fellows pushed away from it, terrified; the dogs growled and threatened, frantically containing the herd, and Will heard John Rowlands yelling, and the thwacking of his stick against the hard road. He too yelled and waved his arms at the heaving flock of sheep, keeping them together as they tried in panic to break away over the moor, and gradually the nervous animals calmed and were still.

  John Rowlands was bending over the injured ewe.

  Will shouted, across the heaving backs, “Is it all right?”

  “Not much hurt. Missed the vein. We’re lucky.” Rowlands bent down, heaved the inert sheep over his shoulders and grasped its fore and hind feet separately, so that it hung across the back of his neck like a huge muffler. Grunting with effort, he slowly stood up; his neck and cheek were smeared red by the sheep’s bloodstained fleece.

  Will came towards him. “Was it a dog?”

  Rowlands could not move his head, because of the sheep, but his bright eyes swivelled quickly round. “Did you see a dog?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I saw something running away through the bracken, but I couldn’t tell what it was. I just thought it must be a dog—I mean, what else could it have been?”

  Rowlands did not answer, but waved him ahead and whistled to the dogs. The flock began pouring on down the road. He walked at the side of it now, leaving the rear entirely to Tip; neatly and efficiently the dog kept the sheep moving along.

  Soon they came to a deserted cottage set back from the road: stone-walled, slate-roofed, sturdy-looking, but with the glass broken in its two small windows. John Rowlands kicked open the heavy wooden door, staggered inside, and came out without the sheep, breathing heavily and wiping his face on his sleeve. He closed the door. “Be safe there until we can get back to her,” he called to Will. “Not far now.”

  Before long they were at Clwyd. Will opened the gate of the broad pasture where he knew the sheep were to be kept, and the dogs nudged and nagged them inside. For a few moments the sheep eddied about, bleating and muttering; then they settled down to a greedy rasping nibble of the lush grass.

  John Rowlands fetched the Land-Rover and took Will with him to collect the injured sheep; at the last moment the black dog Pen leaped up into the car and settled down between Will’s feet. Will rubbed his silky ears.

  “It must have been a dog attacked that sheep, surely?” he said as they drove.

  Rowlands sighed. “I hope not. But indeed, I cannot think of any wild creature that would attack a flock, with men and dogs alongside. Nothing but a wolf would do that, and there hav
e been no wolves in Wales for two hundred years or more.”

  They drew up outside the cottage. Rowlands turned the car so that its back door would be in easy reach, and went into the little stone building.

  He was out again almost at once, empty-handed, looking uneasily about him. “She’s gone!”

  “Gone!”

  “There must be some sign—Pen! Tyrd yma!” John Rowlands went casting around outside the cottage, peering intently at grass and bracken and gorse, and the black dog wove its way round and about him, nose down. Will too peered hopefully, looking for flattened plants or signs of wool, or blood. He saw nothing. A jagged rock of white quartz glittered before them in the sunshine. A woodlark sang. Then all at once, Pen gave one short sharp bark and was off on a scent, trotting confidently, head down, through the grass.

  They followed. But Will was puzzled, and he could see the same bafflement on John Rowlands’s seamed face—for the dog was tracking through untouched grass, not a stem bent by the passing even of a small creature, let alone a sheep. There was the sound of water running somewhere ahead of them, and soon they came to a small stream flowing down towards the river, the jutting rocks in its course showing how much lower than usual it was running in the dry spell.

  Pen paused, cast up and down the stream unsuccessfully, and came to John Rowlands whining.

  “He’s lost it,” the shepherd said. “Whatever it was. Could have been no more than a rabbit, of course—though not too many rabbits I have ever heard tell of would have the sense to hide their trail in running water.”

  Will said, “But what happened to the sheep? It was hurt, it couldn’t have walked away.”

  “Particularly through a closed door,” Rowlands said drily.

  “That’s right, of course! D’you think whatever animal attacked it would have been clever enough to come back and drag it away?”

  “Clever enough, perhaps,” Rowlands said, staring back at the cottage. “But not strong enough. A yearling will weigh about a hundred pounds, I near broke my back carrying her a little way. You’d need a mighty big dog to drag that weight.”