A String in the Harp (34 page)

For the best part of an hour the path led them through sun-dappled, damp-smelling woods. On their right, the Leri rushed by, tumbling and swirling around debris caught along the bank. It was a cold golden color, its depths not yet touched by the spring sun; it filled its bed from bank to bank, carrying down the first of the melted snow and ground frost from higher in the hills. The rushing sound it made was so
loud it seemed to fill the world, covering the sounds of wind in the evergreens and the calls of the tits and wagtails which darted ahead of the party.

It was just past nine when they reached Talybont, entering it from the back, down a cobbled alley. Although it was early, the sun had already caused lines of laundry to sprout in the backyards, flapping and cracking cheerfully in the breeze. A small white dog with very muddy feet bounced out a half-open gate to challenge the expedition as it went by.

In front of the Red Goat they stopped for a short debate; it was necessary to decide how they would go next: they could either continue along the Leri on a paved road or follow a lane north, back into the less civilized hills. Gwilym settled the matter finally by saying, “Actually, there’s a very old site up the lane a bit, if you’d like to see it, sir. It’s called Bedd Taliesin on the map. Just there.”

Jen froze at the name; Becky, too, was suddenly alert.

“What does Bedd mean?” asked David. “Taliesin was the Welsh bard, I know that.” He pronounced the word “Beth,” as Gwilym had.

“It means cairn. Bedd Taliesin is a burial cairn that’s been opened.”

“The grave of Taliesin,” Rhian said. “My Da can tell you about that, lovely great stories.”

“But it isn’t really,” contradicted Gwilym.

“Isn’t it then! You just ask my Da about it!”

“Why isn’t it?” asked David.

“It’s much too old—it’s Bronze Age—and Taliesin didn’t live until the sixth century!”

“Ych y fi,”
exclaimed Rhian in disgust. “Facts again! As if they prove everything anyway! My Da could convince you different before long.”

“You’re right, I think he could,” agreed David with a grin. “Well, let’s see this cairn. We can have lunch there, though I wouldn’t mind eating it right now!”

“But it isn’t anywhere near time,” objected Becky.

Jen was last to start up the lane; she couldn’t help wondering if this day would end the way the day in Cardiff had. Peter waited for her to catch up.

“Come on, we don’t want to lose the sausage rolls,” he urged with a grin. His face was open, his voice friendly; Jen could find no trace of withdrawal. “Gwilym’s quite right about Bedd Taliesin, you know,” he said conversationally. “No matter what Rhian says. I’ve read about it.” So he knew what she’d been thinking. Together, they hurried after the others.

The lane worked its way up out of Talybont, winding deep between earth banks and blackthorn hedges that were misted green with new leaves. There were fat buds on the branches just wanting a day of sun to burst them into white flower. And climbing the banks, scattered in the grass were little yellow flowers. “Primroses,” Gwilym told Jen when she asked, and she stared at them in delight.

Above them, out of sight in the fields, they could hear the frantic bleating of lambs and the equally frantic answers of their mothers.

“They’ve all got different voices,” Becky observed. “Can you hear?”

“You’d make a very good lamb,” said Peter. “You could tell which was your mother.”

The sun had polished off the last of the morning’s mist, and protected by the hedgerows, they could feel the warmth in it. Rhian wasted no time in shedding her windbreaker and the others soon joined her.

“Oh, it feels good not to wear a jacket!” excaimed Jen. “Like shedding a skin! Hello, what’s this?”

Coming around a blind corner, they surprised a large, ragged ram with corkscrew horns. He had been grazing the side of the lane, and they’d caught him with his mouth full. He faced the intruders alert and tense. Jen was close enough
to see his strange, pale eyes, with their hyphen-shaped pupils. His nostrils flared.

“What do we do? Is he dangerous?”

“Keep going,” instructed Rhian.

“But what if he runs at us?”

“Not that one.” She approached the ram confidently. “I’ve no doubt but you’re wanted at home, you.”

The ram bunched himself together, like a spring contracting, and waited until he judged Rhian had come too close, then he bounded backward and turned tail, running nervously up the lane in short, panicky bursts. There was no way for him to go but straight on—the banks were too steep and the hedges too dense to allow a good-sized ram to escape.

In ten minutes or so, preceded by this rather unlikely herald, the party came to a whitewashed farm: raw, new farmhouse on the left, ageless, thick-walled byre and huts on the right. A red-faced young woman was out on the front step feeding a flock of chickens with the help of a small child, who kept putting handfuls of grain in its mouth. Its hair was cut straight across and it wore an overall, so there was no way of telling whether it was a boy or a girl. Beside them lay a fat baby in a battered black pram.

The woman smiled gratefully when she saw them and unconsciously patted her wispy brown hair. “Oh, ta very much! Wondered where that one had got to. Devil he is for getting out. Saves going to look.”

“Halfway to Talybont,” Rhian told her cheerfully.

“Ta!” she called after them again, as they went on.

The earth banks flattened away and the primroses disappeared. The ground grew rough with wintered grass and boulders and clumps of gorse coming into bloom. The great, flat expanse of Borth Bog spread below to the left, and beyond the Dovey the mountains of Snowdonia sprang up, merging with layers of cloud so it was hard to tell which were mountains of earth and which of air.

An ancient, lichen-covered, drystone wall ran beside the lane, which was no more than a cart track here. The land was open for grazing and punctuated with sheep, intent on tearing up grass as quickly as possible.

“Oh!” cried Becky suddenly. “Isn’t it
beautiful!
Let’s stop right here for lunch.”

“It’s still early,” Jen looked at her watch.

“I don’t care,” stated Peter, sitting down. “I’m ravenous.”

“
I
was hungry in Talybont,” said David.

Gwilym set down his knapsack. “Bedd Taliesin’s just up there, so this is a good spot.”

Jen looked uneasily over her shoulder in the direction he pointed, fully expecting to see some unpleasant apparition, but the hill was wild and empty.

“Well, if we’re that close let’s have a look first. We can leave the packs,” suggested David.

It wasn’t very impressive to look at—just a hole in the ground with great slabs of rock lying untidily around it. They stood gazing down in silence for a long moment. Jen remembered what Rhian had said earlier about places having a feel to them. This one certainly did, its appearance was unimportant. It had once been a sacred, magic place for people so far distant in time they could hardly be imagined: strange, hairy, dark little figures that appeared in history and science books. You knew perfectly well they had been real, but you couldn’t actually believe in them.

But here there was contact. Here, that dim, inconceivable world touched the present for an instant. The magic hadn’t all worn away. Jen shivered.

I wonder how the country looked when this was built,” David said quietly.

“Forest,” Gwilym answered.

“It’s hard to imagine the hills forested, they look so old and wild the way they are.”

“Only because you haven’t seen it with trees,” said Peter.

“You sound as if you have, then,” said Rhian.

“I have a good imagination,” said Peter smoothly. “Whoever was buried here must have been important.”

“He’d not have been given such a cairn if he weren’t,” Gwilym agreed.

“But he wasn’t Taliesin,” Peter said with certainty.

They moved away from the cairn, back toward the knapsacks and lunch.

“What I cannot see,” Rhian said to Gwilym, “is how you can be so scientific always. Mind you, I’m not always agreeing with Da myself, but he does say it’s not right to try explaining everything. He says we’re not meant to understand some things.”

Gwilym frowned. “Not everything, you can’t explain. But the bits you can, you’ve got to find out.”

“Does everything have a reason, though?” persisted Peter.

“Doesn’t it?” asked David. “Even when we don’t know what it is? I agree we don’t know all the answers, but I do believe there are answers.”

“Maybe we aren’t supposed to know them all,” Becky said.

David nodded. “The world looks quite different to me from this side of the ocean, I have to admit,” he said with a smile.

“And to me,” said Peter.

The midday sun blazed overhead in blue sky, and so far above them it was invisible, a skylark spilled its song over the hillside. The sound of sheep tearing grass came down the breeze.

Looking out over the Bog, David continued thoughtfully, “I think Gwilym’s right about learning as much as possible, but perhaps one of the most important lessons to learn is to accept what you can’t explain. We can get too tied down by facts.”

Jen’s head was bent, her face hidden by dark curtains of
hair, her fingers busy knotting and unknotting the drawstrings of her knapsack.

It was Rhian who said loudly, “I’m wanting my lunch, and if we’re to sit here talking about what’s real and what isn’t, I don’t see why we can’t be eating at the same time.”

“I don’t either,” declared Becky.

They spread their jackets on the wiry turf in a circle and set about dividing up the picnic.

“Of course, I didn’t bring any cups,” moaned Jen, when it was all spread out.

“Who needs cups?” demanded David. “Much too civilized and we’d have to carry them with us all day.” He took a long drink out of one of the bottles of lemonade.

The great mound of food Peter, Jen, and Becky had bought disappeared at astonishing speed.

“But,” said Becky, through a mouthful of sausage roll, “do let’s save enough for tea.”

“I shall be so full I won’t want to move in a minute,” Peter announced, falling backward, his hands behind his head.

“This will be Bedd Peter,” declared Becky with a giggle. “Twentieth century and not very important.”

Peter didn’t deign to answer.

“Do you really believe, sir—” Gwilym was beginning, anxious to get back to serious matters, when Jen cried suddenly, “Hey! Hey, Gwilym, what’s that? Not a buzzard, is it?”

Shielding his eyes from the sun, Gwilym looked up. “Oh, I say! Look!” The excitement in his voice brought everyone to attention. Two small birds were harrassing a big one in the sky over Bedd Taliesin. They flew at it, chittering in agitation, but it seemed to ignore them, planing and gliding effortlessly, coming within a few feet of the ground, then swooping upward. Its long forked tail twisted like a rudder, its long bent wings carried it easily with spellbinding grace. After a minute or two, it swept out of sight over the crest of the hill, the two small birds with it.

Gwilym let out his breath in a long, satisfied sigh. “That’s the bird to see, a red kite. Wales is the only place in Britain you’ll find them, and not many here either.”

“A birthday present,” said Becky.

“The whole day is a birthday present,” David said quietly. “The best I’ve had in years.”

They all looked at each other and smiled, a little awkwardly at first, but the awkwardness faded. After lunch they sat about for a while, feeling comfortable, then packed up the remains of the food and the papers and bottles, leaving no trace of the picnic. “As it should be,” observed Rhian. “Leave it as you find it.”

“A
REN’T YOU THROUGH
in there
yet,
for heaven’s sake? It’s quarter to six already!” Peter gave the bathroom door a series of impatient thumps.

“Tell her something’s burning on the stove—that’ll get her out in a hurry,” advised David on his way downstairs.

“I heard you!” cried Jen, flinging open the door and emerging in a cloud of steam. “That’s dirty fighting! You could have finished in here while I was down in the kitchen, slaving over dinner. Dad, would you tell Becky to fill the kettle and put it on? I’ll be there in a minute.” She dove into her room to get dressed.

The house was full of the lovely warm smell of roasting lamb; it was tidy and comfortable. David and Peter had built a fire in the lounge several hours earlier to drive out the damp chill.

“In honor of our first real company,” David had pronounced, heaping coal on liberally.

“But they’ll think we live like this all the time,” said Becky, “instead of shivering in the kitchen. You know, those poor soft Americans!”

“I’ll tell them we don’t,” Peter promised, wiping his black hands on his jeans.

“Oh, Peter!” Jen groaned. “You just put those on! Next time
you
can go sit in the Washeteria for an hour and a half.”

“It’s not as if you have to carry them down to the river and bang them on stones.”

Jen snorted. “All right then, you can try it. That place is truly dismal! Full of mums and diapers and little kids and never enough benches. Pink and blue washing machines, half of them out of order. Ugh—depressing!”

“You wring my heart,” said David. “I had no idea you hated the laundromat so much. It sounds like cruelty to children.”

“I am
sick
of the whole ungrateful lot of you!” retorted Jen with a laugh.

“Even me?” asked Becky.

“Of course. No favorites. And if you want to win back my affection, you can clear off the table in the study and move it in here. We are not going to feed company my good dinner in the kitchen, and the study is hopeless.”

“And if you lay a finger on my papers, you risk a father’s curse,” warned David. “
I’ll
clear the table.”

“Who said anything about wanting to win back affection?” demanded Peter.

“You can set the table, too,” added Jen, ignoring both of them.

Haphazardly, but with everyone pitching in cheerfully, it all got done: the house straightened, the dinner cooking, the table set, and when the doorbell rang just after six, they were all ready—hair brushed, dresses straight, jackets tidy. David ran a critical eye over them, then shook his head.