The Grey King (14 page)

John Rowlands sighed, and stretched, knocked out his pipe and ground the ashes into the earth. He stood up; the dogs jumped to his side. He looked down at Will.

“There was all this at the back,” he said, “when Caradog Prichard shot Bran Davies's dog.”

Will picked a single blossom from a gorse bush beside him; it shone bright yellow on his grubby hand. “People are very complicated,” he said sadly.

“So they are,” John Rowlands said. His voice deepened a little, louder and clearer than it had been. “But when the battles between you and your adversaries are done, Will Stanton, in the end the fate of all the world will depend on just those people, and on how many of them are good or bad, stupid or wise. And indeed it is all so complicated that I would not dare foretell what they will do with their world. Our world.” He whistled softly.
“Tyrd yma,
Pen, Tip.”

Carefully he picked up his loop of barbed wire, and with the dogs following, he walked away beside the fence, over the hill.

W
ill went slowly across the slope towards Bran. It was a grey day now; the rain had fallen all night, and there was more to come. The sky was lowering, ominous, and all the mountains were lost in ragged cloud. Will thought:
the breath of the Brenin Llwyd. . . .

He saw Bran begin climbing away up the hill, diagonally, in an obvious effort to avoid him. Will paused, and decided to give up. A ridiculous game of dodging across the mountain would do no one any good. And besides, the harp had to be taken to a safe place.

He set off through the wet bracken on the long muddy walk to the far side of Caradog Prichard's farm. His trousers were already soaked, in spite of Wellington boots borrowed from Aunt Jen. Partway, he crossed the land that had been swept by the fire, and a thin mud of black ash clung to his boots.

Will strode along moodily. He glanced round now and then in case Caradog Prichard were about, but the fields were deserted, and oddly silent. No birds sang today; even the sheep seemed quiet, and there was seldom the sound of a car drifting from the valley road. It was as if all the grey valley waited for something. Will tried to sense the mood of the place more accurately, but all the time now his mind was gradually filling again with the
enmity of the Grey King, growing, growing, a whisper grown to a call, soon to grow to a furious shout. It was difficult to find attention for much else.

He came to the slate-roofed shelter where he had hidden the harp among the stacked bales of hay. The force of his own spell brought him up standing, ten feet away, as though he had walked into a glass wall.

Will smiled. Then to break the enchantment in the way appointed, he began very softly to sing. It was a spell-song of the Old Speech, and its words were not like the words of human speech, but more indefinite, a matter of nuance of sound. He was a good singer, well-taught, and the high clear notes flowed softly through the gloomy air like rays of light. Will felt the force of the resisting spell melt away. He came to the end of the verse.

Caradog Prichard's voice said coldly behind him, “Proper little nightingale, isn't it?”

Will froze. He turned slowly and stood in silence, looking at Prichard's pasty, full-cheeked face, with its crooked nose, and eyes bright as black currants.

“Well?” Prichard said impatiently. “What do you think you are doing here, standing in the middle of my held singing to the hedge? Are you mad, boy?”

Will gaped, changing his face subtly to an expression of total foolishness. “It was the song. I just thought of it, I wanted to try it out. They say you're a poet, you ought to understand.” He let his voice drop, conspiratorially. “I write songs, sometimes, you see. But please don't tell anyone. They always laugh. They think it's stupid.”

Prichard said, “Your uncle?”

“Everyone at home.”

Prichard squinted at him suspiciously. The proud word ‘poet' had made its effect, but he was not the kind of man to relax unwarily, or for long. He said contemptuously, “Oh, the English—they know nothing of music, I am not surprised. Clods, they are. You have a very good voice, for an English
boy.” Then his voice sharpened suddenly. “But you weren't singing English, were you?”

“No,” Will said.

“What, then?”

Will beamed at him confidentially. “Nothing, really. They were just nonsense words that seemed to go with the tune.
You
know.”

But the fish did not bite. Prichard's eyes narrowed. He looked in a quick nervous movement up the valley towards the mountains, and then back at Will. He said abruptly, “I don't like you, English boy. Something funny about you, there is. All this about songs and singing does not explain why you are standing here on my land.”

“Taking a short cut, that's all,” Will said. “I wasn't hurting anything, honestly.”

“Short cut, is it? From where to where? Your uncle's land is all over there, where you came from, and nothing is on the other side of us except moor and mountain. Nothing for you. Go back to Clwyd, nightingale, back to your snivelling little friend who lost his dog. Off. Off out of here!” All at once he was shouting, the pudgy face dusky red. “Get out! Get out!”

Will sighed. There was only one thing to be done. He had not wanted to risk attracting the closer attention of the Grey King, but it was impossible to leave the harp vulnerable to Caradog Prichard's eye. The man was glaring at him now, clenching his fists in a fit of the same unaccountable vicious rage that Will had seen overtake him before. “Get out, I tell you!”

There in the open field under the still, grey sky, Will stretched out one arm, with all five fingers stiff and pointing, and said a single quiet word. And Caradog Prichard was caught out of time, immobile, with his mouth half-open and his hand raised pointing, his face frozen in exactly the same ugly anger that had twisted it when he shot the dog Cafall. It was a pity, Will thought bitterly, that he could not be left that way forever.

But no spell lasts forever, and most for only a short breath of time.
Quickly Will went forward to the stone shelter, reached in between the bales of hay, and pulled out the gleaming little golden harp. One corner of its frame was caught on an old tattered sack left among the bales; impatiently he tugged both harp and sacking free, bundled them together under his arm. Then he moved round to stand behind Caradog Prichard. Once more he pointed a stiff-fingered hand at him, and spoke a single word. And Caradog Prichard, as if he had never intended to do anything else, plodded off across the field towards his farmhouse without once turning round. When he arrived there, Will knew, he would be convinced that he had gone straight home from the day's work, and he would have not an ounce of memory of Will Stanton standing in a field singing to the sky.

The plodding, paunchy form disappeared over the stile at the end of the field. Will untangled the old sack from the harp's intricate golden frame, and was about to toss it aside when he realised how useful it would be as a covering; a nameless bundle under his arm could be explained away, if he should meet someone, rather more easily than a gleaming and obviously priceless golden harp. As he slid the harp carefully inside the sack, wrinkling his nose at the hay dust puffing out, a movement across the field caught his eye. He glanced up, and for a moment even the harp left his mind.

It was the great grey fox, king of the
milgwn,
creature of the Brenin Llwyd, loping fast along the hedge. In sudden furious hatred Will flung out one pointing arm and shouted a word to stop it, and the big grey animal, no longer on its master's land, tumbled backwards in mid-stride as if it had been snatched up by a sudden tremendous high wind. Picking itself up, it stood staring at Will, red tongue lolling. Then it lifted its long muzzle and gave one low howl, like a dog in trouble.

“It's no good calling,” said Will under his breath. “You can just stand there till I decide what to do with you.”

But then, involuntarily, he shivered. The air seemed suddenly colder, and across the fields, all around him, he could see creeping in a low groundmist
that he had not noticed before. Slowly it came pouring over the fences, relentless, like some huge crawling creature. From every direction it came, from the mountain, the valley, the lower slopes, and when Will looked back at the grey fox standing stiff-legged in the field, he saw something else that gave a chill of new terror to the mist. The fox was changing colour. With every moment, as he watched, its sleek body and bushy tail grew darker and darker, until it became almost black.

Will stared, frowning. He thought irrelevantly, It looks just like Pen. And instantly he caught his breath, realising something that was not irrelevant at all—that it was John Rowlands's dog Pen who, with Cafall, had been accused by Caradog Prichard of the sheep attacks made in reality by the foxes of the Grey King.

Something immeasurably strong was pushing against him, breaking his own enchantment. Whilst Will stood for a moment confused and powerless, the big fox, now black as coal, gave its strange small exultant leap into the air, grinned deliberately at him, and was off, running swiftly across the field. It vanished through the far hedge, in the direction that Caradog Prichard had taken, towards his farm. Will knew exactly what was likely to happen when it got there, and there was nothing he could do. He was held back by the power of the Grey King, and reluctantly now he was facing an idea to which he had not given a thought before: the possibility that this power, much greater than his own, was in fact so great that he might never be able to accomplish his allotted quest.

Setting his teeth, he gripped the shrouded harp beneath his arm and set off across the field towards Clwyd Farm. Carefully he slipped under the barbed wire edging the field, crossed the corner of the next, clambered over the stile leading into the lane. But all the time his steps grew slower and slower, his breathing more laboured. Somehow, there beneath his arm, the harp was growing heavier and heavier, until he could scarcely move for the weight of it. He knew that it was not a matter of his own weakness. Against
his resistance, some great enchantment was giving to the precious Thing of Power in his arm a heaviness impossible for any human strength to support. Clutching at the harp, he gasped with pain at its impossible weight, and sank down with it to the ground.

As he crouched there he raised his head and saw that the mist swirled everywhere round him now; all the world was grey-white, featureless. He stared into the mist. And gradually, the mist took shape.

The figure was so huge that at first he could not realise it was there. It stretched wider than the field, and high into the sky. It had shape, but not recognisable earthly shape; Will could see its outline from the corner of his eye, but when he looked directly at any part of it, there was nothing there. Yet there the figure loomed before him, immense and terrible, and he knew that this was a being of greater power than anything he had ever encountered in his life before. Of all the Great Lords of the Dark, none was singly more powerful and dangerous than the Grey King. But because he had remained always from the beginnings of time in his fastnesses among the Cader Idris peaks, never descending to the valleys or lower slopes, none of the Old Ones had ever encountered him, to learn what force he had at his command. So now Will, alone, last and least of the Old Ones, faced him with no defence but the inborn magic of the Light and his own wits.

A voice came from the misty shape, both sweet and terrible. It filled the air like the mist itself, and Will could not tell what language it spoke, nor whether it spoke to the hearing of the ears; he knew only that the things it said were instantly in his own mind.

“You may not wake the Sleepers, Old One,” said the voice. “I will prevent you. This is my land, and in it they shall sleep forever, as they have slept these many centuries. Your harp shall not wake them. I will prevent you.”

Will sat in a small crumpled heap, his arms across the harp he could no longer hold. “It is my quest,” he said. “You know that I must follow it.”

“Go back,” said the voice, blowing through his mind like the wind. “Go back. Take the harp safely with you, a Thing of Power for the Light and your masters. I shall let you go, if you go back now and leave my land. You have won that much.” The voice grew harder, more chill than the mist. “But if you seek the Sleepers, I shall destroy you, and the golden harp as well.”

“No,” Will said. “I am of the Light. You cannot destroy me.”

“It will not differ greatly from destruction,” the voice said. “Come now. You know that, Old One.” It grew softer, more sibilant and nasty, as if caressing an evil thought; Will suddenly remembered the lord in the sky-blue robe.

“The powers of the Dark and the Light are equal in force, but we differ a little in our . . . treatment . . . of those we may bring under our will.” The voice crawled like a slug over Will's skin. “Go back, Old One. I shall not warn the Light again.”

Summoning all his confidence, Will scrambled up, leaving the harp on the ground at his feet. He made a mocking little bow to the grey mistiness that he knew, now, he must not look at directly. “You have given your warning, Majesty,” he said, “and I have heard it. But it will make no difference. The Dark can never turn the mind of the Light. Nor may it hinder the taking of a Thing of Power, once it has been rightly claimed. Take your spell off the golden harp. You have no right to touch it with enchantment.”

The mist swirled darker; the voice grew colder, more remote. “The harp is not spellbound, Old One. Take it from the sack.”

Will bent down. He tried once more to pick up the sacking-wrapped harp, but it would not move; it might have been a rock rooted deep in the land. Then he pulled the sacking aside to uncover the harp, and took it up, and the shining gold thing came into his hand as lightly as ever it had.