The Grey King (2 page)

The man was clearly mocking Rhys for having to change a wheel in the rain. Rhys answered, curtly but without crossness. The man looked deliberately into the car, walking forward to peer in at the window; he stared at Will, unsmiling, with strange small light-lashed eyes, and asked Rhys something. When Rhys answered, one of the words was “Will.” The man in the raincoat said something else, with a sneer in it this time directed at both of them, and then without warning he broke into an astonishing tirade of rapid, bitter speech, the words pouring out flurried and guttural like a churning river in flood. Rhys appeared to pay no attention at all. At last the man paused, angry. He swung round and marched back to his car; then he drove slowly on past them, still staring at Will as he went by. A black-and-white dog was looking out over the man's shoulder, and Will saw that the car was in fact a van, grey and windowless at the back.

He slipped across into the driver's seat and pulled open the window; the Land-Rover lurched gently up into the air beneath him as Rhys heaved on the jack.

“Who was that?” Will said.

“Fellow called Caradog Prichard, from up the valley.” Rhys spat enigmatically on his hands, and heaved again. “A farmer.”

“He could have stayed and helped you.”

“Ha!” Rhys said. “Caradog Prichard is not well known for helping.”

“What did he say?”

“He let me know how amusing it was to see me stuck. And some things about a disagreement we have. Of no importance. And asked who you were.” Rhys spun his spanner, loosing the wheel-bolts, and glanced up with a shy conspiratorial grin. “A good job our mothers were not listening, I was not polite. I said you were my cousin and none of his bloody business.”

“Was he cross?”

Rhys paused reflectively. “He said—
We shall see about that.”

Will looked up the valley road where the van had disappeared. “That's a funny thing to say.”

“Oh,” Rhys said, “that is Caradog. His hobby is to make people feel uncomfortable. Nobody likes him, except his dogs, and he doesn't even like them.” He tugged at the injured wheel. “Sit still up there now. We shan't be long.”

By the time he climbed back into the driving seat, rubbing his hands on an oily rag, the fine drizzle had turned to real rain; the dark hair was curling wet over his head. “Well,” Rhys said. “This is nice old weather to greet you, I must say. But it won't last. We shall have a good bit of sun yet, off and on, before the winter bites down on us.”

Will gazed out at the mountains, dark and distant, swinging into view as they drove along the road crossing the valley. Grey-white cloud hung ragged round the highest hills, their tops invisible behind the mist. He said, “The cloud's all tattered round the tops of the mountains. Perhaps it's breaking up.”

Rhys looked out casually. “The breath of the Grey King? No, I'm sorry to tell you, Will, that's supposed to be a bad sign.”

Will sat very still, a great rushing sound in his ears; he gripped the edge of his seat until the metal bit at his fingers. “What did you call it?”

“The cloud? Oh, when it hangs ragged like that we call it the breath of the
Brenin Llwyd.
The Grey King. He is supposed to live up there on the high land. It's just one of the old stories.” Rhys glanced sideways at him and then braked suddenly; the Land-Rover slowed almost to a halt. “Will! Are you all right? White as a ghost, you look. Are you feeling bad?”

“No. No. It was just—” Will was staring out at the grey mass of the hills. “It was just . . . the Grey King,
the Grey King . . .
it's part of something I used to know, something I was supposed to remember, for always. . . . I thought I'd lost it. Perhaps—perhaps it's going to come back. . . .”

Rhys clashed the car back into gear. “Oh,” he called cheerfully through the noise, “we'll get you better, you just wait. Anything can happen in these old hills.”

Y
ou see?” said Aunt Jen. “I told you it would clear up.”

Will swallowed his last mouthful of bacon. “You wouldn't think it was the same country. Marvellous.”

Morning sunshine streamed like banners through the windows of the long farmhouse kitchen. It glinted on the blue slate slabs of the floor, on the willow-pattern china set out on the enormous black dresser; on the shelf of beaming Toby jugs above the stove. A rainbow danced over the low ceiling, cast up in a sun-spell from the handle of the glass milk jug.

“Warm, too,” said Aunt Jen. “We are going to have an Indian summer for you, Will. And fatten you up a bit too, my dear. Have some more bread.”

“It's lovely. I haven't eaten so much for months.” Will watched small Aunt Jen with affection as she bustled about the kitchen. Strictly speaking, she was not his aunt at all, but a cousin of his mother's; the two had grown up as close friends, and still exchanged quantities of letters. But Aunt Jen had left Buckinghamshire long before; it was one of the more romantic legends in the family, the tale of how she had come to Wales for a holiday, fallen shatteringly in love with a young Welsh farmer, and never gone home again.
She even sounded Welsh herself now—and looked it, with her small, cosily plump form and bright dark eyes.

“Where's Uncle David?” he said.

“Out in the yard somewhere. This is a busy time of the year with the sheep, the hill farms send their yearlings down for the winter . . . he has to drive to Tywyn soon, he wondered if you would like to go too. Go to the beach, you could, in this sunshine.”

“Super.”

“No swimming, mind,” said Aunt Jen hastily.

Will laughed. “I know, I'm fragile, I'll be careful. . . . I'd love to go. I can send Mum a card, saying I got here in one piece.”

A clatter and a shadow came in the doorway; it was Rhys, dishevelled, pulling off a sweater. “Morning, Will. Have you left us some breakfast?”

“You're late,” Will said cheekily.

“Late, is it?” Rhys glared at him in mock fury. “Just hear him—and us out since six with only an old cup of tea inside. Tomorrow morning, John, we will pull this young monkey out of bed and take him with us.”

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?”

D
avid 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.