Greenwitch

by Susan Cooper

Will said, “I’m pretty sure you will.”

  * * *

  Mr and Mrs Penhallow stood waving from the steps of the cottage, as they left: Merriman to put the four children on the London train, the Stantons on a visit to Truro for the day.

  “Good-by!”

  “Good journey to you! Good-by!”

  The cars disappeared across the quay; overhead, sea gulls wheeled and cried.

  “Perfessor did find what he came for, this time, I do believe,” Mr Penhallow said, sucking pensively at his pipe.

  “That liddle gold cup from last year, that was stole in London? Aye. But there was more, I fancy.” Mrs Penhallow gazed at the point where Merriman’s car had rounded the corner, with speculation in her eyes.

  “More of what?”

  “’Twas no accident he came down here at Greenwitch time. He’ve never done that before. This was Cap’n Toms’ first Greenwitch makin’ at home for a good many years, too. . . . I don’t know, Walter, I don’t know. But something strange has been going on.”

  “You’m dreaming,” Mr Penhallow said indulgently.

  “That I’m not. But that young Jane was, one night. That same night everyone was dreaming, the night the whole village was hilla-ridden. . . . Such talk there was next morning, of things best forgotten. . . . And that morning, I was right near the bedrooms, going about my business, when young Jane woke up. And she let out such a hoot, and was out of her room like a wild thing running to her brothers.”

  “So she’d been dreaming, sure,” Mr Penhallow said. “A bad ’un, by the sound of it. What of that?”

  “Twasn’t her dreaming that stays with me.” Mrs Penhallow looked out at the quiet harbour, and the drifting gulls. “‘Twas her room. Clean as a pin it was the night before, she’m a neat little maid. But everywhere in that room, that morning, there was a great mess of little twigs and leaves, hawthorn leaves, and rowan. And everywhere a great smell of the sea.”

  * * *

  Here ends GREENWITCH, third book of the sequence named THE DARK IS RISING. The next book will be called THE GREY KING. There will be five books.

  PICK UP THE NEXT SPELLBINDING CHAPTER OF SUSAN COOPER’S THE DARK IS RISING SEQUENCE:

  —THE GREY KING—

  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 Ynysymaengwyn 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 foun
d 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 p
oised 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?

  Clearly, there was only one way to find out. Taking a deep breath, Will turned to face the dog and began deliberately clambering straight up the slope. The dog stopped, and the long, low growl began again in its throat; it crouched, back curved as if all four feet were planted like trees in the ground. The snarl of the white teeth said, very plainly: Not this way. But Will, clenching his fists, kept climbing. He shifted direction very slightly so that he would pass close to the dog without touching it. But then unexpectedly, with one short bark, the dog darted towards him, crouching low, and involuntarily Will jumped—and lost his balance. He fell sideways on the steep hillside. Desperately reaching his arms wide to stop himself from rolling headlong down, he slithered and bumped upside-down for a few wild yards, terror loud as a shout in his head, until his fall was checked by something jerking fiercely at his sleeve. He came up against a rock, with a numbing thud.

  He opened his eyes. The line where mountain met sky was spinning before him. Very close was the dog, its teeth clamped on the sleeve of his jacket, tugging him back, all warm breath and black nose and staring eyes. And at the sight of the eyes, Will’s world spun round and over again so fast he thought he must still be falling. The roaring was in his ears again, and all things normal became suddenly chaos. For this dog’s eyes were like no eyes he had ever seen; where they should have been brown, they were silver-white: eyes the colour of blindness, set in the head of an animal that could see. And as the silver eyes gazed into his, and the dog’s breath panted out hot on his face, in a whirling instant Will remembered everything that his illness had taken away from him. He remembered the verses that had been put into his head as guide for the bleak, lone quest he was destined now to follow; remembered who he was and what he was—and recognised the design that under the mask of coincidence had brought him here to Wales.