The Grey King

by Susan Cooper

  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.

  At the same time another kind of innocence fell away, and he was aware too of immense danger, like a great shadow across the world, waiting for him all through this unfamiliar land of green valleys and dark-misted mountain peaks. He was like a battle leader suddenly given news: suddenly made aware, as he had not been a moment before, that just beyond the horizon a great and dreadful army lay in wait, preparing itself to rise like a huge wave and drown all those who stood in its way.

  Trembling with wonder, Will reached across his other arm and fondled the dog’s ears. It let go of his sleeve and stood there gazing at him, tongue lolling pink from a pink-rimmed mouth.

  “Good dog,” Will said. “Good dog.” Then a dark figure blotted out the sun, and he rolled abruptly over to sit up and see who stood outlined there against the sky.

  A clear Welsh voice said: “Are you hurt?”

  It was a boy. He was dressed neatly in what looked like a school uniform: grey trousers, white shirt, red socks and tie. He had a schoolbag slung over one shoulder, and he seemed to be about the same age as Will. But there was a quality of strangeness about him, as there had been about the dog, that tightened Will’s throat and caught him motionless in a wondering stare; for this boy was drained of all colour, like a shell bleached by the summer sun. His hair was white, and his eyebrows. His skin was pale. The effect was so startling that for a wild moment Will found himself wondering whether the hair was deliberately bleached—done on purpose, to create astonishment and alarm. But the idea vanished as swiftly as it had come. The mixture of arrogance and hostility facing him showed plainly that this was not that kind of boy at all.

  “I’m all right.” Will stood up, shaking, pulling bits of bracken out of his hair and off his clothes. He said, “You might teach your dog the difference between people and sheep.”

  “Oh,” said the boy indifferently, “he knew what he was about. He would have done you no harm.” He said something to the dog in Welsh, and it trotted back up the hill and sat down beside him, watching them both.

  “Well—” Will began, and then he stopped. He had looked into the boy’s face and found there another pair of eyes to shake him off balance. It was not, this time, the unearthliness he had seen in the dog; it was a sudden shock of feeling that he had seen them somewhere before. The boy’s eyes were a strange, tawny golden colour like the eyes of a cat or a bird, rimmed with eyelashes so pale as to be almost invisible, they had a cold, unfathomable glitter.

  “The raven boy,” he said instantly. “That’s who you are, that’s what it calls you, the old verse. I have it all now, I can remember. But ravens are black. Why does it call you that?”

  “My name is Bran,” the boy said, unsmiling, looking unwinking down at him. “Bran Davies. I live down on your uncle’s farm.”

  Will was taken aback for a moment, in spite of his new confidence. “On the farm?”

  “With my father. In a cottage. My father works for David Evans.” He blinked in the sunshine, pulled a pair of sunglasses from his pocket, and put them on; the tawny eyes disappeared into shadow. He said, in exactly the same conversational tone, “Bran is really the Welsh word for crow. But people called Bran in the old stories are linked up with the raven, too. A lot of ravens in these hills, there are. So I suppose you could say ‘the raven boy’ if you wanted. Poetic licence, like.”

  He swung the satchel off his shoulder and sat down beside Will on a rock, fiddling with the leather strap.

  Will said, “How did you know who I was? That David Evans is my uncle?”

  “I could just as well ask how you knew me,” Bran said. “How did you know, to name me the raven boy?”

  He ran one finger idly up and down the strap. Then he smiled suddenly, a smile that illuminated his pale face like quick flaring fire, and he pulled off the dark glasses again.

  “I will tell you the answer to both questions, Will Stanton,” he said. “It is because you are not properly human, but one of the Old Ones of the Light put here to hold back the terrible power of the Dark. You are the last of that circle to be born on earth. And I have been waiting for you.”

  The Raven Boy

  You see,” Will said, “it’s the first quest, without help, for me—and the last, because this now is the raising of the last defence the Light can build, to be ready. There is a great battle ahead, Bran—not yet, but not far off. For the Dark is rising, to make its great attempt to take the world for itself until the end of time. When that happens, we must fight and we must win. But we can only win if we have the right weapons. That is what we have been doing, and are still, in such quests as this—gathering the weapons forged for us long, long ago. Six enchanted Signs of the Light, a golden grail, a wonderful harp, a crystal sword . . . They are all achieved now but the harp and the sword, and I do not know what will be the manner of the sword’s finding. But the quest for the harp is mine. . . .”

  He picked a sprig of gorse, and sat staring at it. “Out of a long time ago, there were three verses made,” he said, “to tell me what to do. They aren’t written down any more, though once they were. They are only in my mind. Or at least they used to be—forever, I thought. But then not long ago I was very ill, and when I came out of it, the verses had gone. I’d forgotten them. I don’t know if the Dark had a hand in it. That’s possible, while I was . . . not myself. They couldn’t have taken the words for themselves, but they could have managed to hinder my catching them again. I thought I’d go mad, trying to remember. I didn’t know what to do. A few bits came back, but not much . . . not much. Until I saw your dog.”

  “Cafall,” Bran said. The dog raised its head.

  “Cafall. Those eyes of his, those silver eyes . . . it was as if they broke a spell. He had put me on the Old Way, Cadfan’s Way, as well—just here. And I remembered. All the verses. Everything.”

  “He is a special dog,” Bran said. “He is not . . . ordinary. What are your verses?”

  Will looked at him, opened his mouth, shut it again, and looked out at the mountains in confusion. The white-haired boy laughed. He said, “I know. For all you can tell, I might be from the Dark in spite of Cafall. Isn’t that it?”

  Will s
hook his head. “If you were from the Dark, I should know very well. There’s a sense, that tells us . . . the trouble is, that same particular sense that says you aren’t from the Dark doesn’t say anything else about you either. Not a thing. Nothing bad, nothing good. I don’t understand.”

  “Ah,” Bran said mockingly. “I have never understood that myself. But I can tell you, I am like Cafall—I am not quite ordinary either.” He glanced at Will, the pale-lashed eyes darting, secretive. Then he said, reciting deliberately, sounding very sing-song Welsh:

  On the day of the dead, when the year too dies,

  Must the youngest open the oldest hills

  Through the door of the birds, where the breeze breaks.

  Will sat stone-still, horrified, gazing at him. The land broke in waves. The sky was falling. He said huskily, “The beginning of it. But you can’t know that. It’s not possible. There are only three people in the world who—”

  He stopped.

  The white-haired boy said, “I was up here with Cafall, a week ago, up here where you never meet anybody, and we met an old man. A strange old man he was, with a lot of white hair and a big beaky nose.”

  Will said slowly, “Ah.”

  “He was not English,” said Bran, “and he was not Welsh either, though he spoke good Welsh, and good English too, for that matter. . . . He must have been a dewin, a wizard, he knew a lot about me. . . .” He pulled a frond of bracken, frowning, and began to pick it to pieces. “A lot about me. . . . Then he told me about the Dark and the Light. I have never heard anything that I believed so very much, right away, without question. And he told me about you. He told me that it was my task to help you on your quest, but that”—a mocking note slid again into the clear voice, perceptible just for an instant—“but that because you would not trust me, I must learn those three lines, for a sign. And so he taught me them.”

  Will lifted his head to look up the valley, at the blue-grey hills hazy in the sunshine, and he shivered; the sense of a looming shadow was on him again, like a dark cloud hovering. Then he said, shrugging it aside, speaking without strain of suspicion now, “There are three verses. But the first two are the ones that matter, for now. The lines my master Merriman taught you come at the beginning.”

  On the day of the dead, when the year too dies,

  Must the youngest open the oldest hills

  Through the door of the birds, where the breeze breaks.

  There fire shall fly from the raven boy,

  And the silver eyes that see the wind,

  And the Light shall have the harp of gold.

  By the pleasant lake the Sleepers lie,

  On Cadfan’s Way where the kestrels call;

  Though grim from the Grey King shadows fall,

  Yet singing the golden harp shall guide

  To break their sleep and bid them ride.

  He reached out and rubbed Cafall’s ears. “The silver eyes,” he said. There was a silence, with only the distant skylark still trilling faintly in the air. Bran had listened without moving, his pale face intent. At length he said, “Who is Merriman?”

  “The old man you met, of course. If you mean, what is he, that’s harder. Merriman is my master. He is the first of the Old Ones, and the strongest, and the wisest. . . . He will have no part in this quest now, I think. Not in the seeking. There are too many things for all of us to do, in too many places.”

  “Cadfan’s Way, it said in the verse. I remember he told me one other thing, he said Cafall would get you on to the Way, so that the two things together, the place and Cafall himself, would be important—then he said, and also the Way for later. Later—so not yet, I suppose.” Bran sighed. “What does it all mean?” For all his strangeness, it was the plaintive question of a very normal boy.

  “I was thinking,” Will said, “that the day of the dead might be All Hallows’ Eve. Don’t you think? Hallowe’en, when people used to believe all the ghosts walked.”

  “I know some who still believe they do,” Bran said. “Things like that last a long time, up here. There is one old lady I know puts out food for the spirits, at Hallowe’en. She says they eat it too, though if you ask me it is more likely the cats, she has four of them. . . . Hallowe’en will be this next Saturday, you know.”

  “Yes,” Will said. “I do know. Very close.”

  “Some people say that if you go and sit in the church porch till midnight on Hallowe’en, you hear a voice calling out the names of everyone who will die in the next year.” Bran grinned. “I have never tried it.”

  But Will was not smiling as he listened. He said thoughtfully, “You just said, in the next year. And the verse says, ‘On the day of the dead when the year too dies.’ But that doesn’t make sense. Hallowe’en isn’t the end of the year.”

  “Maybe once upon a time it used to be,” Bran said. “The end and the beginning both, once, instead of December. In Welsh, Hallowe’en is called Calan Gaeaf, and that means the first day of winter. Pretty warm for winter, of course. Mind you, nobody is going to get me to spend the night in St. Cadfan’s churchyard, however warm.”

  “I was there this morning, at St. Cadfan’s,” Will said. “That was what put the name back into my head, somehow, to come and look for the Way. But now I have the verse, I must begin at the beginning.”

  “The hardest part,” Bran said. He tugged off his school tie, rolled it up and stuffed it into his trouser pocket. “It says, the youngest must open the oldest hills, through the door of the birds. Right? And you are the youngest of the Old Ones, and these are the oldest hills in Britain for sure, these and the Scottish hills. But the door of the birds, that’s hard. . . . The birds have their holes and nests everywhere, the mountains are full of birds. Crows, kestrels, ravens, buzzards, plovers, wrens, wheatears, pipits, curlews—lovely it is, listening to the curlews down on the marshes in spring. And look, there is a peregrine.” He pointed upwards, to a dark speck in the clear blue sky drifting lazily round in a great sweeping curve, far above their heads.

  “How can you tell?”

  “A kestrel would be smaller, so would a merlin. It isn’t a crow. It could be a buzzard. But I think it’s a peregrine—you get to know them, they are so scarce now that you look more carefully . . . and I have a reason of my own too, because peregrines like to bother ravens, and as you pointed out, I am the raven boy.”

  Will studied him: the eyes were hidden again behind the sunglasses, and the pale face, almost as pale as the hair, was expressionless. It must always be difficult to read this boy Bran; to know properly what he was thinking or feeling. Yet here he was, part of the pattern: found by Merriman, Will’s master, and now by Will—and described in a prophetic verse that had been made more than a thousand years ago. . . .

  He said, experimentally, “Bran.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. I was just practising. It’s a funny name, I never heard it before.”

  “The only way it is funny is in that English voice of yours. It is not bran like a breakfast cereal, it is longer-sounding, braaan, braaan.”

  “Braaaaaaan,” said Will.

  “Better.” He squinted at Will over the top of the sunglasses. “Is that a map sticking out of your pocket? Let’s have it here a minute.”

  Will handed it over. Squatting on the hillside, Bran spread it on the rustling bracken. “Now,” he said. “Read out the names that I point to.”

  Will peered obediently at the moving finger. He saw: Tal y Llyn, Mynydd Ceiswyn, Cemmaes, Llanwrin, Machynlleth, Afon Dyfi, Llangelynin. He read aloud, laboriously, “Tally-lin, Minid Seeswin, Sem-eyes, Lan-rin, Machine-leth, Affon Diffy, Lang-elly-nin.”

  Bran moaned softly. “I was afraid of that.”

  “Well,” said Will defensively, “that’s exactly what they look like. Oh, wait a minute, I remember Uncle David said you pronounce f like v. So that makes this one ‘Avon Divvy.’”

  “Duvvy,” said Bran. “Written in English, Dovey. The Afon Dyfi is the River Dovey, and that pla
ce over there is called Aberdyfi, which means the mouth of the Dovey, Aberdovey. The Welsh y is mostly like the English u in ‘run’ or ‘hunt.’”

  “Mostly?” said Will suspiciously.

  “Well, sometimes it isn’t. But you’d better stick to that for now. Look here—” He fumbled inside his leather satchel and brought out a school notebook and pencil. He wrote: Mynydd Ceiswyn. “Now that,” he said, “is pronounced Munuth Kice-ooin. Kice like rice. Go on, say it.”

  Will said it, peering incredulously at the spelling.

  “Three things there,” said Bran, writing. He appeared to be enjoying himself. “Double d is always a ‘th’ sound, but a soft sound, like in ‘leather,’ not in ‘smith.’ Then, c is always a hard sound in Welsh, like in ‘cat.’ So is g, as a matter of fact—it’s always g as in ‘go,’ not g as in ‘gentle.’ And the Welsh w is like the oo sound in ‘pool,’ nearly always. So that’s why Mynydd Ceiswyn is pronounced Munuth Kice-ooin.”

  Will said, “But it ought to be un at the end, not in, because you said the Welsh y was like u in ‘run.’”

  Bran chuckled. “There’s a memory. Sorry. That’s one of the times when it isn’t. You’ll just have to get used to them if you’re going to say the places right. After all you can’t complain about us not being consistent, not when your old English is full of things like dough and through and thorough.”

  Will took the pencil and copied from the map ‘Cemmaes’ and ‘Llangelynin.’ “All right then,” he said. “If the c is hard, then it must be Kem-eyes.”

  “Very good,” Bran said. “But a hard s, not soft. Said fast, it comes out Kemmess. Like chemist, without the t.”

  Will sighed, looking hard at his next sample. “Hard g, and the y sound. So it’s . . . Lan-gel-un-in.”

  “You’re getting there,” Bran said. “All you have to learn now is the one sound most Englishmen can never manage. Open your mouth a little way and put the tip of your tongue against the back of your front teeth. As if you’re just about to say lan.”

  Will gave him a doubtful look, but did what he was told. Then he twitched his lips upwards, and made a face like a rabbit.