The Grey King

by Susan Cooper

  “They will be no good with fire,” Rhys said, seeing Will cock his head to the plaintive barking. “And the sheep can get out of the way on their own—indeed they will all be well away, by now.”

  “I wonder where Cafall is,” Will said, and then caught sight of Bran’s face and wished he had not.

  Close to, the fire on the mountain was very much more alarming than it had seemed from a distance. They could smell it now, and hear it; smell the smoke more bitter than a farm bonfire; hear the soft, dreadful sound of flames consuming the bracken, like paper crumpled in the hand, and the sudden crackling roar as a bush or a patch of gorse went up. And they could see the flames, leaping high, bright red and yellow at the edges of the fire but ferocious and near-invisible at its heart.

  As they tumbled out of the car David Evans was yelling for the fire brooms. Will and Bran pulled them out: besoms made like those for old-fashioned sweeping, but with the twigs longer and wider-spread. John Rowlands and Bran’s father, already equipped, were thrashing at the leading edge of the fire, trying to contain it; but the wind was gusting higher, and the flames, now leaping, now creeping, were soon past them and travelling along the lower edge of the mountain. As they swept upwards, roaring up the hillside through the tinder-dry bracken, Owen Davies jumped out of the way only just in time.

  The crackling rose; the air was full of fumes and smoke and whirling black specks of charcoal and ash. Great heat shone out at them. They were all in a line beating at the flames, flailing away with all their might, yet only occasionally extinguishing a spark. John Rowlands shouted something desperately in Welsh; then seeing Will’s uncomprehending face near him, gasped out: “We must drive it higher, before it can reach Prichard’s! Keep it from the rock!”

  Peering ahead at the great outsweeping rocky slope of Craig yr Aderyn, Will glimpsed for the first time the corner of a grey stone building jutting out beyond its far side. The light glinted on a spray of water flung up beside the house; someone was soaking the land all round it, in an effort to deaden the fire if it should reach that far. But Will, beating hopelessly with his long flat-tipped broom, felt that nothing could halt or check the inferno before them, snarling high over their heads now as it reached a tangle of blackberry bushes. It was like a huge beast raging over the mountain, gobbling up everything in its path with irresistible greed. It was so powerful, and they so small, that even the effort to control its path seemed ludicrous. He thought: It is like the Dark—and for the first time found himself wondering how the fire could have begun.

  Below them, from the road past the foot of the great Craig, came the clanging of a fire engine’s bell, and Will glimpsed patches of bright red through the trees, and a hose snaking through the air. Men’s voices were calling faintly and there was a sound of engines. But up here on the slope, the fire was gaining a greater hold, as the gusting wind caught it in patches, and gradually they were forced downward, into the trees edging the road. In triumphant thunder the fire roared after them.

  “Down the road!” the thin man Tom Ellis called. “Those trees will catch in a minute!”

  Will panted along at John Rowland’s side. “What will happen?”

  “Burn itself out, eventually.” But the Welshman’s creased face was grim.

  Bran came trotting up at his other side, his white skin smudged and dirty. “This wind is the trouble, taking it up the valley—is Prichard’s place really in danger, Mr. Rowlands?”

  John Rowlands checked his stride for a moment, to gaze all round the sky. Clouds were forming in the blue air now, strange ragged dirty-white clouds that seemed to be coming from no one direction. “I don’t know . . . the wind is for a change in the weather, and it is shifting, but hard to tell where . . . we shall have rain sooner or later.”

  “Well,” Will said hopefully, “the rain will put the fire out, won’t it?” But as he spoke, he could hear the crackle and roar of the fire like laughter at his back, and he was not surprised when John Rowlands shook his head.

  “Only a great deal of rain . . . the ground is so dry, dry as it never is this time of year—nothing but a downpour will have any effect at all.” He looked round again, frowning at the mountains and the sky. “Something is strange, about this fire and everything . . . something is wrong. . . .” He shook his shoulders, giving up the search, and strode on ahead as they rounded a bend and came towards the fire engine and its thunderous thrumming engine.

  Will thought: Ah, John Rowlands, you see more than you think you see, though not quite enough. The Dark Lord has begun his work in these mountains, the Grey King is building up a wall to enclose the golden harp, and the Sleepers who must be wakened, so that I may not come to them and fulfil the quest. For if he can keep them from the reach of the Light, then the Old Ones will not come into their full power, and there will be none to keep the Dark from rising. . . .

  He said, without knowing that he spoke aloud: “But it won’t work!”

  A voice said softly in his ear, “What won’t work?” Bran’s dark smoky spectacles, shrouding the eyes behind, were staring into his face.

  Will looked at him and said with sudden naked honesty, “I don’t know what to make of you.”

  “I know you don’t,” Bran said, a quirk of a smile twitching his strange pale face. “But you’re going to need me all the same.” He spun round, as smoke from the fire up the hillside came billowing down around them. “Don’t worry,” he said, grinning. “Nobody else has ever known what to make of me either.” And he was off, spinning, running, almost dancing up the road towards the fire engine.

  Will ran after him. And then in a moment both of them were brought up short by a sight more astonishing than any yet. Beneath the looming bulk of Craig yr Aderyn the firemen had two hoses playing, drenching both the mountain and the side of the road in an effort to check the fire from leaping over the Craig and down to Prichard’s Farm. Others ran here and there with buckets, fire brooms, anything with which stray sparks might be drowned or beaten out before they gained a hold. The road was buzzing with anxious activity. Yet in the midst of it all, standing rigid and oblivious with fury, stood Caradog Prichard, his red hair bristling, blood on his shirt and a shotgun levelled in one hand—and the other hand out rigid, pointing in accusation as he screamed with rage at John Rowlands.

  “Bring me the dog! Bring him! I will prove to you that it was him, him and that freakish white hound of the freak boy Davies! I will show you! Six sheep in my field, there are six of them, with their throats ripped out, dammo, their heads half off—all for black joy, and that is what those bloody dogs had of it and that is what I shall shoot them for! Bring me them here! Bring them! And I will prove it to you!”

  The boys stood frozen, gazing at him in horror; he was not for that moment a human being, but a frenzied creature possessed by rage, turned into an animal. All that could be seen in him was the urge to hurt, and it was, as it always will be, the most dreadful sight in the world.

  Looking at Prichard with the eye of a human and the vision of an Old One, Will was filled with an overpowering compassion: an awareness of what must inevitably overtake Caradog Prichard if he were not checked, now, for always, in this passion before it was too late. Stop, he longed to call to him: stop, before the Grey King sees you and puts out his hand in friendship, and you, unwitting, take it and are destroyed. . . .

  Before he thought what he was doing he stepped forward, and the movement brought the red-haired man swinging towards him. The finger wheeled viciously round, jabbing at him through the air.

  “You there too, Sais bach, you are part of it, you and your uncle’s farm. They are Clwyd dogs, these murdering brutes, it is on all your heads, and I will have my due from all of you, from all of you—”

  Spittle foamed at the corners of his mouth. There was no speaking to him. Will fell back, and with the fury of Prichard’s shouting even the firefighters paused in amazement. There was no sound but the thump of the fire engine’s pumping and the crackle of the approaching f
lames, and no movement for an instant anywhere. Then David Evans pushed forward, a small brisk form with a fire broom in his hand and smudges of soot on his face and shirt, and he took Prichard fearlessly by the shoulder and shook him, hard.

  “The fire will be on us in minutes, Caradog Prichard—do you want your farm to burn? All of us here working our hands raw to keep the flames from your roof, and your wife inside there doing the same, and you stand here shouting your silly head off and think of nothing but a few dead sheep! A lot more dead sheep you will have, man, and a dead farm too, if you do not pull yourself together now. Now!”

  Prichard gazed blankly at him, the small bright eyes squinting suspiciously in the pudgy face, and then he seemed gradually to wake up, and to realise where he was and what was happening. Dazed, he stared at the flames leaping closer beyond the hedge. The pump of the fire engine rose to a higher pitch, as the workers swung their hoses round to meet the advancing fire; sparks flew in all directions as the beaters thwacked frantically at the bracken. Caradog Prichard gave one short squeal of terror, turned, and rushed back towards his farmhouse.

  Without a word Will and Bran rejoined the line of beaters, edging diagonally up the hillside in an effort to keep the fire from sweeping over and beyond the Craig. The sky was growing darker as the clouds thickened and the evening drew on, but there was no hint of rain. Again the wind gusted, dropped to nothing, rose in a sudden new gust; there was no telling what it would do next. More and more strongly Will could feel the enmity of the Grey King thrusting at him from the high peaks at the head of the valley; it made a wall as fierce as the wall of flames roaring towards them from the other direction, though the only one who could feel the force of both, the only one caught between the two, was the Old One, Will Stanton, bound by birth to follow this quest wherever it might lead. . . . He was swept up suddenly in a wild exhilaration, bringing energy from nowhere to harden his drooping arms and legs. Yelling with sudden glee, grinning madly at Bran, he whacked at the flames licking the bracken at his feet as if he could flatten them in an instant into the ground.

  Then a flash of movement higher up the mountain caught his eyes away from the line of flame, and out of the bare rocks above he saw, flinging itself forward at astonishing speed, the form of a grey-white fox. Brush flying out behind, ears back, it leapt up the towering side of Craig yr Aderyn. Smoke billowed, rising on the wind, and the fox was gone. Will had seen it for only a quick moment.

  He heard a high wail from Bran. “Cafall!”

  Then the Welsh boy was scrambling up the slope, ignoring cries of concern from below, ignoring the fire and the smoke and all else except the glimpse of the white animal he had thought was his dog.

  “Bran, come back! It isn’t Cafall!”

  Will climbed desperately after him, his heart thumping as if it would leap out of his chest. “Bran! Come back!”

  Steeper and steeper the slope grew, until they were upon the Craig itself, scrambling through bracken, over slippery grass, round jutting shelves of grey rock. Bran paused at last on one of these, panting, staring wildly about him. Will stumbled up beside him, hardly able to speak.

  “Cafall!” Bran shouted into nowhere.

  “It wasn’t Cafall, Bran.”

  “Of course, it was. I saw him.”

  “It was a fox, Bran. One of the milgwn. Bran, it’s a trick, don’t you see?”

  Will coughed, choking in a billowy gust of smoke from the black cloud that wreathed round the slope behind and below them. They could see nothing but smoke and the steep rock, with patches of grey sky above their heads. Below, there was no sign of the farm or men or the valley, and in their ears no sound but the sighing of the wind, and somewhere the harsh faint voices of birds.

  Bran looked at Will uncertainly.

  “Bran, I’m sure of it.”

  “All right. I was so certain . . . I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. It wasn’t you seeing. It was the Grey King making you see. But the trouble is, we can’t go back that way, the fire’s coming up after us—”

  “There is a way down the other side,” Bran said, brushing sweat from his eyes. “No bracken for the fire to burn there, just rock. But it’s hard going.” He looked doubtfully at Will’s pale smudged face.

  “I’m all right. Go on, go on.”

  They clambered on up the rough stairway of grass and rock, holding on now with both hands and feet.

  “There’s a bird’s nest here!” Will had glimpsed an untidy pile of twigs and bracken a foot from his head.

  “There’d be birds too, if it weren’t for the fire. It’s a nesting place in spring, I told you. Not just the cormorants—ravens too. Lots of birds . . . which is why they call it Bird Rock, of course. Here—” Bran paused upright on a broad shelf of rock, edged with bracken. “This is the ridge. It goes down the other side towards Prichard’s Farm.”

  But Will was standing very still, looking at him. “Bird Rock?”

  “That’s right,” Bran said, surprised. “Bird Rock. Craig yr Aderyn, rock of the birds. I thought you knew that.”

  Will said softly, reflectively:

  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. . . .

  Bran stared at him. “You mean . . . the door of the birds . . . here?”

  “Bird Rock. It must be. I know it. And this is the day of the dead—” Will swung his head sharply, gazing up at the sky where clouds flew like grey puffs of smoke. “And the wind’s changing, feel. . . . No. . . . Yes, there again. . . . A bad wind, a wind from the Dark. I don’t like it, Bran, it has the Grey King in it.” He spoke now with no thought of Bran as anything but an ally, ever.

  The white-haired boy said bleakly, “It’s swinging to the north. That is the worst wind of all, the north wind. Gwynt Traed yr Meirw, they call it, the wind that blows round the feet of the dead. It brings storms. And worse, sometimes.”

  The distant crackling of the fire seemed louder now. Will glanced over his shoulder, down the hill; the smoke was thicker there, and he felt more heat in the air. The wind whirled in gusts, catching up cinders and soot from below into strange dark eddies round their heads. All at once Will knew with dreadful certainty that the Grey King was aware of him, precisely aware, gathering his power for attack—and that it was at that first moment of awareness that the fire on the mountain had begun. He flinched in a sudden sense of fearful loneliness. An Old One, alone without others of the Light, was vulnerable to the Dark at its strongest. Though he could not be destroyed for all time, yet he could be disarmed; the full power of a Lord of the Dark could, if it struck him defenceless, blast him out of Time for so great a space that he could be of no help to his fellows until too late. So the Grey King struck now at Will with fire, and with all else that might be at his command.

  And Bran was more vulnerable yet. Will swung back quickly. “Bran, come on, along the ridge to the top. Before the fire—”

  His voice died in his throat. Silently on to the ridge round them, out of holes and crevices, round corners and crags, came slinking the grey-white ghostly shapes of the milgwn, more than a score of them: heads held low, teeth grinning, a white tip glimmering on each stiffly-held grey bushy tail. Their foxy smell was in the air stronger than the smoke. At their head stood the king fox, their leader, red tongue lolling from a mouth set in a wide dreadful grin, its white teeth long as fingers and sharp as nails, icicles of bone. The eyes were bright; the ruff stood out white round the huge shoulders and neck.

  Will clenched his fists, shouting angry words of power in the Old Speech, but the great grey fox did not flinch. Instead it made a sudden sharp leap into the air, straight up on the one spot, as Will had once seen a fox do in a Buckinghamshire field, far away from this valley, to discover what danger lurked in a field of wheat higher than its head. As it jumped, the king fox gave one short, sharp bark, deep and clear. The milgwn snarled low. And an
abrupt whoof of flame shot up at Will’s side with a sound like tearing cloth, as the fire on the mountain burst at last on the ridge of Craig yr Aderyn and roared crackling round them in the bracken.

  Will shrank back. There was no way of escape but past the king fox. And the big fox crouched motionless, low on its belly, tensing itself to spring.

  There was a sudden piercing yell at Will’s shoulder. Bran leapt forward, waving in his hand a crooked branch of scrub oak blazing like tinder, a sheaf of flame; he thrust it full into the grey fox’s face. Screaming, the animal fell back amongst its fellows, and the foxes milled in confusion. Before the branch could burn down to his arm, Bran flung it aside. But unexpectedly, caught by a gust of wind, it fell over the opposite side of the ridge, down towards the unburned slope. Out it went and over the edge, and down to the far side of the Craig where the fire might not otherwise have gone. There was a gasp of flame as the fire took hold on its new prey. Bran wailed in horror.

  “Will! I’ve been and sent the fire down to Prichard’s Farm—we’re cut off both ways!”

  “The top!” Will called urgently. “We must get to the top!” With all the certainty of ancient instincts he knew the place they must find; it had begun compellingly to call to him, unseen, waking to his quest. He knew what it would look like; he knew what he must do when they reached it. But the reaching was another matter. Flames crackled at either side of them, scorching their skin dry; ahead, the milgwn gathered now in a tight semicircle, waiting, waiting—

  Desperately Will put protection about himself and Bran, standing foursquare facing the north and calling some words in the Old Speech: it was the Spell of Helledd, to give freedom to a wanderer against any compulsion by those holding the land over which he roamed. But there was not much hope in him; he knew it could not hold for long. Beside him he heard Bran give a great imploring shout, like a small child calling for help without knowing that he calls.