The Grey King

by Susan Cooper

  He said, “Hallo, Bran.”

  Bran raised his head slowly, but said nothing.

  Will said, “There was no dog like him, ever, anywhere.”

  “No, there was not,” Bran said. His voice was small and husky; he sounded tired.

  Will cast about to find words of comfort, but his mind could not help but use the wisdom of an Old One, and that was not the way to reach Bran. He said, “It was a man that killed him, Bran, but that is the price we have to pay for the freedom of men on the earth. That they can do the bad things as well as the good. There are shadows in the pattern, as well as sunlight. Just as you once told me, Cafall was no ordinary dog. He was a part of the long pattern, like the stars and the sea. And nobody could have played his part better, nobody in the whole world.”

  The valley was quiet under its brooding grey sky; Will heard only a song thrush trilling from a tree, the scattered voices of sheep on the slopes; the faint humming, from the distant road, of a passing car.

  Bran raised his head and took off his glasses; the tawny eyes were swollen and red-rimmed in his white face. He sat there hunched, knees bent up, arms dangling limp over them.

  “Go away,” he said. “Go away. I wish you had never come here. I wish I had never heard of the Light and the Dark, and your damned old Merriman and his rhymes. If I had your golden harp now I would throw it in the sea. I am not a part of your stupid quest any more, I don’t care what happens to it. And Cafall was never a part of it either, or a part of your pretty pattern. He was my dog, and I loved him more than anything in the world, and now he is dead. Go away.”

  The red-rimmed eyes stared cold and unwinking at Will for a long moment, and then Bran put back his smoky glasses and turned his head to look out across the valley. It was a dismissal. Without a word, Will stood straight again and plodded on up the hill.

  It seemed a long time before he reached John Rowlands. The lean, leathery sheepman was crouched half-kneeling over a broken fence, mending it from a prickly skein of barbed wire. He set back on his heels as Will came panting up, and looked at him through narrowed eyes, his seamed brown face crinkled against the brightness of the sky. With no greeting, he said, “This is the top level of the Clwyd pasture here. The hill farms have the grazing beyond—the fence is to keep our sheep below. But they are crafty beggars at breaking it, especially now the rams are out.”

  Will nodded, miserably.

  John Rowlands looked at him for a moment, then got up and beckoned him over to a high outcropping of rock a little way up the mountain. They sat down on its lee side; even there the place was like a lookout post, governing the whole valley. Will glanced round him briefly, his senses alert, but the Grey King still lay withdrawn; the valley was as quiescent as it had been since the moment Cafall had died.

  John Rowlands said, “There is the rest of the fence to check, but I am ready for a break. I have a Thermos here. Would you like a mouthful of tea, Will?”

  He gave him the Thermos top brimming with bitter brown tea. Will surprised himself by drinking thirstily. When he had finished, John Rowlands said softly, “Did you know you were sitting near Cadfan’s Way, here?”

  Will looked at him sharply, and it was not the look of an eleven-year-old and he did not trouble to disguise the fact. “Yes,” he said. “Of course I did. And you knew that I knew, and that’s why you mentioned it.”

  John Rowlands sighed and poured himself some tea. “I dare say,” he said in a curious tone that had envy in it, “that you could now walk blindfold all the way from Tywyn to Machynlleth over the hills on Cadfan’s Way, even though you have never been to this country before.”

  Will pushed back his straight brown hair, damp on his forehead from the climbing. “The Old Ways are all over Britain,” he said, “and we can follow one anywhere, once we have found it. Yes.” He looked out across the valley. “It was Bran’s dog who found it for me up here, in the beginning,” he said sadly.

  John Rowlands pushed back his cloth cap, scratched his head and pulled it forward again. “I have heard of you people,” he said. “All my life, on and off, though not so much these days. More when I was a boy. I even used to think I’d met one of you, once, when I was very young, though I dare say it was only a dream. . . . And now I have been thinking about the way the dog died, and I have talked a bit to young Bran.”

  He broke off, and Will looked nervously to see what he might say next, but did not choose to use his art to find out.

  “And I think, Will Stanton,” said the sheepman, “that I ought to be helping you in any way that you might need. But I do not want to know what you are doing, I do not want you to explain it to me at all.”

  Will felt suddenly as if the sun had burst out. “Thank you,” he said. The smaller of John Rowlands’s dogs, Tip, came quietly over and sat down at his feet, and he rubbed the silky ears.

  John Rowlands looked down over the bracken-brown slope; Will’s gaze followed his. Just above the blackened land where the fire had grazed, they could see the tiny figure that was Bran, sitting hunched with his back to them, his white head propped on his knees.

  “This is a very bad time for Bran Davies,” the shepherd said.

  “I’m glad he talked to you,” Will said bleakly. “He wouldn’t talk to me. Not that I blame him. He’ll be so lonely, without Cafall. I mean, Mr. Davies is nice, but not exactly . . . and not having any mother, too, that makes it worse.”

  “Bran never knew his mother,” John Rowlands said. “He was too small.”

  Will said curiously, “What was she like?”

  Rowlands drank his tea, shook the cup dry and screwed it back on the flask. “Her name was Gwen,” he said. He held the flask absentmindedly in his hands, looking past it into his memory. “She was one of the prettiest things you will ever see. Small, with a clear fair skin and black hair, and blue eyes like speedwell, and a smiling light in her face that was like music. But she was a strange wild girl too. Out of the mountains she came, and never would tell where she came from, or how. . . .”

  He turned abruptly and looked hard at Will, with the dark eyes that seemed always to be narrowed against fierce weather. “I should have thought,” he said with sudden belligerence, “that being what you are, you would know all about Bran.”

  Will said gently, “I don’t know anything about Bran, except what he has told me. We are not really so very different from you, Mr. Rowlands, most of us. Only our masters are different. We do know many things, but they are not things that intrude on the lives of men. In that, we are like anyone else—we know only what we have lived through, or what somebody has told us.”

  John Rowlands nodded his head, relenting. He opened his mouth to say something, stopped, pulled his pipe from his pocket and poked at its contents with one finger. “Well,” he said slowly, “perhaps I should tell you the story from the start. It will help you to understand Bran. He knows some of it well enough himself—indeed he thinks about it so much, on his own, that I wish he had never been told.”

  Will said nothing. He sat closer to Tip, and put one arm round his neck.

  John Rowlands lit his pipe. He said, through the first cloud of smoke, “It was when Owen Davies was a young man, working at Prichard’s Farm. Old Mr. Prichard was alive in those days. Caradog worked for his father too, waiting to take over and run the place, though he wasn’t a patch on Owen for work. . . . Owen was sheepman for Prichard. A solitary chap he was, even then. He was living in a cottage on his own. Out on the moor, closer to the sheep than to the farm.” He puffed out some more smoke, and glanced at Will. “You have been at that cottage. It is deserted now. Nobody has lived there for years.”

  “That place? Where you left the sheep, after—” Startled, Will saw again in his mind the figure of John Rowlands staggering into the little empty stone house in the bracken, with the wounded sheep draped over his shoulders and blood from its fleece on his neck. The little house from which, when they had come back half an hour later, the hurt sheep had vanished witho
ut any trace.

  “That place. Yes. And one wild night in the winter, with rain and a north wind blowing, there was a knocking at Owen’s door. It was a girl, out of nowhere, half-frozen with walking through the storm. And worn out from carrying her baby.”

  “Her baby?”

  John Rowlands looked down the mountain at Bran’s hunched figure, sitting lonely on his rock. “A sturdy little chap the baby was, just a few months old. She had him in a kind of sling on her back. The only strange thing about him, Owen saw, was that he had no colour in him. White face, white hair, white eyebrows, and very odd tawny eyes like the eyes of an owl. . . .”

  Will said slowly, “I see.”

  “Owen took the girl in,” John Rowlands said. “He got her back to life, gradually, with much care, that night and the day after—and the baby too, though babies are tough creatures and he was not in such a bad way. And before twenty-four hours were even gone, Owen Davies was more in love with that strange beautiful girl than I have ever seen a man love a woman. He had never loved anyone much before. Very shy, was Owen. It was like a dam bursting. . . . With a man like that, it is dangerous—when at last he loves, he gives all his heart without care or thinking, and it may never go back to him for the rest of his life.” He stopped for a moment, compassion softening his weather-lined face, and sat in silence. Then he said, “Well. There they were, then. The next day Owen went off to the sheep, leaving the girl to rest in the cottage. On the way home he stopped at my house, on Clwyd here, to get some milk for the baby. We had always been friends since he was a boy, even though I am older. I was not there, but my wife was, and he told her about Gwen and the baby. My Blodwen has a warm heart and a good ear. She said he was like a man on fire, glowing, he had to tell somebody. . . .”

  Far down on the lower slope, Bran got up from his rock and began roaming aimlessly through the bracken, peering about as though he were looking for something.

  “When Owen came back to his cottage,” John Rowlands said, “he heard screaming. He had never heard a woman scream before. There was a strange dog outside the door. Caradog Prichard’s dog. Owen went into the house like a wire snapping, and he found the girl struggling with Caradog. He had come looking to see why Owen had not been at work the day before, had Caradog, and found Gwen there instead, and decided in his dirty way that she must be a light woman, and easy for him to take if he fancied her. . . .” John Rowlands leaned deliberately to one side and spat into the grass. “Excuse me, Will,” he said, “but that is how I feel when my mouth has been talking about Caradog Prichard.”

  “What happened? What did he do?” Will was lost in wonder at this mist of romance surrounding dim, ordinary Owen Davies.

  “Owen? He went mad. He has never been a fighter, but he threw Caradog out of the door, and went after him, and he broke his nose and knocked out two of his teeth. Then I arrived, and a good thing I did or he would have killed the man. Blodwen had sent me with some things for the baby. I took Caradog home. He wouldn’t have the doctor called. Afraid of the scandal, he was. I cannot say I had very much sympathy for him. His nose has not looked quite the same shape since.”

  He glanced down the slope again. Bran’s white head was still bent over the ground, as he moved slowly, meaninglessly to and fro.

  “Bran may be glad of your company soon, Will. There is not much more to tell, really. One more day and one more night the girl Gwen stayed with Owen in the cottage, and he asked her to marry him. He was such a happy man, the light shone out of him. We saw them for part of that day, and she seemed just as joyful too. But then, just about dawn on the next morning, the fourth day, Owen was wakened by the baby’s crying, and Gwen was not there. She had vanished. No one knew where she had gone. And she never came back.”

  Will said, “Bran told me she died.”

  “Bran knows she disappeared,” John Rowlands said. “But perhaps it is more comfortable to believe that your mother died than to think of her running away and leaving you without a second thought.”

  “That’s what she did? Just disappeared, and left the baby behind?”

  John Rowlands nodded. “And a note. It said: His name is Bran. Thank you, Owen Davies. And that was all. Wherever she went, she has never been seen or heard of since, nor will she ever be. Owen came to us with the baby that morning. He was out of his head, crazy with losing Gwen. He went up into the hills, and did not come down for three days. Looking for her, you see. People heard him calling, Gwennie, Gwennie.. . . Blodwen and Mrs. Evans, your auntie, looked after Bran between them. A good baby, he was. . . . Old man Prichard gave Owen the sack, of course. About that time your uncle David lost a man, so he took Owen on, and Owen moved to the cottage on Clwyd where he lives now.”

  “And he brought Bran up as his son,” Will said.

  “That’s right. With everybody’s help. There was a bit of a to-do, but he was allowed to adopt the boy in the end. Most people ended up thinking Bran really was Owen’s son. And the one thing that Bran has never been told is that he is not—he believes that Owen is his father, and you must take care you never suggest anything different.”

  “I shall,” Will said.

  “Yes. I have no worries about you. . . . Sometimes I think Owen believes Bran is his real son too. He was always strict chapel, you see, and afterwards he turned even more to his religion. Perhaps you cannot understand this quite, Will bach, but because Owen knew it was wrong by the rules of his faith to live those few days alone in the same house with Gwen, then he began to feel that it was just as much wrong as if he and Gwennie, not married to each other, had had a baby together. As if the two of them had produced Bran. So when he thinks of Bran—still, to this day—it is mostly with love, but a little bit with guilt. For no good reason, mind, except in his own conscience. He has too much conscience, has Owen. The people do not care, even the people of his chapel—they think Bran is his natural son, but the tut-tutting was over long ago. They have brains enough to judge a man by what he has proved himself to be, not by some mistake he may or may not have made a long time ago.”

  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.

  The Grey King

  Will 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?”