The Grey King

by Susan Cooper

  Will said lightly, deliberately, “I suppose the last real stir was when Bran’s mother came.”

  “Ah,” his aunt said. Her pleasant, cosy face was unreadable. “You’ve heard about that, have you? I suppose John Rowlands told you. He is a kind soul, Shoni mawr, no doubt he had his reasons. Tell me, Will, have you had some sort of a quarrel with Bran?”

  Will thought: and that’s what you wanted to ask me, with the cup of tea, because you are a kind soul too, and can feel Bran’s distress. . . . And I wish I could be properly honest with you.

  “No,” he said. “But losing Cafall has been so bad for him that I think he just wants to be alone. For a while.”

  “Poor lad.” She shook her head. “Be patient with him. He’s a lonely boy, and had a strange life, in some ways. It’s been wonderful for him having you here, until this spoiled everything.”

  A small pain shot through Will’s forearm; he clutched it, and found it came from the scar of the Light, his burned-in brand.

  He said suddenly, “Did she never come back at all, ever, Auntie Jen? Bran’s mother? How could she just go off and leave him, like that?”

  “I don’t know,” his aunt said. “But no, there was no sign of her ever again.”

  “In one minute, to go away forever . . . I think that must bother Bran a lot.”

  She looked at him sharply. “Has he ever said anything about it?”

  “Oh, no, of course not. We’ve never talked about that. I just felt—I’m just sure it must bother him, underneath.”

  “You’re a funny boy yourself,” said his aunt curiously. “Sometimes you sound like an old man. Comes from having so many brothers and sisters older than you, I suppose. . . . Perhaps you understand Bran better than most boys could.”

  She hesitated for a moment, then drew her chair closer. “I will tell you something,” she said, “in case it might help Bran. I know you have sense enough not to tell him about it. I think Gwen, his mother, had some great trouble in her life past that she could do nothing about, and that because of that she felt she had to give Bran a life that would be free of it. She knew Owen Davies was a good man and would look after the boy, but she also knew that she simply did not love Owen as deeply as he loved her, not enough to marry him. When things turn out like that, there is nothing a woman can do. It is kindest to go away.” She paused. “Not kind to leave Bran, you might say.”

  “That was just exactly what I was going to say,” said Will.

  “Well,” said his aunt. “Gwen said something to me, in those few days she was here, when we were alone once. I have never talked about it, but I have never forgotten. She said: ‘If you have once betrayed a great trust, you dare not let yourself be trusted again, because a second betrayal would be the end of the world.’ I don’t know if you can understand that.”

  “You mean she was frightened of what she might do?”

  “And more frightened of what she had done. Whatever it was.”

  “So she ran away. Poor Bran,” said Will.

  “Poor Owen Davies,” said his aunt.

  There was a gentle knock at the door, and John Rowlands put his head inside. “Bore da,” he said. “Ready, Will?”

  “Bore da, John,” said Aunt Jen, smiling at him.

  Pulling on his jacket, Will turned suddenly and gave her a clumsy hug. “Thank you, Aunt Jen.”

  The smile brightened with pleasure and surprise. “We’ll see you when we see you,” she said.

  John Rowlands said, as he started the car outside the farm gate, “Fond of you, your auntie.”

  Will held open the door for Pen to scramble up; the dog jumped over the seat into the back, and lay docile on the floor.

  “I’m fond of her too, very. So’s my mum.”

  “Be careful then, won’t you?” Rowlands said. His seamed brown face was innocent of all expression, but the words had force. Will looked at him rather coldly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well,” Rowlands said carefully, turning the Land-Rover into the road. “I am not at all sure what it is that is going on all around us, Will bach, or where it is leading. But those men who know anything at all about the Light also know that there is a fierceness to its power, like the bare sword of the law, or the white burning of the sun.” Suddenly his voice sounded to Will very strong, and very Welsh. “At the very heart, that is. Other things, like humanity, and mercy, and charity, that most good men hold more precious than all else, they do not come first for the Light. Oh, sometimes they are there; often, indeed. But in the very long run the concern of you people is with the absolute good, ahead of all else. You are like fanatics. Your masters, at any rate. Like the old Crusaders—oh, like certain groups in every belief, though this is not a matter of religion, of course. At the centre of the Light there is a cold white flame, just as at the centre of the Dark there is a great black pit bottomless as the Universe.”

  His warm, deep voice ended, and there was only the roar of the engine. Will looked out over the grey-misted fields, silent.

  “There was a great long speech, now,” John Rowlands said awkwardly. “But I was only saying, be careful not to forget that there are people in this valley who can be hurt, even in the pursuit of good ends.”

  Will heard again in his mind Bran’s anguished cry as the dog Cafall was shot dead, and heard his cold dismissal: go away, go away. . . . And for a second another image, unexpected, flashed into his mind out of the past: the strong, bony face of Merriman his master, first of the Old Ones, cold in judgment of a much-loved figure who, through the frailty of being no more than a man, had once betrayed the cause of the Light.

  He sighed. “I understand what you are saying,” he said sadly. “But you misjudge us, because you are a man yourself. For us, there is only the destiny. Like a job to be done. We are here simply to save the world from the Dark. Make no mistake, John, the Dark is rising, and will take the world to itself very soon if nothing stands in its way. And if that should happen, then there would be no question ever, for anyone, either of warm charity or of cold absolute good, because nothing would exist in the world or in the hearts of men except that bottomless black pit. The charity and the mercy and the humanitarianism are for you, they are the only things by which men are able to exist together in peace. But in this hard case that we the Light are in, confronting the Dark, we can make no use of them. We are fighting a war. We are fighting for life or death—not for our life, remember, since we cannot die. For yours.”

  He reached his hand behind him, over the back of the seat, and Pen licked it with his floppy wet tongue.

  “Sometimes,” Will said slowly, “in this sort of a war, it is not possible to pause, to smooth the way for one human being, because even that one small thing could mean an end of the world for all the rest.”

  A fine rain began to mist the windscreen. John Rowlands turned on the wipers, peering forward at the grey world as he drove. He said, “It is a cold world you live in, bachgen. I do not think so far ahead, myself. I would take the one human being over all the principle, all the time.”

  Will slumped down low in his seat, curling into a ball, pulling up his knees. “Oh, so would I,” he said sadly. “So would I, if I could. It would feel a lot better inside me. But it wouldn’t work.”

  Behind them, Pen leapt unexpectedly to his feet, barking. Will uncoiled like a startled snake; John Rowlands braked sharply, half-turning, and spoke swift and low to the dog in Welsh. But still Pen stood in the back of the Land-Rover stiff as a stuffed dog, barking furiously, and in the next moment, as if he were observing something outside himself, Will felt his own body jerk stiff as he felt the same force. His fingernails drove into the palms of his hands.

  John Rowlands did not stop the car, though he had slowed to a crawl. He gave one sharp look out of his near window at the moorland, through the mist, and accelerated again. In a moment or two Will felt the tension go out of his limbs. and sat back, gasping. The dog too stopped barking, and in the sudden loud silence
lay down meekly on the floor as if he had never moved at all.

  Rowlands said, with a tightness in his deep voice, “We have just come past the cottage. The empty cottage, where we lost the sheep.”

  Will said nothing. His breath was coming fast and shallow, as it had when he first came out of the worst of his illness, and he hunched his shoulders and bent his head beneath the fierce weight of the power of the Grey King.

  John Rowlands drove faster, pulling the tough little car round blind slate-walled turns. The road curved across the valley; great new slopes rose on its eastern side, swooping up into the sky bare and grey, treacherous with scree. Everywhere they loomed over the gentle green fields, dominant, menacing. And then at last there were signs of side roads, and scattered grey slate-roofed houses, and before them, as Rowlands slowed for a crossroad, Will saw the lake Tal y Llyn.

  His aunt had called it the loveliest lake in Wales, but lying dark there in the grey morning, it was more sinister than lovely. On its black still surface not a ripple stirred. It filled the valley floor. Above it reared the first slopes of Cader Idris, the mountain of the Grey King, and beyond, at the far end of the valley, a pass led through the hills—away, Will felt, towards the end of the world. He had himself under control now, but he could feel the tension quivering in his mind. The Grey King had felt his coming, and the awareness of his angry hostility was as clear as if it were shouted aloud. Will knew that it could not be long before one of the watchers, a peregrine curving high over the slopes, would catch clear sight of him. He did not know what would happen then.

  John Rowlands turned the Land-Rover down a rough track, away from the lake, and before long they came to a farm tucked beneath the lowest slopes of Cader Idris. Will jumped out to open and close the gate, and as he trudged up into the farmyard he saw a small man in a flat cap come out of the house to greet the car. Dogs were barking. He could see one of them waiting a little way off where the farmer had left it: a sheepdog a little smaller than Pen, but with exactly the same black coat, and the splash of white under the chin.

  Rowlands broke off an animated Welsh conversation as Will came up to them. “Idris, this is a new helper I have—David Evans’s nephew Will, from England.”

  “How do you do, Mr. Jones,” Will said.

  Idris Jones Ty-Bont twinkled at him as they shook hands; he had enormous and rather prominent dark eyes that made him look disconcertingly like a bush baby. “How are you, Will? I hear you have been having fun with our friend Caradog Prichard.”

  “We all have,” John Rowlands said grimly. He gave a whistle over his shoulder, and Pen leapt out of the car, glanced up as if seeking permission to leave, and trotted off to greet the other black dog. They circled one another amiably, without barking.

  “Lala there is his sister, believe it or not,” Idris Jones said to Will. “Came from the same litter, they did, over Dinas way. That’s a while ago, eh, John? Come along inside now, Megan has just made the tea.”

  In the warm kitchen, with stout, smiling Mrs. Jones who was almost twice the size of her neat husband, the smell of frying bacon made Will ravenous all over again. He filled himself happily with two fried eggs, thick slices of home-cured bacon, and hot flat Welsh-cakes, like miniature pancakes flecked with currants. Mrs. Jones began instantly chattering away to John Rowlands in a contented flow of Welsh, scarcely ever seeming to draw breath, or to give way to a phrase or two in her husband’s light voice, or Rowlands’ deep rumble. Clearly she was enjoying relaying all the local gossip, and collecting any that might emanate from Clwyd. Will, full of bacon and well-being, had almost stopped paying attention when he saw John Rowlands, listening, give a sudden start and sit forward, taking his pipe out of his mouth.

  Rowlands said, in English, “Up over the lake, did you say, Idris?”

  “That’s right,” Farmer Jones said, dutifully switching languages with a quick smile at Will. “Up on a ledge. I didn’t have a chance to get too close, being in a hurry after my own sheep, but I am almost sure it was a Pentref ewe. Not dead very long, I think, the birds had not been at it enough—maybe a day or two. What interested me was the blood on the neck. Quite old, it was, very dark, must have been on the fleece a lot longer than the sheep had been dead. And for a sheep that must have been already wounded, that slope was a hell of a funny place to go. Well, I’ll show you later.”

  Will and John Rowlands looked at one another.

  “You think it’s that sheep?” Will said. “The one that vanished?”

  “I think it may be,” John Rowlands said.

  But later, when Idris Jones took them to see the ewe, he would not let Will come close enough to see.

  “Not a nice sight, bachgen,” he said, looking doubtfully at Will and resettling the cap on his head. “A sheep when the ravens have been at her for a day or two is a bit of a mess, if you’re not accustomed to it . . . wait you here a minute or two, we will be straight back.”

  “All right,” Will said, resigned. But as the two men went on up the steep, slippery mountainside, he sat hastily down in a sudden fit of giddiness, and knew that it certainly would not have been a good idea for him to have gone further on. They were on a slope rising above the lake, a broad unprotected sweep of scree and poor grass broken by ledges and outcrops of granite. Further down the valley the mountain was clothed in dark forests of spruce trees, but here the land was bare, inhospitable. The dead sheep lay on a ledge that seemed to Will totally inaccessible; high above his head it jutted out of the mountain, and the pathetic white heap lying on it was not visible from where he sat now. Nor could he see John Rowlands and Idris Jones, climbing higher with the two black dogs.

  Two hundred feet below lay the lake, its stillness broken only by one small dinghy moving lazily out from the small anglers’ hotel that nestled beneath the mountains at the opposite side. Will could see no other sign of life anywhere on the rest of the lake, or on either side of the valley. The land seemed gentler now, with subtle colour everywhere, for the sun was breaking out fitfully between scudding clouds.

  Then there was a scuffling and stumbling above him, and John Rowlands came down the steep slope, planting his heels firmly into the shale lying loose in the thin grass. Idris Jones and the dogs followed. Rowlands’ lined face was bleak.

  He said, “That is the same ewe all right, Will. But how she could have got out of that cottage and up here is just beyond me. It makes no sense at all.” He glanced over his shoulder at Idris Jones, who was shaking his birdlike head in distress. “Nor to Idris either. I have been telling him the story.”

  “Oh,” Will said sadly, without bothering now to dissemble, “it was not very complicated really. The milgwn took her.”

  He saw from the corner of his eye that Idris Jones Ty-Bont stood suddenly very still, up on the slope, staring at him. Avoiding the farmer’s eye, he sat there hugging his knees against his chest, and looked up at John Rowlands unguardedly for the first time, with the eyes not of a boy but of an Old One. Time was growing short, and he was tired of pretence.

  “The king of the milgwn,” he said. “The chief of the foxes of the Brenin Llwyd. He is the biggest of all of them, and the most powerful, and his master has given him the way of doing many things. He is no more than a creature, still, but he is not at all . . . ordinary. For instance, he is now at this moment just exactly the colour of Pen, so that it would be hard for any man who, with his own eyes, saw him attacking a sheep, not to think for certain that it was Pen he was seeing attack the sheep.”

  John Rowlands was gazing at him, his dark eyes bright as polished stone. He said slowly, “And maybe before that he might have been just exactly the colour of Cafall, so that also anyone else might have thought—”

  “Yes,” Will said. “They might.”

  Rowlands shook his head abruptly as if to cast a weight from it. “I think it is time we went down off this mountain, Idris boy,” he said firmly, heaving Will to his feet.

  “Yes,” said Idris Jones hastily. “Yes, yes.�
� He followed them, looking totally bemused, as if he had just heard a sheep bark like a dog and were trying to find a way of believing what he had heard.

  The dogs trotted ahead of them, turning protectively now and then to make sure they followed. John Rowlands very soon released Will to walk alone, for single file was the only possible way down the winding, steep path, made by sheep and seldom used by men. Will was halfway down to the lake before he fell.

  He could never explain, afterwards, how he came to stumble. He could only have said, very simply, that the mountain shrugged—and even John Rowlands in the height of trustfulness could not have been expected to believe that. Nevertheless, the mountain did shrug, through the malice of its master the Brenin Llwyd, so that a piece of the path beneath Will’s feet jumped perceptibly to one side and back again, like a cat humping its back, and Will saw it with sick horror only in the moment that he lost his balance and went rolling down. He heard the men shout and was aware of a flurry of movement as Rowlands dived to grab him. But he was already rolling, tumbling, and it was only a ledge of granite, jutting as the ledge on which they had found the dead sheep, that caught him from rolling the full hundred-foot drop down to the edge of the lake. He came a great thud against the jagged shelf of rock, and cried out in pain as a shaft of fire seemed to shoot blazing up his left arm. But the rock had saved him. He lay still.

  Gentle as a mother, John Rowlands felt along the bone of his arm. His face was a strange colour, where the blood had drained away beneath the tan. “Duw,” he said huskily, “you are a lucky one, Will Stanton. That is going to hurt a good deal for the next few days, but it is not broken anywhere so far as I can tell. And it might well have been in smithereens.”

  “And the boy at the bottom of Llyn Mwyngil,” Idris Jones said shakily, straightening up and trying to recover his lost breath. “How the devil did you manage to fall like that, bachgen? We were not going so very fast at all, but such a speed you went down—” He whistled softly, and took off his cap to wipe his brow.