The Grey King

by Susan Cooper

  “Gently does it,” said John Rowlands, putting Will carefully back on his feet. “Are you all right to walk, now? Not hurt anywhere else?”

  “I shall be okay. Honestly. Thank you.” Will was trying to look round at Idris Jones. “Mr. Jones? What was that you called the lake?”

  Jones looked at him blankly. “What?”

  “You said, the boy might have been at the bottom of the lake. Didn’t you? But you didn’t say Tal y Llyn, you called it by some other name. Llyn something else.”

  “Llyn Mwyngil. That is its proper name, the old Welsh name.” Jones was looking at him in a kind of dazed wonder, clearly suspecting the fall had knocked Will on the head. He added absently, “It is a nice name but not much used these days, even on the Ordnance Survey . . . like Bala too. Now that should be Llyn Tegid as it always was, but they do no more now anywhere than call it Bala Lake. . . .”

  Will said, “Llyn Mwyngil, what does it mean in English?”

  “Well . . . the lake in the pleasant place. Pleasant retreat. Whatever.”

  “The pleasant lake,” Will said. “No wonder I fell. The pleasant lake.”

  “Yes, you could put it that way, loosely, I suppose.” Idris Jones collected his wits suddenly and turned in baffled anguish. “John Rowlands, what is the matter with this mad boy you have found, standing up here talking semantics on a mountain, when he has just come close to breaking his neck? Get him down to the farm before he falls down in a fit and starts speaking with tongues.”

  John Rowlands’s deep chuckle had relief in it. “Come on, Will.”

  Plump Mrs. Jones clucked over Will in concern and put a cold compress on his forearm. Nobody would hear of his doing anything, or going anywhere. The patchy sunshine was warmer now, and Will found it not unpleasant at all to lie on his back in the grass near the farmhouse, with Pen’s cold nose pushing at his ear, and watch the clouds scud across the pale blue sky. John Rowlands decided that he would go to Abergynolwyn, nearby, to fetch the spark plug Rhys wanted from the garage there. Idris Jones discovered errands that meant he should go too. They both announced firmly that Will should stay with Mrs. Jones and the dogs, and rest. He felt that they were still recovering from his fall themselves, treating him as a fragile piece of china which, since it had magically survived without breakage, should be set very carefully on a shelf and not moved for a special conciliatory length of time.

  The Land-Rover chugged away with the two men. Mrs. Jones fussed amiably to and fro until she had satisfied herself that Will was not in pain, or any distress, and then went off and settled to pastry-making in her kitchen.

  For a while Will sat playing idly with the dogs, thinking of the Grey King in a mixture of brief triumph, resentment, belligerence, and nervousness of what might be going to happen next. For there was no escape now. He had known it, somehow, even when they had left that morning. His way lay firmly on into the middle of the heartland of the Brenin Llwyd. By the pleasant lake the Sleepers lie. . . On Cadfan’s Way where the kestrels call. . . . It had never occurred to him to follow the simplest route out of the conundrum, and go out and walk along Cadfan’s Way until it led him to a lake. But there would have been no difference in the end. Sooner or later he would have come here, to Tal y Llyn, Llyn Mwyngil, the lake in the pleasant place under the shadow of the Grey King.

  Taking Pen with him, and leaving a patient resigned Lala behind, he strolled beyond the farm gate and out down the slate-fenced lane. A few late blackberries hung down over the grassy bank, and a woodlark sang behind the fence; it might almost have been summer. But though the sun shone, in the distance over the brambles Will could see mist round Cader Idris’s peaks.

  He was in a dreamy, suspended state of mind, due partly to the aspirin Mrs. Jones had made him take for the pain in his arm, when all at once he saw a boy come hurtling down the lane towards him on a bicycle. Will jumped to one side. There was a squealing of brakes, a flurry of kicked-up slate dust, and the boy collapsed in a pile of legs and spinning wheels on the other side of the lane. His cap tumbled off and Will saw the white hair. It was Bran.

  His face was damp with sweat; his shirt clung stickily to his chest, and his breath came in great gulps. He had no time for greeting, or explanation.

  “Will—Pen—get him away from here, hide him! Caradog Prichard found out. He’s coming. He is as mad as a hatter, he swears he’s going to kill Pen whatever, and he’s on his way here now, with his gun. . . .”

  The Warestone

  Bran got to his feet, brushing off dust and grass.

  Will gaped at him. “You’ve just cycled all the way from Clwyd?”

  Bran nodded. “Caradog Prichard came roaring up in his van this morning, looking for Pen. He is dead set on shooting him. I was frightened, Will. The way he looks, he is not like a man at all. And I think he had been hunting all night for John Rowlands and Pen, he was all creased looking, and not shaved.” His breath was coming more normally now. He picked up his bicycle. “Come on. Quick!”

  “Where shall we go?”

  “I don’t know. Anywhere. Just away from here.” He tugged his bicycle up over the bank edging the lane at the left, and led them off through bushes and trees towards the open moorland that stretched back down the valley, away from the lake.

  Will scrambled after him, with Pen at his side. “But does he really know we’re here? He couldn’t.”

  “That’s the only part I don’t understand,” Bran said. “He was having a big argument with your cousin Rhys, about where Pen was, and then suddenly he stopped in the middle of it and went very quiet. It was almost as if he were listening. Then he said, ‘I know where they are gone. They are gone to the lake.’ Just like that. Rhys tried to talk him out of it, but I don’t think that worked. Somehow Prichard just knew. I’m positive he’s on his way to Ty-Bont. Pen! Hey!” He whistled, and the dog paused ahead, waiting for them. They were walking on rising ground now, through waist-high bracken, on a meandering sheep path.

  “How did you get here before him, then?” Will said.

  Bran looked over his shoulder with a quick grin; he had moved ahead on the path, pushing his bike. Something seemed to have transformed him out of the figure of despair Will had seen the day before.

  “Caradog Prichard will not be too pleased about that,” Bran said solemnly. “I had my clasp knife in my pocket, you see, and I happened to be passing his van when he was not looking, and I stuck it in his back tyre, and gave it a good jerk. And while I was at it I stuck it in his spare tyre too. You know the way he has the spare bolted onto the side of the van? A mistake, that is, he should keep it inside.”

  The tension inside Will snapped like a breaking spring, and he began to laugh. Once he had started, it was hard to stop. Bran paused, grinning, and then the grin became a chuckle and before long they were reeling with laughter, roaring, tottering, clutching at one another, in a wild fit of chortling mirth with the dog Pen leaping about them happily.

  “Imagine his face,” Will gasped, “when he goes tearing off in the van and poof! the tyre goes flat, and he gets out furious and changes it, and goes tearing off again, and poof—”

  They collapsed again, gurgling.

  Bran took off his dark glasses and wiped them. “Mind you,” he said, “it is going to make everything worse in the long run, because he will know very well somebody cut the tyres on purpose, and that will just make him wilder than ever.”

  “Worth it,” Will said. Controlled again, but cheerful, he gave Bran a sideways, rather shy glance. “Hey,” he said. “It was nice of you to come, considering.”

  “Oh, well,” Bran said. He put the glasses back on, retreating once more into inscrutability; his white hair lay in damp-darkened lines across his forehead. He seemed about to say something else, but changed his mind. “Come on!” he said; jumped on his bicycle and began pedalling erratically off along the weaving path through the bracken.

  Will began to run. “Where are we going?”

  “Goodness knows!�
�

  They careered along in a happy, lunatic chase through the valley: over open slopes, down into hollows, up over ridges, in and out of rounded, lichened rocks; through grass and bracken and heather and gorse, and quite often, on damper ground near one of the little streams that fed the river, through reeds and iris leaves. They had come a long way from the lake; this was the main valley land now, open grazing land, merging into the arable fields of Clwyd and Prichard’s Farm further down, past the jutting hills.

  Suddenly Bran skidded, tumbling sideways. Thinking he had fallen, Will went to help, but Bran grabbed his arm and pointed urgently across the moorland. “Over there! On the road! There’s a curve a long way down where you can see cars coming, before they get here—I’m almost sure I just saw Prichard’s van!”

  Will grabbed Pen by the collar and looked wildly about. “We must get under cover—behind those rocks over there?”

  “Wait! I see where we are! There’s a better place, just up here—come on!” Bran bumped off again. The big sheepdog slipped from Will’s hand and bounded after him. Will ran. They rounded a group of nearby trees, and there beyond it was the glimmer of grey stone and slate, behind a low ruined wall. The cottage looked quite different from behind. Will did not recognise it until too late. Bran had shot inside, thumping open the broken back door, before he could call to prevent him, and then there was no alternative but to follow.

  Naked to the eye of the Grey King, feeling the force of the Dark pressing sudden and strong on him like a huge hand, he stumbled after the dog and the white-haired boy into the cottage from which the milgwn had stolen the wounded sheep, the cottage where Owen Davies had fought Caradog Prichard for the woman who had borne and deserted Bran; the cottage haunted, now more than ever, by the malice of the rising Dark.

  But Bran, propping his bicycle against a wall, was bright and unaffected. “Isn’t this perfect? It’s an old shepherd’s hut, no one’s used it for years . . . quick, over here—keep your head down—”

  They crouched beside the window, Pen lying quiet beside them, and saw through the jagged-edged hole the small grey van passing perhaps fifty yards away on the road. Prichard was driving slowly. They could see him peering from side to side, scouring the land. He glanced incuriously at the cottage, and drove on.

  The van disappeared along the road to Tal y Llyn. Bran leaned back against the wall. “Whew! Lucky!”

  But Will was paying no attention. He was too much occupied with shielding his mind from the raging malevolence of the Grey King. He said through his teeth, the words coming slow and dragging, “Let’s . . . get . . . away . . . from . . . here. . . .”

  Bran stared at him, but asked no questions. “All right, then. Tyrd yma, Pen.” He turned to the dog, and suddenly his voice came high as the wind in the telegraph wires. “Pen! What is it? Look at him, Will!”

  The dog lay flat on his stomach, his four legs splayed outwards, his head down sideways against the floor. It was horrible, unnatural; a position impossible for any normal living creature. A faint whistling whine came from his throat, but he did not move. It was as if invisible pins held him forced flat against the ground.

  “Pen!” Will said in horror. “Pen!” But he could not lift the dog’s head. The animal was not paralysed by any natural circumstance. Only enchantment could force him so hard into the earth that no living hand could move him.

  “What is it?” There was fear in Bran’s face.

  “It is the Brenin Llwyd,” Will said. His tone seemed to Bran deeper than before, more resonant. “It is the Brenin Llwyd, and he has forgotten the bargain that he made when we spoke yesterday. He has forgotten that he gave me one night and one day.”

  “You spoke to him?” Bran heard his voice come out in a broken whisper, and he crouched there motionless beside the window.

  But again Will was paying no attention. He spoke half to himself, in this same strange adult voice. “It is sent not at me but at the dog. It is indirect, then, a device. I wonder. . . .”

  He broke off and glanced at Bran, waving a finger at him in warning. “You may watch me if you will, though it would be better not, but you must say nothing, and make no move. Not one.”

  “All right,” Bran said.

  He watched, crouching on the dirty, broken slate floor in one corner, and he saw Will move to the middle of the room, to stand beside the hideously prostrate dog.

  Will bent and picked up a broken piece of wood, from the litter of the empty years that lay scattered everywhere. He touched it to the ground before his feet and, turning, drew a circle about Pen and himself on the floor with the tip of the stick. Where the circle was drawn, a ring of blue flame sprang up, and when it was complete, Will relaxed and stood full upright, like someone freed of a great burden that had been weighing him down. He raised the stick vertically in the air over his head, so that it touched the low ceiling, and he said some words in a language that Bran did not understand.

  The cottage seemed to grow very dark, so that Bran’s weak eyes, blinking, could see nothing but the blue ring of cold fire and Will’s form shadowy in the middle of it. But then he saw that another light was beginning to glow in the room: a small blue spark, somewhere in the far corner, steadily growing brighter until it blazed with such intensity that he was forced to look away.

  Will said something, sharp and angry, in the language that Bran could not understand. The circle of blue flames flared high and then low, high and low, high and low, three times, and then suddenly went out. Instantly the cottage was full of daylight again, and the brilliant star of light nowhere to be seen. Bran let out a long slow breath, staring about the room to try and see where the light had been. But the room seemed now so different and ordinary that he could not tell. Nor could he imagine where the circle had been drawn, though he knew it had been round Will.

  Will, standing there unmoving, was the only thing in the room that seemed not to have changed utterly, in that one second—and even he seemed now once more different, a boy as he had been, but glaring round the floor irritably as if peering for an errant marble that had rolled away.

  He glanced at Bran and said crossly, “Come and look at this.” Then without waiting, while Bran scrambled nervously up, he crossed to the far corner of the room, crouched, and began riffling through a small pile of bits of stone that lay there, random-scattered and dusty, among the debris. Pushing them aside, he cleared a space in which one small white pebble lay alone. He said to Bran, “Pick it up.”

  Puzzled, Bran reached out and took the pebble. But he found that he could not pick it up. He worked at it with his fingers. He stood up, straddled it, and tried with thumbs and forefingers to pull it up from the floor. He stared at the pebble, and then at Will.

  “It’s part of the floor. It must be.”

  “The floor’s made of slate,” Will said. He still sounded cross, almost petulant.

  “Well . . . yes. No stones in slate, true. But all the same it’s fixed, somehow. Bit of quartz. It won’t budge.”

  “It is a warestone,” Will said, his voice flat now, and weary. “The awareness of the Grey King. I might have guessed. It is, in this place, his eyes and his ears and his mouth. Through it—just through the fact of its lying there—he not only knows everything that happens in this place, but can send out his power to do certain things. Only certain things. Not any very great magic. But, for instance, he is able so to paralyse Pen there that we can no more move him than we can move the warestone itself.”

  Bran knelt in distress beside the dog, and stroked the head flattened so unnaturally against the floor. “But if Caradog Prichard tracks us here—he might, his dogs might—then he will just shoot Pen where he lies. And there will be nothing we can do to help.”

  Will said bitterly, “That’s the idea.”

  “But Will, that can’t happen! You’ve got to do something!”

  “There is just one thing that I can do,” Will said. “Though obviously I can’t tell you what it is, with that thing there. I
t means I shall have to borrow your bicycle. But I’m not too sure whether you should stay here alone.”

  “Somebody’s got to. We can’t leave Pen like that. Not on his own.”

  “I know. But the warestone . . .” Will glared at the pebble as if it were some infuriating small child sitting there clutching an object too precious for it to hold. “It’s not a particularly powerful weapon,” he said, “but it’s one of the oldest. We all use them, both the Light and the Dark. There are rules, sort of. None of us can actually be affected by a warestone—only observed. That wretched pebble can give the Grey King an idea of what I do and say here. A general idea, like an image—it’s not as specific as a television set, mercifully. It can’t do anything to harm me, or stop me doing what I want to do—except through the control it has over objects. I mean, it can’t actually affect me, because I am an Old One, but it can transmit the power of the Dark—or of the Light, if it happened to belong to an Old One—to affect men, and animals, and things of the earth. It can stop Pen from moving, and therefore stop me from moving him. You see? So that if you stay here, there’s no knowing what exactly it’s able to do to you.”

  Bran said obstinately, “I don’t care.” He sat cross-legged by the dog. “It can’t kill me, can it?”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Well, then. I’m staying. Go on, off with the bike.”

  Will nodded, as if that was what he had been expecting. “I’ll be as quick as I can. But take care. Stay very wide awake. If anything does happen, it will come in the way you least expect.”

  Then he was gone out of the door, and Bran was left in the cottage with a dog pressed impossibly flat against the slate floor by an invisible high wind, staring at a small white stone.

  Good day, Mrs. Jones. How are you?”

  “Well, thank you, Mr. Prichard. And you?”

  Caradog Prichard’s plump pale face was glistening with sweat. Impatience swept away his Welsh politeness. He said abruptly, “Where is John Rowlands?”