by Jenny Nimmo
‘I know what day it is.’ Her husband spoke the words slowly, through clenched teeth, as though the taste was bitter. ‘There are candles wasting in the kitchen, chairs on the floor, and look at this – litter!’ He flung out his hand, indicating the table.
‘Sit down, Ivor Griffiths, you miserable man,’ said Nain, ‘and celebrate your son’s birthday!’
‘Miserable is it?’ Mr Griffiths big red hands were clasped tight across his chest, one hand painfully rubbing and pressing at the other. ‘Miserable is it, to be remembering my own daughter who is gone? My daughter who went on this day, four years ago?’
Suddenly Mrs Griffiths stood up. ‘Enough! We’ve had enough, Ivor!’ she protested. ‘We remember Bethan too. We’ve mourned her going every year on this day, for four years. But it’s Gwyn’s birthday, and we’ve had enough of mourning! Enough! Enough!’ She was almost crying.
Gwyn turned his head away. He did not want to look at the bright colours on the table; did not want to see his friends’ faces. He knew that his birthday was over. His mother was talking, but he could not listen to the words. She was taking his friends away, he heard them shuffling into the kitchen, murmuring good-bye, but he could not move. His father was still standing by the table, sad and silent in his black suit.
‘How could you do that, Ivor?’ Nain reproached her son as the front door slammed.
‘How could I? I have done nothing. It was that one!’ and he looked at Gwyn. ‘She is gone because of him, my Bethan is.’
It was said.
Gwyn felt almost relieved. He got up slowly and pushed his chair neatly back to the table then, without looking at his father, he walked out to the kitchen.
His mother was standing by the sink, waving to the Lloyds through a narrow window. She swung round quickly when she heard her son. ‘I’m sorry, Gwyn,’ she said quietly. ‘So sorry.’ She came towards him and hugged him close. Her face was flushed and she had put her apron on again.
‘It was a great party, Mam! Thanks!’ said Gwyn. ‘The other boys liked it too, I know they did.’
‘But I wanted your father to . . .’
‘It doesn’t matter, Mam,’ Gwyn interrupted quickly. ‘It was grand. I’ll always remember it!’
He drew away from his mother and ran up to his room, where he sat on the edge of his bed, smiling at the memory of his party and the way it had been before his father had arrived. Gwyn knew his father could not help the bitterness that burst out of him every now and again, and he had acquired a habit of distancing himself from the ugly words. He thought hard about the good times, until the bad ceased to exist.
A tiny sound caused him to go to the window. There was a light in the garden, a lantern swaying in the evening breeze.
Gwyn opened the window. ‘Who’s there?’ he called.
He was answered by a high, girlish laugh, and then his grandmother’s voice, ‘Remember your gifts, Gwydion Gwyn. Remember Math, Lord of Gwynedd, remember Gwydion and Gilfaethwy!’
‘Are you being funny, Nain?’
There was a long pause and then the reply, ‘It’s not a game I’m playing, Gwydion Gwyn. Once in every seven generations the power returns, so they say. Your father never had it, nor did mine. Let’s find out who you are!’
The gate clicked shut and the lantern went swinging down the lane, while the words of an old song rose and fell on the freshening wind, and then receded, until the light and the voice faded altogether.
Before he shut the window, Gwyn looked up at the mountain and remembered his fifth birthday. It had been a fine day, like today, but in the middle of the night a storm had broken. The rain had come pouring down the mountainside in torrents, boulders and branches rumbling and groaning in its path. The Griffiths family had awakened, pulled the blankets closer to their heads and fallen asleep again, except for Gwyn. His black sheep was still up on the mountain. He had nursed it as a motherless lamb, himself, tucking it in Mam’s old jumper, cosy by the fire. Feeding it with a bottle, five times a day, until it had grown into a fine ewe.
‘Please, get her! Please, save her!’ Gwyn had shaken his sister awake again.
Bethan had grumbled but because she was older, and because she was kind, she had complied.
The last time Gwyn saw her she had been standing by the back door in her red mac, testing the big outdoor torch. It was the night after Halloween and the pumpkin was still on the windowsill, grimacing with its dark gaping mouth and sorrowful eyes. Bethan had become curiously excited, as though she was going to meet someone very special, not just a lonely black ewe. ‘Shut the door tight, when I am gone,’ she had whispered, ‘or the wind will howl through the house and wake Mam and Dad!’ Then, swinging the yellow scarf round her dark hair, she had walked out into the storm. She had never been afraid of anything.
Through the kitchen window, Gwyn had watched the light of the big torch flashing on the mountainside until it disappeared. Then he had fallen asleep on the rug beside the stove.
They never saw Bethan again, though they searched every inch of the mountain. They never found a trace of her perilous climb on that wild night, nor did they find the black ewe. The girl and the animal seemed to have vanished!
Unlike most Novembers, calm days seemed endless that autumn. Gwyn had to wait three weeks for a wind. It was the end of the month and the first snow had fallen on the mountain.
During those three weeks he found he could not broach the subject of his ancestors, though he dwelt constantly on Nain’s words. Since his birthday the atmosphere in the house had hardly been conducive to confidences. His father remote and silent. His mother in such a state of anxiety that, whenever they were alone, he found he could only discuss the trivia of their days; the farm, the weather and his school activities.
But every morning and every evening Gwyn would open his drawer and take out the yellow scarf. He would stand by his window and run his hands lightly over the soft wool, all the time regarding the bare, snow-capped mountain, and he would think of Bethan.
Then, one Sunday, the wind came; so quietly at first that you hardly noticed it. By the time the midday roast had been consumed, however, twigs were flying, the barn door banging, and the howling in the chimney loud enough to drive the dog away from the stove.
Gwyn knew it was time.
‘Who were my ancestors?’ he asked his mother.
They were standing by the sink, he dutifully drying the dishes, his mother with her hands deep in the soapy water. ‘Ancestors,’ she said. ‘Well, no one special that I know of . . .’
‘No one?’ he probed.
‘Not on my side, love. Your grandfather’s a baker, you know that, and before that, well . . . I don’t know. Nothing special.’
‘What about Nain?’
Gwyn’s father, slouched in a chair by the stove, rustled his newspaper, but did not look up.
Gwyn screwed up his courage. ‘What about your ancestors, Dad?’
Mr Griffiths peered, unsmiling, over his paper. ‘What about them?’
‘Anyone special? Nain said there were magicians in the family . . . I think.’
His father shook the newspaper violently. ‘Nain has some crazy ideas,’ he said. ‘I had enough of them when I was a boy.’
‘Made you try and bring a dead bird back to life, you said,’ his wife reminded him.
‘How?’ asked Gwyn.
‘Chanting!’ grunted Mr Griffiths. It was obvious that, just as Nain had said, his father had not inherited whatever strange power it was that those long ago magicians had possessed. Or if he had, he did not like the notion.
‘They’re in the old legends,’ mused Mrs Griffiths, ‘the magicians. One of them made a ship out of seaweed, Gwydion I think it . . .’
‘Seaweed?’ Gwyn broke in.
‘I think it was and . . .’
‘Gwydion?’ Gwyn absentmindedly pushed his wet tea-cloth into an open drawer. ‘That’s my name?’
‘Mind what you’re doing, Gwyn,’ his mother complained. ‘Yo
u haven’t finished.’
‘Math, Lord of Gwynedd, Gwydion and Gilfaethwy. And it was Gwydion made the ship? Me . . . my name!’
‘It’s what you were christened, Nain wanted it, but,’ Mrs Griffiths glanced in her husband’s direction, ‘your father never liked it, not when he remembered where it came from, so we called you Gwyn. Dad was pretty fed up with all Nain’s stories.’
Mr Griffiths dropped his newspaper. ‘Get on with your work, Gwyn,’ he ordered, ‘and stop flustering your mother.’
‘I’m not flustered, love.’
‘Don’t argue and don’t defend the boy!’
They finished the dishes in silence. Then, with the wind and his ancestors filling his thoughts, Gwyn rushed upstairs and opened the drawer. But he did not remove the seaweed. The first thing he noticed was the brooch, lying on top of the scarf. He could not remember having replaced it in that way. Surely the scarf was the last thing he had returned to the drawer?
The sunlight, slanting through his narrow window, fell directly on to the brooch and the contorted shapes slowly assumed the form of a star, then a snowflake, next a group of petals changed into a creature with glittering eyes before becoming a twisted piece of metal again. Something or somebody wanted him to use the brooch!
Gwyn picked it up and thrust it into his pocket. Grabbing his anorak from a chair he rushed downstairs and out of the back door. He heard a voice, as he raced across the yard, calling him to a chore. ‘But the wind was too loud, wasn’t it?’ he shouted joyfully to the sky. ‘I never heard nothing!’
He banged the yard gate to emphasise his words and began to run through the field; after a hundred yards the land began to rise; he kept to the sheeptrack for a while, then climbed a wall and jumped down into another field, this one steep and bare. He was among the sheep now, scattering them as he bounded over mounds and boulders. Stopping at the next wall, he took a deep breath. The mountain had begun in earnest. Now it had to be walking or climbing, running was impossible.
A sense of urgency gripped him; an overwhelming feeling that today, perhaps within that very hour, something momentous would occur.
He stumbled on, now upon a sheeptrack, now heaving himself over boulders. He had climbed the mountain often, sometimes with Alun, sometimes alone, but the first time had been with Bethan, one summer long ago. It had seemed an impossible task then, when he was not five years old, but she had willed him to the top, comforting and cajoling him with her gentle voice. ‘It’s so beautiful when you get there, Gwyn. You can see the whole world, well the whole of Wales anyway, and the sea, and clouds below you. You won’t fall, I won’t let you!’ She had been wearing the yellow scarf that day. Gwyn remembered how it had streamed out across his head, like a banner, when they reached the top.
It was not a high mountain, nor a dangerous one, some might even call it a hill. It was wide and grassy, a series of gentle slopes that rose, one after another, patterned with drystone walls and windblown bushes. The plateau at the top was a lonely place, however. From here only the empty fields and surrounding mountains could be seen and, far out to the west, the distant grey line of the sea. Gwyn took shelter beside the tallest rock, for the wind sweeping across the plateau threatened to roll him back whence he had come.
He must surely have found the place to offer his brooch. ‘Give it to the wind,’ Nain had said. Bracing himself against the rock, Gwyn extended his up-turned hand into the wind and uncurled his fingers.
The brooch was snatched away so fast that he never saw what became of it. He withdrew his hand and waited for the wind to answer, not knowing what the answer would be, but wanting it to bring him something that would change the way things were, to fill the emptiness in the house below.
But the wind did not reply. It howled about Gwyn’s head and tore at his clothes, then slowly it died away taking, somewhere within its swirling streams and currents, the precious brooch, and leaving nothing in return.
Then, from the west, came a silver-white cloud of snow, obscuring within minutes the sea, the surrounding mountains and the fields below. And, as the snow began to encircle and embrace him, Gwyn found himself chanting, ‘Math, Lord of Gwynedd, Gwydion and Gilfaethwy!’ This he repeated, over and over again, not knowing whether he was calling to the living or the dead. And all the while, huge snowflakes drifted silently about him, melting as they touched him, so that he did not turn into the snowman that he might otherwise have become.
Gwyn stood motionless for what seemed like hours, enveloped in a soft, serene whiteness, waiting for an answer. Yet, had Nain promised him an answer? In the stillness he thought he heard a sound, very high and light, like icicles on glass.
His legs began to ache, his face grew numb with cold and, when night clouds darkened the sky, he began his descent, resentful and forlorn.
The lower slopes of the mountain were still green, the snow had not touched them and it was difficult for Gwyn to believe he had been standing deep in snow only minutes earlier. Only from the last field could the summit be seen, but by the time Gwyn reached the field the mountain was obscured by mist, and he could not tell if snow still lay above.
It was dark when he got home. Before opening the back door he stamped his boots. His absence from the farm all day would not be appreciated, he realised, and he did not wish to aggravate the situation with muddy boots. He raised his hand to brush his shoulders free of the dust he usually managed to collect, and his fingers encountered something icy cold.
Believing it to be a snowflake or even an icicle, Gwyn plucked it off his shoulder and moved closer to the kitchen window to examine what he had found. His mother had not yet drawn the curtains and light streamed into the yard.
It was a snowflake; the most beautiful he had ever seen, for it was magnified into an exquisite and intricate pattern: a star glistening like crystal in the soft light. And then the most extraordinary thing happened. The star began to move and Gwyn stared amazed as it gradually assumed the shape of a tiny silver spider. Had the wind heard him after all? Was he a magician then?
‘Gwyn, is that you out there? You’ll have no tea if you hang about any longer.’ His mother had spied him from the window.
Gwyn closed his fingers over the spider and tried to open the back door with his left hand. The door was jerked back violently and his father pulled him into the kitchen.
‘What the hell are you doing out there? You’re late! Can’t you open a door now?’ Mr Griffiths had flecks of mud on his spectacles; Gwyn tried not to look at them.
‘My hands are cold,’ he said.
‘Tea’ll be cold too,’ grumbled Mr Griffiths. ‘Get your boots off and sit down. Where were you this afternoon? You were needed. That mad cockerel’s out again. We won’t have a Christmas dinner if he doesn’t stay put.’
With some difficulty Gwyn managed to remove his boots with his left hand. ‘I’m just going upstairs,’ he said airily.
‘Gwyn, whatever are you up to?’ asked his mother. ‘Wash your hands and sit down.’
‘I’ve got to go upstairs,’ Gwyn insisted.
‘But Gwyn . . .’
‘Please, Mam!’
Mrs Griffiths shrugged and turned back to the stove. Her husband had begun to chew bacon and was not interested in Gwyn’s hasty flight through the kitchen.
Tumbling into his bedroom Gwyn scanned the place for something in which to hide his spider. He could think of nothing but the drawer. Placing the spider gently on to the yellow scarf, he pushed the drawer back, leaving a few centimetres for air, then fled downstairs.
He got an interrogation in the kitchen.
Mrs Griffiths began it. ‘Whatever made you run off like that this afternoon?’ she complained. ‘Didn’t you hear me call?’
‘No, it was windy,’ Gwyn replied cheerfully.
‘Well, what was it you were doing all that time? I rang Mrs Lloyd, you weren’t there.’
‘No,’ said Gwyn, ‘I wasn’t!’
‘Not giving much away, are you?’ Mr G
riffiths muttered from behind a mug of tea. ‘It’s no use trying to get that cockerel now it’s dark,’ he went on irritably. ‘We’ll have to be up sharp in the morning.’
‘Won’t have any trouble waking if he’s out,’ Gwyn sniggered.
‘It would take more than a cockerel to wake you some mornings,’ laughed his mother. At least she had recovered her good humour.
After tea Mr Griffiths vanished into his workshop. His work-load of farm repairs seemed to increase rather than diminish, and Gwyn often wondered if it was his father’s way of avoiding conversation.
He thought, impatiently, of the drawer in his room, while his mother chattered about Christmas and the cockerel. Then, excusing himself with a quick hug, Gwyn left his mother to talk to the cat and, trying not to show an unnatural enthusiasm for bed, crossed the passage and climbed the stairs slowly, but two at a time.
His bedroom door was open and there appeared to be a soft glow within. On entering the room Gwyn froze. There were shadows on the wall: seven helmeted figures, motionless beside his bed. He turned, fearfully, to locate the source of light. It came from behind a row of toy spacemen standing on the chest of drawers. Gwyn breathed a sigh of relief and approached the spacemen.
The silver spider had climbed out of the drawer. It was glowing in the dark!
Gwyn brushed his toys aside and hesitantly held out his hand to the spider. It crawled into his open palm and, gently, he raised it closer to his face. The spider’s touch was icy cold, and yet the glow that it shed on his face had a certain strange warmth that seemed to penetrate every part of his body.
He held the spider for several minutes, admiring the exquisite pattern on its back and wondering whether there was more to the tiny creature than a superficial beauty. It had come in exchange for the brooch, of that he was certain. But was it really he who had transformed the brooch? Or had the extraordinary spider come from a place beyond his world? He resolved to keep it a secret until he could consult his grandmother the following evening.
Replacing the spider in the drawer, Gwyn went downstairs to fetch a book. When he returned the glow came from the bedpost and, deciding that he had no need of an electric light, he sat on the bed and read his book beside the spider. It was an exceptional sensation, reading by spiderlight.