by Jenny Nimmo
‘Like your Auntie Elinor,’ Nia said.
‘A bit like that.’
It was much darker than usual for an early summer evening; and cold. The rabbits wouldn’t eat their supper of favourite weeds. They sat rigid on their hind legs, alert and anxious. The birds had fallen silent and even the chorus of ever-hungry lambs had died to an intermittent plaintive bleat.
Something rippled through the air, not a breeze, but more like a shock wave: a sound like silent screaming.
Gwyn stood up. ‘Aw heck!’ he said quietly. ‘Aw heck, Nia. It’s happening.’ He clutched his thick hair with both hands.
‘What?’ she asked, frightened by his attitude.
‘The children are here, and I didn’t call. I didn’t make the ship; the seaweed is safe in my drawer. They’ve come for someone, like they came for Bethan. Can’t you feel it?’
Nia didn’t need to answer. Cold and dread had caused her to wrap her arms tight about herself.
They stood staring helplessly at each other and then a movement by the gate broke the tension and Nain Griffiths came towards them, tall under the apple trees, and dressed in forest green.
‘I heard children in the lane,’ she said, ‘and I thought it was you.’
‘We’re here,’ Gwyn said. ‘We’ve been here all the time.’
‘I saw a boy,’ Nain went on, ‘and he was alone. But there were others in the woods beside him. I heard them laughing.’
‘Emlyn knows,’ Nia whispered. ‘He knows where his mam is. They’re taking him there.’
‘And the others will be waiting!’ Gwyn’s voice cracked and then he was seizing Nia’s hand, dragging her through the orchard, up the path and through the gate. ‘Tell them we’ve gone to look for someone,’ he shouted to his grandmother as they pounded towards the field.
Their race, this time, was desperate. Nia felt as though the earth was rocking upside down. They ran on dark rolling clouds in an icy stream of air. The only warmth in the whole world was caught between her hand and Gwyn’s, and then he let go of her and, as he drew ahead, she lost him in a mist of freezing vapour.
Her feet and instinct took her to the place, and on the woodland path she caught up with Gwyn as he stood waiting for her. He was watching Emlyn Llewelyn walking toward the Orchard of the Half Moon, and the cottage where his mother was.
Emlyn would soon be with his mam. Nia sighed with relief. She let herself sink on to the path and sat there, relaxed and almost happy. Gwyn took several paces away from her. Something about the set of his shoulders, the way he moved, would not let her rest. When she stood again she was petrified by the prospect before her.
There were children crowding into the cottage garden: pale, graceful children; hundreds: they moved in from the trees like streams of thistledown, murmuring softly, their voices gentle as rain.
‘They are ancient,’ Gwyn said. ‘But only in wisdom. Their bones are not brittle. They will not die – unless they are afraid. I know this!’
Nia knew that Emlyn had forgotten his mother. He could only see the children, so beautiful, almost translucent in the dusk.
‘They’ll take him, Gwyn,’ she wanted to cry, but even had she been capable, Gwyn wouldn’t have heard her: he had gone and something else was where he should have been: a frosty tree stump: a man kneeling under a cloak that reflected all the bright shades in the sky, and hair silver with sunlight.
There were words in the air, rising and falling like insistent, monotonous music. Names perhaps: Math, Lord of Gwynedd, Gwydion and Gilfaethwy. Names in the air, sung like a sacrament.
And once again, as in the churchyard, time held back and nothing moved, except the flowers, and they were growing. And Nia saw, or maybe dreamt, that from the flowers two men came: soldiers or princes, the way they used to be, with gold at their throats, and round their naked arms; with broad shining swords and patterned shields that gleamed like fire.
They dipped their swords, once, twice, as in a rite, together, and where fiery bronze touched the earth, flames came leaping round them.
If nothing else was real, the fire was. Nia could feel the heat on her face. But Emlyn wasn’t moving. Fear or the children seemed to paralyse him and he would soon be engulfed by flames.
‘Help him, Nia!’ It was Gwyn’s voice. He was beside her, tugging her hand. ‘He’s remembering.’
Nia couldn’t move.
‘I can’t do it alone, Nia!’
The fire was white hot.
‘It’s an illusion, Nia. It won’t hurt you. But I can’t keep it!’
‘No!’ she shrank back.
‘We must hold him, or he will go. I am losing myself . . .’
‘I can’t do nothing,’ she moaned.
‘We’re in this together, Nia Lloyd!’ the voice hissed in her ear, so close that she felt it in her head; she sprang away from it and ran with one boy, down towards the other who now seemed less substantial than the flames.
But she grasped one hand in both of hers, while Gwyn took the other, and they held and pulled him.
The fire spat and stank. It licked their feet and clothes like a hungry beast. And Emlyn was rooted in the ground, heavy as oak.
They pulled him until Nia thought that if her body didn’t burn it would surely break, and then, slowly, he came with them.
Beyond the tall soldiers, Nia could see the children, pressing together, terrified by something that should not exist either in their world, or in the place they had invaded. They turned and screamed through the trees.
A mist of swimming white shapes escaped out on to the mountain and gathered into a cloud of snow: it seemed to shake the earth as it rose into the sky.
Before she fell, Nia thought she saw a billowing sail and a silver prow with dancing creatures on it passing overhead.
They were all in the kitchen at T Bryn: Nia hardly remembered how they had come there.
It had been dark in Perllan yr Hanner Lleuad, and there had been a wind. They had gone to find Emlyn, she and Gwyn, but the world had rocked and they had fallen, all three, down together to the place where Emlyn’s mother lived.
An earth tremor, Gwyn’s father called it.
But the bruises on Nia’s hands were red, like burns. Her father was there, without his butcher’s apron, and he was stroking her head like he used to do, when she was a very little girl.
She couldn’t see Gwyn.
Emlyn was there, on the big settle beside his own mother, who held him like she never wanted to let him go, and Geraint was sitting on Idris Llewelyn’s knee.
But Nia couldn’t see Gwyn.
Gwyn’s father was there, grim by the stove. He had known where the children would be when Idris Llewelyn came banging on his door, and summer lightning shattered the sky.
Gwyn wasn’t there.
Mrs Griffiths was pouring tea by the kitchen table. It was she who had carried Nia out of the valley. She had gone with her husband and Idris Llewelyn, under a sky as green as a field of spells. And they had found the children, dazed and bruised, with Elinor Llewelyn crying beside them. The wind had torn her roof away.
‘Where is Gwyn?’ Nia cried.
They all looked at her and Gwyn’s mother said gently, ‘He’s resting, cariad.’
‘Let me see him!’
‘He’s asleep!’
She didn’t believe them. ‘I want to see him!’ she demanded.
So Mrs Griffiths took Nia into the front room and she saw Gwyn lying in a big armchair with a blanket over him. His eyes were closed and his face, beneath the cloud of black hair, looked like paper.
‘The doctor’s coming soon,’ Mrs Griffiths told her. ‘He’ll put Gwyn right; he must!’
It seemed then that, not only Nia’s voice, but her whole body yelled, ‘He’s not asleep!’ And tears spilled out in a wave that left her breathless. She wiped them away again and again; as though they had no business there, when there were so many things to consider.
Mr Griffiths gripped her shoulders. ‘He’s
not gone, girl,’ he said. ‘We’ll get him right. Come away, now.’
As he drew her into the passage, the front door opened and Nain Griffiths stood there, in a cloak that shone darkly, like crow feathers.
‘Give me my boy!’ she said.
Without a word, Mr Griffiths went and lifted his son out of the chair. He put Gwyn, wrapped in the blanket, into Nain’s arms, and although he was ten years old, his grandmother carried him into the night, as if he was nothing but a shadow.
Summer came swiftly after the storm: a scorching summer of cloudless skies and hours of sunshine that stretched from early dawn till long after bedtime.
Morgan-the-Smithy and his three sons worked shirtless out of doors. Nia watched them in the evenings, splashing themselves cool in the river, singing and swearing cheerfully at each other.
Six weeks went by and in those weeks so many things happened it was as if a train had thundered through the valley, throwing out goodwill like birthday parcels.
Idris Llewelyn sold his yellow-patterned painting to a gallery in London; they wanted more if he could do them. They took his photo for the papers, with his wife and his two sons. How proud he was in his black boiler suit, holding a cheque for a thousand pounds.
Emlyn came back to school, quite his old self again, only now he was ‘that Emlyn whose dad sells paintings’, and children queued up to talk to him.
Elinor Llewelyn left the cottage in the Orchard of the Half Moon; she couldn’t stay for her roof had fallen in. She and Geraint went to live in the Griffiths’ farmhouse. She saw Emlyn and her husband every day, but nothing would persuade her to move back to the chapel. This unsatisfactory situation might have continued, had not help arrived from quite an unexpected quarter.
One afternoon Mr Lloyd came out of his shop, hot and a little irritable. It wasn’t easy trying to sell meat from the window and keep it cool. His impatient family waited for their tea while he scrupulously scrubbed his hands in the sink, and then he said, in an off-hand way, ‘Would Idris Llewelyn think of living in T Llr? His wife would go there, I’m sure. There’d be no money involved – well not much – no one else wants it, and it’ll fall down if it’s empty longer. He can keep his chapel, just for work.’
Nia ran and hugged him, bloody apron and all.
‘Hold on, girl,’ he laughed. ‘They haven’t agreed. And it’ll need a fair bit of work doing on it.’
Of course they did agree. Elinor had always loved T Llr, and Idris could turn his hand to any sort of building.
He and Ivor Griffiths, reconciled at last, spent a night in The Red Dragon inn, with Iestyn Lloyd, to seal the buying of T Llr. It was a night the town never forgot. They called it Llewelyn’s night, for he was like a returning prince, now that he had a house and a wife, two fine sons and money in the bank. Pendewi Male Voice Choir was there, and you could hear the singing all the way to the sea.
But Nia remembered it because it was the night she finished her picture. She took the tiny pieces she had cut from the hem of Elinor Llewelyn’s dress and sewed them in a half-circle on the side of the mountain, and beneath them she glued clusters of silver glitter, so that they appeared to reflect the stars in her midnight sky.
It was finished – yet incomplete.
She could have asked Emlyn’s advice: he was an acceptable visitor now, and she could have taken it to Idris Llewelyn in his chapel studio, to ask what was missing. But she waited until Gwyn Griffiths had recovered.
He came to visit them a week after Llewelyn’s night. He was still pale, but his grandmother’s herbs had brought him to life. If it was shock that he had suffered from, as his father said it was, then why did his eyes look so weary and why did he stumble on the stairs? Nia knew that it was exhaustion, that he’d put too much of himself into the spell that had brought ghosts back to Wales, to save his cousin.
After tea, when the other boys were playing in the river, Nia took Gwyn indoors to see her work.
She laid it out on the floor of her room and sat back, watching him.
Gwyn knelt beside the canvas. He observed it solemnly, while Nia waited anxiously.
‘It’s beautiful, Nia!’ he said at last. ‘It’s a masterpiece. It’s magic . . .’
‘But,’ she said anxiously, ‘something’s missing, isn’t it?’
Gwyn frowned. ‘No. Not really, it’s only . . . there’s no one there: no people: only birds and sheep.’
‘Oh!’ She gazed at the canvas for a moment. ‘People change,’ she said. ‘They go and they die!’
Gwyn looked at her. ‘In a way,’ he said. Then he left her and went to join Alun by the river.
When he had gone she cut the shape of a girl out of her mother’s shell-grey tights, and put it where the starry flowers grew in Perllan yr Hanner Lleuad. And in the oak wood she put a starling’s feather: it could have been a holly tree or a shining cloak. Beyond the feather she glued strips of brown silk sprinkled with gold glitter, and in the centre of each strip, a silver circle, like the shield of a soldier, a prince – or a magician!
Her landscape was complete.
The following day the children in Standard Three had to submit their project work.
They were all in the Assembly Hall, Miss Powell and the older children from Standard Four as well, brought in to help Mr James with his judging. The long table at the end of the hall was filling with papers, books and models. Gwyneth Bowen’s story was three exercise books long, and her illustrations drew sighs of envy and admiration.
Then it was Nia’s turn. She handed Mr James her long roll of canvas and he looked at her apprehensively before unrolling it. For a second Nia panicked. It was the wrong way up. They wouldn’t understand. Then Miss Powell caught the other end and they held it up, two metres of it, high enough for everyone to see.
It went dead quiet and Nia’s nose began to itch, though it hadn’t done so for nearly a month, and she felt Gwyneth Bowen glaring at her.
There was sunlight in the hall. The stars, streams and flowers glittered. Nia had never seen her picture from a distance. She could hardly believe it was she who had put those brilliant colours and shapes together.
‘Nia Lloyd, did anyone help you with this?’ Mr James asked, astonished and disbelieving.
‘No, sir!’ Nia tried to say, but her throat had gone dry and the words came out as a guilty sort of cough.
Then, from the back of the room, Emlyn Llewelyn shouted, ‘Nia did it herself, sir. I know. You can ask my dad. And don’t you ever say she didn’t!’
Everyone looked at him and then at Nia who felt very hot, and Mr James was too taken aback to make an issue of the impudence. ‘Well!’ he said, and, ‘By heck, this is a helluva . . .’
He didn’t realise he was swearing until everyone began to laugh and he felt Miss Powell staring at him.
‘I think this is it, children, don’t you?’ he said, remembering his dignity. ‘A masterpiece! We’ll hang it right in the middle! Pride of place! Llongyfarchiadau, Nia Lloyd! Congratulations! By heck, this is something for the papers!’
Then everyone was clapping and stamping and shouting, ‘Hooray!’ and banging Nia on the back. And when she left the Assembly Hall she knew she would never be Nia-can’t-do nothing again.
She went up to Llewelyn’s chapel that evening. It was the last night that it would be a home and although the painter would come to work there, it would never be quite the same again.
The Griffiths family were there. The boys were kicking a ball round the field, little Geraint following Emlyn and screaming with delight. The parents watched and murmured to each other.
Nia stepped up on to the railings and looked over. She couldn’t go in. They were all together now, one family, but not hers. She clung to the railings and watched them for a long time. They never saw her. She had brought them together, just as she’d always intended.
She stepped down into the road and became aware that someone was shouting her name.
Alun was running up the hill. ‘It’s come
, Nia! The baby! Mam wants you!’ he called.
Nia flew down towards him but Emlyn must have seen her. He came out on to the road and shouted, ‘Nia! You’ll come to T Llr, won’t you? There’s going to be loads of plums and the flowers are yours, they always will be!’
But she was too breathless to reply or turn to him. There were so many thoughts racing through her mind, above all the sudden realisation that she wasn’t in the middle any more.
If she was a little apprehensive ascending the last flight of stairs, she forgot everything when she found her family, crushed into the few spaces round the huge bed.
The boys were sitting on it, her sisters leaning on one side, and Mr Lloyd on the other.
Mrs Bennett, the midwife, was in the only chair. The baby had come that quick she was still breathless from bicycling two miles and running up three flights of stairs, and she overweight and old enough to retire.
‘Come and see your sister, Nia,’ Mrs Lloyd said, ‘Beautiful, she is! And so like you!’
‘Give her a name, girl!’ Mr Lloyd drew her closer to the bed, where the baby lay in her mother’s arms.
‘It’s your turn, Nia, to name the baby!’ Catrin reminded her.
Nia approached, self-conscious and diffident. The baby looked solemnly out of her knitted white cocoon: her eyes were round and dark as berries. There was only one name for a baby like that.
‘Let’s call her Bethan!’ Nia said.
For Myfanwy
The prince did not come entirely unannounced! There were messages. They slipped through the air and kindled Gwyn’s fingers; the joints ached, things fell out of his grasp and he knew something was on its way.
They had nearly finished the barn; it only needed a few extra nails on the roof to secure it against the wild winds that were bound to come, and planks to fit for the lambing pens. That was Gwyn’s task. He had never been much of a carpenter and today he was proving to be a disaster. But he could not pretend that cold or damp was causing his clumsiness. A huge September sun glared across the mountains, burning the breeze. The air was stifling!