The Grey King (22 page)

“Give it back,” Will said. Then he paused.
“She?”

“It is a Welsh harp, English, an old one.” Prichard peered owlishly at it. “What might it be doing in your hands? You have no right to be holding a Welsh harp.” Suddenly he was glaring viciously at Will. “Go home. Go back where you belong. Mind your business.”

Will said, “The harp has fulfilled its purpose. What did you mean,
like she was playing?”

“Mind your business,” Prichard said again, savagely. “A long time ago, and nothing to do with you.”

From the corner of his eye Will could see that Owen Davies had joined Bran up on the hillside, with Pen darting restlessly between them. Desperately he tried to will Bran to move away, out of sight; he could not understand why he stayed there in the open, where a casual glance would show them to Caradog Prichard.
Move!
he shouted silently.
Go away!
But it was too late. Something, perhaps the sheepdog's anxious wheeling, had caught Prichard's eye; he glanced half-consciously up at the mountain, and he froze.

Every part of the moment seared itself into Will's brain, so that ever afterwards he could feel the quick roaring of impending disaster and see like a bright picture the heavy grey sky, the rearing mountain, the rippling dark lake, the startling patches of colour made by a white-haired boy and a man with flaring red hair: and over it all the strange glow of a light like the warning luminousness hanging over a countryside before a dreadful storm. Caradog
Prichard turned towards him a face marked with a terrible mingling of anger, reproach, and pain, and at the heart of them all a thin core of hatred and the urge to hurt back. Looking deliberately into Will's face, he heaved back his arm and flung the golden harp far out into the lake. Ripples circled outward on the dark water, and then were still.

Then Prichard ran, light as a boy, throwing himself forward to the mountain, and to Bran standing there like a figurehead with the dog Pen. At the last moment before the slope he turned aside, along the curving road that led back down the valley; and Will saw that he had left the small grey van there in the road and was running towards it now with desperate speed.

In the same moment he realised why, and flung a great spell of prevention at Prichard—only to have it cast aside by the protection of the Grey King that the farmer, unknowing, still carried with him. Caradog Prichard reached the van, snatched open its back doors and brought out his long-muzzled shotgun, the same gun with which he had shot Bran's dog Cafall. Swiftly he cocked the gun, swung round and began walking, deliberately and steadily, towards the boy and the dog on the hill. He had no need for haste now. There was no cover to which they could run. Will dug his fingernails into his palms, his mind thrashing for an effective defence. Then he heard the sound of a noisy car.

The Land-Rover swung at astonishing speed out of the lane from Ty-Bont Farm, and round the corner to the lake. John Rowlands must have seen Prichard and his van and his gun all in one appalled moment, for the chunky little car rushed forward to a jerking halt almost at the farmer's feet. The door seemed hardly open before John Rowlands's lanky form was out. He stood still, facing Caradog Prichard and the boy and the dog on the hillside beyond. “Caradog,” he said. “There is no sheep here with its throat cut. You have no right, and no need.”

Prichard's voice was high and dangerous. “There is a sheep dead up there now!” And Will saw that the body of the ewe attacked by the
milgwn,
still
up there on its ledge, was visible as a white heap from where they stood. He knew then for the first time why the Grey King had made sure that his
milgwn
should bring it to that spot.

“That is a Pentref sheep, from those wintering at Clwyd,” John Rowlands said.

“Oh, very likely,” said Prichard, sneering.

“I will show you. Come up and see.”

“Even if it were, what of that? It is still that murdering dog of yours that does these things—to sheep in your own care too, is it? What is the matter with you, Rowlands, that you keep him?” His face glistening with the sweat of rage, Prichard brought up his gun level with his waist, facing the hill.

“No,”
John Rowlands said behind him, his voice very deep.

Something in Caradog Prichard cracked, and he swung round to face Rowlands, the gun still pointing. His voice pitched itself higher still, he was like a wire about to break.

“Always pushing your nose in, you are, John Rowlands. Trying to stop me now, the way you stopped me before. You should not have stopped me then, I would have fought him harder and won, and then she would have come with me. She would have come with me, if it had not been for you pushing in.”

His hands were white where they clenched the gun; his words came out so fast they fell over themselves. John Rowlands stood speechless, staring at him, and Will saw understanding gradually follow astonishment on the tough kind face as he realised what Prichard was talking about.

But before he could speak, Owen Davies's voice came unexpectedly strong and clear from the hillside above them, like a bell ringing out. “Oh, no, indeed, she would not have come with you, Caradog. Never. And you were not winning that fight and you would never have won in a hundred years, and it was lucky for you that John Rowlands did break into it. I did not know what I was doing, but I would have killed you if I could, for hurting my Gwen.”

“Your Gwen?” Prichard spat the words at him. “Any man's Gwen! That was as clear as the light in the sky. Why else would she choose a man like you, Owen Davies? A lovely wild thing out of the mountains she was, with a face like a flower, and fingers that made music out of that little harp that she carried like no music you ever knew before. . . .” For an instant there was a terrible yearning in his voice. But almost as soon again, the tortured, half-crazed face twisted back into malevolence. He looked at Bran's white head.

“And the bastard son there, that you kept all these years to torment me, to remind me—you had no right to him either, I could have looked after her and her child better than you—”

Bran said in a high remote voice, that seemed to come so far out of the past that it put a chill into Will's spine: “And would you then have shot my dog Cafall, Mr. Prichard?”

“Not even your own dog, that animal was not,” Prichard said roughly. “That was a working dog of your father's.”

“Oh, yes,” said Bran in the same clear distant voice. “Yes, indeed. My father had a dog named Cafall.”

Will's blood tingled in his veins, for he knew that the Cafall of whom Bran spoke was not the dog Cafall who had been shot, and the father not Owen Davies. So now Bran, the Pendragon, must know of his true, magnificent, dreadful heritage. Then a last sudden astonishment woke in Will's mind. It must have been Owen Davies who gave the dead dog his name, for Bran had said that Cafall had come to them when he himself was only a very small boy.
Why had Owen Davies named his son's dog by the name of the great king's hound?

His eyes flickered to Owen Davies's thin unprepossessing form, and he saw that the man was watching him.

“Oh, yes,” Davies said. “I knew. I tried not to believe it, but I've always known. She came from Cader Idris, you see, and that is the Seat of Arthur, in English. With Arthur's son she came out of the past, because she had betrayed the king her lord and was afraid that he would cast out his own son
as a result. By enchantment of the
dewin
she brought the boy into the future, away from their troubles—the future that is the present time now for us. And she left him here. And perhaps, perhaps she would not herself have had to go back into the past, if the fat fool there had not interfered, and heard the harp, and wanted my Guinevere, and tried to take her away.”

He looked coldly down at Caradog Prichard. With a snarl of fury Prichard jerked his gun up to his shoulder, but John Rowlands swiftly reached out a long arm and wrenched it from him before his finger could reach the trigger. Prichard shouted angrily, gave him a great push and leapt away, scrambling up in venomous fury towards the ledge where Bran and Owen Davies stood.

Bran went to Davies and put his arm round his waist, and stood close. It was the first gesture of affection between the two that Will had ever seen. And wondering, loving surprise woke in Owen Davies's worn face as he looked down at the boy's white head, and the two stood there, waiting.

Prichard scrambled towards them, murder in his eyes. But John Rowlands was close behind him. He swung the gun at Prichard like a stick, knocking him sideways, and then seized and held him with the force of a much younger man. Wildly struggling, but grasped into helplessness, Caradog Prichard put back his head and gave a terrible shriek of madness, as all control from the Dark left him, and his mind collapsed into the wreck it must now remain. And with the Sleepers ridden, and the last hope of harming Bran gone, the Grey King gave up his battle.

The echoes of Prichard's shriek became a long howling cry through the mountains, rising, falling, rising, echoing from peak to peak, as all powers of the Dark vanished forever from Cader Idris, from the valley of the Dysynni, from Tal y Llyn. Cold as death, anguished as all the loss in the world, it died away and yet still seemed to hang in the air.

They stood motionless, caught in horror.

And the mist that men call the breath of the Grey King came creeping down out of the pass and down the side of the mountains, rolling and curling
and wisping, concealing all it reached, until at the last it cut off every one of them from the rest. A rustling, flurrying sound came out of the mist, but only Will saw the great grey forms of the ghost foxes, the
milgwn
of the Brenin Llwyd, come rushing headlong down the mountain, and plunge into the dark lake, and disappear.

Then the mist closed over Llyn Mwyngil, the lake in the pleasant retreat, and there was a cold silence through all the valley save for the distant bleat, sometimes, of a mountain sheep, like the echo of a man's voice calling a girl's name, far away.

Also by Susan Cooper

The Boggart

The Boggart and the Monster

Green Boy

King of Shadows

The Magician's Boy

The Silver Cow

Victory

MARGARET K. McELDERRY BOOKS

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