The Grey King (7 page)

“How d'you do, Mr. Davies,” said Will. He was trying not to look surprised. Whatever he had expected in Bran's father, it was not this: a man so completely ordinary and unremarkable, whom you could pass on the street without noticing he had been there. Someone as odd as Bran should have had an odd father. But Owen Davies was all medium and average: average height, medium-brown hair in a medium quantity; a pleasant, ordinary face, with a slightly pointed nose and thin lips; an average voice, neither deep nor high, with the same precise enunciation that Will was beginning to learn belonged to all North Welshmen. His clothes were ordinary, the same shirt and trousers and boots that would be worn by anyone else on a farm. Even the dog that stood at his side, quietly watching them all, was a standard Welsh sheepdog, black-backed, white-chested, black-tailed, unremarkable. Not like Cafall: just as Bran's father was not at all like Bran.

“There is tea in the pot, Bran, if you would both like a cup,” Mr. Davies said. “I have had mine, I am off over to the big pasture. And I shall be going out tonight, there is a chapel meeting. Mrs. Evans will give you your supper.”

“That's good,” Will said cheerfully. “He can help me with my homework.”

“Homework?” said Bran.

“Oh, yes. This isn't just a holiday for me, you know. They gave me all kinds of work from school, so I shouldn't get behind. Algebra, today. And history.”

“That will be very good,” Mr. Davies said earnestly, pulling on his waistcoat, “so long as Bran takes care to do his own work as well. Of course, I know he will do that. Well, it is nice to meet you, Will. See you later, Bran. Cafall can stay.”

And he went out, nodding to them amiably but with complete seriousness, leaving Will to reflect that after all there was one thing about Owen Davies that was not altogether common; he had not a glimmer of laughter in him.

There was no expression in Bran's face. He said flatly, “My father is a big one for chapel. He is a deacon, and there are two or three meetings for him in the week. And we go twice on Sundays.”

“Oh,” Will said.

“Yes. Oh is right. Want a cup of tea?”

“Not really, thank you.”

“Let's go out, then.” With absentminded conscientiousness Bran rinsed out the teapot and left it neatly inverted on the draining-board.
“Tyrd yma,
Cafall.”

The white dog bounded happily beside them as they crossed the fields, away from cottage and farm, up the valley towards the mountains and the lone near peak. It stood at a right angle to the mountain behind it, jutting into the flat valley floor.

“Funny how that rock sticks out like that,” Will said.

“Craig yr Aderyn? That's special, it's the only place in Britain where cormorants nest inland. Not very far inland, of course. Four miles from the sea, we are here. Haven't you been over there? Come on, we've got time.” Bran changed direction slightly. “You can see the birds fine from the road.”

“I thought the road was that way,” Will said, pointing.

“It is. We can cut across to it this way.” Bran opened a gate onto a footpath, crossed the path and scrambled over the wall on the other side. “The only thing is, you must go quietly,” he said with a grin. “This is Caradog Prichard's land.”

“Hush, Cafall,” Will said in a heavy stage-whisper, turning his head. But the dog was not there. Will paused, puzzled. “Bran? Where's Cafall?”

Bran whistled. They both stood waiting, looking back at the long sweep
of the slate-edged stone wall along the stubbled field. Nothing moved. The sun shone. Far away, sheep called. Bran whistled again, with no result. Then he went back, with Will close behind, and they climbed over the wall again and went down to the footpath they had crossed.

Bran whistled a third time, and called in Welsh. There was concern in his voice.

Will said, “Wherever could he have gone? He was right behind me when I came over the wall.”

“He never does this. Never. He will never go from me without permission, or not come when he is called.” Bran gazed anxiously up and down the footpath. “I don't like it. I shouldn't have let him come so near Mr. Prichard's land. You and me is one thing, but Cafall—” He whistled again, loud and desperate.

“You don't suppose—” Will said. He stopped.

“That Prichard would shoot him, the way he said?”

“No, I was going to say, you don't suppose Cafall wouldn't come because he knew he shouldn't go on Mr. Prichard's land. But that's silly, no dog could work out something like that.”

“Oh,” Bran said unhappily, “dogs can work out things a lot more complicated than that. I don't know. Let's try this way. It leads to the river.”

They set off along the path, away from the looming mass of the rock Craig yr Aderyn. Somewhere ahead of them, a long way off, a dog barked.

“Is that him?” Will said hopefully.

Bran's white head was cocked on one side. The dog barked again, closer. “No. That's John Rowlands's big dog, Pen. But Cafall might have gone that way when he heard him—”

They both broke into a run, along the stony, grass-patched path. Will very soon lost his breath and dropped behind. Bran disappeared round a bend in the path ahead of him. When Will turned the corner himself, two things slammed simultaneously into his consciousness: the sight of Bran—without Cafall—talking to his father and John Rowlands, and the sick certainty that
something evil had taken control of everything that was happening now on Clwyd Farm. It was a recognition, like the sudden sensing of an overwhelming sound or smell.

He came panting up to them, as Bran said, “. . . heard Pen bark, and thought he might have come this way, so we came running.”

“And you saw nothing at all?” Owen Davies said. His face was tight with some deep concern. Looking at it, Will felt foreboding clutch at the pit of his stomach.

John Rowlands said, his deep voice strained, “And you, Will? Did you see anyone, anything, on the path just now?”

Will stared. “No. Only Cafall, before, and now we've lost him.”

“No creature came past you?”

“Nothing at all. Why? What's wrong?”

Owen Davies said, bleakly, “In the big pasture up the way, there are four dead sheep with their throats torn out, and there is no gate open or any sign of what can have attacked them.”

Will looked in horror at John Rowlands. “Is it the same—?”

“Who can tell?” said the shepherd bitterly. Like Davies, he seemed caught between distress and rage. “But it is not dogs, I do not see how it could be dogs. It looks more like the work of foxes, though how that can be, I do not know.”

“The
milgwn,
from the hills,” said Bran.

“Nonsense,” his father said.

“The what?” said Will.

“The
milgwn,”
Bran said. His eyes were still darting round in search of Cafall, and he spoke automatically. “Grey foxes. Some of the farmers say there are big grey foxes that live up in the mountains, bigger and faster than our red foxes down here.”

Owen Davies said, “That is nonsense. There are no such things. I have told you before, I will not have you listening to those rubbishy old tales.”

His tone was sharp. Bran shrugged.

But across the front of Will's mind there came suddenly a brilliant image, clear as a film thrown on a screen: he saw three great foxes trotting in line, enormous grey-white animals with thick coats growing to the broadness of a ruff round their necks, and full brushlike tails. They moved across a hillside, among rocks, and for an instant one of them turned its head and looked full at him, with bright unwinking eyes. For that instant he could see them as clearly as he could see Bran. Then the image was gone, they were vanished, and he was standing again in the sunshine, mute, dazed, knowing that in one of the brief communications that can come—very rarely, only very rarely—unguarded from one Old One to another, his masters had sent him a warning picture of the creatures of the Grey King, agents of the Dark.

He said abruptly, “They aren't tales. Bran is right.”

Bran stared at him, shaken by the crisp certainty in his voice. But Owen Davies looked across in chilly reproof, the corners of his thin mouth turned down. “Don't be foolish, boy,” he said coldly. “What can you know of our foxes?”

Will never knew what he could have said in answer, for breaking into the tense stillness of the sunlit afternoon came a shout from John Rowlands, urgent, loud.

“Tân!
Look over there! There is fire on the mountain! Fire!”

T
here was not much smoke, for so much fire. In a line along the lower slope of the mountain, which they could only just see above the hedge from where they stood, flames were blazing in the bracken. It was like a long wound, a gash in the peaceful brown slope, quivering with deadly, ominous life. Yet there was little colour in it, and they were too far away to hear any sound. For a moment Will was conscious only of wonder that John Rowlands should have caught sight of it at all.

Then they were deep in instructions, and the urgency of Rowlands's soft voice. “Off to the farm, both of you, quick. Call the fire from Tywyn and the police, and then come back with anyone who is there. All the hands you can get. And bring more fire brooms, Bran, you know where they are. Come on, Owen.”

Both men ran up the path across the valley, and the boys dived for the gate that led over the fields to Clwyd Farm. Bran swung his head round in a whirl of white hair: “Take it
gently,
now,” he said earnestly, “or you'll be worse ill—” and he was off like a sprinter, leaving Will to close the gate and trot resignedly in his wake.

The telephoning was done by the time he caught Bran up at the farm.
David Evans took them with him in the Land-Rover, with Rhys and a tall thin farmer called Tom Ellis who had been there when they arrived. The back of the little car had been hastily filled with fire brooms and sacking, and several buckets that Will's uncle seemed to have small hope of using. The dogs, for once, were left behind.

“They will be no good with fire,” Rhys said, seeing Will cock his head to the plaintive barking. “And the sheep can get out of the way on their own—indeed they will all be well away, by now.”

“I wonder where Cafall is,” Will said, and then caught sight of Bran's face and wished he had not.

Close to, the fire on the mountain was very much more alarming than it had seemed from a distance. They could smell it now, and hear it; smell the smoke more bitter than a farm bonfire; hear the soft, dreadful sound of flames consuming the bracken, like paper crumpled in the hand, and the sudden crackling roar as a bush or a patch of gorse went up. And they could see the flames, leaping high, bright red and yellow at the edges of the fire but ferocious and near-invisible at its heart.

As they tumbled out of the car David Evans was yelling for the fire brooms. Will and Bran pulled them out: besoms made like those for old-fashioned sweeping, but with the twigs longer and wider-spread. John Rowlands and Bran's father, already equipped, were thrashing at the leading edge of the fire, trying to contain it; but the wind was gusting higher, and the flames, now leaping, now creeping, were soon past them and travelling along the lower edge of the mountain. As they swept upwards, roaring up the hillside through the tinder-dry bracken, Owen Davies jumped out of the way only just in time.

The crackling rose; the air was full of fumes and smoke and whirling black specks of charcoal and ash. Great heat shone out at them. They were all in a line beating at the flames, flailing away with all their might, yet only occasionally extinguishing a spark. John Rowlands shouted something
desperately in Welsh; then seeing Will's uncomprehending face near him, gasped out: “We must drive it higher, before it can reach Prichard's! Keep it from the rock!”

Peering ahead at the great outsweeping rocky slope of Craig yr Aderyn, Will glimpsed for the first time the corner of a grey stone building jutting out beyond its far side. The light glinted on a spray of water flung up beside the house; someone was soaking the land all round it, in an effort to deaden the fire if it should reach that far. But Will, beating hopelessly with his long flat-tipped broom, felt that nothing could halt or check the inferno before them, snarling high over their heads now as it reached a tangle of blackberry bushes. It was like a huge beast raging over the mountain, gobbling up everything in its path with irresistible greed. It was so powerful, and they so small, that even the effort to control its path seemed ludicrous. He thought:
It is like the Dark
—and for the first time found himself wondering how the fire could have begun.

Below them, from the road past the foot of the great Craig, came the clanging of a fire engine's bell, and Will glimpsed patches of bright red through the trees, and a hose snaking through the air. Men's voices were calling faintly and there was a sound of engines. But up here on the slope, the fire was gaining a greater hold, as the gusting wind caught it in patches, and gradually they were forced downward, into the trees edging the road. In triumphant thunder the fire roared after them.

“Down the road!” the thin man Tom Ellis called. “Those trees will catch in a minute!”

Will panted along at John Rowland's side. “What will happen?”

“Burn itself out, eventually.” But the Welshman's creased face was grim.

Bran came trotting up at his other side, his white skin smudged and dirty. “This wind is the trouble, taking it up the valley—is Prichard's place really in danger, Mr. Rowlands?”

John Rowlands checked his stride for a moment, to gaze all round the sky. Clouds were forming in the blue air now, strange ragged dirty-white clouds
that seemed to be coming from no one direction. “I don't know . . . the wind is for a change in the weather, and it is shifting, but hard to tell where . . . we shall have rain sooner or later.”