The Grey King (19 page)

Cafall dead.

He thought of Will then. It was Will's fault. If Will had never brought him to—

“No,” Bran said aloud suddenly. He turned and glared at the warestone. Was it trying to turn his mind to thinking ill of Will, and so to divide them? Will had said, after all, that the Dark might try to reach at him in some way he would least expect. That was it, for sure. He was being influenced subtly to turn against Will. Bran felt pleased with himself for noticing so soon.

“You can save the effort,” he said jeeringly to the warestone. “It won't work, see?”

He went back to the doorway and looked out at the hills. His mind drifted back to thought of Cafall. It was hard to keep away from the last image: the worst, yet precious because it was the closest. He heard again the shot, and the way it had echoed round the yard. He heard his father saying, as Cafall lay bleeding his life out and Caradog Prichard sneered with success:
Cafall was going for the sheep, there is no question . . . I cannot say that I would not have shot him myself, in Caradog's place. That is the right of it. . . .

The right, the right. So very sure his father was always, of the right and the wrong. His father and all his father's friends in chapel, and most of all the
minister with his certain-sure preaching of good and bad, and the right way to live. For Bran it was a pattern of discipline: chapel twice on Sundays, listen and sit still without fidgeting, and do not commit the sins the Good Book forbids. For his father it was more: prayer meetings, sometimes twice a week, and always the necessity of behaving the way people expected a deacon to behave. There was nothing wrong with chapel and all of that, but Bran knew his father gave it more of himself than any other chapel member he had ever met. He was like a driven man, with his anxious face and hunched shoulders, weighed down by a sense of guilt that Bran had never been able to fathom for himself. There was no lightness in their lives; his father's endless meaningless penance would not allow it. Bran had never been allowed to go to the cinema in Tywyn, and on Sundays he could do nothing at all except go to chapel and walk the hills. His father was reluctant to let him go to school concerts and plays. It had even taken John Rowlands a long time to persuade him to let Bran play the harp in contests at
eisteddfodau.
It was as if Owen Davies kept both of them, himself and Bran, locked up in a little box in the valley, bleak and lonely, out of contact with all the bright things of life; as if they were condemned to a life in jail.

Bran thought:
It's not fair. All I had was Cafall, and now even Cafall is gone. . . .
He could feel grief swelling in his throat, but he swallowed hard and gritted his teeth, determined not to cry. Instead rage and resentment grew in his mind. What right had his father to make everything so grim? They were no different from other people. . . .

But that's wrong, said a voice in his mind. You are different. You are the freak with the white hair, and the pale skin that will not brown in the sun, and the eyes that cannot stand bright light. Whitey, they call you at school, and Paleface, and there is one boy from up the valley who makes the old sign against the Evil Eye in your direction if he thinks you are not looking. They don't like you. Oh, you're different, all right. Your father and your face have made you feel different all your life, you would be a freak inside even if you tried to dye your hair, or paint your skin.

Bran strode up and down the cottage room, furious and yet puzzled. He banged one hand against the door. He felt as though his head were about to burst. He had forgotten the warestone. It did not occur to him that this haunting too might be brought by the subtle workings of the Dark. Everything seemed to have vanished from the world except the resentful fury against his father that flooded his mind.

And then outside the cottage's broken front door there was the crunch and squeal of a car drawing up, and Bran looked out just in time to see his father jump out of the Land-Rover and stride towards the cottage.

He stood still, his head singing with rage and surprise. Owen Davies pushed open the door and stood looking at him.

“I thought you would be here,” he said.

Bran said curtly, “Why?”

His father made the strange ducking movement of his head that was one of his familiar nervous gestures. “Will was up at the farm, fetching something, and he said you were both up here, somewhere . . . he should be along soon.”

Bran was standing stiffly. “Why are you here? Did Will make you think something was wrong?”

“Oh, no, no,” Owen Davies said hastily.

“Well then, what—”

But his father had seen Pen. He stood very still for a moment. Then he said gently, “But something is wrong, isn't it?”

Bran opened his mouth, and shut it again.

Owen Davies came further into the room and bent over the helpless sheepdog. “How is he hurt, then? Was it a fall? I never saw an animal lie so . . .” He stroked the dog's head, and felt along his legs, then moved his hand to pick up one paw. Pen gave an almost inaudible whine, and rolled his eyes. The paw would not move. It was not rigid, or stiff; it was simply bound fast to the earth, like the warestone. Bran's father tried each of the
four paws in turn, and each time could not move any a fraction of an inch. He stood up and backed slowly away, staring at Pen. Then he raised his head to look at Bran, and in his eyes a terrible fear was mingled with accusation.

“What have you been doing, boy?”

Bran said, “It is the power of the Brenin Llwyd.”

“Nonsense!” Owen Davies said sharply. “Superstitious nonsense! I will not have you talk of those old pagan stories as if they were true.”

“All right, Da,” Bran said. “Then it is superstitious nonsense that you cannot move the dog.”

“It is some kind of rigor of the joints,” his father said, looking at Pen. “It seems to me he has broken his back, and the nerves and the muscles are all stiffened up.” But there was no conviction in his voice.

“There is nothing wrong with him. He is not hurt. He is like that because—” Bran felt suddenly that it would be going much too far to tell his father about the warestone. He said instead, “It is the malice of the Brenin Llwyd. Through his trickery Cafall was shot when he should not have been, and now he is trying to make it easy for that crazy Caradog Prichard to get Pen as well.”

“Bran, Bran!” His father's voice was high with agitation. “You must not let yourself be carried away so by Cafall dying. There was no help for it,
bachgen,
he turned into a sheep-chaser and there was no help for it. A killer dog has to be killed.”

Bran said, trying to keep his voice from trembling, “He was not a killer dog, Da, and you do not know what you are talking about. Because if you do, why can you not get Pen to move one centimetre from where he is lying? It is the Brenin Llwyd, I tell you, and there is nothing you can do.”

And he could tell from the apprehension in Owen Davies's eyes that deep down, he believed it was the truth.

“I should have known,” his father said miserably. “When I found you here in this place, I should have known such things were happening.”

Bran stared at him. “What do you mean?”

His father did not seem to hear him. “Here of all places. Blood will tell, they say. Blood will tell. She came here out of the mountains, out of darkness to this place, and so this is where you came too. Even without knowing, you came here. And evil comes of it again.” His eyes were wide and he was blinking very fast, looking at nothing.

Suspicion of his meaning began to creep into Bran's mind like an evening mist over the valley.
“Here.
You keep saying,
here
. . .”

“This was my house,” Owen Davies said.

“No,” Bran said. “Oh, no.”

“Eleven years ago,” Davies said, “I lived here.”

“I didn't know. I never thought. It's been empty ever since I remember; I never thought of it being a proper house. I come here quite often when I'm out on my own. If it rains. Or just to sit. Sometimes”—he swallowed—“sometimes I pretend it's my house.”

“It belongs to Caradog Prichard,” his father said emptily. “His father kept it as the shepherd's house. But Prichard's men live by the farm now.”

“I didn't realise,” Bran said again.

Owen Davies stood over Pen, looking down, his thin shoulders bowed. He said bitterly, “The power of the Brenin Llwyd, aye. And that was what brought her out of the mountains to me, and then took her away again. Nothing else could have done it. I have tried to bring you up right, away from it all, in prayer and in goodness, and all the time the Brenin Llwyd has been reaching out to have you back where your mother went. You should not have come here.”

“But I didn't know,” Bran said. Anger flared in him suddenly like a blown spark. “How was I to know? You never told me. There's never anywhere else to go anyway. You don't let me go to Tywyn ever, not even to the pool or the beach after school with the others. Where else do you let me go except out on the moors? And how was I to know I shouldn't have come here?”

Davies said wretchedly, “I wanted to keep you free of it. It was over, it
was gone, I wanted to keep you away from the past. Ah, we should never have stayed here. I should have moved away from the valley at the beginning.”

Bran shook his head from side to side as if trying to cast something away from it; the air in the cottage seemed to be growing oppressive, heavy, filled with prickling tension like the forewarning of a thunderstorm. He said coldly, “You've never told me anything, ever. I just have to do what I am told all the time.
This is right, Bran, do it, this is for the best, this is the way you must behave.
You won't ever talk about my mam, you never have. I haven't got a mother—well, that's not so unusual, there's two boys at school haven't either. But I don't even know anything about mine. Only that her name was Gwen. And I know she had black hair and blue eyes, but that's only because Mrs. Rowlands told me so, not you. You wouldn't ever tell me anything, except that she ran away when I was a baby. I don't even know whether she's alive or dead.”

Owen Davies said quietly, “Neither do I, boy.”

“But I want to know what she was like!” The tension sang in Bran's head like an angry sea; he was shouting now. “I want to know! And you're scared to tell me, because it must have been your fault she ran away! It was your fault, I've always known it was. You kept her shut off from everybody the way you've always kept me, and that's why she ran away!”

“No,” his father said. He began walking unhappily to and fro in the little room; he looked at Bran anxiously, warily, as if he were a wild animal that might spring. Bran thought the wariness was that of fear; there was nothing else in his experience that he could imagine it to be.

Owen Davies said, stumbling over the words, “You are young, Bran. You have to understand, I have always tried to do what is right, to tell you as much as is right. Not to tell you anything that might be dangerous for you—”

“Dangerous!” Bran said contemptuously. “How could it be dangerous to know about my mother?”

For a moment Davies's control cracked. “Look over there!” he snapped, pointing at Pen. The dog still lay motionless, dreadfully flattened down, like a
skin pegged out to dry. “Look at that! You say that is the work of the Brenin Llwyd—and then you ask how there could be danger?”

“My mother has nothing to do with the Brenin Llwyd!” But as he heard his own words Bran stopped, staring.

His father said bleakly into the silence, “That is something we shall never know.”

“What do you mean?”

“Listen. I do not know where she went. Out of the mountains she came, and back into the mountains she went, in the end, and none of us saw her again, ever.” Owen Davies was forcing the words out one by one, with difficulty, as if each one gave him pain. “She went of her own choice, she ran away, and none knew why. I did not drive her away.” His voice cracked suddenly. “Drive her away!
Iesu Crist,
boy, I was out of my head up in those hills looking for her, looking for her and never finding, calling, and never a word in return. And no sound anywhere but the birds crying, and the sheep, and the wind an empty whine in my ears. And the Brenin Llwyd behind his mist over Cader and Llyn Mwyngil, listening to the echo of my voice calling, smiling to himself that I should never know where she had gone. . . .”

The anguish in his voice was so clear and unashamed that Bran fell silent, unable to break in.

Owen Davies looked at him. He said quietly, “I suppose it is time to tell you, since we have started this. I have had to wait, you see, until you were old enough to begin to understand. I am your legal father, Bran, because I adopted you right at the beginning. I have had you from when you were a baby, and God knows I am your father in my heart and soul. But you were not born to me and your mother. I cannot tell you who your real father was, she never said a word about him. When she came out of the mountains, out of nowhere. she brought you with her. She stayed with me for three days, and then she went away forever. And took a part of me with her.” His voice shook, then steadied. “She left me a note.”

He took his battered leather wallet out of his pocket and drew from an inner flap a small piece of paper. Unfolding it with great gentleness, he handed it to Bran. The paper was creased and fragile, almost parting at the folds; it bore only a few pencilled words, in a strangely rounded hand.
His name is Bran. Thank you, Owen Davies.

Bran folded the note again, very slowly and carefully, and handed it back.

“It was all she left me of herself, Bran,” said his father. “That note—and you.”

Bran could think of no words to say. His head was crowded with jarring images and questions: a crossroads with a dozen turnings and no sign of which to follow. He thought, as he had thought a thousand times since he was old enough, of the enigma that was his mother, faceless, voiceless, her place in his life nothing but an aching absence. Now, across the years, she had brought him another absence, another emptiness: it was as if she were trying to take away his father as well—at any rate the father who, whatever their differences, he had always thought of as his own. Resentment and confusion rose and fell in Bran's mind like the wind. He thought wildly:
Who am I?
He looked at Pen, and the cottage, and the warestone of the Brenin Llwyd. He heard again his father's bitter remembering:
the Brenin Llwyd behind his mist over Cader and Llyn Mwyngil. . . .
The names re-echoed round his head, and he could not understand why they should. Llyn Mwyngil, Tal y Llyn . . . the roaring in his head grew; it seemed to come from the warestone.