The Grey King (21 page)

“Leave me alone, Mr. Prichard,” Will said. “I have not got John Rowlands's dog with me. I don't even know where he is.”

“Oh, yes, you do know, boy, and so do I.” The words tumbled out of Prichard, nearer the surface of his mind than the wonder at his new gift. “He has been taken to Jones Ty-Bont's farm, to be kept from me so that he can get back to his murderous business again. But it will not work, indeed no, no hope of it, I am not such a fool.” He glared at Will. “And you had better tell me where he is, boy, tell me what you are all up to, or it will go very badly with you.”

Will could sense the man's anger and malice whirling round his mind like a maddened bird caught in a room without exit.
Ah, Brenin Llwyd,
he thought with a kind of sadness,
your powers deserve better than to be put into one without discipline or training, without the wit to use them properly. . . .

He said, “Mr. Prichard, please leave me alone. You don't know what you are doing. Really. I don't want to have to hurt you.”

Caradog Prichard stared at him for a moment of genuine blank wonder, like a man in the instant before he understands the point of a joke, and then
he broke into gulping laughter. “You don't want to hurt me? Well, that's very nice, now, I am delighted to hear it, very thoughtful. Very kind . . .”

The sunshine that had intermittently lit the morning was gone now; grey cloud was thickening over the sky, sweeping down the valley on the wind that rippled the lake. Some instinct at the back of Will's mind made him suddenly aware of the greyness growing like a weight all around, and woke the decision that took hold of him as Caradog Prichard's jeering laughter spluttered down into control. He took a step or two backwards, holding the harp close at his side. Then half closing his eyes, he called silently to the gifts that had made him an Old One in full strength, to the spells that made him able to ride the wind, to fly beyond the sky and beneath the sea; to the circle of the Light that had set him on this quest for the last link in their defense against the Dark's rising.

There was a sound like the murmuring sea out of the still lake Tal y Llyn, Llyn Mwyngil, and from the far edge of the dark water a huge wave came travelling. It curled up high and white-topped, fringed with foam as if about to break. Yet it did not break, but swept on across the water towards them, and on its curving peak rode six white swans, moving smooth as glass, their great wings outstretched and touching wing tip to wing tip. They were enormous, powerful birds, their white feathers shining like polished silver even in the grey light of the cloud-hung sky. As they drew nearer and nearer, one of the swans raised its head on the curving, graceful neck and gave a long mournful cry, like a warning, or a lament.

On and on they came, towards the shore, towards Will and Caradog Prichard. The wave loomed higher and higher: a green wave, glowing with a strange translucent light that seemed to come out of the bottom of the lake. It was clear that the birds would dive upon them, and the wave break over them and rush forward down the valley, with all the water of the lake in one long rush, sweeping farms and houses and people before it in total devastation, down to the sea.

Will knew this not to be true, but it was the image that he was forcing into Caradog Prichard's mind.

The white swan gave one more whooping, mourning cry, the shriek of a soul in utter emptiness, and Caradog Prichard stumbled backwards, his small eyes bulging in his head from horror and disbelief, one hand clutched in his red hair. He opened his mouth, and strange wordless sounds came out of it. Then something seemed to seize him, and he jerked into a frozen immobility, arms and legs caught at unnatural angles; and the air was filled with a rushing, hissing sound that came so quickly its direction could not be told.

But Will, appalled, knew what it must be. By accepting help from the Dark, the Welshman had doomed his own mind.

He saw in Caradog Prichard's eyes the quick flash of madness as human reason was swept aside by the dreadful power of the Grey King. He saw the mind sway as the body was, still unwittingly, possessed. Prichard's back straightened; his pudgy form seemed to rise taller than before, and the shoulders hunched themselves in a hint of immense strength. The force of the Brenin Llwyd's magic was in him and pulsing out of him, and he stared at the advancing wave and shrieked in a cracked voice some words of Welsh.

And the swans rose crying into the air and curved away on long slow-beating wings, for all at once the rearing wave collapsed, dragged down into heaviness by a tremendous churning and heaving of thousand upon thousand fish. Silver and grey and dark glinting green they boiled on the surface, perch and trout and wriggling eels, and slant-mouthed pike with needle teeth and small evil eyes. It was as if all the fish in all the lakes of Wales seethed there in a huge mass on the water of Llyn Mwyngil, smoothing its surface into a quivering stillness. Yet it was with the use of a voice and a mind no more than human that so great a spell had been cast. A chill struck into Will as he understood this new deviousness of the Brenin Llwyd. There would be no open confrontation. He himself would never see the Grey King again, for in such a facing of two poles of enchantment there was danger of annihilation
for one. Instead Will would face, as he was facing now, the power of the Grey King channelled through the mind of an evil-wishing but innocent man: a man made into a dreadfully vulnerable vessel for the Dark. If the Light were to give any final annihilating stroke in this encounter, the Dark would still be protected, but the mind of the man would inevitably be destroyed. Caradog Prichard, if he were still sane now, would be driven then forever into hopeless madness. Unless Will could somehow avoid such an encounter, there was no help for it. The Grey King was using Prichard as a shield, knowing that he himself could remain protected if the shield were destroyed.

Will called out in anguish, hardly knowing he did so, “Caradog Prichard! Stop! Leave us alone! For your own sake, leave me alone!”

But there was nothing he could do. The momentum of their conflict was already too great, like a wheel spinning faster and faster downhill. Caradog Prichard was gazing in childish delight at the lake of seething fish, rubbing his hands together, talking steadily to himself in Welsh. He looked at Will and giggled. He did not stop talking, but switched to English, the words coming out in a half-crazed conversational stream, very fast.

“You see the pretty creatures now, so many thousands of them, and all ours and doing what we ask, more of a match for six swans than you were expecting, eh,
dewin bach?
Ah, you do not know what you are up against, enough nonsense we have had now, my friends and me, it is time that you are going to show me the dog, the dog, because anything you do to try and turn us aside will be no use at all. No use at all. So I want the dog now, English, you are to tell me where I can find the dog, and my good gun is there in the car waiting for him and there will be no more sheep-killing in this valley. I shall see to that.”

He was watching Will, the little eyes darting up and down like small fish themselves, and suddenly once more his gaze fastened on the sacking-bundled harp.

“But first I would like to know what that really is under your arm there,
boy, so I think you will show me that if you would like us to leave you alone.” He giggled again on the last word, and Will knew that there was no hope now of reaching the side of the mountain, the place from which it would have been safest and most fitting to play the golden harp. He stepped slowly backwards, in a smooth movement designed to keep Caradog Prichard from alarm, and as caution woke too late in the farmer's bright eyes, he slipped the harp out from its covering, laid it crooked in one arm as he had seen Bran do, and swept the fingers of the other hand over its strings.

And so the world changed.

Already now the sky was a heavier grey than it had been, as the afternoon darkened toward evening and the clouds thickened for rain. But as the lilting flow of notes from the little harp poured out into the air, in an aching sweetness, a strange glow seemed very subtly to begin shining out of lake and cloud and sky, mountain and valley, bracken and grass. Colours grew brighter, dark places more intense and secret; every sight and feeling was more vivid and pronounced. The fish covering the whole swaying surface of the lake began to change; flickering silver, fish after fish leapt into the air and curved down again, until the lake seemed no longer burdened with a great weight of sluggish creatures, but alive and dancing with bright streaks of silver light.

And out of the sky at the seaward end of the valley, down towards the lake, another sound rose over the sweet arpeggios lilting to and fro as Will ran his fingers gently up and down the strings of his harp. There was a harsh crying, like the calling of seagulls. And flying in groups and pairs, without formation, came swooping the strange ellipsoid black forms of cormorants, twenty or thirty of them, more than Will had ever seen flying together. The kings of the bird-fishermen of the sea, never normally seen away from the sea and its cliffs and crags, they came skimming down to the surface of Llyn Mwyngil and began snatching up the leaping fish, and Will remembered suddenly Bran's stories of how the Bird Rock, Craig yr Aderyn, is the only place in the world where cormorants are known to gather and build their nests
inland, because in the land of the Grey King the coast has no rocky cliffs for such building, but only sand and beaches and dunes.

Down they swept. The fish jumped, sparkling; the cormorants gulped them; swerved away; dived and gulped again. Caradog Prichard gave a cross wail like a disappointed child. The curious light glimmered through the valley. Still Will's fingers flickered over the harp, and the music rippled out deliberate and clear as spring water. He was caught up in a tension that prickled through him like electricity, a fierce anticipation of unknown wonders; he felt as taut as though every hair stood on end. And then, all at once, the fish vanished, the surface of the lake was suddenly smooth as dark glass, and all the cormorants swept upwards in a cloud and curved away, shrieking, disappearing back up the long broad valley to Bird Rock. And through the luminescence that held the valley suspended in daylit, moonlit half-light, Will saw six figures take shape.

They were horsemen, riding. They came out of the mountain, out of the lowest slopes of Cader Idris that reached up from the lake into the fortresses of the Grey King. They were silvery-grey, glinting figures riding horses of the same strange half-colour, and they rode over the lake without touching the water, without making any sound. The music of the harp lapped them round, and as they drew near, Will saw that they were smiling. They wore tunics and cloaks. Each one had a sword hanging at his side. Two were hooded. One wore a circlet about his head, a gleaming circlet of nobility, though not the crown of a king. He turned to Will, as the ghostly group rode by, and bent his smiling bearded head in greeting. The music rippled bell-like round the valley from the harp in Will's hands, and Will bent his own head in sober greeting but did not break his playing.

The riders rode past Caradog Prichard, who stood gaping vacantly at the lake, looking for the vanished wondrous fish, and clearly did not see anything else.
He has the power of the Grey King,
Will thought,
but not the eyes. . . .
Then the riders wheeled back suddenly towards the slope of the mountain, and
before Will could wonder at it, he saw that Bran stood there on the slope, halfway up the loose scree, near the ledge that had broken his own fall earlier that day. The black sheepdog Pen was beside him, and toiling up the slope after them was Owen Davies, bent and weary, with the same blankness in his face that Caradog Prichard wore. It was not for ordinary men to see that the Sleepers, woken out of their long centuries of rest, were riding now to the rescue of the world from the rising Dark.

But Bran could see.

He stood watching the Sleepers with a blaze of delight in his pale face. He raised one hand to Will, and opened both arms in a gesture of admiration at the playing of the harp. For a moment he seemed no more than an uncomplicated small boy, caught up in bubbling wonder by a marvellous sight. But only for a moment. The six riders, glinting silver-grey on their silver-grey mounts, curved round after their leader and paused for a moment in line before the place on the hillside where Bran stood. Each drew his sword and held it upright before his face in a salute, and kissed the flat of its blade in homage as to a king. And Bran stood there slim and erect as a young tree, his white hair gleaming in a silver crest, and bent his head gravely to them with the quiet arrogance of a king granting a boon.

Then they sheathed their swords again and wheeled about, and the silver-grey horses sprang up into the sky. And the Sleepers, wakened and riding, rose high over the lake and away, disappearing further and further into the gathering gloom of the Tal y Llyn pass and beyond, until they were gone from the valley, and beyond, and could be seen no more.

Will stilled his fingers on the golden harp, and its delicate melody died, leaving only the whisper of the wind. He felt drained, as though all strength had gone out of him. For the first time he remembered that he was not only an Old One, but also a convalescent, still weak from the long illness that in the beginning had sent him to Wales.

For a flicker of an instant too, then, he remembered what John Rowlands
had said about the coldness at the heart of the Light, as he realised by what agency he must have become so suddenly and severely ill. But it was only for an instant. To an Old One such things were not of importance.

All at once he was brushed aside, and a hasty rough hand snatched the golden harp from his grasp. The power of the Grey King seemed gone from Caradog Prichard, but he was not what he had been before it had come.

“So that is what it's all about, then,” Prichard said thickly. “A bloody harp, a little gold thing just like she was playing.”