The Owl Service (16 page)

“After breakfast.”

“After breakfast,” said Huw. “Well, well, sir.”

“Look here, Halfbacon,” said Clive. “You must understand this overtime lark is entirely your own affair. If you think you can twist my arm with it for more wages you've come to the wrong shop.”

“No, sir,” said Huw. He walked away. “No, no, not at all. I must go helping my uncle with finish a job, see. Good night, sir. Good night, my lady.”

“Urrh,” said Clive. “These people give me the jim-jams. It's the same in business. You never know where you are with them, you never have a straight answer. You never know when they're being polite or just sarky.”

“Cold,” said Alison.

“Eh? What?”

“Cold – kippers.”

H
e sat behind a thorn bush high in the valley, waiting for dusk. The first part of the climb into the rocks might be seen from the farms. He ate a little of the cheese and scooped the stream water into his hands. He was wearing both his shirts, his pullover on top of them, and the anorak, and two pairs of trousers were tucked into his socks.

These boots are a bit of all right.

He had kept low along the stream, and quiet, and he had seen no dogs, no voices had called, and no one had whistled. So far it had been easy, but now he had to climb the Black Hiding, and the noise of its waters pounded him.

It was dark enough to move. There had been hardly any rain for several weeks, and the channels were running slack, so that he could climb between the loose slate of the cliffs and the foam of the water.

Them cliffs and screes – by, foxes know what they're at.

He climbed the narrow thread of rock, smoothed, hollowed by waterfalls. On either side the decayed buttresses of the Black Hiding rose above him and fell below him.

He rested on a flat stone, his feet hanging over the drop. Lamps were showing in the house.

Cosy is it for you down there? You can't touch me. I've done with you lot.

He ate some food, and climbed again. The top of the Black Hiding started to show, a notch against the skyline, and then it disappeared as he came in close to the stream below a waterfall: twenty feet, and no way up unless he moved out on to the crag. The buttresses crowded the water.

So how do foxes manage?

The buttress was not sheer, and he saw that an animal could take it at a run. The surface would hold long enough.

But you're not a fox, man.

He ran at the shale, and the force of his scrabbling carried him more than half way. Then he stuck. He was spread-eagled on the buttress. His toes dug into the muck and his fingers clutched deep. His head was twisted to the side. He looked down out of the corner of one eye.

Two hundred feet? What's the chances? Slide? Like a cowing cheese-grater.

His hands pulled balls of clay out of the surface, and the boots were moving farther apart.

The lamps twinkled at him from the valley.

He dragged his head up. The slab of the waterfall was less than twice his own height above him, but he was at full stretch, with nothing to thrust against.

What you worrying for? Ten seconds and you'll be on that ledge, or you won't. Them holds will go, or they won't. What's your problem? Nothing to it, man! One. Two. Three. Hup!

He spat from the slab to the crest of the waterfall. Where his hands and feet had touched there were no holds, only streaks in the shale.

He stood on the edge and rolled stones to see how he would have fallen from the buttress, then he threw stones at the house. It was nearly a mile away, but before they dropped into the crags the stones arched high and seemed as if they would reach.

Surprising what you can do when you try: as if I cared.

He turned from the valley, and climbed. He was near the top of the Black Hiding, and the water lost its fierceness, and soon he would come to the peat hags, and from there he would find the rocks that marked where some women had died in a snowstorm, and then he would be near the line of slates, upended in the moss, that pointed over the mountain to the next valley. From that valley he could reach a main road, thumb a lift, and be in Aberystwyth next morning.

The top of the Black Hiding was a deep stone gutter which ran into the plateau. Behind him the crags fell to the valley and the spark of lamplight, and over his head the grass caps of the buttresses held the last of the day.

He trod carefully, wanting to stay dry if possible, but the gutter was thick with boulders, and when one of the boulders moved under his feet, and screamed, rose, and came for him he scrambled backwards up the shale wall and forgot his wet feet.

He had stepped on the black sow. The sow squealed as it strained to reach him. It could not lift its flanks on to the slope out of the pit where it had been wallowing, but he began to slide back towards the jaws which squelched and gobbled the shale that rained from where he was trying to stop his fall. The head was turned side on to him, the teeth like broken bottles.

Worst bite there is. Takes a lump clean out. You'll not be seeing much of Aber if she gets you.

His hand thrashed against something firm. He spun himself round and grabbed: it was a tree root. He swung clear of the gutter, hanging free, and kicked up to the trunk which grew sideways from the rock. He draped himself over the trunk and watched the sow.

If she goes upstream to that sheep track she can have a do at me here from the side. I suppose I ought to move.

The sow had stopped squealing and was nosing about, its sound covered by the water, and its body hidden by darkness. A grunt or a splash or a gleam of jaw were all that gave it way, and nothing came from the same place twice. He climbed into the branches of the tree.

Well, that's me for the night. Roll on death, eh? Now: daylight by four: over the top and into the next valley by seven: main road by ten. Blast Gareth Pugh. Never mind, should be clear of Aber before she can get back, even if she twigs.

He ate some more food, and arranged himself on the tree. He found a compass and a whistle tied to a lanyard in the anorak pocket. He took the lanyard and made a sling round a branch, and pushed his arm through to the shoulder. Then he wedged himself between the trunk and a tangle of branches.

It was a warm night, and he was sheltered from the wind, but he could not sleep for more than a few minutes at a time. He was cold and cramped. He had no watch, but the position of the moon told him how short each sleep had been.

The lamps went out in the valley.

He dozed, and shivered, and dozed, and ate the last of the food, and dozed.

He woke. He was cold to the bone, and his head had fallen backwards across a branch, so that when he opened his eyes he was looking at the edge of the plateau thirty feet above him. The lanyard had deadened his arm, and his other arm lay over his chest, the fingers hooked in the sling. His neck was stiff. There was a man on the plateau.

The man walked along the top of the gutter towards the peat hags.

Them with their dogs, is it? There'll be a right sort-out if they tread on that pig. Let them get on with it. I'm not bothered.

He found a new position in the branches to ease his arm. Darkness came and went with clouds over the moon, and the water rattled the stones, but he watched.

He saw the scree move before he heard any change in the note of the stream: a long slew of rubble farther up the gutter hit the water where it lay in a hollow. The bubbles rose like silver blossom.

The sheep track in the wall of the gutter touched the scree there, followed a bend in the stream, and crossed over the roots below him. He watched the track at the bend.

Sheep? That old pig?

But there was a new sound, very close, broken by the water, but he could hear it, and it went on and on – a voice, humming, mumbling, scarcely words, but it was a kind of song.

He moved his head to peer through the branches. The man was sitting at the foot of the tree.

Cripes! Now what?

The man came to the end of his song, but he did not go. He sat, swinging his legs above the stream, and pushed his cap back on his head.

“Lovely night, isn't it?”

He wiped his nose on his forearm.

“Lovely night,” he said again. “Yes. Lovely. For the time of year.”

“I
t is indeed a lovely night,” said Huw.

“Leave me alone.”

“You come down now, boy.”

“I'm fine here.”

“You're needed.”

“No one needs me, and I need nothing.”

“Then you are very lucky,” said Huw. “What will you do with all your riches?”

“I'm clearing out. This time tomorrow I'll be in Birmingham, and that's the last you'll see of me.”

“You are needed back at the house. It is nearly time.”

“Leave me alone. I've had enough. Spooks or whatever it's all yours.”

“You won't run away,” said Huw. “You care too much.”

“I don't care about anything. I nearly fell off that cliff, and I trod on Gareth Pugh's sow, and I wasn't bothered. That's how much I care. And you want to watch out for that sow: she's a nasty pair of chompers.”

“She was only stopping you from leaving the valley,” said Huw.

“Not half she wasn't.”

“It is always the Black Hiding,” said Huw, “but you went in the wrong direction this afternoon, and we had to use the dogs to fetch you away.”

“Tell me another.”

“I shall tell you one other,” said Huw, “then you will come down. I'm tired of your childishness.”

“Thanks!”

“Not at all,” said Huw. “Are you thinking yet how I came straight to you?”

“No.”

“We come here,” said Huw. “It is the place.”

“I came here to miss the dogs, and I'm in this tree because I don't want to tread on any more pigs in the dark. If you want to make something of it that's your business.”

Huw crossed the stream and pulled himself on to a ledge in the opposite wall of the gutter. “Now,” he said. “You're safe. You can run back up the tree if I move, little boy. Come down and I'll show you the chance in this. Down to the foot of the tree. There. Reach into the crack where the root grows. You must put your arm right in.”

“It's a dead end.”

“Feel to one side,” said Huw. “Careful. Careful. Take out your hand. – Well?”

“Mister Huw: I'm sorry,” said Gwyn.

He was holding a spear head in the palm of his hand. It was made of flint, and was so thin that the moon shone through it, and the fretting of its surface made it a leaf of sculpted light and stone.

“This was the spear,” said Gwyn.

“A year he took to make it,” said Huw. “Gronw Pebyr, Lord of Penllyn.”

“It's older than that,” said Gwyn. “It's very old.”

“It was a long time ago,” said Huw.

Gwyn put his arm back in the rock. There was a hollow at right angles to the crack at the far end, and there were several things lying inside. Most of what he touched fell to pieces before he could pull it out: leather, wood, or cloth all rotted in the wet.

He laid a stone beside the flint. It was a ball of quartz the size of his fist and a face was painted on it. It was only a simple double arch of brow, like a pick head, running to a short nose or beak, and two dots for eyes. He found this pattern again and again on all the solid things, on jars, and pebbles and a slate disc pierced to be worn on a cord round the neck. The simple line stared out, human or bird face: it was impossible to tell.

“How long has this been happening?” said Gwyn. He held the rusted fragments of a dagger in its sheath.

“There's no saying. But we of the blood must meet it in our time, and we bring here what we have.”

“I didn't understand,” said Gwyn. “I'm all numb inside.”

“I know,” said Huw.

“I felt I could blow that house up just by looking at it.”

“Perhaps you could,” said Huw. “Here: in this valley: now. That is how the power is spent. Through us, within us, the three who suffer every time.”

“But why, Huw?”

“Because we gave this power a thinking mind. We must bear that mind, leash it, yet set it free, through us, in us, so that no one else may suffer.”

“What's going to happen?”

“I don't know. She is here, the lady, and you have made her owls: she will go hunting. But don't let her destroy. She will be the worse for my fault, and my uncle's fault and my grandfather's fault, who tried to stop what can't be stopped – him with the painting, him with the plates. We built the dyke of sand, and won a little space.”

“So we're in this mess because you ducked it.”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“Oh, it is a story, and we have suffered for it no less that if we had faced our time.”

“Who's ‘we'?” said Gwyn.

“Me, your mother, him.”

“My Mam?”

Huw smiled. “You did not know her. She was young and lovely. There was not a girl like Nancy.”

“What! Her!”

“So much harm done through so much weakness,” said Huw. “You must be strong.”

“But my Mam!”

“She was the winds of April.”

Gwyn started to put things back into the rock.

“Huw – can I take any?”

“Have you some to leave?”

“—Yes.”

“At this time, all this is yours.”

Gwyn lifted the thin slate with the eye pattern on it. He took a cardboard box from the anorak pocket and tipped the shell owl on to his hand. As he stretched to place the owl next to the flint spear head in the rock “Greetings from the Land of Song” shimmered briefly in luminous paint at arm's length before he pushed it round the corner.

Gwyn put the slate in the box.

“Will you give this to Alison tomorrow?”

“You give it, boy.”