The Owl Service (19 page)

“How can I find a doctor?”

“You can't find no doctor. What you want a doctor for?”

“It's Miss Alison. She's fainted: or concussed. I don't know.”

“You find Gwyn,” said Mrs Richards. “You'll be all right. The poor girl. You go find him now. He's up the house.”

Roger backed out of the shop.

“Gwyn! Gwyn! Gwyn!”

He searched the garden as far as the wood. He fought through nettles and swamp to the drive, and when he reached the level ground he could hardly stand. Gwyn was climbing over the gate from the road.

“Gwyn!”

Gwyn sat on the gate.

“Gwyn! Halfbacon wants you! He says be quick! The kitchen! – Wait for me!”

But Gwyn went without speaking to Roger. Below him the wood held a noise that came closer, yet was hard to place among the trees, and the rain and the river crashed in flood, and the one noise itself was the total of all its sounds. If it was anything it was the noise of a wind on the pass and its echo before it in the valley, or it was the noise of owls hunting, though he had never heard so many: never a wood of owls.

“Huw! Huw, man! Huw! Huw!” Roger caught up with Gwyn while Huw was unfastening the bolts. “What is it, Huw? What's happened?”

“Come in, boy.”

Alison lay on the table, covered with Huw's jacket. Feathers clung to her and drifted round her. Huw brushed them off, and they circled with the convection currents, and came back to her.

“It's the power,” said Huw. “It's in her now, bad. This is it, boy.”

“'What do you want me to do?” said Gwyn.

“Help her.”

“Her there? Or her outside?”

“They are the same now,” said Huw.

The wind hit the house. Blossom and twigs flew by, stripped from the bushes, the tendrils of clematis cracked on the walls and leaves stuck to the window and skylight in a green autumn. Rain washed them off, gravel let pinholes of day through. More leaves came.

“I've stayed to help you and the valley, not this lot,” said Gwyn. “These two are nothing.”

“You are the three. You have made this together,” said Huw.

“I'm not doing anything for them. I've finished.”

Roger brushed the feathers away from Alison. They circled and clung: circled and clung: the owl dance he had found in the dust. They were moving on the ceiling and the walls, and he began to see the patterns that had followed Huw in the rain: eyes and wings and sharpness: winged eyes, yellow, and blackness curved: all in the rafters and the wall and the feathers everywhere. There had never been so many feathers. He brushed them from Alison's cheek. She cried out, and he saw three lines scored from brow to neck, and on her hands, and no break in the skin.

“Stop jabbering, you, and do something,” said Roger. “Get these feathers off. Get them off!”

“I am not knowing what to do,” said Huw.

“You said you did know,” said Gwyn. “What's gone wrong?”

“You.”

“Why me? I'm here. I've not run away. You said this was my valley, and I've not run away. I promised not to. I trusted you last night, and came back. Show me what I've to do.”

“I can't – say.”

“What?” said Gwyn.

“I only feel. Always it is owls, always we are destroyed. Why must she see owls and not flowers? Always it is the same.”

“What is it you want me to do?” said Gwyn.

“Look to her. Comfort her.”

“I can't.”

“Just comfort her.”

“I can't, man. Anything else. You don't know what these two have done. I can't touch her.”

Alison trembled. Claw marks dragged at her legs.

“She is coming, and will use what she finds, and you have only hate in you,” said Huw. “Always and always and always.”

Gwyn's jaw was fixed.

“Try,” said Huw.

“You didn't say it would be this,” said Gwyn. “I can't.”

“Try. Comfort.”

“No.”

“Comfort.”

Gwyn shook his head.

The skylight smashed under a branch, but the wires bonded in the glass kept out the weight that pressed to enter, and in the darkness the feathers and the eyes and the claws hung and moved. The kitchen was swept with rain. There was no colour in Alison's face except for the scratches. Her breath came quick and shallow.

“Can't you stop it?” said Roger.

“He can,” said Huw. “But he is not wanting.”

“Can't you make him? Why not?”

“He was hurt too much. He is not telling me.”

“You won't do this,” Roger said to Gwyn. “It's Ali.”

Gwyn did not move.

Roger put out his hand, but Gwyn ignored him. “Gwyn.” Roger spoke quietly. “It's my fault. It was me. Not Ali. She never laughed at you. It wasn't like I said. I twisted it round. I'm sorry. Don't let it happen, Gwyn. If you really can stop it, don't let it happen.”

Gwyn turned his head and looked at Roger. Roger saw the question form in his eyes, and he saw that Gwyn knew.

“All right, Gwyn?”

The blue of the eyes froze, and in a slow voice Gwyn said, “Get lost – Mummy's boy.”

The walls were shedding their texture and taking another in the pouncing feathers. Gwyn spoke again, but Roger could scarcely hear across the darkness. “Yes. Yes, Gwyn.” The back of his head and all his spine were hollow. There was bile in his throat. He could do nothing to answer the words. He could only shore his mind against them, because if he did not he would be spilled by the bitter dark.

“And how is the Birmingham Belle? Still ringing?

“Yes, Gwyn.”

There was no more.

He waited, but there was no more, and in the calm of the pain's clearing he found no anger. Gwyn stood alone. Huw crouched by the stove. Roger looked at them both, the man and the boy. “You poor devils,” he said.

He went to Alison and gathered the feathers that lay on her.

“You poor devils.”

“He is hurt too much she wants to be flowers and you make her owls and she is at the hunting—”

“Is that it?” said Roger. “Is that all it is? As easy as that?”

“—and so without end without end without end—”

“Hey, Ali, did you hear?” Roger brushed the feathers aside. “You've got it back to front, you silly gubbins. She's not owls. She's flowers. Flowers. Flowers, Ali.” He stroked her forehead. “You're not birds. You're flowers. You've never been anything else. Not owls. Flowers. That's it. Don't fret.”

Alison stirred.

“Oh yes they are flowers! And you know it! Flowers, Ali. Quietly, now. Flowers. Flowers. Flowers. Gentle. Flowers—”

He pulled Huw's jacket higher, and turned the collar to keep off the rain. Alison tugged it down between her shoulder and chin. Roger laughed.

“Flowers. Flowers. That's the way.”The marks paled on her skin, and tightness went from her face as she breathed to the measure of his hand on her brow. “That's better. There now: yes: yes: of course they're flowers. What made you think those plates could be anything else? Why didn't you cut the pattern into flowers right at the start, you silly girl?”

“By damn,” said Huw.

Something touched Roger's hand. He started to brush it away, but there were too many. He looked up.

“Hello, Ali.”

And the room was full of petals from skylight and rafters, and all about them a fragrance, and petals, flowers falling, broom, meadowsweet, falling, flowers of the oak.

I am indebted to Betty Greaves, who saw the pattern; to Professor Gwyn Jones and Professor Thomas Jones, for permission to use copyright material in the text; and to Dafydd Rees Cilwern, for his patience.

A.G.

The Owl Service
is a kind of ghost story, in real life as well as on the page. Right from the start things happened that had not happened with earlier books.

It began when I read an old Welsh legend about Lleu, and his wife Blodeuwedd who was made for him out of flowers. Later she fell in love with Gronw Pebr, and together they murdered Lleu. Lleu was brought back to life by magic, and he killed Gronw by throwing a spear with such force that it went right through the rock behind which Gronw was sheltering; and the rock, says the legend, is called The Stone of Gronw to this day. Blodeuwedd, for her part in her husband's murder, was turned into an owl.

When I read the legend, I felt that it was not just a magical tale, but a tragedy of three people who destroy each other through no fault of their own but just because they were forced together. It was a modern story: the idea that you could have three people for some reason unable to get away from each other, and I began to think about how I could bring them into that position, and what sort of people would they have to be to interact so lethally and yet be harmless in themselves.

The legend stuck in my mind for several years, and then one day my mother-in-law showed me an old dinner service. She had noticed that the floral pattern round the edge of the plates could be seen as the body, wings and head of an owl. My wife, Griselda, traced the pattern, juggled it a bit, folded the pattern together and there it was, a model paper owl, which she perched on the back of a chair.

An owl from flowers. A woman made from flowers and changed into an owl. I saw at once that here, in this dinner service, was my modern story, based on the legend. But even so, for a long time nothing else would come. Then, by chance, we went to stay at a house in a remote valley in North Wales. Within hours of arriving I knew that I had found the setting for the story, or the setting had found me. Its atmosphere fitted both the original legend and the nature of the dinner service. Ideas began to grow. Suppose three people came here to this house and found the plates. Suppose the plates held the power of the legend, like batteries. The story took shape. I looked around for more ideas. The lie of the land fitted the descriptions in the legend. Everything was where it ought to be. The legend could have happened here. As I stood on the doorstep at night, thinking these things, an owl brushed its wings in my face.

The sensation of finding, not inventing, a story continued. It was all there, waiting, and I was the archaeologist picking away the earth to reveal the bones.

Dafydd Rees was eighty-one years old. He was known in the valley as Clocydd, “bell-ringer”, because he had rung the church bell for sixty-five years, after his uncle retired from the same job after seventy years. Dafydd had worked as the caretaker and gardener of the house since 1898. He was the greatest help to me, since he let me in to his knowledge of the valley, its history, its traditions, its folklore. Everything that Gwyn, in the book, tells Alison about the valley, is what Dafydd told me. But although he knew that I was writing a story about the valley, I never mentioned the legend to him, nor he to me. So it was a shock one day when I was walking in the rain and came upon Dafydd sitting in the hedgebank, a sack about his shoulders, and scratching a flat piece of slate with a pointed one. I sat down to talk, and looked at what he was doing. He had scratched the world “Blodeuwedd” on the flat slate.

“What's that?” I said.

“A name,” said Dafydd.

“Can you tell me about it?”

“It's just a name,” said Dafydd, and threw the slate into the river.

“Has anyone ever been killed here?” I said.

“Yes,” said Dafydd.

“How?”

“Bow and arrow. A Red Indian stood on the hill just by there, and shot the man at a stone near the river. Perhaps he escaped from Buffalo Bill's circus that was at Dolgellau that time, the Indian. Funny old tale, isn't it?”

But Dafydd told me nothing of Lleu, Blodeuwedd and Gronw Pebr; and I knew better than to ask.

The Owl Service
was made into a television series, for which I wrote the script, and we filmed it in the valley. I found the experience hard to bear, because characters – who had lived in my head for so many years – were now really in the valley and really speaking the words that I had written. What had been a thought was now happening in front of me. It felt like a kind of magical madness. But, after nine weeks, it was over, and all the concentration that had made the story and the actors more real than reality ended instantly, with the director's command of “Cut!”

The cameras stopped, the lights went out, the gear was stowed, the costumes were packed, the actors cleaned off their make-up and went their ways, to become once more individuals, never again to be together in that relationship. They went.

For me, in the valley where I had set the story, it was a sense of loss. The valley had not changed. It was as it had been before I ever knew it. For a few hectic weeks my thoughts had taken on shapes, and moved as people in the landscape where I had imagined them. But now they had gone, and all was as it had always been.

“It was a good time,” Dafydd wrote in a letter afterwards. “I have been to the stone. She is lonely now.”

A
LAN
G
ARNER

“Remarkable … a rare imaginative feat, and the taste it leaves is haunting.”
Observer

“In his earlier novels,
The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, The Moon of Gomrath
and
Elidor,
Garner used the successful formula of the spilling of the twilight world of ancient legend into the present day. Here he uses the formula again, with an added depth, and even more compulsive terror-haunted beauty.”
Financial Times

Alan Garner received the
Guardian
Award and the Carnegie medal for this outstanding novel.

The Weirdstone of Brisingamen
The Moon of Gomrath
Elidor
Red Shift
A Bag of Moonshine
The Stone Book Quartet

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