The Grey King

  “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.

  He looked toward the stone. And again, as when Will had been there, the cottage seemed to grow dark, and the point of blue light began to shine out of the dim corner, and suddenly Bran had a strange jolting awareness of a part of his mind he had never been conscious of before. It was as if a door were opening somewhere within him, and he did not know what he would find on the other side. Flashing through his consciousness came a quick array of images, making no sense, like a dream dreamed while waking.

  He thought he saw mist swirling on the mountain, and in it the tall blue-cloaked figure of the lord Will called Merriman, hooded, his head bent and his arm outstretched pointing down into a valley at a cottage—the cottage in which Bran now stood. For a flash Bran saw a woman, with black hair blowing, and he felt washed by love and tenderness, so that in longing he almost cried out to keep the feeling from flickering away. But then it was gone, and the mist swirled, and then again the hooded figure was there, and the woman too, looking back at the cottage, stretching out her arms in yearning. Then the figure of the lord called Merriman swept his robed arm arou
nd the woman and they were both gone, vanished into the mist, out of sight and, he knew, out of the world. He saw only one other image: far below, through a break in the mist, the water of a distant lake glimmering like a lost jewel.

  Bran did not understand. He knew that somehow he was seeing something out of the past concerning his mother, but there was not enough. What had Merriman to do with her coming, with its beginning and its end? He blinked, and found he was staring at his father again. Davies’s eyes were wide in concern; he was clutching Bran’s arm, and calling his name.

  And in the new part of his mind that he had not seen before, Bran knew suddenly that he had now the power to do more things than he could ordinarily have done. He forgot all else that had happened that day, thinking only of the glimpse of his mother on a mountain over a glinting lake; all at once he wanted only to get to Tal y Llyn and the slopes of Cader Idris, to find out if this new part of his mind could sense there some further memory of the way he had begun. And he knew he could do something else, too. Leaping up, he called to the dog in a strong voice that seemed hardly his own, “Tyrd yma, Pen!”

  And out of his flat-pressed paralysis the black sheepdog instantly rose, and leapt, and the boy and the dog ran out and away across the moor.

  Owen Davies, his face lined old in fear and concern, stood silently watching for a moment. Then he moved heavily out to the car, and drove out away from the cottage along the road to Idris Jones’s farm.

  Will rode more slowly than he had expected. The awkward shape of the harp, pressed against his chest, cut into his bruised arm and hurt so much that soon he could scarcely keep from dropping it. He stopped often to change its position. There were other reasons for pausing too, for the ferocity of malevolence building up in the valley now thrust at him like a great hand, pushing him away, threatening to clutch him in the giant fingers and crush him into nothingness. Doggedly Will rode on. First the cottage, then the lake. In the discordant chaos trying to force him back, only the simplest thoughts and images could survive, keep their shape. First the cottage, then the lake. He found himself saying it under his breath. Those were the two tasks for the harp that, above all else, he must make sure were carried out in these next two or three hours. The enchanted music must release Pen from the grip of the warestone, in the cottage, so that he would escape Caradog Prichard’s gun. That was a simple matter. But then, more important than anything in the world, the music must wake the Sleepers of the pleasant lake, the creatures who slept their timeless sleep beside Tal y Llyn—whoever, and whatever, those creatures might be. For if a Lord of the Dark such as the Grey King could gain so astonishing a power as that now filling this valley, after centuries of murmuring sleep beneath his mountain, then indeed the Dark was rising, and its whole power increasing like a vast cloud threatening to engulf the whole world.

  At last he came to the cottage. And found it empty.

  Will stood in the bare stone-walled room, baffled and anxious. How could Pen have escaped the power of the warestone? Where was Bran? Had Caradog Prichard come hunting, with aid from the Grey King, and carried them both off? Impossible. Caradog Prichard was an unwitting servant, knowing nothing of his own links with the Grey King; he was a man only, with the instincts of a man—the worst instincts, with the best sadly submerged. Where was Bran?

  He crossed to the corner of the room. The small white pebble that was the warestone lay just as it had lain before, innocuous and deadly. All around him the force of the Grey King’s will beat implacably: Go away, give up, you will not win, give up, go away. Will cast desperately about through the powers of his own mind to find out what might have happened to Bran and the dog, but found nothing. He thought miserably: You should never have left them here alone. In a kind of angry self-abasement he leaned down once more and put his hand to the small round stone that he knew would be bound fast to the earth, beyond any ability of his to move it a fraction of an inch.

  And the warestone came away as easily as any other stone, and lay loose in his palm, as if asking to be used.

  Will stared at it. He could not believe what he saw. What had loosed the grip of the warestone? No magic he knew could do such a thing. It was a part of the Law, that the Light could not budge a warestone of the Dark, nor the Dark influence a warestone of the Light. That monstrous rigidity, once in force, could not be shattered by any but the stone’s owner. Who then could have broken the power of the warestone of the Brenin Llwyd, other than the Brenin Llwyd himself, the Grey King?

  Will shook his head impatiently. He was wasting time. One thing was certain, at any rate: left now without ownership, its control broken, the warestone was outside the Law and could itself be employed to tell him what had happened to bring it to its strange present state.

  Will kept close hold of the harp; he felt he would never put it down again, least of all in this place. But he stood in the centre of the room with the warestone lying in his open palm, and he said certain words in the Old Speech, and emptied his mind and waited to receive whatever kind of awareness the stone could put into it. The knowledge would not be simple and open, he knew. It never was.

  It came, as he stood there with his eyes closed and his mind thrumming, in a series of images so rapid that they were like a narrative, a piece of a story. Will saw a man’s face, strong and handsome, but worn, with clear blue eyes and a grey beard. Though the clothes were strange and rich, he knew who it was in an instant: the face was that of the second lord in the cavern of Bird Rock, the Lord in the sea-blue robe, who had spoken with such particular—and then unaccountable—closeness to Bran.

  There was a deep sadness in the man’s eyes. Will saw then the face of a woman, black-haired and blue-eyed, twisted in a dreadful mingling of grief and guilt. And somewhere with them he saw Merriman. Then he was seeing a different place, a low building with heavy stone walls and a cross above its roof—a church, or an abbey—and from it Merriman was leading the same woman, with a baby in her arms. They stood in a high place, on one of the Old Ways; there was a great whirling of mist, a rushing, and a flurry of images so fast that Will could not follow, nor make out more than a flash of the cottage, and an upright smiling Owen Davies with a younger, unlined face; and dogs and sheep and the mountain slopes green with bracken, and a voice calling, “Gwennie, Gwennie. . . .”

  Then, clearer than any, he saw Merriman, hooded in the dark blue robe, standing with the black-haired woman up on the slope above the Dysynni Valley, on Cadfan’s Way. She was weeping quietly, tears running slow and glinting down her cheeks. She held nothing in her arms now. Merriman stretched out his hand, fingers stiff-straight, and Will heard through the whistle of the wind a thread of bell-like music that, as an Old One following the ways of the Old Ones, he had heard before in other places and times. Then the whirling came again, and all was confusion, though now he knew from the music that what he was witnessing was a travelling back to another age, long ago: the movement through Time that held no difficulty for an Old One, or a Lord of the Dark, though impossible for men except in dreams. In a last flashing image he saw the woman who had been with Merriman turn and go sadly back into the stone-built abbey, and disappear behind its heavy walls. And away alone elsewhere, yet superimposed on the abbey like the reflection in the glass that covers a picture, he saw the bearded face of the lord who had worn the sea-blue robe, with the gold circlet of a king crowning his head.

  And suddenly Will understood the true nature of Bran Davies, the child brought out of the past to grow up in the future, and he felt a terrible compassion for his friend, born to a fearsome destiny of which, as yet, he could have no clear idea at all. It was hard even to think about so astounding a depth of power and responsibility. He saw now that he, Will Stanton, last of the Old Ones, had been fated all along to aid and support Bran in time to come, just as Merriman had always been at the side of Bran’s great father. The father who had not known of his son’s existence, back when he had been born, and who only now, over the centuries, had as a Lord of the High Ma
gic seen him for the first time. . . . It was clear enough now how the ownership of the warestone had been broken. Beside a figure of this rank, the power of the Grey King dwindled to insignificance. But—that was true only if Bran truly knew what he was doing. How much of his buried and infinitely powerful nature had really been released? How much had he seen, in the cottage; what images had spun into his own unsuspecting mind?

  Clutching the harp, forgetting his hurt arm in his haste, Will ran out of the cottage, clambered on the bicycle and made off along the road to Tal y Llyn. Bran could have gone nowhere else. All roads now must lead to the lake, and to the Sleepers. For at stake was not only the quest of the golden harp, the Sleepers’ waking, but a power of the High Magic that could, if still unrecognised and uncontrolled, destroy not only that quest but the Light as well.

  The Waking

  When Will came to Tal y Llyn, he knew he must try to keep out of sight. There was no way of telling where Caradog Prichard might be; whether he had gone to Idris Jones’s farm, where he would have turned from there. . . . Will thought of going to the farm to check, keeping hidden round the bend in the lane in case the battered grey van might be there. Then he changed his mind. There was too little time. Clutching his bundle, he rode on past the top of the Ty-Bont lane, and came to the corner where the road curved round the lake.

  Tal y Llyn lay before him, rippled by the wind that all day had sent chunky cumulus clouds scudding across the sky. Green with grass and brown with bracken, the mountains swept out and up from its shores at both sides; the dark lake filled the valley all the way to the far end, where mountains met in a great V to make the pass of Tal y Llyn. Will stared at the rippled water.

  Fire on the mountain shall find the harp of gold

  Played to wake the Sleepers, oldest of the old. . . .

  Where should it be played, and when? Not here, out on the unprotected valley road. . . . He turned left and rode towards the side of the valley where, above the low gentle green fields, the first dark slope of Cader Idris climbed like a wall roofed by the sky. It was the slope on which they had found the dead sheep; the slope that its master the Grey King had shaken to throw Will down into the lake. Yet the instinct of the Old Ones drove Will to struggle towards it; to make for the stronghold of the enemy, in a deliberate challenge to the furious force driving him back. The greater the odds, he thought, the greater the victory.