The Grey King Read Free Page A

it sounded, but really I am not mad, there was nothing that could have made her swerve over to the side like that and hit the rock. Unless the steering rod is going.”
    â€œThere is nothing wrong with the steering of that car,” David Evans said.
    â€œWell, then!” Rhys was all elbows and indignation. “I tell you she just lurched over for no reason at all. Ask Will.”
    â€œIt’s true,” Will said. “The car did just sort of jump sideways and hit that rock. I don’t see what could have made it jump, unless it had run over a loose stone in the road—but that would have had to be a pretty big stone. And there was no sign of one anywhere.”
    â€œGreat allies, you two, already, I can see,” said his uncle. He drained his teacup, gazing at them over the top; Will was not sure whether or not he was laughing at them. “Well, well, I will have the steering checked anyway. John, Rhys, now that extra fencing for the fridd —”
    They slid into Welsh, unthinking. It did not bother Will. He was occupied in trying to scorn away a small voice at the back of his mind, an irrational small voice with an irrational suggestion. “If they want to know what made the car jump,” this part of his mind was whispering at him, “why don’t they ask Caradog Prichard?”
    D avid Evans dropped Will at a small newsagent’s shop, where he could buy postcards, and chugged off to leave the Land-Rover at a garage. Will bought a card showing a sinister dark lake surrounded by very Welsh-looking mountains, wrote on it “I GOT HERE ! Everyone sends their love,” and sent it off to his mother from the Post Office, a solemn and unmistakable red brick building on a corner of Tywyn High Street. Then he looked about him, wondering where to go next.
    Choosing at random, hoping to see the sea, he turned right up the narrow curving High Street. Before long he found that there would be no sea this way: nor anything but shops, houses, a cinema with an imposing Victorian front grandly labelled ASSEMBLY ROOMS , and the slate-roofed lychgate of a church.
    Will liked investigating churches; before his illness had overtaken him, he and two friends from school had been cycling all round the Thames Valley to make brass rubbings. He turned into the little churchyard, to see if there might be any brasses here.
    The church porch was low-roofed, deep as a cave; inside, the church was shadowy and cool, with sturdy white painted walls and massive white pillars. Nobody was there. Will found no brasses for rubbing, but only monuments to unpronounceable benefactors, like Gruffydd ap Adda of Ynysy-maengwyn Hall. At the rear of the church, on his way out, he noticed a strange long grey stone set up on end, incised with marks too ancient for him to decipher. He stared at it for a long moment; it seemed like an omen of some kind, though of what significance he had not the least idea. And then, in the porch on hisway out, he glanced idly up at the notice-board with its scattering of parish news, and he saw the name: Church of St. Cadfan.
    The whirling came again in his ears like the wind; staggering, he collapsed onto the low bench in the porch. His mind spun, he was back suddenly in the roaring confusion of his illness, when he had known that something, something most precious, had slipped or been taken away from his memory. Words flickered through his consciousness, without order or meaning, and then a phrase surfaced like a leaping fish: “On Cadfan’s Way where the kestrels call  . . .” His mind seized it greedily, reaching for more. But there was no more. The roaring died away; Will opened his eyes, breathing more steadily, the giddiness draining gradually out of him. He said softly, aloud, “On Cadfan’s Way where the kestrels call . . . On Cadfan’s Way . . .” Outside in the sunshine the grey slate tombstones and green grass