The Grey King Read Free Page B

glimmered, with jewel-glints of light here and there from droplets of rain still clinging to the longest stems from the day before. Will thought, “On the day of the dead . . . the Grey King . . . there must have been some sort of warning about the Grey King . . . and what is Cadfan’s Way?”
    â€œOh,” he said aloud in sudden fury, “if only I could remember!”
    He jumped up and went back to the newsagent’s shop. “Please,” he said, “is there a guide to the church, or to the town?”
    â€œNothing on Tywyn,” said the red-cheeked girl of the shop, in her sibilant Welsh lilt. “Too late in the season, you are . . . but Mr. Owen has a leaflet for sale in the church, I think. And there is this, if you like. Full of lovely walks.” She showed him a Guide to North Wales, for thirty-five pence.
    â€œWell,” said Will, counting out his money rather reluctantly. “I can always take it home afterwards, I suppose.”
    â€œIt would make a very nice present,” said the girl earnestly. “Got some beautiful pictures, it has. And just look at the cover!”
    â€œThank you,” said Will.
    When he peered at the little book, outside, it told him that the Saxonshad settled Tywyn in 516 A.D ., round the church built by St. Cadfan of Brittany and his holy well, and that the inscribed stone in the church was said to be the oldest piece of written Welsh in existence, and could be translated: “The body of Cyngen is on the side between where the marks will be. In the retreat beneath the mound is extended Cadfan, sad that it should enclose the praise of the earth. May he rest without blemish.” But it said not a word about Cadfan’s Way. Nor, when he checked, did the leaflet in the church.
    Will thought: It is not Cadfan I want, it is his Way. A way is a road. A way where the kestrels call must be a road over a moor, or a mountain.
    It pushed even the seashore out of his mind, when later he walked absentmindedly for a while among the breakwaters of the windy beach. When he met his uncle for the ride back to the farm, he found no help there either.
    â€œCadfan’s Way?” said David Evans. “You pronounce it Cadvan, by the way; one f is always a v sound in Welsh . . . Cadfan’s Way. . . . No. It does sound a bit familiar, you know. But I couldn’t tell you, Will. John Rowlands is the one to ask about things like that. He has a mind like an encyclopedia, does John, full of the old things.”
    John Rowlands was out somewhere on the farm, busy, so for the time being Will had to content himself with a much-folded map. He went out with it that afternoon, alone in the sunlit valley, to walk the boundaries of the farm; his uncle had roughly pencilled them in for him. Clwyd was a lowland farm, stretching across most of the valley of the Dysynni River; some of its land was marshy, near the river, and some stretched up the soaring scree-patched side of the mountain, green and grey and bracken-brown. But most was lush green valley land, fertile and friendly, part of it left new-ploughed since the harvest of this year’s crops, and all the rest serving as pasture for square, sturdy Welsh Black cattle. On the mountain land, only sheep grazed. Some of the lower slopes had been ploughed, though even they looked so steep to Will that he wondered how a tractor ploughing them could have kept from rolling over. Above those, nothing grew but bracken, groups ofwind-warped scrubby trees, and grass; the mountain reared up to the sky, and the deep aimless call of a sheep came now and then floating down into the still, warm afternoon.
    It was by another sound that he found John Rowlands, unexpectedly. As he was walking through one of the Clwyd fields towards the river, with a high wild hedge on one side of him and the dark ploughed soil on the other, he heard a dull, muffled thudding somewhere