"Cooper, Susan - Dark is Rising 04 - The Grey King" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cooper Susan)

\i'Diolch yn fawr\i,' said David Evans, taking the cup of tea she held out to him. 'And then I must be off to Tywyn. You want to come, Will?'

'Yes, please.'

'We may be a couple of hours.' The sound of his words was very precise always; he was a small, neatly-made man, sharp-featured, but with an unexpectedly vague, reflective look sometimes in his dark eyes. 'I have to go to the bank, and to see Llew Thomas, and there will be the new tyre for the Land-Rover. The car that jumped up in the air and got itself a puncture.'

Rhys, with his mouth full, made a strangled noise of protest. 'Now, Da,' he said, swallowing. 'I know how 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.'

'There is nothing wrong with the steering of that car,' David Evans said.

'Well, then!' Rhys was all elbows and indignation. 'I tell you she just lurched over for no reason at all. Ask Will.'

'It'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.'

'Great 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 \ifridd\i -'

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. \i'If they want to know what made the car jump,\i' this part of his mind was whispering at him, \i'why don't they ask Caradog Prichard?\i'

David 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 comer 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 Ynysymaengwyn 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 his way out, he glanced idly up at the notice-board with its scattering of parish news, and he saw the name: \iChurch of St Cadfan\i.

The whirling came again in his ears like the wind; staggering, he collapsed on to 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: \i'On Cadfan's Way where the kestrels call...\i' 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 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, \i'On the day of the dead ... the Grey King\i... there must have been some sort of warning about the Grey King ... and what is Cadfan's Way?'

'Oh,' 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?'

'Nothing 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 \iGuide to North Wales\i, for thirty-five pence.

'Well,' said Will, counting out his money rather reluctantly. 'I can always take it home afterwards, I suppose.'

'It would make a very nice present,' said the girl earnestly. 'Got some beautiful pictures, it has. And just look at the cover!'

'Thank you,' said Will.

When he peered at the little book, outside, it told him that the Saxons had settled in Tywyn in A.D. 516, 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, said 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.

'Cadfan'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 old things.'