"Dark Rising 4 - The Grey King" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cooper Susan)

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: Church of St Cadfan.

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: '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 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?'

'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 Guide to North Wales, 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.'

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 of wind-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 ahead. Then suddenly at a curve in the field he saw the figure, moving steadily and rhythmically as if in a slow, deliberate dance. He stopped and watched, fascinated. Rowlands, his shirt half-open and a red kerchief tied round his neck, was making a transformation. He moved gradually along the hedge, first chopping carefully here and there with a murderous tool like a cross between an axe and a pirate's cutlass, then setting this down and hauling and interweaving whatever remained of the long, rank growth. Before him, the hedge grew wild and high, great arms groping out uncontrolled in all directions as the hazel and hawthorn did their best to grow into full-fledged trees. Behind him, as he moved along his relentless swaying way, he left instead a neat fence: scores of beheaded branches bristling waist-high like spears, with every fifth branch bent mercilessly down at right angles and woven in along the rest as if it were part of a hurdle.

Will watched, silent, until Rowlands became aware of him and straightened up, breathing heavily. He pulled the red kerchief loose, wiped his forehead with it and re-tied it loosely round his neck. In his creased brown face, the lines beside the dark eyes turned upwards just a little as he looked at Will.

*I know,' he said, the velvet voice solemn. 'You are thinking, here is this wonderful healthy hedge full of leaves and hawthorn berries, reaching up to the heavens, and here is this man hacking it down like a butcher jointing a sheep, taming it into a horrid little naked fence, all bones and no grace.'

Will grinned. 'Well,' he said. 'Something like that, yes.'

'Ah,' said John Rowlands. He squatted down on his haunches, resting his axe head down on the ground between his knees and leaning on it. 'Duw, it's a good job you came along. I cannot go so fast as I used to. Well, let me tell you now, if we were to leave this lovely wild hedge the way it is now, and has been for too long, it would take over half the field before this time next year. And even though I am cutting off its head and half its body, all these sad bent-over shoots that you see will be sending up so many new arms next spring that you will hardly notice any difference in it at all.'

'Now that you come to mention it,' said Will, 'yes, of course, the hedging is just the same at home, in Bucks. Ifs just that I never actually watched anyone doing it before.'

'Had my eye on this hedge for a year,' John Rowlands said. 'It was missed last winter. Like life it is. Will - sometimes you must seem to hurt something in order to do good for it. But not often a very big hurt, thank goodness.' He got to his feet again. 'You look more healthy already, bachgen. The Welsh sun is good for you,'

Will looked down at the map in his hand. 'Mr Rowlands,' he said, 'can you tell me anything about Cadfan's Way?'

The Welshman had been running one tough brown finger along the edge of his mattock; there was a second's pause in the movement, and then the finger moved on. He said quietly, 'Now what put that into your head, I wonder?'

'I don't really know. I suppose I must have read it somewhere. Is there a Cadfan's Way?'

'Oh, yes, indeed,' John Rowlands said. 'Llwybr Cadfan. No secret about that, though most people these days have forgotten it. I think they have a Cadfan Road in one of the new Tywyn housing estates instead... St Cadfan was a kind of missionary, from France, in the days when Brittany and Cornwall and Wales all had close ties. Fourteen hundred years ago he had his church in Tywyn, and a holy well - and he is supposed to have founded the monastery on Enlli, that is in English Bardsey, as well. You know Bardsey Island, where the bird-watchers go, out there off the tip of North Wales? People used to visit Tywyn and go on to Bardsey - and so, they say, there is an old pilgrims' road that goes over the mountain from Machynlleth to Tywyn, past Abergynolwyn. And along the side of this valley, no doubt. Or perhaps higher up. Most of the old ways go along high places, they were safer there. But nobody knows where to find Cadfan's Way now.'