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

'Well' - Will began, and then he stopped. He had looked into the boy's face and found there another pair of eyes to shake him off balance. It was not, this time, the unearthliness he had seen in the dog; it was a sudden shock of feeling that he had seen them somewhere before. The boy's eyes were a strange, tawny golden colour like the eyes of a cat or a bird, rimmed with eyelashes so pale as to be almost invisible, they had a cold, unfathomable glitter.

'The raven boy,' he said instantly. "That's who you are, that's what it calls you, the old verse. I have it all now, I can remember. But ravens are black. Why does it call you that?'

'My name is Bran,' the boy said, unsmiling, looking unwinking down at him. 'Bran Davies. I live down on your uncle's farm.'

Will was taken aback for a moment, in spite of his new confidence. 'On the farm?'

'With my father. In a cottage. My father works for David Evans.' He blinked in the sunshine, pulled a pair of sunglasses from his pocket, and put them on; the tawny eyes disappeared into shadow. He said, in exactly the same conversational tone, 'Bran is really the Welsh word for crow. But people called Bran in the old stories are linked up with the raven, too. A lot of ravens in these hills, there are. So I suppose you could say "the raven boy" if you wanted. Poetic licence, like.'

He swung the satchel off his shoulder and sat down beside Will on a rock, fiddling with the leather strap.

Will said, 'How did you know who I was? That David Evans is my uncle?'

'I could just as well ask how you knew me,' Bran said. 'How did you know, to name me the raven boy?'

He ran one finger idly up and down the strap. Then he smiled suddenly, a smile that illuminated his pale face like quick flaring fire, and he pulled off the dark glasses again.

'I will tell you the answer to both questions, Will Stanton,' he said. 'It is because you are not properly human, but one of the Old Ones of the Light put here to hold back the terrible power of the Dark. You are the last of that circle to be born on earth. And I have been waiting for you.'



Part One: The Golden Harp
The Raven Boy

'You see,' Will said, 'it's the first quest, without help, for me - and the last, because this now is the raising of the last defence the Light can build, to be ready. There is a great battle ahead. Bran - not yet, but not far off. For the Dark is rising, to make its great attempt to take the world for itself until the end of time. When that happens, we must fight and we must win. But we can only win if we have the right weapons. That is what we have been doing, and are still, in such quests as this - gathering the weapons forged for us long, long ago. Six enchanted Signs of the Light, a golden grail, a wonderful harp, a crystal sword... They are all achieved now but the harp and the sword, and I do not know what will be the manner of the sword's finding. But the quest for the harp is mine...'

He picked a sprig of gorse, and sat staring at it. 'Out of a long time ago, there were three verses made,' he said, 'to tell me what to do. They aren't written down any more, though once they were. They are only in my mind. Or at least they used to be - forever, I thought. But then not long ago I was very ill, and when I came out of it, the verses had gone. I'd forgotten them. I don't know if the Dark had a hand in it. That's possible, while I was ... not myself. They couldn't have taken the words for themselves, but they could have managed to hinder my catching them again. I thought I'd go mad, trying to remember. I didn't know what to do. A few bits came back, but not much ... not much. Until I saw your dog.'

'Cafall,' Bran said. The dog raised its head.

'Cafall. Those eyes of his, those silver eyes ... it was as if they broke a spell. He had put me on the Old Way, Cadfan's Way, as well - just here. And I remembered. All the verses. Everything.'

'He is a special dog,' Bran said. 'He is not ... ordinary. What are your verses?'

Will looked at him, opened his mouth, shut it again, and looked out at the mountains in confusion. The white-haired boy laughed. He said, 'I know. For all you can tell, I might be from the Dark in spite of Cafall. Isn't that it?'

Will shook his head. 'If you were from the Dark, I should know very well. There's a sense, that tells us ... the trouble is, that same particular sense that says you aren't from the Dark doesn't say anything else about you either. Not a thing. Nothing bad, nothing good. I don't understand.'

'Ah,' Bran said mockingly. 'I have never understood that myself. But I can tell you, I am like Cafall - I am not quite ordinary either.' He glanced at Will, the pale-lashed eyes darting, secretive. Then he said, reciting deliberately, sounding very sing-song Welsh:

'On the day of the dead, when the year too dies,
Must the youngest open the oldest hills
Through the door of the birds, where the breeze breaks.'

Will sat stone-still, horrified, gazing at him. The land broke in waves. The sky was falling. He said huskily, 'The beginning of it. But you can't know that. It's not possible. There are only three people in the world who -'

He stopped.

The white-haired boy said, 'I was up here with Cafall, a week ago, up here where you never meet anybody, and we met an old man. A strange old man he was, with a lot of white hair and a big beaky nose.'