The Grey King Read Online Free

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 retied 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.
    â€œI 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.”
    â€œAh,” 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.”
    â€œNow that you come to mention it,” said Will, “yes, of course, the hedging is just the same at home, in Bucks. It’s just that I never actually watched anyone doing it before.”
    â€œHad 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?”
    â€œI don’t really know. I suppose I must have read it somewhere. Is there a Cadfan’s Way?”
    â€œOh, 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