by Jenny Nimmo
Emlyn appeared to accept this as a perfectly normal request. ‘D’you want me to paint it?’ he asked.
This hadn’t occurred to Gwyn. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Thanks!’
‘I’ll enjoy it,’ Emlyn told him. ‘Copper streaks an’ all.’
‘Heck, Emlyn. I’m glad you’re around.’ Gwyn drew up a stool beside the unformed unicorn and sat down. ‘When can you finish it?’
‘I’ve got some seasoned chestnut wood.’ Emlyn said. ‘It’s used for making toys. D’you remember, Dad had to lop a branch off that old tree up the lane a couple of years ago. It’ll take me two or three evenings.’
‘It’ll be another chestnut soldier.’ Gwyn found himself laughing with a desperate kind of relief.
The door shook and Emlyn’s brother Geraint called plaintively through it, ‘Emlyn, Dad wants you!’
‘I’ll be there in a minute,’ Emlyn shouted. He lowered his voice. ‘Gwyn, I know what you’re into. But this sort of thing has to be done gently. You can’t cast him into the depths in anger. You want him cured, not dead.’
Gwyn realised, with a shock, that this was perhaps what he had intended, and even now, if this unlikely remedy did not work, it might come to that. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘Emlyn, you will be careful, don’t . . .’
‘It’ll be safe enough in here,’ Emlyn told him. ‘No one else will know!’
‘Thanks!’ He unbolted the door and ran past Geraint, who was pressed suspiciously close to the wall of the barn. ‘Ta ra, Geraint!’ Gwyn yelled to him.
Confidence surged through him, propelling him into a jaunty downhill sprint to nowhere in particular. He was whistling merrily when he turned on to the bridge where, the previous night, events had reduced him to a wreck. He recalled that snivelling incoherent self with something like contempt. He was returning to the quarry to prove, somehow, to himself that Iolo’s fall had been no accident. He didn’t know what he expected to find.
The water had dropped considerably. It ran fast but clear. The rocks were visible and the spray that lapped around them was frosty white.
He was walking purposefully towards the quarry when he saw a fisherman stepping through the water, stealthily, a furled rod in his hand, a basket hung, slantwise, across his back.
It wasn’t too late to run away, the man hadn’t seen him, but Gwyn lingered, fascinated by the man’s sure movements against the current, and the elegant swing of his arm as he cast his line over a deep pool. A silver flash indicated the belly of a salmon as it leapt to catch the fly. Evan began to wind in his line, slowly. A battle ensued as the fish thrashed through the spray, desperately unwilling to lose its life. It was a war of wills as well as strength lasting several minutes. But the fisherman held steady, playing the line with incredible skill as he edged his way towards the bank. At last he had the writhing fish in his hands. He held it on the stones, dashed a rock against its head and when the fish lay still, deftly removed the hook. He showed no surprise when he saw Gwyn. ‘Noswaith dda,’ he greeted him. ‘Good evening, Gwydion Gwyn!’
He’s using the language like a true Welshman, Gwyn thought wryly. And how does he know my other name? ‘Noswaith dda,’ he returned. ‘You’re catching salmon out of season, Major Llr. It’s against the law!’
‘Are you going to betray me, then?’ Evan asked. He curled the fish into his basket and walked towards Gwyn. ‘How will they punish me?’
‘I won’t tell them,’ Gwyn said, standing his ground. If they were to have a conversation, he might discover what sort of man would be left, should the healing spell prove effective.
‘Sut mae’r teulu?’ Evan asked. ‘How is the family after that long night?’
‘Da iawn, diolch’, Gwyn replied. ‘Very well, thank you!’
They began to stroll upriver until they found themselves on a beach of wet stones where the brittle reeds had parted round a huge slab of shale. They shared this seat and began to talk about the moods of the river, the mountains and clouds, mentioning, on their way, the myths that seemed to have been born out of such a landscape. They spoke in Welsh, the only language that was appropriate for such a discussion. And all the time Gwyn kept thinking. We’re so calm! Is it always like this before a battle?
It was dusk when they walked together towards Nain Griffiths’ house. Evan had promised her a fish for tea.
When they passed by the still splendid chestnut tree, Evan gazed up at the topmost branches and murmured, ‘My brother died of that tree.’
Gwyn asked, ‘Were you there?’
‘I was standing where you are now,’ Evan told him, ‘watching every move my brother made, so that I should remember and repeat his route. He looked down, so triumphant, lost his footing and fell. I thought he was diving into my soul.’
They silently regarded the tree and Gwyn sensed that, for Evan, the moment was critical. He was absorbed in the shape and colour of leaves and branches as though he were committing them to memory, for a journey he would make, after which time all things would have changed beyond his recognition.
In all the world, Gwyn thought, there can’t be a man as lonely as he is!
They continued their walk without exchanging another word, but when Evan reached Rhiannon Griffiths’ white gate he held out his hand and said, ‘Nos da, Gwydion Gwyn. Thank you for your company!’
Gwyn took the soldier’s hand. ‘Nos da,’ he said. It seemed like saying goodbye.
The Lloyds lived uneasily after Iolo’s accident. They seemed unable to talk to each other in the comfortable way they had been used to. Mr Lloyd held opinions he was too afraid to voice, as though, once uttered, they would divide him even further from his wife and daughters.
Every day Mrs Lloyd would visit the hospital and stay an hour with Iolo. Sometimes her husband would accompany her, sometimes she would take one or two of the other children after school.
On the fourth day Nia begged to go with her parents. She had always disliked hospitals and prepared herself the way she did for a horror movie, expecting a mummy-like figure strung up with wires and surrounded with bottles of plasma. She arrived outside the ward clinging to her mother’s hand, handkerchief at the ready, tense and jumpy.
‘Calm down, Nia,’ her father said, his nerves already jangling. ‘We don’t want Iolo upset now!’
‘Perhaps you’d better stay outside,’ Mrs Lloyd suggested. ‘I don’t think this was a good idea!’
‘I’ll be calm. I’ll be calm, I promise!’ Nia assured them breathlessly.
‘Well, just nip out if you feel bad,’ her mother said.
They went in.
In many ways it was not nearly as horrific as Nia had expected. There were no bottles of blood in sight and Iolo was not swaddled in white. A narrow bandage encircled his head like a tiny crown. But his fractured ribs were safely concealed beneath pyjamas and a hump in the bed was the only indication of injured legs. He was even smiling. But as soon as Nia had taken all these reassuring signs of recovery into her mind she was immediately alerted by the expression behind that cautious smile. Iolo was frightened. Terrible memories were chasing through his head and his eyes betrayed him. Like Nia and Bethan, Iolo had inherited his father’s dark colouring. His anxious umber-coloured eyes lurched out of the small sallow face, dense with unrecounted nightmares.
‘He’s still a bit – distressed,’ a genial nurse explained. ‘Perhaps his sister will cheer him up!’
But Nia could do no such thing. She was too shocked by her brother’s helpless fear.
Mrs Lloyd took Iolo’s hand. ‘Have you been eating, cariad? D’you like the food better now?’
‘You’ll be home soon,’ Mr Lloyd said with forced heartiness and, unmindful of the alarm that flickered across Iolo’s face, added, ‘We’ll have a slap up meal, all your favourites, won’t we, Mam? Roast lamb and mashed potatoes, and apple crumble, you’ll like that, won’t you?’
Iolo nodded weakly and Nia suddenly realised her brother was being primed for other, more important question
s.
‘Have you remembered yet, why you were on that cliff? No?’ Iolo shrank against the sheets but his determined father lumbered on. ‘Gwyn Griffiths has told us it was a game, and that you phoned him!’
‘Leave it, Iestyn,’ Mrs Lloyd warned softly. ‘It’s not the time!’
Her husband was unable to do this. Someone was responsible for his son’s sorry condition. He had waited long enough. The mystery was tormenting him. ‘Gwyn says you were following Evan . . .’
‘No!’ Iolo cried, jerking himself away from the pillows. ‘I wasn’t following no one. It was a game, see, but the spirits played a trick on me!’
‘Spirits? What spirits, cariad?’ Mrs Lloyd attempted to touch him but he ducked away from her.
‘Evil spirits, Mam,’ Iolo said gravely. ‘I know because I could feel them!’
‘Feel them?’ his parents repeated in alarmed unison.
‘Yes,’ he lowered his voice to share the next secret, ‘and I saw one, shining!’
‘Shining?’ said Nia, her mind racing. What had Gwyn been up to? Why had he chosen Iolo for this mission and not her?
‘Here,’ Iolo told her, touching his wrist, ‘something shining, and here,’ he pointed to his shoulder.
Iestyn, still bent on a different answer quietly pressed, ‘Are you sure, Iolo, that it wasn’t your cousin Evan?’
‘No! No! No!’ lolo cried, drawing the white sheet up to his face. ‘It wasn’t anyone real, it wasn’t!’
A nurse materialised through a distant door as Mrs Lloyd exclaimed, ‘How could you, lestyn? He’s not ready.’ Again she tried to touch her son and again he resisted her.
‘We’ve got to get to the bottom of this,’ lestyn argued.
Nia couldn’t bear her favourite brother’s confused and troubled stare. Unable to comfort him, she turned away from the scene and began to run, passing the nurse whose stride had quickened into an anxious jog.
Nia slipped through the swinging door and raced down a long cool passage of numbered and mysterious doors. She didn’t stop until she was out in the air. She crossed the car park and flopped down on a low brick wall beside the butcher’s van. Why was her father, all at once, intent on proving Evan a villain? Gwyn doesn’t trust me, she thought resentfully, because I’ve defended Evan.
When her parents emerged they were still arguing and they didn’t stop on the journey home. Nia had never heard them so angry with each other. Their quarrel alienated her from both of them, making her feel helpless and unhappy.
The atmosphere that waited in number six was no better; Bethan in a storm of tears in Catrin’s arms, Nerys complaining of the noise. Gareth and Sîon had been fighting; Sîon sported a black eye and Gareth, in an attempt to comfort himself, had reached for the special biscuits and knocked a precious glass duck on to the tiled floor, where it still lay in glittering fragments. Alun had locked himself in the bedroom and was shouting, to anyone who cared to listen, that he wasn’t ‘bloody well going to open the door until people grew up!’
Betty Lloyd, unable to console her tearful baby, declared that the whole family had gone mad. ‘Can’t you stop fighting?’ she appealed to them. ‘What’s happening to us?’
‘It would never have happened but for that Gwyn Griffiths,’ grumbled Iestyn. ‘Trouble always follows him. Clings to him like a shadow, it does!’
‘It’s not his fault,’ said Nerys. ‘It’s his grandmother, giving him strange ideas. You know what she’s like, all those silly stories.’
‘They’re both mad, then,’ her father muttered.
‘How could you?’ Betty cried at her husband’s retreating back.
He stumped into his shop just as the front door slammed and Catrin said, almost to herself, ‘That’s Evan!’
They listened to soft footfalls on the stairs. He never marched or thumped as Nia imagined a soldier used to wearing boots would do. Evan’s strides were light and almost musical, like an animal or forest Indian.
‘Evan doesn’t like crying babies,’ Nia remarked, in an attempt to explain his avoidance of the kitchen.
‘He doesn’t like babies at all,’ Nerys said, as though she sympathised with his point of view. She had tied a pink scarf in a bow on top of her head and was wearing a very un-Nerys blouse with frills all down the front.
‘You’re just too much at times, Nerys Lloyd!’ Catrin cried, ‘and who said you could borrow my scarf?’
Bethan began to howl again. Catrin left the room and Nia followed, leaving their mother and Nerys to continue a noisy argument.
What has happened to us, Nia wondered. Something has sneaked into the very heart of our family and it’s gnawing away like a treacherous rat. She wished she was out of it all, up at T Llr with the Llewelyns, where everything was safe and calm and beautiful. Where Idris would laugh her out of her fears and Elinor would be singing in the garden. But she knew she was needed here. Any little crack in the family might cause it to break apart altogether.
She went to the top of the house but remained on the small landing between her room and her parents’. She was aware that she was spying but past caring now. In fact she realised that she was quite likely to develop this unpleasant trait of hers further; recent events did partly justify a lurking, furtive Nia.
A few seconds after Catrin’s door had closed it opened again, just as Nia had expected. She heard her sister cross the passage and knock on Evan’s door.
Tap! Tap! Tap! Very gentle. No answer.
‘Evan, are you there?’
A door opened. Two sets of footfalls on the passage, down the stairs, across the hall. The front door opened and closed.
For a brief moment Nia hesitated. Perhaps she thought of Iolo’s near-fatal journey, but curiosity eventually sent her bounding down the stairs and out in the street.
They were strolling towards the bridge, Evan’s exotic hair unmistakable beyond the few late shoppers.
She tried to keep up without being seen, but it was impossible. Catrin kept stopping and turning into shop windows. It soon became apparent why she was doing this. On the other side of the street Michael McGoohan was walking arm in arm with Lluned Price. So what does everyone think about that? Nia wondered. Michael smiled at her. She smiled back, feeling guilty somehow, at having a foot in both camps. None of it was Michael’s fault anyway. When she looked back up the street Catrin and Evan had vanished.
‘Damn!’ Nia muttered, and a voice behind her asked, ‘What’s the problem?’
She turned to see Gwyn grinning at her. ‘What’re you doing here?’ she asked ungraciously.
‘Nothing! I’m innocent!’ He held up his hands in mock surrender. ‘I came down with Dad to get some chicken feed. It’s not like you to swear!’
‘We’ve just been to see Iolo!’ she told him.
A shadow fell across his face, drawing his confident grin into an anxious line. ‘How is he?’ he asked.
‘He’s mending, physically!’ She repeated a nurse’s description, ‘But he’s not too good up here!’ She touched her head. ‘And I don’t mean mad; he’s frightened, so frightened he can’t even bear our Mam to touch him!’
‘I’m sorry,’ Gwyn said and then, too casually, ‘He’s forgotten, I suppose, what happened?’
‘Not exactly.’ She watched Gwyn’s face for signs that might give him away. ‘He says a spirit pushed him. Its arm was shining.’ Gwyn seemed to find this description very promising. ‘Dad says you told Iolo to follow Evan. Why did you do that? Why didn’t you tell me? It’s horrible at home. Everyone’s angry and hating each other, and none of us really knows why!’
‘Look!’ Gwyn broke into her angry flow. ‘It’s going to be all right, Nia!’
‘What is? What’ve you done now?’ Out of the corner of her eye she saw Mr Griffiths emerging from Alwyn Farmers, where they sold everything from chicken feed to gumboots. ‘I wish you would leave people alone,’ she added.
‘Gwyn!’ Mr Griffiths bellowed across the street.
‘It’s too l
ate for that,’ Gwyn said grimly. He turned his back on her and crossed the road, waving his hand. She couldn’t tell if he was feeling the air for rain or had flung a spell into it, for tiny drops of water began to tickle her face.
She ran towards the bridge, regretting her effort at spying. She was too old. Gwyn could enjoy his childish games; they always seemed to bring bad luck. She decided to take a pondering sort of walk beside the river; the rain would soothe her nerves and, in this way perhaps, she would find a solution to the trouble at home.
After crossing the bridge, Nia took a narrow path that wound between bushes and brambles until it reached the river. The water was very low. She hopped along the beach from rock to stone, while the rain beat a companionable rhythm on the water beside her. There was no one in sight. Beyond the reach of all the worry and grimness she began to sing chirpily, ‘Who cares, anyway? Who cares?’ She found herself wading through a forest of reeds and, crouching down among the thick stems, it occurred to her that she was in an excellent position for a spy. The thought was hardly formed when she realised that it was exactly what she was.
On the other side of the river where the bank rose, house-high, beyond the beach, two figures were clambering down. They stood a moment on the narrow strip of pebbles, enjoying the shower. Evan’s hair was all black now, it drooped about his head like a slippery helmet. Catrin’s sweater clung, tight as skin, and her hair hung in long coils almost to her waist.
Unseen, Nia froze. She watched, as she might have watched an illustration to a fairy tale, waiting for the picture to spring to life, yet dreading it. And when it did she observed every detail, preserving it somewhere in her mind as something that happened outside her life, to creatures in a story, that she didn’t know at all. For Evan’s kiss was not gentle. Like dreadful sorcery it turned Catrin to stone and, for a moment, all the fairy tales turned backwards as in an ugly mirror. The prince didn’t waken this sleeping beauty, he sent her scrambling away from him, up the narrow path, all mud and tears.
