People of the Black Mountains Vol. I: The Beginning

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Map

  Title Page

  First

  Glyn to Elis: 1

  Marod, Gan and the Horse Hunt

  Varan at the Edge of the Great Ice

  Glyn to Elis: 2

  The Summer Lake and the New Blood

  Cara Daughter of Cara

  Incar’s Fire and Aron’s Pig

  Glyn to Elis: 3

  Gord and Namila See the New People

  The Voyage of Idrisil and Dubanak

  The Meeting of Hunters and Shepherds

  Tarac and Lirisa

  Glyn to Elis: 4

  The Long House at Midsummer

  With Antlers to the Seariver

  The Coming of the Measurer

  Glyn to Elis: 5

  Seril and the New People

  The Earthstorm

  The Black Stranger and the Golden Ram

  Glyn to Elis: 6

  Tami in Telim and Grain Valley

  Tami and the Devils

  Telim and the Lord Epodorix

  Glyn to Elis: 7

  The Lords of Banavint

  The Wise One and the Slave

  The Mirror and the Song

  Glyn to Elis: 8

  The Fisher Kings

  The Battle of Claerion

  Last

  Approximate Dates of the Stories

  Place Names

  Copyright

  About the Book

  This proud and haunting novel is the last great work of Raymond Harris, his final testament.

  Here, in one vast, breathtaking sweep is his story of the land where he was born, the land he loved and left, but could never forget – the story of the people of Wales and the borders, not over one or two generations but many thousands, from the very beginning of recorded time.

  People of the Black Mountains is a chronicle with a difference, alive with feeling, set within a night-long quest of a young man of today, searching for his grandfather lost on the high ridges. On the moonlit heights Glyn hears voices calling within him, voices which pull us back, over the rim of the years to the days of Marod and his family, sheltering in their caves and hunting horses in a misty Arctic summer. As Glyn follows the tracks the stories form a linking chain across the ages, from before the last Ice-Age to the fierce, defiant struggle against the invading Romans.

  Lost lives, forgotten memories, like like the arrowheads beneath close-cropped turf. Myth and magic, plague and invasion, the warmth and sadness of daily life – slowly the waves of history ebb and flow, like the oceans which long ago formed the sandstone layers at the heart of the mountains themselves.

  Rooted in the past yet written for the present, People of the Black Mountains is a novel unlike any other, written by one of the great men of our time: a journey in search of a buried history, following the tracks on a map that all of us can read – and walk along – today.

  About the Author

  Raymond Williams (1921-1988) was born in the Black Mountains, in the village of Pandy. One of the most influential thinkers and critics of this century he was also a distinguished novelist and all his fiction is set against the background of the beautiful border country of Wales where he grew up, and where he returned increasingly in later life.

  People of the Black Mountains

  I The Beginning . . .

  Raymond Williams

  First

  SEE THIS LAYERED sandstone in the short mountain grass. Place your right hand on it, palm downward. See where the summer sun rises and where it stands at noon. Direct your index finger midway between them. Spread your fingers, not widely. You now hold this place in your hand.

  The six rivers rise in the plateau towards your wrist. The first river, now called Mynwy, flows at the outside edge of your thumb. The second river, now called Olchon, flows between your thumb and the first finger, to join the Mynwy at the top of your thumb. The third river, now called Honddu, flows between your first and second fingers and then curves to join the Mynwy. The fourth river, now called Grwyne Fawr, flows between your second and third fingers and then curves the other way, south, to join the fifth river, now called Grwyne Fechan, that has been flowing between your third and your outside finger. The sixth river, now called Rhiangoll, flows at the edge of your outside finger.

  This is the hand of the Black Mountains, the shape first learned. Your thumb is Crib y Gath. Your first finger is Curum and Hateral. Your second finger is Ffawyddog, with Tal y Cefn and Bal Mawr at its knuckles. Your third finger is Gadair Fawr. Your outside finger is Allt Mawr, from Llysiau to Cerrig Calch, and its nail is Crug Hywel. On the high plateau of the back of your hand are Twyn y Llech and Twmpa, Rhos Dirion, Waun Fach and Y Das. You hold their shapes and their names.

  Yet the fingers are long and skeletal, curving on themselves, and at their edges and in the plateau there are glaciated cwms and cross valleys, red rockfalls and steeply gouged watercourses. Beyond the hand are other heights: Troed and Llangynidr to the west, between Rhiangoll and Lake Syfaddon; Brynarw and Sugar Loaf to the south, and then the isolated Skirrid, the Holy Mountain; east, each ridge running lower, Cefn and Arthur’s Seat and Merbach, before the dip to the meadows of Wye.

  Beyond these outliers are two rivers to the sea. Mynwy carrying Olchon and Honddu flows to the circling Wye. Grwyne and Rhiangoll flow into the Usk. Wye and Usk, divided by Wentwood, the old Forest of Gwent, flow to the ancient seariver, the Severn Sea, where Wales now looks towards England.

  The hand of the Black Mountains. From a distance, in good light, the long whaleback ridges are blue. Under cloud they are grey cloudbanks. But from within they are many colours: olive green under sunlight; darker green with the patches of summer bracken; green with a pink tinge when there are young leaves on the whinberries; dark with the heather out of flower, purple briefly in late summer; russet with autumn bracken, when at dawn after rain the eastern slopes can be red; pale gold in dead winter bracken, against the white of snow. Yet black, a cellular black, under storm cloud: a pitted honeycomb of darkness within darkness.

  The valleys are always green, for the grass is bright there. Yet from the ridges they seem woodlands, with farms and fields in clearings. At midsummer, on the closely trimmed hedges, there are stands of honeysuckle and of pink and white wild roses, and on the banks beneath innumerable foxgloves. It is close looking up from the flowers to the steep bare ridges, but the contrast is sharp: above the bleak open tops, with their heather and sedge and cottongrass and peat pools, their paths which dissolve into endless sheeptracks, their sudden danger with few landmarks in low cloud and mist; and below the settled green valleys, with their network of banked lanes, their patchwork of fields, the few ploughlands above the sandstone a wet dark red or dried pink; their scattered stone houses, rough layered or ashlar, from brown or grey towards pink and green under rain. This settled and that open wild country are still within the shape of the hand.

  Press your fingers close on this lichened sandstone. With this stone and this grass, with this red earth, this place was received and made and remade. Its generations are distinct but all suddenly present.

  GLYN TO ELIS: 1

  GLYN WAS DRIVING faster now. In the dark the road was safer. The lights of anything coming would show much earlier than any sign by day, when every corner was blind and the high hedges muffled sound. The banked road was too narrow for passing except at a few hardened gateways. Yet although unsigned it had its marks: the tightness of a corner; the open red earth of a newly dug drain; a rebuilt culvert; a stretch of broken drystone wall; twin yews that arched over the second long pitch.

  The headlights shone on the hedges. Roughstalked bracken, on the banks, stood proud to the elbows of hazel. Tangled holly and hawthorn, field maple and blackthorn, spread under rising rowan and ash. Trailing greenberried brambles, fruiting honeysuckle, late briars and columns of seeding foxglove, stood out from the body of the hedges. There were hartstongue ferns and the glossy leaves of ramson, under webs of fruiting vetch.

  Glyn and Megan were late. There had been a delay at the hospital, where Megan had to wait for a letter to her doctor and Glyn had been impatient and then cajoling in the office. Then between Builth and Llyswen, along the fast road by the Wye, they had a sudden engine failure, finally traced to a fuel airlock. In the fading light, with Megan holding a torch, Glyn traced the fault and at last sucked petrol through the pipe. He could still taste the raw sourness in his mouth. It was long dark when at last they turned into the mountains.

  Glyn had set out early that morning, to bring his mother back after the operation. She was now to stay with her father Elis until her husband Edwin Sayce came back from Strasbourg. Glyn would stay on with his grandfather until term began in Cardiff.

  It was not far now to Llwyn Derw. They were turning and climbing to the watershed, and were suddenly clear on the open mountain road. Towards Rhos Dirion the headlights of a distant car, going away, swung in an arc in the dark sky. The lights of the valley were spread below them: bright yardlights of farms, at scattered distances. At night the pattern of the settlement could be seen most clearly. The oldest farms were on the flanks of the mountains, where the old springs rose. The new farms and houses of the last two hundred years were nearer the valley road but only a few directly on it; most of them turned aside, making the small customary distances.

  A
cross the whole valley there were more than forty lights, irregularly scattered. But the darkness between them was so deep that the eyes soon lost the known features and saw only these isolated points. Their ordinary relations were sunk in the night, in the wide darkness under the black ridges. Glyn had often, from the car, tried to pick out the outside light of his grandfather’s house. But as often as he thought he was certain he would again lose his bearing.

  Then, as he got nearer, the road dipped again, the high hedges were back, and most of the lights had gone.

  They were rounding the bend by the church. There was a winter sand-and-salt heap by the lychgate. The church was isolated on its spur, at its traditional distance from the world of the farms.

  ‘They’ve lopped the beeches,’ Megan said.

  ‘The wind was breaking them.’

  ‘The wind harrows this whole valley,’ Megan said, touching her face.

  Glyn looked across at her. As she saw his movement she willed a smile. But she was drawn and pale, in the machine-green glow from the panel. The delay on the road had been hard, for her.

  Tanhouse, Perth y Pia, Tir Mynach, Old Fforest, Felindre. Glyn rehearsed the succession of entrances as he stared at the twisting road. At the corner below Pentwyn the line of the road led straight to the shallow ford of the Mynwy, but the metalled road swung right, up a long pitch. His mind was now partly ahead, running to each expected place, and partly where he was, within the enclosing headlights amid the rushing darkness. Yet the place would come for certain, after the swing round the corner by the long stretch of holly and the sharp turn under the oak tree to the lane. He would see the big covered light on the outside wall above the mounting block, and at last the softer brown-curtained lights in the windows.

  ‘Has he been well?’ Megan asked, forcing her voice.

  ‘Yes, as usual. He’s got so much more energy than the rest of us.’

  ‘Seems to have more energy.’

  ‘Yes, because he lives in one piece.’

  ‘He’s sixty-eight, Glyn.’

  ‘In one piece, in one place. It makes all the difference.’

  ‘Perhaps it does. But I’ve known him longer than you.’

  They were passing Felindre. Beyond the big outside light there were truck headlights in the yard, where two boys were unloading hurdles. A shape moved suddenly from the open gate: a young black sheepdog was running fast at the car.

  ‘Keep going,’ Megan said urgently.

  ‘Yes, though I’ll never get used to it.’

  ‘If you slow he’ll think you’re more risk.’

  The dog seemed to go under the car but he was only snapping at the tyres. As Glyn accelerated the dog dropped back and lost place. Then it stopped suddenly, its protection of a boundary completed. Glyn laughed and tapped the wheel. He took the corner jauntily. He touched the horn twice.

  There was no outside light on the wall. As he stopped at the gate he could see that the windows were dark. He unlatched the gate and opened the back door, unlocked as usual. The whole house was dark and silent.

  ‘Taid?’ he called. ‘Taid, are you there?’

  There was no reply. He switched on the passage light, then went out to help Megan. As she came under the light he saw how pale and tired she now was. She was looking anxiously around for her father.

  ‘He’s probably just out for a while,’ Glyn said, across the absence. Megan didn’t answer. She went through to the living room. As she switched on the light she saw a note on the table. She looked for her glasses to read it, but Glyn was close behind her.

  The note read:

  Dear Megan and Glyn – I am almost certain to be back before you see this, but I am leaving it in case you are early. Tom Davies called with a load of ash blocks and we’ve stacked them in the shelter. It is such a lovely day, so still and bright, that I’m taking a lift back with him so that I can go once again along the best of all walks through these mountains: what you’ve heard me call its heart line. I shall go up by Twyn y Gaer and along its old pastures to the Stone of Vengeance, then to the old circle at Garn Wen and the Ewyas tower, along the ridge above the reservoir and Terren yr Esgob, past the Blacksmith’s Anvil and the Bird House under Twyn Tal-y-Cefn, over Rhos Dirion and the mouth of Rhiw y Fan to Twmpath, across the road at the Gospel Pass and along the ridge to Penybeacon, then as always above Blaen Mynwy and past Llech y Ladron to our spot height above Blaen Olchon and so along the Cat’s Back to the Rhew and the lane to the house. I know the distance of this walk within yards but say for safety fourteen miles; in the old days in this weather just over the five hours but say now just over the six. That makes it back home by five at the latest, and I’ll see you then or soon after. – Love, Elis.

  ‘What time is it now?’ Megan asked. As she spoke she took the note, written on the back sheet of an old calendar, and looked down at the writing: the large, angular, official hand.

  ‘Twenty past nine.’

  Megan turned the note over.

  ‘He’s always so careful, when anyone goes up, making them give an exact route.’

  Her hand was trembling. Glyn put his arm across her shoulders.

  ‘He’ll be all right, Mam. He knows every yard of the way.’

  ‘It’s still a very long walk at his age.’

  ‘I’ll go up and meet him if you like.’

  ‘Not in the dark, Glyn. You’d get lost yourself.’

  ‘He won’t be lost, Mam.’

  ‘Then what could have happened, to be as late as this?’

  Glyn looked away.

  ‘The moon will be up in an hour, Mam. And it’s full.’

  ‘It’s still dangerous at night.’

  ‘Not if you know it.’

  She stared into his face, on the edge of tears.

  ‘Look, mam, I’ll make some tea and get a fire going. Then if he isn’t back I’ll get my things and go and find him.’

  Megan nodded. He settled her in the front room and lit a wood fire in the old grate. He made tea and brought biscuits and cheese. She was shivering in her chair. He put a rug over her knees.

  ‘Don’t fuss me Glyn. Go for him.’

  ‘I’ll get my things.’

  He changed his shoes for climbing boots, took off his jacket and put on two jerseys and his orange cape. He put a torch and compass, cheese and whisky in his rucksack, and took the old blackthorn stick which Elis had cut for him on his twelfth birthday.

  ‘There’s plenty of wood for the fire,’ he said, going back to his mother.

  ‘It’s all right, I am fine.’

  He looked round the room, filled with Elis’s records of his lifetime in these mountains. On the stone walls were three large aerial photographs, several maps in picture frames, enlarged photographs of dolmens and hillcamps.

  On a specially-made table below the window was a large relief model which Elis had built by contours in sliced layers of polystyrene. Behind Megan’s chair was a tall glass cabinet, filled with specimens of the different-coloured sandstones and with his various finds: rows of flint arrowheads, a roughly finished stone axe, an incised bone, a blackened coin, broken sherds of pots. The room seemed so inhabited by Elis’s interests that it was difficult not to look round for him, to find him at your shoulder explaining. After his parents’ divorce Glyn had grown up in this house: at first with his mother and then, when she had gone back to London to work, with his grandparents Elis and Gwen. When he was sixteen Megan set up house with Edwin Sayce, in Berkshire, but he had chosen to stay in Croes Hywel. Then Gwen had died and for three years he lived alone with Elis, until he went away to university. It was here, always, that he chose to come back.

  ‘Should you be waiting?’ Megan asked.

  ‘I’m just giving the moon a chance.’

  He walked across to the relief model. The surface of the polystyrene was lightly pitted but there was still a smoothness of shape and a crowded, inhabiting detail of features and names. All these were accurate on the model but they were very unlike those desolate tops, of heather and sedge and bog cotton and peat pools, of rutted tracks which narrowed suddenly into sheepwalks and unexpected hollows, of long featureless ridges and false ridges as you climbed.

  It seemed at times, walking there, an entirely empty world. But this was the paradox of the place and the history. The features, the periods, were all there, to be marked and to be visited. The shapes of the land and the shapes of the history could be carried in your mind, slowly learned and verified. Yet often, alone on a dark ridge, with a storm coming in from the west, you could feel entirely cut off not only from the present but from any real sense of the past. Then there was only, and intensely, an immediate and indifferent physical world.