---
And I knew that I was going to learn
again,
again, in this less hazy light,
I saw the fields beyond the fields, the fields beyond the fields.
--Dar Williams, The End of the Summer
The peaks cast shadows across the fields, long and deep and grey, swallowing up the dips and hollows of the land below. Crimson streaks across the sky at their tips, the colour of sunset in the height of summer, bright violent shades that tint the clouds so red that Cader Idris looks like it burns.
Every dusk, Bran watches the mountain and thinks it on fire, and thinks that this should mean something.
Cof barks sharply at his side. The old sheepdog's fur is silvering now, and when the weather turns cold he picks up a cough. His limbs go stiff sometimes, and when they return to the cabin he will turn three times in a circle and curl up by the fire. But there is nothing he seems to be barking at now, unless it is the haze of smoke-that-is-not wisping around the mountaintop, and the harsh glare of sunset.
'Come on, then.' Bran whistles to him and turns back toward the house. Cof is not the only one whose old bones creak these days. He walks with a bit of a limp, but he's long since been used to it, and the slope of the hillside makes up for it in its way. The lamp is on inside the cottage, glowing in the window. Like a lighthouse, he thinks, but shoves the thought away. A lighthouse in the middle of the fields. Ridiculous.
His coat on a peg by the door, first, this is all routine, and a check of the dogs' food and water dishes. All in order, and he can start the kettle for an evening cuppa, and sure enough there's Cof turning, lying himself gingerly down on the old red blanket Megan made for him. It's only Bran and Cof, now—well, and the puppy, but it belongs to the boy, really, he took it home last New Year's. Though even he isn't a boy any longer, his Arthur, he's a grown man and living on his own. Bran thinks fondly that he looks like his mother.
Then there's the kettle whistling, tea at last. He takes down the blue cup and leaves Megan's green one right where it always sits, though he's taken to stirring a bit more sugar in these days. She would always get on him about the sugar. Told him it was bad for him—caused health problems, it did, and surely he wouldn't want to die ahead of her and leave her alone?
Another spoonful, then.
The house, it's about the way she left it. Her pillows, that purple afghan, thrown over the back of the couch; the flowers in the windowboxes and the watering can beneath. The harp in the corner, and he'd play it sometimes if he could, but his old hands are too rough and withered. The scattered leavings of a lifetime, of growing up and leaving home, of coming back, of nervous dates and laughing and newlywed arguments and staying up all night with a baby who won't stop crying. Of homework and first days of school, of long nights with birthing animals and cups of hot tea. Of growing up, and growing old.
He's lonely sometimes, but mostly he doesn't mind. Old men, if they are wise at all, know when they've had a good life to look back on. And oh, yes, there could have been more excitement in Bran's, but he wasn't gone for long before he knew in his heart it was his time to come back, that there was a part of him in the hills and he would never feel quite whole anywhere else. He doesn't mind so much that all the faces are different from when he was young, because this is the way of thing: he is not young now, and when those who are—his grandchildren, if Arthur would ever get on with finding a girl and having them—will remember him for a while, when he is gone, and then he too will be just a part of the history of the mountains.
And perhaps he's thinking too much again.
The last letter from Arthur lying on the table. Something about going off to Poland with his second wife; Bran could never figure out just what was wrong with the first one. This one, what's her name, Paula, he's met her a few times and she seems all right, but suave and polished and not at all like Mary Jones his boy fell in love with first. There was something there, though, too, a baby they'd not been able to have. Megan would have remembered the details, Bran just recalled feeling sad. He still saw Mary, she lived in Tywyn and worked at the post office, she still called him Da and made him cookies at Christmastime. She had one of the puppies, too, he remembered. Though it likely wasn't a puppy anymore.
Now his tea's cold, he's been staring off again. Should probably start worrying about supper soon, though he's not really hungry. Get up and see what's in the pantry, at least.
Cof barks once, wheezing, and pushes himself up; his nails clack against the entryway floor. Somebody at the door, but who's bothering an old man at this hour on a Sunday? A motorist possibly, the road's been known to do strange things to car tyres, and he's got an air pump and a car jack somewhere in one of the sheds.
It's a boy at the door—well, a teenager anyway, sixteen or so, brown hair falling in his face and his hands stuffed oh-so-casually into his jeans pockets. Only he looks up then, and Bran gets a good look at his face, and the blue-grey eyes with no sense of age about them at all, and—
'Hullo,' says Will Stanton, as if it hadn't been nearly sixty years since he last walked these hills, and for some reason he's looking exactly the same. Bran doesn't know what to make of this, but he lets the boy in anyway, turns the kettle back on while Will drops to one knee to pet Cof, and fixes it for him in Megan's favourite green mug. He remembers, for some reason, that Will used to take entirely too much sugar in his tea.
'I missed you,' Will says, when they're settled. He's sitting on the floor, legs crossed, on the throw rug, the one shaped like a circle with a cross the centre that Bran can never remember quite where it came from. But Will seems to like it, tracing the pattern over with his finger, waiting for his tea to cool.
Bran could say that he has missed Will, too. It would be true. His first real friend, and it's not that anything happened, it's just that in time they drifted, did other things, didn't see each other anymore. He wondered if Will is dead, if this is a ghost, or less likely yet an angel. It would explain the age, at least. So he asks.
Will grins at him, and shakes his head. 'Not dead,' he promises.
'And what about me?' Bran asks, just to be sure. It's the sort of thing he imagined happening, at the end, and really it wouldn't be such a bad way to go. But Will shakes his head again.
'You're not dead, either. I just thought…it might be all right to bring you back, now. If you wanted to.'
'Bring me back?' Bran thinks he does not sound so questioning as he ought, but there is something in his chest that twinges now, the sort of twist it makes when he accidentally makes tea enough for two. Memory, it feels like. And Will nods.
'Up the fields,' he says, 'if you wanted to.'
And then Will Stanton who's still sixteen sets down the green glaze teacup and kneels in front of Bran Davies in the centre of a quartered cross and bows his head. And for some reason it doesn't seem as unnatural as it should, even when he says 'My lord, I've come to take you home.'
And Bran pushes himself to his feet, and thinks his joints didn't used to be so stiff, and takes Will's hand. He doesn't ask questions or to set things aside, to leave a note for Arthur or put out the post, because whatever he doesn't know about what's going on here, he knows that Will can take care of all the mundane things. Except perhaps the dog.
'What about him?' he asks.
Will scratches Cof around the ruff and shrugs. 'He can come with us.'
And it may have been sixty years, but Bran trusts Will, in all his strangeness and his eyes in his too-young face, and he just takes his jacket off the peg and whistles to his dog and opens the door.
The shadows have swallowed up the valley now. The sky is dark, the pale twinkling glint of stars nearly visible between the clouds. They crest the rise by the cottage and head further up the mountain, and Will takes Bran's hand. His hands are tan, strong, still smooth. A young man's hands.
Bran's breath starts coming easier the higher they go. Wrinkles fade from his face, from the fingers laced through Will's, old bones grow stronger, his back straightens, and Cof lopes along next to him as if he were a puppy again. At Craig yr Aderyn they pause, look down over the shadow-draped fields. There is still a lamp on inside Bran's cottage, a golden glow in the chill dark of the valley. Two boys atop a rock they stand, at the gate to immortality. Bran throws his head back and laughs, and the wind carries the echoes of it off into the air.
'Are you ready?' Will asks, though there is no turning back now, anyway.
Bran nods, fingers tightening around Will's, and his other hand tangles in Cof's fur. 'Let's go, then.'
The shadows of the mountains stretch long over the fields, with only the calling of the kestrels where two boys had been.
[fin.]