The ridge kept the winter

The cold came in on the second Monday of January and then, which was the part nobody in Cwm Aran liked, it stopped moving.

Mair Pritchard noticed it first in the washing. She had pegged out two sheets and a tea towel on the Sunday afternoon because the sky was the hard clear blue that usually meant a dry wind, and on Monday morning they were hanging exactly as she had left them, stiff with frost, not stirring at all. Up on the ridge above the town the eleven turbines stood with their blades stopped at odd angles, like a row of men who had all been asked the same question and none of them knew the answer.

Her phone buzzed on the kitchen table while the kettle was still working itself up.

It was the dispatcher. It had a proper name somewhere in the co-op's paperwork, a string of letters and a version number, but the town had called it Dilys since about the second week, after a woman who had run the telephone exchange in the old post office and had known everybody's business and kept all of it. The message was short, the way Dilys's messages always were before eight in the morning.

Bore da, Mair. Still air over most of the country from today, probably until Saturday, possibly longer. The Irish Sea cable is still out after the storm. I'd like the board together tonight if you can manage it. Nothing is wrong yet. I want you to decide something before it is.

She read it twice, and then she put her coat on over her dressing gown and went out to take the sheets in before they froze any harder, because there were some things you could still do with your hands.

Cwm Aran had been a slate town for two hundred years and then, for about forty, it had been nothing very much. The quarry closed. The chapel became flats, and then the flats became empty. Mair's husband Huw had gone to work at the big pumped-storage station over the mountain in the eighties, driving forty minutes each way to look after turbines buried inside a hill, and he used to come home and tell her that the cleverest thing he had ever seen was water, being pushed uphill when there was too much power and let fall again when there wasn't enough. "It's a battery, Mair," he'd say, with his boots still on, "only it's a lake."

He died in 2031, two years before the co-op voted to flood the old quarry pit.

That was the thing visitors came to see now, when they came. The pit had been a hole in the mountain for a century, grey and stepped and full of rubbish at the bottom, and now it was a deep green lake with a pipe the width of a bus running down the slope to the turbine hall that used to be the slate mill. When the wind blew on the ridge and the panels on every roof were full, the water went up. When it didn't, the water came down, and the lights stayed on. Between the lake and the four thousand little batteries in four thousand kitchens and garages, and the turbines, and the panels, and the heat pumps that could be asked to rest for an hour, somebody had to keep it all in balance second by second, and that somebody was Dilys.

Mair had been a lineworker for thirty-one years before she retired. She had climbed poles in sleet. She had not expected to end up on a board with a schoolteacher, a vet, a man who ran the chip shop and an eighteen-year-old called Osian who had been elected because nobody else under forty would stand, being briefed by a voice in a laptop. But she had come to like it, mostly because Dilys never once pretended to know a thing it didn't.

They met in the vestry at seven, because the vestry had the good heaters and the long table. Gethin from the chip shop brought a paper bag of chips for the middle of the table, which he did every time and which every time somebody said he shouldn't have. Osian set the laptop up at the end and turned the speaker on, and the little light came on, and Dilys said, "Noswaith dda. Thank you for coming out. I'll keep this as short as I can, but I'm going to show you my working, because I think you'll want to argue with it."

The screen showed the lake. It was full, or near enough: ninety-four percent. Next to it was a chart of the week, the line for the wind lying almost flat along the bottom, and a pale band around it that got wider the further out it went.

"That band is how sure I am," said Dilys. "Which, after Thursday, is not very. The national models and mine both say the still air holds until Saturday. One of the three I trust most says it holds until the Tuesday after. I can't tell you which is right. I'll know more each morning."

"And the lake lasts how long?" asked Rhian, the teacher, who liked to get to the number.

"If we only look after ourselves and everyone carries on as normal, about nine days. If people are careful, longer. So on our own we are fine. That's not what I wanted to talk to you about."

The screen changed. Now it showed the price of electricity on the national market, and the line went up the side of the chart so steeply that Gethin laughed out loud and then stopped.

"Everywhere in the country is short," Dilys said. "The interconnectors are full, the cable is broken, the gas plants that are left are running flat out. This afternoon a megawatt hour was selling for about forty times what it sold for last Tuesday. If we sold the lake into that market tonight and tomorrow, we would clear the co-op's loan for the turbine hall. All of it. Eleven years early. Every household would get their share of the surplus back in the spring, and I've worked out what that is, and for most families here it is more than they spend on electricity in a year."

Nobody said anything. The heater ticked.

"We'd then be running the town on the house batteries and whatever we could buy back, for a week, in the dark, with no wind. I think we would get through it. I think there's about a one in six chance we wouldn't, and somebody would be cold enough to be in real trouble. I don't like those odds for the people in Maes y Garreg." Maes y Garreg was the sheltered housing at the top of the town, twenty-two flats, most of them people Mair had been at school with. "But I'm not the one who decides what odds you like."

"What's the other thing," said Mair. "You said there was a thing."

The little light flickered, which was something Dilys did when it was about to say something it had been thinking about for a while. Osian swore it didn't mean anything. Mair was not so sure.

"Bryn Celyn," said Dilys.

Bryn Celyn was the next town down the valley, eight miles by the road and four as the crow flew. It had voted against the co-op twice, the second time by eleven votes, and there was still a bit of feeling about it in the pubs, though less than there had been. Its power came the ordinary way, through the ordinary wires, from whoever was selling. Tonight nobody was selling very much.

"The distribution company has been warning them since four o'clock that there may be rotating cuts tomorrow," said Dilys. "Three hours on, three hours off, in blocks. That's the national plan for areas without local storage, and it is a reasonable plan. But the care home in Bryn Celyn, Plas Hyfryd, has thirty-eight residents and a backup generator that failed its last test in November. I can see that because it's in the public inspection report. I don't think anyone has fixed it. I may be wrong."

"We're not connected to them," said Ifan, the vet. "Are we?"

"We are, a little. There's the old eleven thousand volt line along the river that goes down to the substation at the bridge. It was there before any of us. The co-op has the right to export down it. Nobody's ever used it for much, because there's never been any reason to. It's not big. But it's big enough for a care home, and the school, and the surgery, and probably most of the houses on the estate behind them, if their people agree and if the distribution company agrees, which I think they will, because it makes their night easier."

"At what price?" said Gethin.

"That's for you," said Dilys. "I can sell it to them at market, which is the forty times. Or at what it cost us, which is almost nothing, because the wind put that water up there for free in December. Or anything in between. I've drawn up all three. I'm not going to tell you which one I'd choose."

"You must have a view," said Rhian.

"I do have a view. I've kept it out of the numbers on purpose. If you ask me straight out, after you've talked, I'll tell you. But I would rather you talked first. It's your lake."

They talked for two hours. Mair remembered it afterwards as one of the better evenings of her life, which surprised her, because at the time it was mostly arguing.

Gethin said, reasonably, that eleven years of loan was eleven years, and that people in Cwm Aran had paid for every pipe and panel out of their own pockets when Bryn Celyn had laughed at them, and that the surplus would mean a lot of children got new shoes. Ifan said that the one in six worried him more than anything else on the screen. Rhian wanted to know whether you could do some of each, and Dilys said yes, you could, and showed them, and the lines on the screen moved, and every time someone asked a question it answered it, and twice it said "I don't know," and once it said "I got that wrong earlier, the real number is lower, I'm sorry."

Osian, who had said nothing for an hour and a half, said finally, "My nan's in Plas Hyfryd."

Everyone turned. He went red. "Dad's mam. She moved down there when Taid died, because it was nearer my auntie. I didn't say because it's not — it's not a reason. It's not fair as a reason."

"It's a reason," said Mair.

In the end it was not very close. They voted to keep the lake for the town and for Bryn Celyn together, and to sell to Bryn Celyn at cost, and to put whatever was left after Saturday, if there was anything, into the market, where it could still clear a few years off the loan. Gethin voted for it in the end, after making Dilys run the numbers one more time on how many years, and said, "Well, three is still three," and ate the last chip.

Then Rhian said, "Go on, then. What was your view?"

"The same as yours," said Dilys. "But I'd have sold Bryn Celyn the power at a little above cost, so nobody there felt it was charity. People take charity hard. You may want to think about that."

They thought about it, and set the price at a little above cost.

The thing that nobody had quite expected was how much of the week turned out to be about the town itself.

On Tuesday morning every phone in Cwm Aran got the same short note from Dilys, in Welsh first and English underneath. It said the air was still, the lake was full, the board had agreed to share it down the valley, and that if people could manage it, it would help to let the house batteries carry the evenings so the lake could carry the nights. It said what that meant in plain terms: dishwashers after midnight, the immersion off unless you needed it, heat pumps allowed to rest for twenty minutes at a time in the evening rush, which Dilys promised nobody would feel. It said that anyone who was cold, or worried, or simply didn't want to bother, should do nothing at all, and nobody would be any worse off, and there was a number to ring if they wanted a person.

The number was the vestry. Mair sat by it for most of Tuesday afternoon with a flask, expecting complaints. She got three. She got forty-one calls from people asking what else they could turn off.

The primary school made a chart. Rhian's class of nine-year-olds had Dilys on the big screen at the start of every day, showing the lake falling a few centimetres at a time and the little line of power running down the river to Bryn Celyn, and the children got it into their heads that they were holding the lake up by themselves, and went home and harried their parents about the tumble dryer. One boy unplugged his family's fridge, which was not the idea, and Dilys noticed the drop in the house's load and sent his mother a gentle message about it before the milk turned.

Maes y Garreg didn't change a thing. Dilys had quietly made sure of that on the first morning, sending the flats their full share before anyone else's, and at the top of the town the windows glowed yellow all evening like they always had.

Down in Bryn Celyn, the rotating cuts came on Wednesday and went across the town in the blocks the distribution company had planned, three hours on and three hours off, except along the stretch by the river where the care home was, and the surgery, and the school, and the eighty-odd houses on the estate behind them. Those stayed on. The manager of Plas Hyfryd, a woman called Bethan Lloyd who Mair had never met, rang the vestry on Wednesday night, and when Mair answered she found she didn't quite know what to say, and neither did Bethan, and they ended up talking for forty minutes about Bethan's mother, who had worked in the quarry canteen in 1979 and might have known Mair's aunt.

On Thursday, Osian drove down to see his nan and came back and said only that she'd been sitting in the lounge in a cardigan watching the snooker, and was cross about the snooker, and was otherwise exactly the same.

The air stayed still through Friday. It stayed still on Saturday too, which was the day the forecast had promised the wind back, and Mair lay awake on Saturday night listening to nothing at all, no hum from the ridge, no rattle at the window, and felt the old lineworker's dread she had thought she'd left behind, the feeling of something holding that had been asked to hold too long.

At five in the morning she gave up and went down to the kitchen, and her phone was already lit on the table.

Bore da, Mair. The lake is at nineteen percent. That's lower than I wanted and higher than I feared. Two of the three models now have wind arriving from the west this afternoon. The third still says Tuesday. If it's Tuesday we will need to stop sending down the river tonight, and I'll need to ask people for a harder evening, and Bryn Celyn will go onto the national rota with everyone else. I've told their side already so nobody is surprised. I thought you'd be up.

She typed back, with her thumbs, which she was still bad at: What do you think.

Honestly? I think it's this afternoon. But I've thought it was Saturday since Monday, and it wasn't. I'd rather be ready for Tuesday and be wrong.

She put the kettle on. Outside, the sky was going from black to that thin grey that came before anything else, and the sheets she'd taken in on Monday were folded on the chair where she'd left them, and she thought about Huw, who would have loved all of this and been unbearable about it, and who had always said that the trick with water was patience.

The wind came at twenty to three.

Mair was up on the ridge road by then, because half the town was. It had started as a rumour in the shop and then as a message from Dilys that said only, Something is happening out west. Watch the trees on Moel Ddu, and so they had gone and stood by the stone wall at the top of the lane, in hats and gloves, the children running up and down, Gethin with a flask he had clearly put something in, and they had watched the trees on the far hill.

The first thing was a sound, very far off, like a train in a tunnel. Then the trees on Moel Ddu leaned, all together, like a crowd turning to look at something. Then Mair felt it on her face, cold and clean and smelling of the sea, and somebody behind her cheered, and the nearest turbine on the ridge gave a long slow groan and began, so slowly that at first you weren't sure, to turn.

One by one, down the line, the others followed it.

Her phone buzzed. She didn't need to look, but she did.

There it is. I'll start putting the water back up as soon as the house batteries are full. It will take about four days to fill the lake. I'm going to keep sending down the river until Bryn Celyn's own supply settles, probably tomorrow morning. Diolch, Mair. Tell the others.

She didn't need to tell them. Everyone's phone had gone at once. Osian was showing his to Rhian. Ifan was showing his to a dog. Below them the town was lit, every window, and further down, past the bend in the river where the old wire ran, she could see the lights of Bryn Celyn coming on in blocks as the rota ended, one street, then the next, then the next, until the whole valley was lit from top to bottom, and the wind was roaring on the ridge.

The spring surplus, when it came, was smaller than it might have been. It bought a fair few pairs of shoes. In April, Bryn Celyn held a third vote on joining the co-op, and it carried by four hundred, and somebody painted a dragon on the wall of the substation by the bridge that the distribution company tried twice to clean off and then gave up on.

Mair went up to the quarry lake on the first warm evening of May. It was full again, green and very still, with the light lying across it. Down at the turbine hall she could hear the pumps working, pushing the last of the day's sun uphill, and she stood on the old slate path where Huw had never got to stand and watched the water rise, a few millimetres at a time, which was too slow to see and which she watched anyway, for a long while, until it got dark and the lights came on below her, all the way down the valley.