The Language of Stones

by Robert Carter

  He muttered words in the true tongue, then said to those who crowded anxiously around, ‘Fetch me hot water. And give your liege lord air!’

  But still the knights and nobles pushed in close with apprehensive faces, though Will saw they were more concerned for their privileges and positions than for the life of their king. Gwydion swept them angrily back to their benches and cleared a space for himself.

  ‘Come here, bag-carrier!’ he called out, and cast about for Will. ‘Where’s my apprentice boy?’

  But as Will got up beside him he saw how Duke Edgar whispered furiously with his son, then sent a servant away on an errand.

  The queen stood close by, her hands white and wringing one another. ‘He must not die yet,’ she repeated over and again, as if saying it would make it so. Will noticed how her tight red gown bulged in the middle – and suddenly it dawned on him that she was with child.

  Gwydion worked purposefully on the unconscious king, whispering spells and making signs and sigils above the royal brow. He dissolved a pink powder into a bowl of water that was brought to him. It smelled of strawberries, and Will could almost feel the wholesomeness of it rising through the air. The king’s shirt was opened and his throat, chest and belly washed.

  At last Gwydion raised his head and drew Will towards him as he addressed the hall. ‘I have completed my work here. There is nothing else that can be done for him save to make him comfortable, which I am sure the queen will see to after her fashion. His recovery will begin as soon as he leaves this place. But it will be slow, for his body has been poisoned and his will-power is even now being sapped away by—’

  His words were drowned by the gasps that came from those who thought they had heard an accusation.

  ‘Poisoned!’

  The duke, whose page had secretly brought his broadsword, exploded in wrath. He had made his calculation. He had decided that, now the king’s life was no longer in danger, there should be a reckoning. He launched out his sword and sprang at the wizard all in one movement.

  But Gwydion was ready. He pulled out a small white object that hung at his neck, and mouthed a powerful word, enfolding Will in his mouse-brown cloak at the same time.

  The heavy hand-and-a-half blade tore through the air.

  ‘Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh!’

  Will howled in horror as the sword sliced down through his own body from shoulder to hip, and rang sparking on the chequered stone floor. Then everything went black.

  CHAPTER NINE

  A BARROW ON THE BLESSED ISLE

  When Gwydion swept his cloak away, Will saw he was clinging to a jagged ledge in what seemed to be a blasting gale. The wind was cool and fresh and full of moisture, and there was bright sunshine all around him. A wall of grey rock pressed hard against his cheek, but he knew without looking down that he was poised over a long and precipitous drop.

  That knowledge alone almost made him fall, for he had more than a little terror of heights.

  All round he heard echoing screams and he tried to turn.

  ‘Easy, there!’ Gwydion gripped his shoulder hard and drew him in a little from the edge. ‘Step towards me, Willand. Now the other foot. That’s good. Tread softly now.’

  The ledge was narrow and the fall deadly. But there was soft turf close by his hand, and the hope of safety. The wizard guided him upward and shoved him over the lip of grass, where he lay exhausted among the sun-warmed blades, tingling with gratitude and astonishment.

  The wind ruffled him. ‘What happened to us?’ he said after a moment. ‘Where are we?’

  ‘The edge of this hill is the edge of the world.’

  ‘But…how?’ He stood up and stared around. A few paces away there was a grassy rise, and below it a path, and woods beyond. But to windward there was – nothing. Nothing except sky and a grassy brink where the land fell straight down into – what?

  ‘They are the rocks where the song of the drowned breaks forever upon the shore,’ Gwydion said, breathing deep. ‘This is the sea, Willand. The same glittering silver band that you saw from the heights above Sarum. We are at the uttermost end of the land here.’

  Will continued to stare out into the emptiness, until suddenly a great grey-and-white stormbird with a yellow bill sliced up from below the cliff like a sword stroke. It screamed at him and he flinched.

  ‘She will not hurt you. She is the faoilenn,’ Gwydion said, laughing. ‘The bird of joy and hospitality. She makes her home here and comes only to see who approaches her nest. Have you never seen a sea gull before? But of course you will not have done. Yet you should thank her for one of her kind has just saved your life.’

  But it was not the bird that had made Will start, so much as the memory of the duke’s blade. He was so certain that Duke Edgar’s sword had passed through him that he dared not move in case he fell into two parts. To drain away the fear he looked out at the purifying sea. Far below, a crawling carpet of dark blue stretched away as far as his eyes could see into the distance. A swell, born somewhere in the Great Sea, rose and fell, crashing wave upon wave upon the adamant shore. With the sun on his face and the wind’s freshness carrying tears from the corners of his eyes, he felt lifted up. The sea! There was just so much of it!

  ‘Behold the Western Deeps!’ Gwydion said. ‘This is what was called in the true tongue the Fairgge. The word is still used in the North to mean “the ocean in storm”. It is a marvellous sight indeed! Do not fall down there, now. For there will be no getting you up from the rocks if you go over. I am quite spent for the moment.’

  At last Will sat down, and asked, ‘How did we get here?’

  ‘This is the reason.’ Gwydion kissed the bird’s skull that hung at his breast. ‘Come sit with me upon the barrow while I receive that which the earth would offer me, and I will tell you how this bird’s skull has kept us whole.’

  They went to sit on the small hill, where the turf was fine and green and the remains of pink flowers stood browning on their stalks. Back from the edge there was not quite so much wind, and Will listened with amazement at what the wizard told him about how he had prepared a vanishing-spell upon the bird’s skull some seasons ago in this very place.

  ‘But how has it become daytime?’ he asked suddenly. ‘At the royal lodge a moment ago, night was falling, yet by the sun—’

  ‘If you change place, then you must also change time. It works that way, for the one is connected to the other – and contrariwise – if you see what I mean.’

  Will’s eyes opened wide at the idea that time had jumped. ‘I don’t think I do.’

  ‘Well, worry about it when you have a quiet moment to yourself, and perhaps you will see how it goes. It is now the equinox – or as you would say, the twenty-first day of September.’

  Will blinked. ‘But that means you’ve robbed us of six weeks! Are we ever to get them back?’

  ‘You will,’ Gwydion said. ‘But not until the end of your life.’

  ‘Master Gwydion, I meant the war? What about that? Can we afford to lose so much time?’

  ‘We would have lost a great deal more had it not been for the vanishing-spell. Nor was it so small an undertaking – such a spell is never used casually, for its outcome is never quite sure. And only one may be prepared at a time. We have travelled a long way, for this is the westernmost point of land in the world.’

  ‘In the whole world?’ Will repeated, thinking over what must have been the result if the range of the spell had been just a fraction longer. ‘Then we must have come to the Blessed Isle! Who would have thought I would ever come here, and in such a fashion?’

  ‘And how do you like it here?’

  ‘Tilwin told me it was very…green. And so it is.’

  Gwydion looked to him sharply. ‘But do you feel anything?’

  ‘Feel anything?’

  ‘How do you like the taste of a sea breeze? Do you feel it filling you with the stuff of life?’

  Will breathed deep until he was quite dizzy, then he said, ‘How did
that spell bring us here?’

  Gwydion lifted up the bird’s skull he wore. ‘I wove the spell’s trigger upon this. You are right to think that a vanishing-spell must have a destination. They are usually woven upon a spell of possession, therefore I designed it to bring me back from where I invoked it to the place where the hand of man first touched the trigger upon which it was woven. A vanishing-spell, once woven, waits to be sprung at time of need. Once a single subtle word is landed upon the trigger, the spell vanishes everything alive within its compass!’ Will blinked as Gwydion snapped fingers in his face. ‘Vanishing-spells are useful for they are paid for ahead of time, so to speak. They are a power stored and set. Such has been the danger of this summer’s mission that I have been ready to fly here like a bolt from a crossbow for over a year now. Yet at Clarendon Lodge even this stalwart piece of magic almost failed to save us, for we were standing in a finely wrought trap. So fine that I did not at first perceive it, yet in the end it was all I could do to pull the trigger that released us.’

  Will stretched himself. ‘It’s a pity you didn’t pull the trigger a bit sooner. That sword scared me half to death and back.’

  ‘It is the back that matters most. But I had little choice. That hall was wrapped tight, and thick with spells! All those antlers – and every point of them glowing with dirty magic. Could you feel anything in your feet? I could not. There was nothing crackling in the floor. Dead marble is the worst kind of hewn stone, Willand. It is not like having live rock underfoot. There was precious little for me to draw upon. No wonder they meet in that place to plot their schemes. And no wonder King Hal fell into a swoon under the pressures stored up there. Have I not said before that the king has a sensitive spirit?’

  ‘Is that why King Hal’s nose bled?’ Will asked, thinking suddenly of the hooded figure that had shimmered into being behind the royal chair. ‘Dirty magic? You mean like Maskull’s magic?’

  Gwydion looked to him suddenly. ‘Why do you speak that name, I wonder? Maskull was certainly at Clarendon some little time before us. I am troubled to think that our moves might have been so closely anticipated by him.’

  ‘And perhaps your deceptions too?’ Will said, watching the slender thread of his own safety fraying to almost nothing.

  The wizard got up and planted his feet firmly in the turf. ‘Willand, I’m going to explain to you what I did not have the chance to explain to the king. Pay attention to me, for it is important you understand it well. You have already heard me speak of the fae folk, have you not?’

  Will nodded. ‘Yes, Master Gwydion.’

  ‘Then you will know that the fae were an ancient race who once had the stewardship of the world. They matured their worldly wisdom over many hundreds of centuries, and so came to understand much that was true. They were the keepers of the wild, the ones who planted the first forests of birch and pine in the Isles, seeding trees ever further north as the ice melted before the power of their earth magic. After their victory over the cold and at the ending of the Long Night, they began to plant groves of oak and lime, hazel and alder, but by the time the First Men came, their stewardship was already coming to a close.

  ‘By then their knowledge was at its peak, and their greatest achievement was the nine ligns of the lorc that channelled enriching earth power to all parts of the Isles. But there was a darker side to the skills of the fae. They found that all things in the world might be thought of as vessels that contained two contrary kinds of spirit – “bliss” and “bale” as we call them in dealings magical, though you may wish to think of them as “kindness” and “harm”. Everything that exists in the world – every rock, every blade of grass, even the air – contains nearly equal measures of each kind of spirit, churning and boiling constantly together. But in the end, the fae found a way to part these spirits one from the other and use them separately.’

  ‘How did they do that?’ Will asked, awed by the idea.

  ‘By their magic.’ The wizard stopped walking up and down, and spread his hands. ‘The arts of the fae were so profound in the end that they could stand two stones beside one another and shift all the bliss into one, and all the bale into the other. And in this way, one stone became a vessel of refined, unblemished kindness, and the other one of pure, unrestrained harm.’

  Will chewed his lip. ‘I think I begin to see. You’re speaking of the battlestones.’

  ‘Indeed I am, Willand.’

  ‘And it’s the harm in the stones that would make all the suffering happen.’

  ‘Correct again.’

  Will thought about that in the light of what he already knew. ‘Can’t it be brought out a bit at a time and set to the four winds?’

  ‘Not without cost. Think of the harm that resides in a cup of poison. If someone drank that cup, then he would die. And if the cup were passed between two people then perhaps neither would die, but both would suffer serious illness. But if the cup were to be passed from mouth to mouth around a whole feast, five dozen folk might suffer the bellyache.’

  ‘So if the harm that was inside a battlestone were let out all in a rush, there would be a battle.’

  ‘And should a battlestone’s harm be got out and dispersed into the world today, then tomorrow there would be many breakages and falls, lost coins and spilled milk. Do you see? All the men in the Realm would wake up a little bit weaker, and all the women of the Realm would turn a shade uglier.’

  ‘Yet that seems a cheap price to pay when set against a war.’

  ‘Perhaps it may come to that in the end. But do you see the vastness of the idea? Huge powers of destruction and preservation were brought into being when these stones were wrought. At first the harmful stones were kept closely paired with their sisters and housed together, each pair within a roofed chamber. How many pairs there were, I do not know, but their barrows were said to lie scattered throughout the North and West. Some are known to me, for three great ones have survived almost whole. One is at Maeris Howel on the Isle of Orcsay, which lies beyond the northernmost coast of Albanay. Another is within the Grange of Buyenn, here in the Blessed Isle.’

  ‘And the other?’

  ‘The other?’ Gwydion looked him over. ‘You cannot guess?’

  ‘Should I be able to?’ The moment grew awkward. ‘Should I know, Master Gwydion?’

  ‘Perhaps you should, for you are sitting upon it!’

  Will marvelled. ‘You mean this little hill?’

  ‘Do you feel nothing at all?’ the wizard advanced on him, his exasperation showing now. ‘The Black Book says that the barrows were chosen most carefully. They stand at important places, where powerful earth streams come together. Stand up! Can you feel no tingling in your toes?’

  Will got up. He rubbed his feet back and forth across the turf, then shrugged. ‘It feels to me like…grass.’

  ‘But these barrows were given to the First Men. They have been known in later times only to the druida, the wisest of the men of a later age. There can be no mistake! Try again!’

  Will looked down at his feet uneasily. He hardly knew what was being asked of him. ‘I don’t know what else to do, Master Gwydion.’

  The wizard sat down heavily. ‘Oh, never mind,’ he said, waving away Will’s concern. ‘Perhaps I have been wrong about you, after all.’

  Will lingered, anxious now. ‘Master Gwydion, have I displeased you?’

  ‘Oh, Willand, sit down. The fault is not yours. There is no fool like an old fool, and of all the old fools the worst is the one who wants to believe.’

  Gwydion’s gloom had settled in for the rest of the afternoon. He sat in silence on the barrow and Will let him be, thinking that the dirty magic of Clarendon Lodge had perhaps sapped more of the wizard’s strength than he had imagined.

  Yet it seemed to Will that Gwydion was also wrestling with some great disappointment and trying to adjust his plans to take account of it. But he decided not to ask for he thought that the disappointment might concern him and if it did, there was no sense
in stirring it up.

  After a while the wizard gave up his brooding and returned. He seemed to have cheered up and he began to speak of the ages that had passed since the time of the ice, how when the ice had withdrawn the Drowned Lands had become ocean and the Isle of Albion had been left. Then he began to tell of the Age of Trees, and the time of the First Men since when a dozen-dozen times seven-dozen years had passed. And this time Will found that his mind did not wander from the wizard’s words, and it seemed that there truly was something special in the air of the Blessed Isle for when the stories of elder days were told they were made more real.

  And so Will learned about the departure of the fae, and of the three hundred generations of First Men who dwelt peaceably in the Isles and lived according to the ways of the fae.

  ‘But then, three and a half thousand years ago the world changed,’ Gwydion said, his eyes now filled with fading light. ‘The Age of Trees came to an end, and there began the Age of Giants, when there were no men in the Isles. And that Age, which was a time of desolation, lasted for a thousand years. Then began the third Age, which was called the Age of Iron, when the hero-king Brea came and defeated the giants and proclaimed the Realm, and there were men in the Isles once more.

  ‘Ah, those were high days, Willand, but by then the sorcery that had arisen in the East was driving westward vast migrations of folk, and the fae’s gift to the First Men began to stir.’

  ‘The battlestones?’ Will asked. ‘But why?’

  ‘Thousands of years before, while the fae were still living in the world of light and air, the barrows of the North and West were opened and every stone, harmful and kind, was brought forth. Each pair was sent over to its own special place of strong flow along the lorc. No battlestone could be sent alone, for without its sister in attendance it would have been a most dangerous cargo. On its own each harmful stone would have attracted strife like a lodestone attracts flecks of iron. Turmoil would have been summoned, for the stones have the power to affect the minds of those who are drawn to them. But the fae said that once these harmful stones were set like coffins into their graves in the lorc and the array tuned and shaped by the power that flows there – ah! – then they would become a powerful guardian force.’