The Language of Stones

by Robert Carter

  They found that the lign upon which the battlestone of Aston Oddingley stood ran broadly west to east. For the next few days it swelled strongly, and they were able to follow it westward. Then they lost it and wandered aimlessly northward for ten leagues, but as they crossed a great river called the Trennet and so entered the Earldom of Staffe, the moon rose and Will began to feel something stirring again.

  He knew at once what it was, and that this lign was different to the one they had been following previously. That was hard to explain. ‘They’re not as different as the tastes of cider and ale, but still quite different – sort of like the scents of two different flowers, if you see what I mean.’

  ‘If I could see what you meant,’ Gwydion said, ‘I would be a far wiser man.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, grinning, ‘just as you wanted Duke Richard to have faith in you, so you’ll have to have faith in me.’

  And Gwydion laughed at that. ‘Well said!’

  At last, with the help of the full moon they came upon what Will said was sure to be another battlestone. It was half buried in the ground near a bend in the River Churnet.

  The folk of the earldoms of Staffe and Warrewyk were, so Gwydion said, among the wisest people in the Realm. The local people of Cheddle would not go near the place where the stone stood, which was on the far side of a leek field. They called it the ‘Plaguestone’, and said there was a story that whomsoever touched it would fall ill and die before the next full moon.

  ‘I have been to this spot many times, and I have known of this stone for many generations,’ Gwydion said. ‘But there are tens of thousands of sarsens scattered throughout the Realm, and a large proportion of them are either of ill repute or actually show a malign nature. So this one was a battlestone, eh? How fortunate you are here this time to show me.’

  Something about the wizard’s words sounded sarcastic, even sinister. The scent of wild garlic was on the air. Will’s skin crawled at the sight of the stone. When Gwydion set him to scrying the land about he found four paths of influence, two flowing inwards and two out. Again, he could sense differences between them.

  ‘Ah,’ Gwydion said, bending to examine the small wildflowers that grew nearby. ‘It must be because two ligns cross here.’

  ‘The one that passes north-west to south-east is the stronger,’ Will said as the hazel wand twitched suddenly.

  ‘There! That must be the lign that was called in the Black Book “Mulart”, after the elder tree. The other will be “Bethe”, named for the birch.’

  ‘The ligns have names?’ Will muttered. ‘You didn’t tell me. You keep too much from me.’

  Gwydion’s chin jutted. ‘Do I, indeed? Then let me tell you now. The lorc consists of nine great ligns. They were called of old: Eburos, Caorthan, Indonen, Tanne, Collen, Celin, Mulart, Heligan and Bethe. Is that enough for your ill temper to bite on for the time being?’

  ‘If you know so much, why can’t you find them yourself?’

  ‘I have told you before, the knowledge of where each lign runs has long been lost. Pay attention! We must approach the stone.’

  ‘I don’t want to go near it,’ Will said. A sudden obstinate loathing filled his mind. ‘I think you’ve secretly found the Black Book and don’t want to tell me about it!’

  When the wizard turned to him he was smiling and pointing like a mischievous demon. ‘You’re betrayed!’ he said, crooking a sorcerer’s finger. ‘One shall be made two! You’re going to die!’

  A vivid picture leapt into Will’s mind of a portcullis running down and cutting him in two. His fragile courage snapped and he bolted.

  When Gwydion caught up with him he was sitting on the grass with his head in his hands. ‘Willand, Willand…’

  He was shaking. ‘Go away!’

  ‘Speak to me.’

  ‘Why did you do that?’

  ‘What did I do?’

  ‘Say that I was betrayed! That one would be made two and I would die!’

  ‘I never said you were betrayed, or that you would die. You must have imagined it.’

  Will looked up, angry. ‘I thought you were Maskull!’

  ‘Maskull?’

  ‘He’s a sorcerer, isn’t he? He might have taken your place last night while you slept. It’s all right for you, you’re a wizard. Your spirit is in an egg in the Far North. Nothing can harm you!’

  ‘If you think I am immune from harm, then think again. I have told you more than once that the power within a battlestone is easily sufficient to destroy me. I do not approach these stones lightly, and neither should—’ Gwydion stopped suddenly and threw up his hands. ‘Oh, listen to the pair of us! We are at each other’s throats like Nag and Blaggard. Now, why do you think that is?’

  Will made a tremendous effort to clear his mind. ‘It’s…it’s the stone.’

  ‘Shall we start again, from the beginning?’

  Will dragged himself to his feet, forced his mind to open a crack. A tiny sliver of dread entered and sparkled inside his skull, but he ruthlessly snuffed it out and forced his feet onward. As they neared the brooding stone the sun went behind a cloud and the ache in his belly deepened.

  The stone was not very big – two strong men might just be able to lift it once it was dug out. But it was lying at a sickening angle to the ground, like a broken leg, like a ship sinking in the sea, like the tower of a slighted castle. Perhaps someone had tried to pull it up before, but had been beaten back. Will gritted his teeth and forced another forward pace out of his unwilling legs.

  ‘Do not touch it!’

  Then, against his own advice, the wizard advanced upon the stone and laid a palm flat against the side. The words he muttered were in the true tongue: ‘Acil na dorcais an gealach agish greane…’

  Gwydion was demanding an answer and listening for the reply, then he said, ‘Willand, what do you make of it?’

  Will stared at the warty surface. As he opened his mind a little more his nostrils filled with the stench of infection, and his belly writhed as if it was full of worms. The horror of the exposure made him retch. Near the stone the taste of the two ligns was powerfully combined into a cloying bitterness that filled his mouth and made him spit.

  ‘It’s not a stone of the kind we seek,’ he said, wiping his mouth. ‘This is one of the lesser sort.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And there’s no verse.’ Will gasped as another sick wave rose inside him. ‘Only a letter carved into its end.’

  ‘Which letter?’ Gwydion said, then he looked for himself. ‘Duirre – oak.’

  ‘So. No verse. No clue.’

  ‘While filled with malice these stones give only such clues as please them! Perhaps a draining is needed to force more out!’

  Will’s eyes began to sting. He blinked and bloody tears came. Gwydion seized him and led him away. He limped for a hundred and one crippled paces, then fell down.

  ‘It’s over,’ the wizard said. ‘You’ve done all that was asked. Rest now.’

  Slowly, the revulsion ebbed and Will began to recover his senses. He sat on the damp grass feeling his heart beating out a stumbling rhythm. After a while it slipped back into its usual regularity.

  ‘This Plaguestone appears to be one that is spoken of in the Black Book as the second most powerful of the lesserranking stones. Important but not, alas, what I had hoped to find.’

  Will lay propped on his elbow. He did not want to consider the Doomstone. This lesser stone seemed vile enough. He said with foreboding, ‘The question is, now we’ve found it, what do you want to do with it?’

  ‘This time we must raise it.’

  Will groaned. ‘It’s been here as long as any of them. Why raise this one and not the other? Surely another year or two—’

  ‘I think we should not leave this stone here.’

  ‘You can’t mean you want to try draining it?’

  ‘Oh, that would be far too dangerous. And unnecessary. But we should move it. If the lo
rc is becoming active, the good folk of Cheddle and all the other towns and villages nearby might be drawn here and hurt.’

  ‘Now tell me the real reason.’

  Gwydion threw down his staff. ‘I have reason to believe that taking a guide-stone out of the lorc might delay the awakening of the rest.’

  ‘And where will you take it? Where would it be safe? You bound the Dragon Stone with spells, but it has seeped a lot of harm.’

  The wizard looked sharply to him, then bit a knuckle. ‘There may be a place. Stay here while I go to spellbind the stone.’

  After Gwydion had danced out his magic, they went to borrow a cart and ropes and other tools of work. They lifted the Plaguestone just as they had the Dragon Stone, and set about driving it northwards. Will spat again, unable to rid his mouth of a foul taste, unable either to shake from his mind the image of the blemished, toad-like skin of the stone. ‘Would it really have killed me if I’d touched it?’

  ‘Perhaps not right away,’ Gwydion said with a wry smile. ‘But you can always try it and see.’

  He asked what kind of castle they were going to this time, and what guardian might have the strength to resist the stone’s whisperings. But Gwydion would not say. Instead, he distracted Will with tales about what life was like atTrinovant. He spoke of the Great Spire and the White Hall, and the White Tower where the kings of the Realm kept a menagerie and how there was a huge ice-bear kept on a long chain that walked out every summer day into the River Iesis to catch trout and salmon fish for its dinner.

  At length they came into a wild and unkempt land, and Will knew they must be nearing their destination. They had come many leagues and he felt far away and under threat again. He supposed that was the stone’s defences eating at him, but still he could not avoid looking round at the wasteland and suppressing a shudder.

  ‘Where are we?’

  ‘Be cheerful,’ Gwydion said encouragingly. ‘You are quite safe in this place. No one dares to come here.’

  Will looked around all the more. ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because a leper lives here.’

  ‘A leper?’

  ‘Don’t look so ill at ease. He is a leper no more. He is a man well known to me, for it was I who halted the serpigo that ruined his flesh. Once he was a most accomplished mason.’

  ‘What did he build?’

  ‘All his life he worked on raising new towers and soaring spires for the Sightless Ones. But in his fortieth year he began to lose the feeling in his fingers. One day he dropped his hammer and it narrowly missed hitting one of the chapter house Elders. After that, the Fellowship found him out and expelled him from their works. He was too proud to beg for charity through the bars of a lazar house. Instead, he was brought to a quiet place to dwell alone, a place close to the village of his birth.’

  ‘Here?’

  Gwydion indicated the rocky cliff they were nearing. ‘Anstin the Leper lives alone in yonder cave. I halted his ailment, but no spell of mine could restore the damage that had already destroyed much of his hands and face. I could do nothing about that, for it had come to him during the days of his service to the Sightless Ones and had arisen out of Anstin’s own troubled heart.’

  Will stared around at the bleakness of the heath with its wide tracts of heather and scrub, and, here and there, rocky outcrops. ‘How does he live out here?’

  ‘This is a disused quarry. Anstin’s trade-tools are fitted to leathers which are bound to his stumps. He ekes out a living sculpting figures from the stone that lies around him. A Sister leaves food and drink close by this spot every week and takes away what finished work he leaves for her, but she never looks upon him.’

  ‘That’s sad.’

  ‘I think there is no better place for the Plaguestone to rest than in Anstin’s cave, for he will not touch it himself, and no one else dares to come here. The remedy is not perfect, but it will have to serve until I can find its sister-stone and bring it here.’

  ‘But you haven’t even brought the Dragon Stone’s sister yet,’ Will said, looking sidelong. ‘I thought that was one of the things you were supposed to do when you went away from Foderingham.’

  ‘There were many matters more urgent than the Dragon Stone, which is, despite your fears, far safer in its bindings than it was while at liberty.’

  Will cast another glance at the Plaguestone, wondering if the wizard’s unwillingness to entertain obvious measures was any of its malicious doing. ‘What would happen if you tried to pair the wrong stones?’

  ‘I fear that would be my final mistake.’

  The creaking cart came to a halt and Will began to hear the slow clinking of a mason’s chisel. A faint smell of corrupted flesh lay on the air. It caused Will to turn suddenly and look at the Plaguestone again.

  Gwydion said, ‘It would be better if you climbed down and waited here.’

  He stood by the entrance to the quarry as Gwydion took the cart inside. The clinking that came from the wounded earth stopped. He sat down on a rock, brooding over what the wizard had said, standing guard over his thoughts as they turned to Anstin. It was a sad life that Gwydion had revealed, and Will wondered how many other private sadnesses were being silently suffered throughout the Realm, sadnesses that need never have been. If I was king, he thought, I’d proclaim a Day of Sadness when all such wounded folk would be able to walk together and let their hearts sing as one. That would be real kingship and better than all the greed and quarrelling.

  He steeled himself to look into the quarry and catch a glimpse of the form that no one dared look upon, but as he rounded the corner he was stopped by a sight so unexpected that his hands fell loosely to his sides, for flanking a cave mouth were two perfect naked human forms, both life-sized and carved with such grace and beauty that the breath caught in Will’s throat and tears came to his eyes.

  ‘A leper did that?’ he said. Then he remembered the rede that said, ‘True beauty most often has a spotted rind, yet is delicious fruit.’

  He replaited his braids as he waited, thinking about Willow and missing her more than ever. Then Gwydion came out and led the cart into the quarry to unload the stone. Seven flashes of blue light lit the rocks, lightning intense but soundless, then a more mellow feeling began to settle through the air and the sound of sobbing. When Gwydion reappeared they got back on the cart and they started out on the long journey back to Cheddle. The wizard said nothing about what had passed in Anstin’s cave, nor did Will have the courage to ask about it.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  AT THE NAVEL OF THE WORLD

  After returning the cart to Cheddle, Gwydion urged Will to pick up either the Bethe or Mulart ligns once more, but that was easier said than done. ‘Our lifting of the Plaguestone seems to have lessened the flows,’ Will told the wizard.

  ‘I may have forestalled the lorc,’ Gwydion said. ‘But I may also have made a rod for our backs.’

  ‘It surely feels as if we’ve sent the power deeper underground.’

  Will found that the strength of a given lign was never constant. It varied with the weather and with the quality and aspect of the ground. It also broadly rose and fell according to a daily rhythm and also a monthly one, and when all had been taken into consideration the hardest task remained to disentangle it from Will’s own varying moods. But whatever his mood, he searched endlessly, going sometimes northward and at other times to the south, and though he did notice a faint tingling in his arms or legs once or twice, following the feeling for more than a few dozen paces was always too difficult.

  One day as they reached the northern village of Stoneyfold, Gwydion’s patience ran thin. His staff went toc-toc-toc as he strode the woodland path. A pair of magpies sported in the branches ahead of them, showing great curiosity as to who might be passing through their wood. Spring was here and the days were growing lighter and warmer – and longer. The weather would soon be pleasant enough to let men fight a war. The wizard’s manner had been losing its cool disguise for some days, and after a d
ifficult morning with Will showing more than his usual indecision, Gwydion tried to hurry him along with too sharp a remark.

  ‘Master Gwydion, I’m doing my best!’ Will said, stopping. ‘With all that tapping of your staff I can’t concentrate. And I can’t get that maddening verse out of my head.’

  ‘What verse? Not a poetic word has passed my lips today!’

  ‘The verse on the Dragon Stone, I mean. It has a longstriding rhythm, sixteen beats, just as you walk, and it’s plaguing me.’

  ‘You have an ear for song. That is good, but I would rather you attended to the matter in hand.’

  ‘I can’t attend to anything. That rhythm just goes on and on, round and round inside my head until I’m dizzy from it!’

  ‘The music of the true tongue is powerful, I grant you. It sticks ideas inside the head better than the debased tongues of latter days. Though in translation the battlestone verses keep barely a shred of their original power…’ And then he sang,

  ‘Northern King’s bewitched son,

  Queen of the Moon in her father’s field.

  Dragon of Darkness, awaken and slay!

  Lonely Stone take war away!’

  ‘What can it mean?’ Will asked again, wearied and frustrated. He spoke aloud the cross-reading.

  ‘King and Queen with Dragon Stone.

  Bewitched by the moon, in darkness alone.

  In northern field shall wake no more.

  Son and father, killed by war.’

  ‘That reading would seem to foretell the deaths in battle of King Hal and his son, Master Gwydion. But that surely cannot be for some years yet for the child is only just grown from being a suckling infant.’

  ‘On the other hand,’ the wizard said, ‘it could refer to another king.’

  ‘What other king?’

  ‘Not the one who was crowned, but the one who by the strict laws of blood should have been.’

  Will gasped, for he had not anticipated the possibility. ‘You mean, Richard of Ebor…and Edward.’