The Language of Stones

by Robert Carter

  When he looked upon Willow’s grief, he saw that the harm of war came to many more than those who took hurts upon the field, for as Gwydion had once said in his wisdom, the acts that men do, be they kind or otherwise, spread out like rings across the flat of a pond until all the folk in the world are touched by an echo of delight or despair.

  Every day on the journey home Will did as Gwydion had bidden him. He read from his little book, though it never seemed to grow any bigger as he had expected it would. Each time after he had read it he found himself thinking about the battlestones that yet lay undiscovered, and what Gwydion had said about the lorc not being dead despite its rottenest tooth having been pulled. Will thought of the great pond of fate too, and saw just how close Maskull had come to casting a great stone into the waters of the world and making it impossible for them ever to find their proper level again.

  What had truly happened to Maskull? For the sorcerer could not be dead, and it seemed from what Gwydion had said that he had been banished rather than beaten. When Will thought about the sorcerer, his last words came like hornets to plague him.

  ‘“I made you, I can just as easily unmake you.” What did he mean by that?’ he asked the sky.

  But the sky would give no answer.

  On the morning of the third day they rode up over the Tops and came to a place from which Will could see the Giant’s Ring. His jaw set as he came upon the crooked thumb of the King’s Stone and saw below it the ruin of the battlestone, still lying where it had been shattered – one large piece and a dozen smaller. He rode a little way down the slope towards the huddle of pock-marked stones that were all that remained of the tomb of Queen Orba. Avon would not go near the scorched earth around it, and so Will led him away again, and when they reached the sheep track he took out his little book and opened it with due ceremony.

  As he began to read the words that appeared, they lifted a corner of the cloaking-spell and the woods at the top of the Vale came mistily into plain sight. He jumped up on Avon’s back, and pulled Willow up behind, then they galloped away a little way eastward again. It was not long before he saw Nether Norton laid out prettily below. Swallows called to them from their looping flights overhead, and Will felt a wonderful tingle in his bones. Then they dipped down into the Vale and Willow marvelled at how the briars and brambles parted to let them pass.

  The path led them down through Foxberry Woods and by the beechwoods of Overmast and past Gundal’s cottage. It seemed to be a different world here, warmer and greener underfoot, and shining with a mellow light. And there was a special joy in Will’s heart, a lightness, so that everywhere he looked he was reminded of happy times that he had half forgotten. The way wound down between soaring beech trees, grey and smooth of bark and shady, and as they approached the solitary dwelling many tame white doves came to meet them, and one landed on Will’s shoulder.

  A dog barked as they approached the house.

  ‘Who’s there?’ Ysenleda, widow of Gundal, called.

  ‘Friends,’ Will said, though she looked at them as if they were not. ‘Do you not know me, Ysenleda? For, by the sun and the moon, I know you very well!’

  She peered closer, then burst into laughter. ‘Why, Willand! It’s you…but look how you’ve changed! Where’re your braids? And who’s this pretty girl with you upon such a great big horse? Come down, both of you, and share a cup of milk with me, if you will!’

  And they did, for they were parched and the Widow Ysenleda liked to speak of old times to any who would listen. For his part, Will wanted to know much that had passed in the two years he had been away, but at length he stood up from the widow’s table and told her they must take their leave, and in truth his excitement to be truly home had grown unendurable.

  They came into the village by a dusty way, Willow sitting on Avon now and Will leading him. Nothing had changed. Nether Norton was as it had always been.

  Will was recognized only with difficulty by the boys playing outside the Green Man. Their fathers and elder brothers stopped their chewing and stared at him. The sign above them was the same old weatherbeaten sign, but now the Green Man was smiling in a way he had never smiled before.

  ‘I’d like to go straight home,’ he whispered to Willow, ‘but I suppose we’ll get no further than this for the time being.’

  ‘Well, well, well! And if it ain’t Willand the Wanderer!’ said Baldgood, pointing up at him as if at a ghost. ‘Hey, Breg! Look who’s here! And with his hair cut short and the sproutings of a beard on his chin!’

  Bregowina put her head round the door. ‘Now there’s a sight I never thought to see!’

  Half a dozen Valesmen came out. They pulled Will into the Green Man and pressed a welcome cup of ale on him.

  ‘I’d hardly know you!’ said Baldulf, who was fatter and rosier-cheeked than ever.

  ‘Wybda told us all you was dead!’ said the landlord of the Green Man. ‘Says you come to a sticky end and was et by hobgoblins.’

  ‘If he was et by goblins,’ Baldgood said, ‘then they soon spat him out again.’

  ‘Oh, I never did say no such thing!’Wybda called from the back room. She was still embroidering. ‘What I said was: it wouldn’t surprise me if he had got himself done to death going off like he did.’

  ‘Ah, never mind old Wybda!’ said Baldulf, looking now at Willow. ‘But where’s your manners, Will?’

  He turned a little shyly. ‘This is a friend of mine. She goes by the name of Willow.’

  She smiled at them and they all nodded to her and confessed themselves very pleased to have met her. Then Baldgood fetched out mugs of foaming ale that were passed around, so the entire room could drink Will’s good health and give a welcome to his friend. But it was amazing to Willow that although the Valesmen were kind to her, and all seemed genuinely pleased to have Will back among them, nobody asked where he had been or what he had been doing, or even where Willow had come from.

  ‘It’s the cloaking-spell,’ he told her quietly. ‘I guess that if Gwydion hadn’t made Valesmen a little incurious about the outside world, they might all have wandered out of the Vale by now and never have been able to find their way back in again.’

  Word of his arrival spread quickly, for as he supped his ale, Will began to see familiar faces appearing at the door in ever greater numbers.

  ‘Now, then!’ he said, standing up when it seemed that half the village had arrived. ‘Everybody look at this! We’ve brought back a gift for you from the king himself!’

  Willow handed him the king’s charter and Will read the words off the paper with such expert smoothness that everyone ooh-ed and ahh-ed in wonder. Then they started to ask what it was that Will had actually told them.

  ‘It means that the king has promised that no more tithes are to be gathered from the Vale.’

  ‘No more tithes? For a whole year?’

  ‘This year. Next year. And forever.’

  There was surprise and delight and then cheering at that, and when Will turned, there at the back of the crowd were Eldmar and Breona. He rushed to them and they clasped one another wordlessly, their eyes filling with tears of joy.

  ‘Mother, Father,’ he said, taking Willow’s hand and bringing her forward. ‘There’s someone I’d like you to meet.’

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Nowhere in The Language of Stones is mention made of Britain or Ireland or any other familiar country, for these are places in our world. But the world in which Willand grew up is not wholly imagined; it bears a complex relationship to our own world in both space and time. There is correspondence between episodes in the book and events that took place in our own fifteenth century, between the various settings of the novel and locations scattered about Britain.

  Readers wishing to explore these settings might start in Oxfordshire, in that part which lies midway between Oxford and Stratford-upon-Avon. Nether Norton, and the rest of the Vale, seem to have their origins here. Dedicated beer drinkers will doubtless know the name ‘Hook Norton’,
but there are several other Nortons here.

  Not far away, the most easterly, and most delightful, of Britain’s neolithic stone rings is to be found near a road that runs between Little and Great Rollright. It might be said to be on ‘the Tops’ because it is locally the highest point of land. Associated with the ring is a crooked stone called the King’s Stone, though the king may not have been called Finglas, and also a ruined tomb, which may or may not have belonged to a queen called Orba.

  South of the putative Vale, run our rivers Windrush and Evenlode, passing the lordly estates of Cornbury and Blenheim. All near here was once dominated by the great royal forest ofWychwood, almost two hundred square miles of it. It was at Woodstock that King Henry I kept a menagerie of exotic animals, though there were never any unicorns in his collection. Memories of the forest still persist in the names of several of the villages that lie to the west. Through our Wychwood once ran the Roman road known as Akeman Street, part of which is still trod by walkers enjoying the Oxfordshire Way. Although there was a Lord Strange in fifteenth-century England, he did not live in Wychwood. Nothing now remains in our world of the place where Will’s Lord Strange kept his tower – nothing, that is, except a moat. Sadly, no sacred oak grove has been replanted near here, on the other hand all trace of arms production has ceased. A modern visitor who wants to see a tower like Lord Strange’s could do no better than to visit Castell Coch in the nation we call Wales or Cymru, and whose equivalent was known to Will as Cambray.

  The journey which brought Will and Gwydion to Clarendon would have taken them, in our world, across the River Thames at Radcot Bridge (where a fourteenthcentury battle was once fought) and through Uffington, famous for its White Horse. There really is a Dragon Hill below the scarp, and the Wormhill Bottom mentioned in passing lies on the Downs just up from Lambourn – which of course is still famous for its horses.

  Climbing up onto the Ridgeway near Wayland’s Smithy and turning first west and then south, a modern traveller might arrive eventually at Savernake Wood, near Marlborough. And from there it would be an easy matter to pick up the headwaters of the River Bourne, which runs more or less along the Wiltshire-Hampshire border and down towards Salisbury.

  The ruins of Celuai na Sencassimnh, also stand in our world, though ‘the meadows of the storytellers’ is today walked around by far more visitors than ever assembled on the quarter days among the stones of the Great Henge to listen to epic tales being told in the true tongue.

  The ruins of Old Sarum and Figsbury Ring still exist too, near modern Salisbury, as do traces of Clarendon Palace. This was the place where in our summer of 1453, King Henry VI of England went insane, and so precipitated events which would eventually culminate in the Wars of the Roses.

  Visitors to Ireland will find extraordinary neolithic treasures in abundance. It is tempting to believe the cliffs to which Will and Gwydion clung were the Cliffs of Moher in County Clare, sheer faces of rock which fall six hundred feet into the Atlantic, the brows of which afford the most astonishing sunsets on earth. However, it must be said that the barrow containing the Dragon Stone’s sister could just as easily be situated along the rugged coast of an alternative County Kerry, down by Cnoc Breanainn.

  A small boat sailing from a port on the south coast of Ireland – let us say Cobh – would probably try to catch the prevailing westerlies that whip up the grey waters of the Irish Sea. People dwelling on an island in that sea might just recognize the name of Gwydion’s birthplace, ‘Druidale’. But let us suppose that our small boat runs well south of the isle of ‘Ellan Vannin’ and sails eventually past the isle of Lundy and along the coast of South Wales into the estuary of the Severn. After passing Bristol and going under the two magnificent suspension bridges that now link England and Wales, if the tide was just so, our boat might be caught up by the Severn Bore and carried along for a while towards the city of Gloucester. However, a landfall on the eastern shore and a walk south into the hills could easily bring our traveller to near Uley and the famous long barrow known as Hetty Pegler’s Tump.

  Wandering north through our Cotswolds might put modern travellers on a line that coincided with Will’s and Gwydion’s journey. If so, it would parallel the Roman road known as the Fosse Way. They might pass across it eventually, and let their feet take them into Warwickshire, then westward across the northern extremities of Oxfordshire and into a region of Northamptonshire where the River Cherwell rises. Keen-eyed readers might even be able to discover the spot where the Dragon Stone once lay, though the names of the villages have become, in our world, a little worn down.

  Taking a path along an increasingly north-eastward track, following the River Nene as it flows towards the Wash, would bring the modern explorer first into what remains of the great Forest of Rockingham. To the east of Geddington, most famous for its Eleanor Cross, lies the village of Wadenhoe on the Nene. Five miles to the north of that lies Oundle and five miles north again, Fotheringhay. Today there is a pleasant village there, and an extraordinary church which seems far too grand for so modest a place. Nothing much guards the river crossing today, but those who trouble to look behind the farm buildings near the bridge are apt to discover the mound that is all that remains of a once magnificent castle.

  In our world, Fotheringhay Castle became famous as the fifteenth-century stronghold of Richard, Duke of York, and the birthplace of his son Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who later became King Richard III of England. In a later century Fotheringhay became sunk in infamy as a scene of judicial murder, for it was in the Great Hall there that brave Mary, Queen of Scots, had her head struck off. When her son, James VI of Scotland gained the English throne in the century that followed, he ordered the Great Hall and the fine octagonal keep next to it pulled down, and the rest of the castle utterly erased, so that now hardly a stone is left. There are few stones to see, but the mound survives and it is said that spearplume thistles may be found growing on the mound every summer and a ghostly form may be seen wandering the ruins when autumn fogs drift in from the Fens.

  Shropshire, on the Welsh borders, boasts another of Richard ofYork’s castles, that of Ludlow. It is a fine historic town, and substantial portions of its castle still stand. If you visit, you might like to look down the well, for it is one of the deepest castle wells in England. Will’s leaving of his Ludford, and subsequent journeyings with Gwydion, took him far and wide across ‘the Middle Shires’ and to many places that would appear to correspond to locations in our world. The Plaguestone’s ‘leek field’ gives a clue to the whereabouts of Anstin’s Cave, as does the name Cheddle.

  The ‘pretty villages along the River Rea’, where Will spent his fifteenth birthday, have now vanished under our Birmingham, but the nine hamlets whose names end in ‘stone’ still exist in various forms in our world and, all except Atherstone, cluster to the north of Market Bosworth in a small area just four miles by four.

  Young Shakespeare began his career as a dramatist by recounting ‘the Contention Betwixt the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster’, or as we would say, the Wars of the Roses. A look through Shakespeare’s King Henry VI – especially the third part – will probably reward readers with clues to the dramatis personae of the present book, and the keenest readers will spot other connections.

  Those familiar with the Bard may also nod at mention of the ‘district of Arden’. Our Wootton Wawen has a Black Bull, but it is debatable if ‘man-eating beasts of the air’ were ever bred there. England has no Aston Oddingley, nor any estate belonging to a Lord Clifton, but there is an Oddingley near Worcester, and there were two Lords Clifford, father and son, who made themselves infamous enough to be recorded by fifteenth-century chroniclers.

  When it comes to other lordly titles, there has never been a Duke of Mells in England, but there is a village called Mells – another of those places that seems to have a church far too grand for it. It is in Somerset, and in the churchyard there lies one of England’s greatest war poets. By the bye, Jack Horner of nursery rhyme f
ame is also connected with Mells.

  Arondiel’s gallop might have taken Will and Gwydion across Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire to the beacon that marks the beginning (or end) of the Ridgeway. They pass ‘Thring, Wing and Ivangham’ which echo the names of three manors which were said in an ancient rhyme to have been forfeited by a certain lord who once quarelled with the Black Prince. Sir Walter Scott used the latter name, in the form Ivanhoe. Today we can find three towns – Wingrave, Tring and Ivinghoe – in the vicinity of that chalk scarp.

  And so our present day traveller comes at last to Hertfordshire, and to the cathedral city of St Albans. The Romans called their own nearby city Verulamium, and it was at St Albans in May of 1455 that an army gathered around the person of King Henry VI, and another, commanded by the Duke of York and the Earl of Warwick, came to seek redress for perceived wrongs. If our traveller visits St Albans in the summer he may be fortunate enough to find the town’s old bell-tower open. It is sometimes possible to go up and stand on the roof as perhaps Maskull did upon a similar tower while battle raged below him. A visitor to the cathedral might try to find there a dark slab, ‘cracked clean in two’ that can be found raised up on a plinth in the south presbytery aisle, close to the shrine. Visitors to a greater cathedral in the north, where the archbishop is styled ‘Ebor’, will also find an interesting stone. This one is imprisoned down in the crypt and is called ‘the Doomstone’.