The duke’s army closes on Verlamion, which is strongly garrisoned by King Hal. As the two hosts come together, thousands of men clash in a terrifying death-struggle. Showers of deadly arrows darken the skies, and as soldier battles soldier in the market square, wizard battles sorcerer in a flame-fight that blasts across the rooftops in a blaze of fiery magic and counter magic.
Will is trapped among the savagery and bloodshed below. He knows he must reach the Doomstone and try to stop the battle, but the stone is somewhere inside the chapter house. Will claims the ‘sanctuary of the Fellowship’ and so gains entry. He fights his way through hundreds of blind, kneeling, enraptured Fellows before he locates the deadly stone under the Founder’s shrine. The power of the Doomstone is very strong, but Will remembers everything that Gwydion has taught him. He digs deep and finds the courage to do what he must – go down into the tomb to attack the battlestone directly.
As his spells are spoken out, the Doomstone fights back, but Will hangs on grimly. Appalling visions are cast into his mind, and it is only when he uses the leaping salmon talisman which Breona gave him that the stone submits. There is a blinding flash, and when the smoke clears he sees that the monstrous slab has been cracked in two!
Will emerges from the tomb, his head ringing. Outside, the roar of battle has ceased, brother has stopped killing brother, and war seems to have been averted. But there has been bloodshed – Duke Edgar, Baron Clifton and several of the other corrupt lords who have been controlling the king now lie dead. Others, including Queen Mag, have fled. As for Maskull, Will finds him atop the fire-blackened curfew tower where he has been conducting his own magical duel against Gwydion. When Will confronts him, Maskull recognizes him as the Child of Destiny, and prepares to kill him, saying, ‘I made you, I can just as easily unmake you.’ But as Maskull readies the killing stroke he is vanished away by a spell that Gwydion manages to land on him while his back is turned.
Now the battle is truly over. The king and Duke Richard jointly announce that they will ride to Trinovant together and put in place the foundations of good government.
Will is rewarded and says he wants nothing more than to return to his home village of Nether Norton with Willow, whose father has been killed in the fighting.
As they part, Gwydion gives Will a magic book, and bids him read from it often.
Will and Willow arrive home to general delight. Will tells his friends in the Vale that the king has freed them from the tithe and so they will never again have to hand over their livestock and grain to the sinister Sightless Ones. Then Will is reunited with his happy parents – after all they have not lost a son but gained a daughter – even so, there is a sense that things are not over quite yet.
More than four years have now passed since the fighting at Verlamion. We meet Will and Willow again in Nether Norton in the Vale at the Lammastide festival. It is the time of the first fruits and of harvest blessing and the joining of man and woman…
PART ONE
JEOPARDY’S DILEMMA
CHAPTER ONE
THE BLAZING
Flames leapt up from the fire, throwing long shadows across the green and dappling the cottages of Nether Norton with a mellow light. This year’s Blazing was a fine one. Tonight was what the wizard, Gwydion, called in the true tongue ‘Lughnasad’, the feast of Lugh, Lord of Light, the first day of autumn, when the first-cut sheaves of wheat were gathered in to the village and threshed with great ceremony. On Loaf Day, grain was ground, and loaves of Lammas bread toasted on long forks and eaten with fresh butter. On Loaf Day, Valesfolk thought of the good earth and what it gave them.
Today the weather had almost been as good as Lammas two years ago when Will had taken Willow’s hand and they had circled the fire together three times sunwise, and so given notice that henceforth they were to be regarded as husband and wife.
He put his arm around Willow’s shoulders as she cradled their sleeping daughter in her arms. It was a delight to see Bethe’s small head nestled in the crook of her mother’s elbow, her small hand resting on the blanket that covered her, and despite the dullness in the pit of his stomach, it felt good to be a husband and a father tonight. Life’s good here, he thought, so good it’s hard to see how it could be much better. If only that dull feeling would go away, tonight would be just about perfect.
But it would not go away – he knew that something was going to happen, that it was going to happen soon, and that it was not going to be anything pleasant. The foreboding had echoed in the marrow of his bones all day but, unlike a real echo, it had refused to die away. Which meant that it was a warning.
He brushed back the two thick braids of hair that hung at his left cheek and stared into the depths of the bonfire. Slowly he let his thoughts drift away from Nether Norton and slip into the fire-pictures that the flames made for him. He opened his mind and a dozen memories rushed upon him, memories of great days, terrible days, and worse nights. But the most insistent image was still of the moment when the sorcerer, Maskull, had raised him up in a blaze of fire above the stone circle called the Giant’s Ring. That night he had seen Gwydion blasted by Maskull’s magic, and afterwards, as Gwydion had tried to drain the harm from a battlestone, the future of the Realm had balanced on the edge of a knife…
It had been more than four years ago, but the dread he had felt on that night and the redeeming day that had followed remained alive in him. It always would.
‘Will?’ Willow asked, searching his face. ‘What are you thinking?’
He broached a smile. ‘Maybe I’ve taken a little too much to drink,’ he said and touched his wife’s hair. It was gold in the firelight and about as long as his own. He looked at her, then down at the child whose small hand had first clasped his finger just over a year ago. How she had begun to look like her mother.
‘Ah, but she’s a beautiful child!’ said old Baldgood the Brewster, his red face glowing from the day’s sunshine. He had begun to clear up and was carrying one end of a table back into the parlour of the Green Man. The other end of the table was carried by Baldram, one of Baldgood’s grown sons.
‘Seems like Bethe was born only yesterday,’ Will told the older man.
‘She’ll be a year and a quarter old tomorrow, won’t you, my lovely?’ Willow said dreamily.
‘Aye, and she’ll be grown up before you can say “Jack o’ Lantern”. Look at this big lumpkin of mine! Get a move on, Baldram my son, or we’ll be out here all night!’
‘My, but he’s a bossy old dad, ain’t he?’ Baldram said, grinning.
Will smiled back at the alehouse-keeper’s son as they disappeared into the Green Man. It was hard to imagine Baldram as a babe-in-arms – nowadays he could carry a barrel of ale under each arm all the way down to Pannage and still not break into a sweat.
‘Hey-ho, Will,’ one of the lads from Overmast said as he went by.
‘Hathra. How goes it?’
‘Very well. The hay’s in from Suckener’s Field and all’s ready for the morrow. Did you settle with Gunwold for them weaners?’
‘He offered me a dozen chickens each, but I beat him down to ten in the end. Seemed fairer.’
Hathra laughed. ‘Quite right, too!’
‘Show us a magic trick, Willand!’ one of the youngsters cried. It was Leomar, Leoftan the Smith’s boy, with three of his friends. He had eyes of piercing blue like his father and just as direct a manner.
Will asked for the ring from Leomar’s finger, but when the boy looked for it, it was not there. Then Will took a plum from the pouch at his own belt and offered it.
‘Go on. Bite into it. But be careful of the stone.’
The boy did as he was told and found his ring tight around the plumstone. He gasped. His friends wrinkled their noses and then laughed uncertainly.
‘How’dya do that?’ they asked.
‘It’s magic.’
‘No t’aint. It’s just conjuring!’
‘Away with you, now, and enjoy the Blazing!’ he said, ru
ffling the lad’s hair. ‘And you’re right – that was only conjuring. Real magic is not to be trifled with!’
Two more passers-by nodded their heads at Will, and he nodded back. The Vale was a place where everybody knew everybody else, and all were glad of that. Nobody from the outside ever came in, and nobody from the inside ever went out. Months and years passed by without anything out of the ordinary happening, and that was how everybody liked it. Everybody except Will.
Though the Valesmen did not know it, it was Gwydion who had made their lives run so quietly. Long ago he had cast a spell of concealment so that those passing by the Vale could not find it – and those living inside would never want to leave. The wizard had made it so that any man who wandered the path down from Nether Norton towards Great Norton would only get as far as Middle Norton before he found himself walking back into Nether Norton again. Only Tilwin the Tinker, knife-grinder and seller of necessaries, had ever come into the Vale from outside, but now even his visits had stopped. Apart from Tilwin, only the Sightless Ones, the ‘red hands’, with their withered eyes and love of gold, had ever had the knack of seeing through the cloak. But the Fellows were only interested in payment, and so long as the tithe carts were sent down to Middle Norton for collection they had always let the Valesmen be. Four years ago, Will’s service to King Hal in ending the battle at Verlamion had won him a secret royal warrant that paid Nether Norton’s tithe out of the king’s own coffers, so now the Vale was truly cut off.
And I’m the reason Gwydion’s kept us all hidden, Will thought uncomfortably as he stared again into the depths of the fire. He must believe the danger’s not yet fully passed. But with Maskull sent into exile and the Doomstone broken, is there still a need to hide us away?
Maskull’s defeat had given Gwydion the upper hand, but he had shown scant joy at his victory. He and Maskull had once been part of the Ogdoad, the council of nine earth guardians whose job it had been to steer the fate of the world along the true path. But then Maskull had given himself over to selfishness, and though a great betrayal had been prophesied all along, that had not made it any easier for Gwydion to accept.
Will sighed, roused himself from his thoughts and looked around at the familiar surroundings. It was strange – in all his months of wandering he had thought there was nothing better than home. And now he had a family of his own there was even more reason to love the way life was in the Vale. And yet…when a man had extraordinary adventures they changed him…
It’s easy for a man to go to war, he thought. But having seen it, can he so easily settle down behind a plough once more?
It hardly seemed so. Occasionally, a yearning would steal over Will’s heart. At such times he would go alone into the woods and practise with his quarterstaff until his body shone with sweat and his muscles ached. There was wanderlust in him, and at the root of it was a mess of unanswered questions.
He stirred himself and kissed Willow on the cheek. ‘Happy Lammas,’ he said.
‘And a happy Lammas to you too,’ she said and kissed him back. ‘I guess we’re just about finished with the Blazing. Looks like everyone’s had a good time.’
‘As usual.’
‘What about you?’
‘Me?’ he asked, his eyebrows lifting. ‘I enjoyed it.’
‘It looks like you did,’ she said, a strange little half-smile on her lips.
‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’
She fingered the manly braid that hung beside his ear. ‘I saw you looking into the bonfire just then. What were you thinking?’
‘I was thinking that only a fool would want to be anywhere else today.’
She smiled. ‘Truly?’
‘Truly.’
It was good to see everyone so happy. They had watched the lads and lasses circling the fire. They had listened to the vows that had brought the night’s celebration to a fitting close. Some had plighted their troths, and others had made final handfasting vows. Now couples were slipping off into the shadows, heading for home.
There was no doubt about it, since the ending of the tithe the Vale had prospered as never before. They had put up three new cottages in the summer. They had filled the new granary too, and all this from the working of less land. Now the surpluses were not being taken away to make others rich, the plenty was such that Valesmen’s families had already forgotten what it was to feel the pinch of hunger.
‘About time this little one was abed,’ Willow said.
‘Yes, it’s been a long day.’
They walked up the dark path to their cottage, his arm about her in the warm, calm night. In the paddock, Avon, the white warhorse that Duke Richard of Ebor had given him, moved like a ghost in the darkness. Away from the fire the stars glittered brightly – Brigita’s star, sinking now in the west; Arondiel rising in the east; and to the south Iolirn Fireunha, the Golden Eagle.
An owl called. Will remembered the Lammastide he had spent six years ago sitting with a wizard atop Dumhacan Nadir, the Dragon’s Mound, close by the turf-cut figure of an ancient white horse. Together they had watched a thousand stars and a hundred bonfires dying red across the Plains of Barklea.
He sighed again.
‘What’s that for?’ Willow asked.
He scrubbed fingers through his hair. ‘Oh…I was just thinking. You know – about old times. About Gwydion.’
It seemed a long time since Will and the wizard had last set eyes on one another. How good it would be to wander the ways as they had once done. To walk abroad again among summer hedgerows, enjoying the sun and the rain, or feeling the bite of an icy wind on their cheeks.
‘I wonder what he’s doing right now?’ Will muttered.
‘Unless I miss my guess, he’ll be striding the green hills of the Blessed Isle,’ Willow said. ‘Or sitting in a high tower somewhere out in the wilds of Albanay.’
Will’s eyes wandered the dark gulfs between the stars. ‘Hmmm. Probably.’
‘Wilds?’ he could almost hear Gwydion chuckle. ‘It is not wild here. See! These trees in a line show where a hedge once grew. And what of those ancient furrow marks? The Realm has been loved and tended for a hundred generations of men. It is almost, you might say, a garden.’
While Willow went indoors to put Bethe into her cradle, Will lingered in the yard at the back of their cottage. He could smell the herbs, all the green leaf he had grown in the good soil – plants ripe and ready to offer the sweetness of the earth’s bounty. The scents of the orchard were keen on the still air. He heard Avon whinny again, and tried to recall when he had noticed the elusive feeling in his belly before, but when he looked inside himself he was shocked.
‘A premonition about a premonition,’ he told himself wryly. ‘Now that would be something…’
Willow came out and said, ‘I’m glad we chose to call her Bethe. There’s strong magic in naming, for I can’t think now what else we could have called her.’
‘Bethe is the birch tree,’ he said. ‘“Beth”, first letter of the druid’s alphabet, and Bethe our firstborn.’
‘I like that.’
‘You know, the birch was the first tree to clothe these isles when the ice drew back into the north. Her white bark remembers the White Lady, she who was wise and first taught about births and beginnings, the one who some call the Lady Cerridwen. Our May Pole is always a birch, and Bethe was born on May Day, which is my birthday too. In the old tongue of the west “bith” means “being”. And “beitharn” in the true tongue means “the world”. Maybe that’s the reason I suggested the name and why you agreed – because our daughter means the world to us.’
Willow squeezed him close and laid her head against his breast. ‘There’s such a power of learning in that book of yours.’
She meant the magic book that Gwydion had given him that sad day at Verlamion. He said, ‘There’s much to read and more to know. It’s said that a country swain comes of age at thirteen years, that the son of a fighting lord may carry arms in battle at fifteen, and that
a king must reach eighteen years to rule by his word alone – but one who would learn magic may not be properly called wise until he has come to full manhood.’
Willow looked at him. ‘And how old’s that?’
He shook his head. ‘I don’t know. But as the saying has it: “The willow wand is slow to become an oaken staff.” And so it must be, for if I know anything at all it’s that there’s much more to be understood in the world than can ever be learned in one man’s lifetime.’
Now it was Willow’s turn to sigh. ‘Then tell me true: do you read that book every day in the hope that one day you’ll become a wizard too? Like Gwydion?’
He laughed. ‘No. That I can never be.’
‘Then why?’
‘Because Gwydion gave it to me and bade me read it. And I gave him my word that I would.’
She squeezed him again, but this time it was to stress her words. ‘Well, now, you’re going to promise me something, Willand Bookreader: that you won’t be burning any candle stubs over hard words tonight!’
He grinned. ‘Now that I’ll gladly promise!’
They held one another in the starlight for a moment. A shooting star flared brilliantly and briefly in the west, and then a coolness stirred among the leaves of the nearest apple trees. She looked up, and he felt her stiffen.
‘What is it?’
But there was no need for an answer, for there, high up over the Tops, an eerie purple glow had begun to bruise the sky.
‘Don’t look at it,’ she told him, turning away suddenly.
He felt his foreboding intensify. ‘It’s…it’s only the northern lights.’
‘I don’t care what it is…’ Her voice faded.
He stared at the flickering as it grew. ‘Gwydion once told me about the northern lights,’ he whispered, ‘but I’ve never seen them.’
The Giants' Dance Page 2
