The Giants' Dance

by Robert Carter

  The long dusk died slowly, bloodily, and with an accompaniment of complex birdsong to which Gwydion listened with care. Will drank in the full beauty of a sunset seen with an open horizon. It was a kind of beauty the Vale did not afford. Red and gold and pink and violet made the sky a vast, fiery furnace. It made him wonder about the Beyond, the realm of bright, burning nothingness that lay on the far side of the sky.

  As night deepened the brighter stars began to peep out and a profound peace came over the land. Will took up the scrier’s stance to prepare his mind. From small beginnings, almost unfelt and unseen, a powerful tension was revealed. In a little while the Indonen lign began to glisten in the earth like a silvery blade picked out by moonlight. It reminded Will of that first night he had followed a stranger out of the Vale, and the stranger had touched his eyes and lit the night all around with the silver-green glow of elflight.

  ‘Tell me what you see now,’ Gwydion said.

  ‘I see glimmerings very clearly,’ he whispered, his voice awe-filled. ‘Indonen runs from a point on the skyline near that elm tree: I judge it to be about halfway between east and north-east. It passes below the small hill over there to the south of where the moon is rising.’

  Gwydion’s eyes narrowed as he committed the track to memory. ‘What else?’

  Will gasped, hardly able to believe what he was seeing. ‘Yes! There’s another lign. I can see it crosses Indonen. Down there!’

  ‘Describe it to me.’

  ‘It seems much fainter. A darker, more turbulent flow. Perhaps…greener.’ He put his right arm out from his shoulder and sighted along it, though his eyes were now closed. ‘It comes from a place between west and north-west and runs over there to the south of Baneburgh.’

  ‘Is it Eburos?’ That was the lign on which the Giant’s Ring stood.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Very sure. Can’t you sense how different it is, Gwydion?’

  But the wizard just peered into the darkness near Tysoe like a look-out peering into a dense fog. A nightjar’s churring call came to them from far away. Gwydion had once taught him that hearing that sound meant the sun had been down for an hour. It was as good a clock as any. By now the moon was rising harvest gold.

  ‘It will set at the full at the moment of sunrise,’ Gwydion said. ‘I guess that is the reason the ligns are so visible to you.’

  ‘They’re very active,’ Will said, feeling the flow strongly now. ‘The power’s surging down below.’

  ‘I believe the second lign must be Caorthan – the lign of the rowan,’ Gwydion said.

  Will stared hard at the lign. It seemed to brighten even as he did so, spilling power into the swirling and spiralling earth streams that bordered it. Then Will said in wonderment, ‘Oh, Gwydion! There’s a richness to it!’

  The wizard came to him. ‘Then tell me what you feel.’

  ‘Two flows. Both rising. Both swelling with power. But something’s wrong. It should be beautiful. It should make me think of moonlight and waterfalls and great forests, but it doesn’t.’

  Suddenly there were colours swarming everywhere in Will’s mind, and a music that seemed to fill the sky. Then fire swept across the stars, a golden flame, licking and swirling and finally dying until all that was left was a depthless blue pricked by countless jewels of scattered light. And now above all rode the pain-bright whiteness of the moon, a perfect disc that blotted out the stars. His face upturned, Will bathed in the mystic shine. He lay down as the radiance pierced him, was transfixed by silver beams that nailed his flesh to the earth. And as he lay on his back he listened to the music that rose and thundered like the ocean, and filled everything under the sky. The hollows of his bones hummed, reverberating with the one great chord that connected him to everything and to everyone, so that he cried out in gladness to have so sudden and complete an understanding come to him.

  Then it was as if he had come awake from a good night’s sleep. He looked around and felt Gwydion’s hands firm on his shoulders, shaking him gently. He was sitting cross-legged, facing east, with his back to the setting moon, waiting for the dawn. By the look of the sky, sunrise was no more than an hour away. It looked dull and grey compared to the vivid visions that had filled his mind’s eye moments ago.

  ‘What happened to me?’ he asked, touching the dew on his arms and legs.

  ‘You have been inside yourself all night long. You were lulled.’

  ‘Lulled?’

  Gwydion chuckled. ‘By the music of the lorc. What a harper you would have made, Will, had you been born in the old days. Are you feeling well? I would say you have been well and truly moonstruck.’

  Will got up and walked around, but there was no need to loosen his limbs. He felt neither cold nor stiff, as he should have been after a night on the damp ground.

  ‘I feel…’ he brushed back his braids and said dreamily, ‘…very, very well.’

  ‘But can you feel the battlestone?’

  He heard patience being sorely tried, and knew Gwydion was waiting for him to regiment his thoughts. ‘Is there a stone near here?’

  ‘I would say so.’

  ‘Let me see.’

  He stumbled around for a while, then they went down and approached the lign and immediately Will’s feeling of wellbeing dropped away. A sick feeling of despair seized him.

  Gwydion demanded, ‘Is this one a greater or a lesser stone?’

  Will, wary now and fully awake, steeled himself to address the question. Finally he clenched a fist and put it to his forehead in an effort to make the answer come. ‘I think it might be weaker than the Arebury stone.’

  ‘Willand…’ Gwydion was shaking him gently. ‘We have work to do.’

  He made another effort to dispel the sickness. ‘Without getting closer I can’t say for sure. I daren’t go closer. Not yet.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Maybe if the moon were to set, or the sun to rise. Just now it’s like trying to see into the distance on a rainy day. One day a man can look out and see a faraway hill as clear as clear, another day he won’t see a thing. Maybe if we went just a little bit closer.’

  Gwydion looked around carefully, then nodded. ‘If you think so.’

  They skirted the place where the two earth streams crossed and, as they came abreast of it, a sudden nausea rose in the pit of Will’s stomach. He was reminded very strongly of the sludgy, sucking bog into which he had stumbled the day before. He caught again the same unbearable whiff of corruption, though there was nothing here to make the air unsweet. He retched drily, staggering as he waited for Gwydion to come to him.

  ‘It’s right here,’ he said shortly. ‘Do you want to make a start?’

  But Gwydion continued to look back at the hill from which they had come. He was unhappy at something. ‘We should not unearth it.’

  ‘You want to leave another one alone?’ Will felt the blade of annoyance flash inside him. ‘What’s the excuse this time, Gwydion?’

  The wizard’s gesture seemed to dismiss his anger. ‘It is perhaps too deeply buried.’

  ‘Gwydion, surely we must dig it up. What’s the purpose of finding these monsters if we don’t slay them?’

  ‘I think we must not slay this one until we have slayed another.’

  ‘What other? What are you talking about? You mean the one back there? The one near Arebury that we did nothing about either?’ Will waited for Gwydion to answer, but the wizard added nothing, and so Will came back at him. ‘I’ve been thinking about Maskull. I don’t understand why he wants so much to kill me. And I don’t understand why you won’t tell me about him.’

  The wizard circled the site of the battlestone warily, then began to dance. ‘This is not a good time or place to speak of this.’

  ‘Gwydion, when will you ever say it is a good time to speak of it? I want to know what’s going on!’

  ‘You will not understand. His motives are complex.’

  ‘Is he evil?’


  ‘Not in the way that you still insist on misusing the word.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘He has come to believe in unkind solutions.’

  ‘Why did you banish him when you could have killed him?’

  The wizard broke off his movements and looked at Will sharply. ‘I banished him because it is beyond me to kill him.’

  ‘Are you saying his power’s greater than yours?’

  ‘That, Willand, remains to be seen.’

  Will folded his arms, irked by the wizard’s magical dance around the site. It seemed faintly ridiculous. ‘Surely it would have been better to imprison Maskull in plain sight rather than to exile him. For too long, you didn’t know he had escaped. And now you don’t know where he is at all.’

  Gwydion’s half-glance scorned him. ‘You speak as if I had had all the time in the world at Verlamion to have Maskull whipped and shipped to the Isle of Gulls! I have already told you, I was fortunate to be able to land any spell at all upon his person as he battled me from the curfew tower. I did not plan my action as a lasting solution. It was an emergency. You already know that such a vanishing spell always brings with it a jump in time for the one who is vanished away. I therefore knew we would be free of him for thirteen months, at the least. And there are other considerations.’

  ‘There always are.’ Will walked away, but as soon as he had gone two paces from the lign he saw that he was goading the wizard and could not help himself. ‘You seem to me far too cautious for this kind of work.’

  ‘Caution is one of the prerogatives of having lived so long, and perhaps also a reason for it.’

  ‘And cowardice? Is that one of your old man’s vices too?’

  Gwydion’s eyebrow curved like the black blade of an eastern sword. ‘Now that is a failing that I will not allow.’

  He continued to work his way sun-wise around the burial site as the golden disc of the morning sun sent its shadows long into the west. The wizard’s gestures seemed to Will like those of some strange insect sensing the world then halting to make up its mind about what to do next. But, as suddenly as the wizard had begun, he stopped and said, ‘As for rushing madly into the draining of battlestones, Willand, it may be more dangerous than we yet know.’

  ‘Who understands battlestones better than I?’

  Gwydion came and looked at him closely. ‘And you know this much!’ He snapped his fingers in front of Will’s face. ‘Show me the true path, Willand! Show it to me, and I will agree that you know better than I how to deal with the problem!’

  ‘True path? I have no knowledge of any such thing.’

  ‘It is, at least, something to the good that you can admit your ignorance.’

  ‘How can I learn when you choose to tell me so little?’

  The wizard marched away from the unhallowed ground. ‘It is a rede of magic that a little knowledge is more dangerous than no knowledge at all – as you so amply prove.’

  ‘An old man’s excuses! You’ve done next to nothing in four years! Or so you claim! What are you hiding from me, Gwydion?’

  ‘You can be very tiresome when you are in the vicinity of a battlestone, Willand. At least your rudeness allows me to gauge the strength of what lies in the ground, but you should try harder to guard your mouth, for it is most irritating to listen to an uncontrolled flow of nonsense.’

  ‘We ought to be doing something about this evil. Quickly! Before it’s too late!’

  ‘And I do strongly advise you that patience is a very great virtue indeed.’ Gwydion made Will stand back, then he danced final magic and cast general calming spells over the earth all around the stone, but never once did he approach it.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘This is a light cosmetic. So that for a year and a day any innocent who strays here will change his mind about staying, and he will do so without ever knowing why.’

  ‘Coward!’

  ‘Do you remember the stakes that are up on the hill?’ Gwydion said evenly. ‘Do you know what they are?’

  ‘What?’ he said, interested despite himself.

  ‘They are sighting stakes. Posts driven into the ground so that their alignment points to this place. They sight where the ligns cross.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh, indeed! So the stone may be found at a later time, whatever the phase of the moon might be.’

  Will’s arms stiffened, his face was colouring with an unreasoning anger. ‘You mean you’ve been here before? Then you’ve lied to me! You knew about this battlestone already, and you were testing me!’

  ‘Willand, it was not me who put the stakes up there.’

  ‘Then who?’

  ‘You were not listening very closely when I asked patient questions of the place. Come! We must be moving on.’

  ‘First tell me who put the stakes there!’

  ‘Oh, who do you think?’ The wizard rolled his eyes.

  ‘Maskull?’

  ‘The whole hill reeks of him.’

  Soon after the full of the moon, the ligns quickly faded, and though Will cut several supple wands, he could scry the flow no more. There was only a sense of fast-receding depth, masked by the mystic swirls and criss-crossing lines that showed enduring ancient streams. These, Will knew, were the natural surface flows that always patterned the land, the shapes the folk of old had learned to feel in their bones and which had given them so fine a talent for planting the right crop in the right place and building without offence to the land. It was a talent not shared by lordly builders with their city walls and their great stone keeps, a talent the Sightless Ones had all but snuffed from the minds of men.

  They left the site of the Tysoe stone and, as the wizard went onward at half his customary pace, Will recovered his courtesy and began to review what had happened. While it deepened Will’s understanding to feel each stone attack his mind in its own fashion, the experience was vastly tiring. He wondered if Gwydion was wholly immune from the stones’ suffocating embrace, for if that was the lorc’s way to protect itself from disturbance, then it seemed to be succeeding.

  That day and the next they continued westward, but progress was painfully slow. Gwydion’s vigour had deserted him. He instructed Will in geomancy – the proper reading of the land. He spoke of the rude way in which the bones of the earth had been rooted up. He pointed out quarries, calling them open wounds upon the land. He denounced distant towers and spires, saying they had got above themselves. ‘See how the villains pile stone upon stone to such a height that they humble the hearts of men! The only true house is one built of stones that the earth gives up freely. Of flints or red clay baked to a good hardness, or better, houses built of wood and well thatched with reeds. The best dwellings are those that nestle in the land, Willand. Those that respect the Tenets of Amergin, who was a great architect of old. Those that do not seek to dominate men or the earth around them! No building should be made to glorify its builder or its owner, for that makes it a boastful monument, and boastful monuments are best left to the dead!’

  Will listened, hearing frustration and bitterness in the wizard’s words. It was worrying that the discovery of the sighting stakes had upset him so much. Perhaps they spelled some kind of disaster for Gwydion’s great master plan. As for buildings, Will knew very well what style of house his own heart yearned to see again. It was a modest place, oakframed, with whitened walls of wattle and daub and a neat thatch. It was home.

  The wizard was talking about the balance now, how it must always be kept, and of how the powers of recovery of the earth were being sorely tested by the demons of greed and selfishness that seemed every day to be growing stronger in men’s hearts.

  ‘Oh, men are mostly wilful blunderers. They disturb the balance in whatever they touch – kings more so than shepherds.’

  ‘And sorcerers more than kings, I suppose,’ Will ventured, hoping to steer the wizard towards the subject of Maskull.

  ‘Sorcerers far more than kings. What better poacher will you find th
an the one who has been a keeper of game?’

  ‘Have there been many sorcerers?’

  ‘There have been many dangerous men in the history of the world. They have arisen mostly in the kingdoms that lie across the Narrow Seas, in the Tortured Lands far away, but also here from time to time in the Realm. The worst of these dangerous men possess a clear vision of a particular future they wish to bring about. They have certainty about what must be and why. So certain are they that they easily convince others that their way is best. Maskull is such a man as this.’

  Shortly after they crossed the River Stoore, Gwydion halted next to the raised bed of another ancient stone highway. He threw out his arms to north and south, announcing to the sky in a resounding voice, ‘Behold, this work of sorcerers, Willand! It is the Fosse, the same we have seen before, yet called hereabouts “Trench Strete”, or “the Ditch Way”. It was made fifty generations of men ago, but see what ruin has befallen it in the present season.’

  Gwydion shook his staff angrily at the crooked slabs that marked an arrow-straight highway. ‘See with what cunning the Slavers ravaged the common treasury of this Isle! A peaceful folk were enslaved in great numbers to rip up stone to build these vile paths. And we shall soon see armies moving along them once again.’

  ‘Then we must make greater haste,’ Will urged, trying to stoke up further the fires that had sprung up in the wizard’s belly. ‘We must find the next battlestone before it’s too late.’

  ‘We cannot make more haste, for we must wait until the equinox.’ Gwydion looked at him, his features seeming again careworn and haggard. ‘In magic, remember, there is always a powerful link between time and place. Oh, I wish I knew the answer!’

  And then Will saw clearly the root of the wizard’s fears, for Gwydion was the last phantarch. It was his task to steer the world along the track of fate that yielded up the best of all possible worlds, yet he had lost his way.

  No wonder he’s angry, Will thought. He’s afraid. He can no longer see what the true path is. He’s almost convinced that we’re lost!

  He looked out across the land and saw how for the most part the Slaver road was mounded up high above the meadows and how a ditch followed it along the side, though in places both road and ditch were in ruin.