The Giants' Dance

by Robert Carter

  When he raised himself up, it was only to his knees. He looked on the battle with hopeless eyes now, seeing there was nothing more to be done about it. Wars were never stopped by fools shouting into the void, no matter what they said. A lack of foresight and vigilance had been to blame – his own as much as Gwydion’s. They had tarried and dithered and missed their chance.

  But now the problem towered above him and the terror of it gripped his heart. He stood up, empty-handed, staring awestruck at the sky. A raucous humming filled all the air around him, but this time it was not the sound of arrows. The rising mass of malice that was being forced upward like smoke by the wizard’s magical grip was revealed now as countless millions of carrion flies.

  They were streaming from the stone in teeming numbers, as if the battlestone was the spout of some huge underground cave. The flies rushed out in a torrent, but still they were swept up and confined by Gwydion’s magic. Those few that escaped the vortex swirled out over the field unable to do much harm, but as the stone continued to empty itself into the sky Gwydion’s power to oppose it began to fail. Will watched how the wizard was overcome as the unstable column of darkness grew ever more gigantic. It began to twist then fall apart. Then the flies burst out and spilled across the sun and sky until the light of day was turned grey by their teeming numbers.

  But below the vast tower of blackness the battle went on regardless. Another volley of arrows arched high and sped down through the darkness, doing murder among Lord Ordlea’s men. Then two bodies of opposing footmen clashed, and the fighting became bloody and hand-to-hand. A thousand armed men crashed into one another, opposing colours crushed together as if by gigantic forces. The shafts of pole-arms and billhooks spilled this way and that, inclined at all angles as men were hacked and stabbed and forced to the ground to be trampled and die underfoot. At the fringes of the melee the fighting was most furious, for here men had the room to wield their weapons. Daggers and axes did the bloodiest murder. Horses reared as armoured captains slashed at their antagonists from the saddle. Footmen tried to unseat riders with their pole-arms, tangling their pikeheads among mail and plate, and when they succeeded, a dozen men fell on the hapless victims. They raked them with great hammer blows, or cut away their helmet straps then ripped out the strings of their necks so they were drowned in gushes of blood. Will saw arms and legs cut off, heads cloven in two; even though one blow came through the rim of a steel bonnet it was given with such force as to open the skull beneath. He saw men frozen by terror, men with no stomach for killing, men grey-faced and wide-eyed who had lost control of their actions and wanted to run. And there were other, rarer men, men who enjoyed the killing. But whatever kind of man came into the fight, and whatever his thoughts and feelings, still there remained a white-hot place at the centre that consumed all who approached it.

  The struggle washed around Will, became a disorderly morass of shouting and screaming, with flurries of extreme anger showing in bursts of intense violence. It was horrible to see, and worse to smell, for when men’s bodies are ripped open what spills across the grass is pungent and vile. He staggered through it untouched, and it seemed as if the killing would go on forever, but at last the sun was eclipsed as if by a giant hand, and to Will’s eyes it seemed that night had come suddenly upon the valley. All the sky turned black and the noonday sun was blotted out, and he heard nothing now beyond the screams of dying men and the sourceless hiss and buzz that enfolded him. There was a great concussion upon his body and he dived down to find escape in the blood-sodden earth, but the flies found their way into his eyes and up his nose and into his mouth, choking him, making him spit and retch in increasing fear. All around, soldiers were waving their arms in frenzy, caught in a storm of stinging black snow. Footsoldiers threw their arms to the ground, horses ran madly, riders were blinded and thrown. The timeless torment went on, in agony, in insanity, beyond all endurance, while men danced openly with Death.

  But Will had not died. He managed to scoop the flies from his mouth long enough to draw breath. He wiped them from his eyes sufficient to see the pyre that had been their cart. Flame sheathed the stone now, flaring and crackling as thousands of black motes blundered through its flame. It was a stone once more, shrunken and dying, its rage spent.

  At last the darkness began to clear as the blow flies settled widely over the field. The swarm dropped on the fallen who sprawled and grovelled all around. It lay in drifts, covering everything in a thick, black blanket. Wounded horses whinnied in terror underneath those drifts, their legs kicking out. Wounded men were smothered in it, drowned, reaching up for air they could not find. When Will forced himself to rise he saw just how intimately he had been caught up among the slaughter. All around him men were crying out. The battle was over. The main butchery had lasted less than an hour, but the harm that had issued from the stone had slaked itself only by emptying life from the bodies of seven times three hundred men.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CAPTIVES

  Across that hideous place, which forever after was known as Blow Heath, the flies settled then melted away until all visible sign of them was gone. Soon, as the wizard had said, they would vanish in like manner from human memory.

  The conflict had been the work of half an afternoon, but it had been enough to change everything, and Will and Gwydion found themselves passing among an unexpectedly victorious army that had now begun a most brutal celebration.

  ‘So it is, when the bloodlust comes upon men,’ Gwydion said, his eyes searching the heaps of bodies that lay all around. The wizard looked very old and worn thin by his failure. ‘I have seen this so many times before. Savage fools! Sarum’s men knew they were the day’s underdogs. They believed they were going to die. Yet look what thanks they now give for their lives! How easily men glory in the deaths of others who are so like themselves! Is there never to be a saving of humankind?’

  Will sat in the trampled grass, dazed, sickened, filled with horror. The murderous rout had flowed past, leaving them unscathed. Whether that was by chance or by Gwydion’s art or through some other reason, he did not know. He looked around at a scene that had been unimaginable just a few hours before. Through the morning this place had been just another peaceful green meadow, one scattered with daisies and buttercups and dandelions. Now so many hundreds of men were heaped here like sides of meat – the disgusting dead. Many more were bleeding and destined soon to die, and horror hung over the place along with the shocking reek.

  The embers of the cart smoked nearby, and in the midst of it all stood the burned-out battlestone. It had shrugged off all the bonds that Gwydion’s magic had placed upon it. It had fulfilled its purpose. Now, it seemed to be laughing at them.

  Will rose to his feet. Anger boiled up inside him and he sprang at the smoking stone. He gnashed his teeth and beat wildly at it with his fists until his knuckles bled and until the ashes flew around him and his rush of rage was sated. And then he began to weep. He put his arms around the warm shell of the stone and hugged it, and slowly sobbed the hurt out of himself.

  And the stone understood. It forgave him, for each had, in their separate ways been emptied, and Will’s heart beat in rhythm with the thimbleful of kindness that remained inside the stone now that the fountains of harm were spent.

  At length Gwydion came to him and took him gently away. A spent battlestone was a thing of comfort, a stump that would confer mild boons upon the world. It was hard for Will to release it, and harder still to walk away, but he did so. There was now much needful work to be done and a deal of suffering to walk among.

  In the next hour he witnessed the deaths of many men. He went from corpse heap to corpse heap, looking for those who might yet be saved, and no one tried to stop him, no matter how weakminded or savage was their own foul business among the dying. Soon a sweet stink hung over the field, and he was reminded of the smell of the bodies that had been laid out in rows after Verlamion, faces grey yet reposing in apparent sleep, many of them bright with splashe
s of blood, many others whose flesh had been torn in horrible ways. Yet some still fair of feature and seemingly untouched.

  Will saw again the miasma that hovered over the heaps like a ghostly mist, as if the dead were preyed upon by spectres and the other boneless presences that were said to dwell in the lower airs. But as he watched, he saw that it was not so, that there was something sacred present, something lingering and reluctant to leave.

  ‘Come, Willand!’ the wizard’s voice called to him. ‘We must work with good despatch and do what we can.’

  Will bent to his task. As a healer he knew how much greater was the kindness required to repair a brief moment’s harm. Harm, it seemed, flowed too readily through the world, as freely as blown breath or the water in a mountain stream. Whereas kindness – kindness was an altogether slower quantity, thick and sluggish as honey.

  Gwydion turned back the bands of men who went among the terrified wounded like wild beasts intent on doing cold murder and butchery. Will soon saw where comfort and healing might best be offered, but most of the wounds he found were grievous. ‘I know what you’re suffering. I know what it’s like,’ he told a youth whose arm had been struck off at the elbow. But the lad’s lips were blue and his eyes shone bright with shock and held a contrary certainty as he counted Will’s two good arms. Even so, he welcomed the incantations that lessened his pain and would in time help to heal the ragged flesh.

  ‘How old are you?’ Will asked before he moved on.

  ‘Nineteen years, Master,’ the lad said, still gripping Will’s hand. ‘I have been a shepherd since I was seven. But today I was a soldier. And from this day forward it seems I am to be a beggar.’

  A brute of a man who waited nearby said, ‘At least a crow pudding has not been made of you!’ But then he bethought what he had said, seeing the word ‘crow’ was used by many to speak ill of wizards. He quickly muttered, ‘Begging your pardon, Master. I didn’t mean that to sound as it did.’

  But Will did not care about insults. He saw the wounded lad offer a brave smile as the blood stopped and his flesh made a miraculous start on the long road to healing.

  It was a long time before the leaders of the victorious army were able to draw their wilder men back to good order, such was the booty to be had from the routed foe. Horses and helms, swords and purses, lordly shoes and coats of heavy cloth – all were here aplenty, and more besides. There was still much to be got from men by murder. Such luxuries as a golden buckle or a knight’s saddle were counted worth a year or two of work in a field, so looting was rife and the healing went on alongside a far grimmer business. Where Gwydion could not stop them, men went from friend to foe alike, saying loudly that injured dogs would never have been left in such misery. Many a throat was cut with a false excuse of mercy. Opportunists crept among the fallen, looking for whatever it pleased them to have.

  Will heard it called out by Lord Sarum’s heralds that a mere two hundred was the count of his dead, but that ten times that number at least had been slain among the opposing ranks. At that announcement a cheer was raised by the victors.

  ‘What is to become of the bodies of the dead?’ Will asked the wizard in a voice raw with outrage.

  Gwydion said, ‘They will be left here, fly-blown and rotting, until the local folk are driven here to bury them.’

  ‘Driven?’

  ‘By the Sightless Ones. They will see to it that these dead are heaped together in common graves. They will take this golden chance to rant about death and so terrify and catch hold of the minds of those village folk they fetch here to do the digging. And the people will dig and endure speeches, for those who would put out the people’s eyes love to reproach them for their blindness!’

  Will looked one more time across the heath with its thousands of dead. When the victorious army began to assemble again, Gwydion stood up and thrust out his hands like a scarecrow. He called a cleansing spell over the battlefield, then sang out:

  ‘Crow, caddow, pie,

  Rook, raven, fly!’

  A hundred birds flew up from the field at his words. But it could have been the beating of drums and the blast of trumpets and the thunder of hooves that sent them into the air, for the next moment Lord Sarum came bursting through the ranks on his great charger, standing stiff in his stirrups, his whole body shining in steel. His standard bearer and his chief captains galloped at his back. He raised his sword as he rode and whirled it again and again above his head. A wild shout went up as he paraded in triumph, back and forth before his army. His visor arched above his shining sallet-helm. Thousands of eyes were fixed upon the man. This, Will knew, was one of those moments a warrior lived for. What passed between lord and man was the pure, hard light that shone at the heart of a soldier’s glory.

  But Will turned away. His spirit rebelled against the cheering mass of men. He bent his mind instead to his healing. His arms were bloodied to the elbow, but at last he was pulled away by insistent men-at-arms who cried, ‘Tell my lord’s herald who you are!’

  ‘A healer, that is all. Leave me be.’

  ‘He is a wizard!’

  Lord Sarum’s herald looked on. ‘Then are you not the same wizard who laid a blessing upon our victory? The one who brought us the wondrous stone?’

  And when Will looked where they directed him he saw men surrounding the spent battlestone, touching it and delighting in it.

  ‘I’m no wizard!’ he told them angrily. ‘And I’d not call this a victory!’

  ‘Are you then our enemy?’ they asked him, taken aback at his sternness.

  ‘Who’s your enemy? Look around you! A dozen times as many men have died here as were killed at Verlamion! What kind of victory do you call that?’

  But they cried, ‘Fetch the wizard! Bring him to the magic stone!’ And they pulled Will away from his tender work.

  Lord Sarum came now, to see for himself the miracle at which his men were marvelling, but Will stabbed a rude finger at him and accused him hotly. ‘See, my lord? Look what happens when our work fails! For the want of a two-horse cart and a half dozen men to help us bear the stone smartly away, this terrible thing has been brought upon you!’

  The lord’s braver retainers threatened to throw him down for his insolence, wizard or no, but he shrugged them off and stood mutely by the stone, watching to see how easily men’s hands reached out to touch it. It was shrivelled and crazed and it had gone dark now. Its surface was pitted and puckered, or perhaps it was just that its power to cast illusions as to its true shape and size had died.

  Lord Sarum walked three times about the spent stump. ‘So this is one of the magical stones against which the Crowmaster used to warn! Where is he?’

  Gwydion stepped forward then, haggard and stumbling in his singed rags and looking to all who saw him like a mad and filthy beggarman, but his voice was thunderous. ‘I warned Richard of Ebor! I asked him for help in finding these stones – and I was denied!’

  Lord Sarum countered dismissively, ‘Then ask again, Crowmaster, and this time permission may be granted to you, for it seems this stone at least has brought us victory!’

  Hundreds goggled at the idea.

  ‘Imbeciles! Does not one of you understand what has happened here this day?’

  But they laughed at him, making light of his insolence. After all, he was a wizard, one driven half mad by a life dabbling in corrosive magic. The earl laughed. And his soldiers laughed, and there was cheering all around, men glad in their deadly achievement, praising one another as if it had been their prowess that had decided the fight. Their war chants rose now until they blotted out the cries of the dying. Will pressed his bloodied hands over his ears, but the tumult only grew. He was jostled away, and the stone taken up and borne aloft by many hands and carried off.

  ‘Where are they taking us?’ he asked Gwydion as they were borne away also.

  ‘To Ludford!’ the soldiers said, laughing. ‘We must go from here! Before the evil queen sends another army to punish us!’

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sp; CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  THE KINDLY STUMP

  They were brought along to the carts that were to carry the wounded at the tail of the baggage train.

  ‘Get in,’ the soldiers told him.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You are to come with us.’

  ‘By what right?’ Will said, pulling away.

  ‘Right? It is my Lord of Sarum’s order.’

  ‘We are not Earl Sarum’s men. We choose to stay here!’

  They were quickly surrounded by men who drew blades, and though Will raised his stick ready to resist, Gwydion waved him down with a tired gesture. ‘We will go wherever the greatest need presently lies, and that is with those who are hurt.’

  ‘But what about the next stone?’ Will hissed. ‘We must hunt it down.’

  ‘Be easy now. First we must ponder on the true meaning of this stone’s verse.’

  Will did as he was told, for he saw no gain in resisting. He watched sullenly as the army formed up along the road. The line of men stretched ahead into the far distance, three thousand of them, marching forward, slowly at first and with many delays, but then faster and with many of them singing of a triumph which two hundred of their number had purchased through sacrifice.

  The earl’s carts were laden with all that an army must carry, and now much booty besides. Nor did they leave the spent stone behind. As they creaked along there was an escort of men packed close about the cart in which it rode. The soldiers walked bare-headed. Some wore their helms slung on their backs. Some had bound up small wounds. Their faces and jackets were stained from the fighting, but the eyes of those who reached through the bars of the cart to touch the stump were full of wonder. They were already calling it the ‘Blow Stone’.