The Giants' Dance

by Robert Carter

  Will tried to stop them, but Gwydion caught his hand.

  ‘Let them do it,’ he said hollowly. ‘For there is no harm left in it, and if it pleases them why should you prevent it?’

  ‘There was a time,’ Will said, ‘when you would have called this a superstitious abuse of magic and you would have tried to stop it yourself.’

  ‘Just let them be, I told you!’

  ‘I will! And I’ll let you be too!’

  His anger having fizzed up, he turned away and fell silent. Shorn of their hair, the soldiers looked like so many dirty-faced children. Some were already drunk, others carried jugs to sup from. But Will knew he could find no peace in dulling his thoughts, and so he worked on, healing where he could, and so did the wizard, though he seemed to Will like a man disgraced in his own esteem, and working only to make amends for his own shortcomings.

  As night stole over the land, Lord Sarum’s scouts steered the army to wood-sheltered high ground which they had chosen above the valley of the River Mease. The night was cool and dry and the weald around very dark and gloomy, without even a single star showing in the sky. Fires were lit and tents put up, and there was food aplenty – tons of fine victuals had been found among the enemy’s baggage.

  ‘Don’t blame yourself,’ Will said, sitting down.

  But it was as if the wizard saw deeper troubles among the dancing shadows of the fires. Will sought to comfort him again, but Gwydion would not let himself be comforted. Not even the kindly emanations of the spent stone could give him back his usual countenance, and it seemed to Will that this time he had stretched himself beyond the limit of his powers.

  ‘I am at a loss,’ Gwydion admitted at last in a distant voice. ‘The binding spells were the same ones I called down upon the Dragon Stone. And on the Plaguestone. Yet this time they did not hold.’

  ‘It’s no fault of yours that the stone grew hot. Nor that we were forced to drive into muddy ground.’

  Gwydion’s hard, grey eyes seemed like stones in the firelight. ‘Why do you talk of blame and fault, Willand? I want only to decide what must be done.’

  Will withdrew then, and left the wizard to his cold thoughts. He wrapped himself in a blanket and quickly drifted into sleep. But no sooner had he closed his eyes than he began to dream. And what he saw was a dream within a dream, for it began with the feeling that he was waking up. In the inner dream he knew that something had been hidden from him, but he did not know what it was. There had been a haunting beauty all around him and a feeling of joy of such richness that he had wanted to shout out. But then he had remembered his waking life, and that had seemed in comparison very mean and disappointing. In the inner dream the air had been warm and soft and summery, there had been sun on his skin, the birds had been singing in the trees and the colour of the grass had been greener than any green he had ever known in waking. In the inner dream he felt glad and at peace with himself and he knew it was the feeling of home, of the secret, happy world of the Vale. Yet he knew he must wake from it. But how could he waken, for was he not now already awake?

  When he really did open his eyes it was to draughts and shadows. His feet were stone cold and the blanket rough and damp under his chin. He got up to walk among the dying fires and came at last to the edge of the camp. Here dark woods loomed thick with undergrowth. Uppermost in his mind now was the decision he had made to send Willow home. He wondered how she had fared and what Morann must have had to say to persuade her to stay in the Vale. Despite all that had happened, that at least had been for the best – Willow had not had to brave the dangers of battle, nor witness its horrors. And there was a more selfish reason to be glad that she was back in the Vale – she had not seen their dreadful failure with the battlestone.

  His heart gave a squeeze – how he missed her.

  He peered into the black stillness and recognized that it echoed the void inside him. When he saw how his thoughts were tending, he stood up to them. Wallowing. That was what Gwydion called it when a person surrendered to his own weaknesses and then helped them drag him lower into despondency.

  Will turned his thoughts deliberately towards the sorcerer. He had half expected Maskull to appear as the battle raged, but had he even been aware of the battle? More likely he had been watching it from some remove. This time there had been no fountains of fire, no plume of violet flame. But had there been more subtle magic at work? A sorcery that made things turn out the way Maskull wanted? One, maybe, that worked without Gwydion’s knowledge? The stone had certainly achieved what seemed to be far too easy a victory against them.

  He shook off the last thoughts as unanswerable and dangerous. Unanswerable, because only Maskull knew the truth of it, and dangerous because it helped his despondency to deepen.

  ‘I know you’re out there, Maskull,’ he whispered fiercely. ‘Show yourself!’

  But no one came, and not so much as a badger or a fox stirred in the inky night.

  He tried to look deeper into the blackness, still weary in body and spirit, but wherever his mind led him he ran up against a single name – Arthur.

  If Gwydion’s right about me, he thought, then I’m the third and final incarnation of Arthur, and that’s that. But what does it mean? How can I be linked with a hero who lived and died a thousand years ago? Are we the same person? And how can we be that?

  But there was something else that he did not want to acknowledge, for it was certainly true that he knew more about Arthur than ever he had learned.

  ‘Well, whoever I am,’ he told the night, ‘I still feel as if I’m me. How could I be Arthur, when Arthur was a king of the Realm?’

  He tried to find his way back to his sleeping place, but it was not as easy as he had hoped. Many fires still burned, there was the hum of conversation in the camp. Round and about there was singing and some raucous laughter, but most of the drunkards had obliterated their memories of the worst day of their lives by pitching themselves headlong into sleep.

  He wandered towards the centre of the camp and found the painted tents of Lord Sarum and his captains. Their standards hung limply in the windless air. Cressets burned. Sober night guards in kettle hats leaned on their poleaxes, enduring their wearisome duty. Will did not want to draw a challenge so he kept away from the earl’s enclosure. Even so, he saw nearby the cart that carried the spent stone, and beside it a wagon on which was mounted a cage. The covers were half drawn back, and sitting inside the cage, looking as forlorn as any man could, was the figure of Lord Dudlea.

  He was clad only in a long shirt and seemed to have suffered some hurt to his shoulder and arm. Will wondered what would become of him, but even as he watched the figure stirred, reached through the cage and placed the tips of his outstretched fingers on the nearby stump. Will did not yet know what powers the stone might now possess, nor what boon it might confer, but the gesture touched him, and as he crept away he added his own wishes to those of the captured lord that mercy might yet be alive at Ludford.

  A long morning’s march through hilly lands brought the earl’s army first to the crossing of the Great River of the West, then shortly after, turning south-west at the village of Mart Woollack, they went by a good, hard road along Luddsdale, and eventually came upon the way to Ludford.

  Will watched over himself and worried much upon his mood that morning. A day’s healing and a night plagued with horrors had left him drained. He walked or rode along in the carts that carried the wounded as the condition of the men allowed. The churlish soldiers were grateful for his attentions, but the captains whose business it was to escort Lord Dudlea would not let him approach the nobleman.

  ‘But he’s wounded,’ Will said. ‘I should tend him.’

  The guards shook their heads. ‘His wound is slight. We were told that no one is to speak with him for he is to be questioned at Ludford.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘He has made a bargain for his life.’

  ‘In what way has he bargained?’

  The biggest of
the guards brushed him aside. ‘Begone! It is not the part of captives to question their keepers.’

  ‘I am no one’s captive!’ Will said hotly.

  ‘At least let us inspect our stone,’ Gwydion said, hushing him.

  ‘No man may see it,’ the guards replied uncomfortably. ‘The order was given last night by my Lord Sarum himself.’

  And that was an end to it.

  As soon as they were out of earshot Will asked, ‘What shall we do?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Nothing? Let’s walk away. They can’t stop us.’ He was still bristling.

  ‘Be easy. I would rather we went to Ludford.’

  By mid-afternoon Will’s powers of healing were running low again and his spirit had become faintingly weak.

  Gwydion, grave of face, still laid tireless hands on the wounded.

  Will quoted the rede at him. ‘“By his magic, so shall ye know him.” Aren’t you drawing Maskull to us by doing so much healing?’

  ‘What would you have me do? Fail these men again?’

  ‘Again…’ That word said much. ‘You told me off for doing the same at Eiton. For healing.’

  ‘Healing was not your crime, but the fame that you spread about by doing it. A little healing will not in itself draw Maskull to me. Healing is not great magic and so much of it is done every day by thousands of Sisters up and down the Realm that the chatter of it drowns in the ether.’

  Will asked permission of the guards, on his honour, to go and walk alone, and when word was granted to him he drew apart from the column a little way. The soldiers still watched him but gave him respect and a kind of liberty, for they knew that wizards were by repute strange creatures who needed their own company at times.

  And it was true that a deep part of Will craved refreshment. As he walked he listened to what the trees told him. The leaves of the oaks were in the last of their three seasons now, being darkest green and heavily galled. Soon they would brown and fall. The life the trees had put forth was already drawing back into their trunks as they prepared for winter. The dry, gentle rustling of their leaves told much about the powers that were moving below in the dark streams of the earth.

  The nearer they came to Ludford the closer the moon crept towards the sun, and the stronger the earth powers waxed in the lorc. He could sense a lign running deep within the hills to his left. It crossed the Great River of the West, Severine’s Flood, at almost the same place as the army crossed. Deep in a wooded gorge where a fine stone bridge stood, he had seen an unmistakable glimmering in the waters. Now that same invisible green lane seemed to shadow them ever closer as they walked on towards Ludford.

  The sensation was unlike anything he had felt before. It rose and fell as he drifted along so that, had the feeling been music, it would have grown louder and softer every few paces. He could not be sure, but it seemed as if there might be at least one other lign running through the land nearby, one somewhere out beyond Appledale, beyond the cliffs of Woollack Ridge. It seemed that the two ligns were coming closer together. If so, at some point, they must cross. And in that place another battlestone would be found.

  It was an uneasy thought. He remembered Ludford as a strongly walled town with a castle on the west side. The fortress stood above the place where the waters of two rivers joined. He shaded his eyes against the setting sun. I was overcome with confusion when last I came to Ludford, he thought. What will happen to me this time? Am I to be driven completely mad? Is that to be the nature of my sacrifice?

  The town walls rose up, and they came to the Feather Gate. To Will’s surprise, they found the tall, iron-bound doors flung wide and all the maze of streets and alleys lit up.

  This was a town that had been forewarned of great news. The earl’s heralds had ridden ahead. All Ludford’s cressets were burning bright and all its people had been turned out to welcome the victorious army of their lord’s great ally. Everything was in uproar as Will and Gwydion entered the goose market. The six town waits strolled ahead playing their instruments. Woven in with the cheering Will heard the festive song of tabor and mandolin. The bullring was filled with more folk, the torchlight red on their faces. The Duke of Ebor’s trumpets sounded and Earl Sarum’s drums beat their warlike reply. Will watched as the troops, marching five abreast, proudly carried their poleaxes in parade. Children took up the beat, skipping alongside. Bells pealed and girls cast baskets of pale rose petals by the handful over the soldiers from balconies and windows.

  Will looked away from the wild cheering as they passed under the jutting upper floors of neat lime-washed merchants’ houses. Here were many prosperous dwellings that sported carved timbers and faced the streets leading into the market square. Will said, ‘Anyone would think we’d just saved them from a great disaster.’

  ‘My guess is that Richard has told them a far-fetched tale. What use is truth to a lord when a war is in the offing?’

  Now they rounded a corner and Will’s eyes were drawn to the spire of the Sightless Ones with its great iron vane and mysterious letters – A, A, E, F – and the device of the white heart, ghostly in the night. He caught again the curiously scented foulness which he had smelled at Verlamion. And he heard the voices of forlorn men hidden behind their walls of stone and tall windows of black glass. They were adding their discord to the din. As Will passed through the cloth market he noted the morbid stone monument that stood outside the chapter house. As always, it was decked with red-shaded candles, and Will’s flesh crept to see the hooded Fellow who watched blindly from his niche, standing motionless in the shadows beyond.

  In the excitement of their entry into Ludford, Will had forgotten about the chapter house, and the freedom Duke Richard gave to the Sightless Ones to come and go, not only in the town, but also inside his castle. Will wondered if the Fellows had yet heard the rumours about the ‘wondrous stone’, and the wizards young and old who had helped bring the earl victory.

  Ahead, two familiar white castle towers soared, their stone rippling in the glare of the torches. Will felt his heart beating faster. His skin tingled, and an unusual sensation gripped him. He pushed it away, denying it as no more than his own tiredness and the enthusiasm of their reception. Outside the castle, the procession split into two parts. The bulk of the army peeled away, marching out of the town again by the Durnhelm Gate. They were going down towards the river where a part-prepared camp waited. But the earl and his party continued on up, into the open mouth of the castle.

  Will and Gwydion went with them, past the four lions that he remembered. When last he had seen them they had lain slothfully in their cages; now they were roused, pacing back and forth and making growling sounds deep enough to send a tremor through a man’s ribs. The animals had been made anxious, and not just because of the activity. He felt the need to open his mind and try to make some sense of the tangle of earth streams that ran under the cobbles of the market square, but he did not dare to do it.

  He said suddenly, ‘What are we going to do about the Blow Stone? Have you been able to catch sight of it?’

  The wizard smiled. ‘I have. And a most remarkable change has come over it.’

  ‘What change?’

  ‘It has continued to shrink. It is now no more than half its original size. And it has taken upon its surface a pattern. It appears, so to say, carved.’

  ‘You mean with the verse?’ Will said, alarmed. ‘In plain words?’

  ‘Nothing so straightforward as that. In the words of the archer who told me, “It is impressed by the very mark of the Lord of Ebor’s signet.”’

  Will’s eyes opened wide, and he marvelled. ‘Do you mean the device on Duke Richard’s ring? The one he wears all the time on the little finger of his left hand?’

  ‘You may have seen its impress on the letters he sends. It shows a four-leaf clover, and below three pike flowers on long stems.’

  Will felt an eerie chill pass through him. ‘What do you think that means?’

  ‘I only repeat what I hav
e been told. As to its meaning, that I cannot yet speak about. Ah, but look who is here to greet us!’

  Will followed Gwydion’s staff and saw a shambling figure with a mass of unruly hair and a beard all striped like a badger.

  ‘Wortmaster Gort!’

  Gwydion seized his friend by his shoulders and hugged him. Words of the true tongue passed between them and Gort offered a respectful gesture, not of the kind offered by a servant to a lord, but rather like one that might pass between brothers.

  ‘Master Gwydion! Tsk! tsk!’ Gort said, beaming and laughing. ‘Well met! And look who walks by your side! Willand! Hey-ho, my dear friend! Welcome! Welcome to poor old Ludford again!’

  What little could be seen of Gort’s face among his heap of unkempt hair was red cheeks and smiles. He was the Duke of Ebor’s herbalist and healer and gardener and much more besides. He had not changed a whit since Will had last clapped eyes on him. He still wore his robe of oaken green and the same shapeless grey hat was perched on the top of his head. Will moved forward to embrace him. ‘It’s good to see you, Wortmaster!’

  ‘Not scared of castle gateways any more, I see!’ he said suddenly, tugging on Will’s arm.

  Will only realized now that he was standing under Ludford Castle’s great suspended portcullis. He looked up and a stab of fear passed through his heart. The last time he had been at Ludford he had been unable to shake off the vision of himself being impaled by the great black spikes that hung so precariously. There was a yell and the hairs on his neck stood up stiff as bristles.

  ‘Hoy! Look out there!’

  As he stepped aside a large ox-cart rumbled through the gate. But the beasts that hauled it were struggling, hooves slipping and sliding on the muddied granite of the threshold. The panicked driver shouted for Will to get out of the way, then something snapped on the cart and it lurched sideways.

  Will flattened himself against the stone of the guardhouse wall just as the cart tipped. One of the great iron-shod wheels leaned towards him and threatened to give. He pressed his nose flat to the wall and sank down as the rim gouged a crescent-shaped groove in the guardhouse arch beside his head.