The Giants' Dance

by Robert Carter

  ‘Get out of the road!’ the red-faced driver shouted. ‘You want to get yourself killed?’

  Bare inches further and the wheel would have caught his head and burst it against the stone like a ripe berry.

  ‘Are you hurt?’ Gwydion asked, lifting him up.

  ‘It missed me.’ Will blinked at the cart, unsure if it was the one that carried the spent Blow Stone. He wondered suddenly if the accident, or perhaps his escape from injury, had been the stone’s doing.

  ‘My flapping mouth! Speaking too soon!’ Gort fussed and brushed Will down with his hand, tearing a cloak that was already burned into holes. ‘Oh, dear!’

  ‘Never mind!’ Gwydion thrust out a warning finger. ‘Keep your eyes and ears open, Willand And all your wits about you! Remember where you are come to.’

  He nodded tightly, cold inside. The vision of the portcullis had been more than just an idle fancy. It was a long-standing fear connected with the prophecy that said ‘one would be made two’. Will had often thought that it must mean that one day he would be cut in two. And even Gwydion had said that it was likely to be a premonition that foretold his death. He looked back at the deadly portal and reproved himself for having put it out of his mind. At the same time he acknowledged that his joy at seeing Gort again might just have come at a most crucial moment.

  Once they had moved away from the gatehouse, the cold feelings went away. He hugged the Wortmaster once more. ‘Oh, Gort, it’s very good to see you again!’

  ‘And you, my lad! But look at you, you’re a lad no longer!’

  ‘Married now, and with a fine daughter.’

  ‘You don’t say!’

  ‘I do say. And proudly too. Bethe, we named her.’

  ‘Good choice! Oh, for a certainty!’

  ‘She’s halfway through her second year and already looking as beautiful as her mother.’

  ‘Ah, young Willow! Now there’s a willing spirit and as handsome a girl as ever I saw. Where is she?’ He craned his neck, looking back past the lines of the earl’s baggage carts.

  ‘She isn’t with us,’ Will said, his spirits guttering. ‘Gort, didn’t you hear about the battle?’

  ‘Ah. That. A little bird told me. And after that Earl Sarum’s men came here about noon today, all with the same news. Come along and you can tell me what I’ve missed. Are you hungry?’

  ‘Are we hungry?’ Will repeated, looking at Gwydion.

  The wizard inclined his head. ‘As weevils.’

  ‘But who is this?’ Gort asked, pointing at the cage that carried Lord Dudlea as it swayed and creaked in through the gate.

  ‘That is John Sefton, called Lord Dudlea,’ Gwydion said. ‘He was caught upon the Heath commanding the enemy after Lord Ordlea was slain.’

  ‘Oh, I would not wish to be in his shoes!’ Gort said.

  ‘He has none,’ said Will bleakly. ‘All but his shirt has been stolen. What do you think they’ll do with him?

  ‘It’s no supper and a hard bed tonight, I’ll be bound,’ Gort said. But Will knew the Wortmaster’s levity covered a serious possibility.

  ‘Will they execute him?’

  Gwydion steered Will away. ‘Duke Richard would not slay a fellow noble in cold blood, for that would set a dangerous precedent.’

  ‘But will they not torture him to learn what he knows?’

  ‘Unnecessary. The nobles of this Realm are not such fools that they would not willingly shout out a hundred secrets at the sight of a hot iron. The problem is not too few words, but too many. Already, in his solitary misery, Lord Dudlea has been squirming like a maggot. He will speak eloquently enough in order to gain his release.’

  ‘What has he said so far?’ Will asked.

  ‘He has spoken with Earl Sarum about a certain secret weapon that the queen now possesses.’

  Will’s eyes widened. ‘Secret weapon?’

  ‘So he calls it.’

  ‘He’s just trying to save his neck!’

  ‘Maybe,’ Gwydion said. ‘Though there is a safe haven which I shall show Friend Dudlea in time should negotiations fail.’

  ‘What safe haven?’

  ‘I have learned there is a sorrow underlying Lord Sarum’s triumph. A soldier told me that while the battle was being fought upon Blow Heath a second army raised by the queen lay not three leagues distant. It seems that two of Sarum’s sons, Thomas and John, were captured while pursuing a band of the enemy in the rout. They have been borne off to await the queen’s pleasure at the city of Caster in the north. Dudlea does not yet know this, nor will he learn it from me until he has coughed up enough morsels to satisfy his captors. Yet he will eventually have Sarum’s voice to plead for his release even if things should go badly for him with Friend Richard.’

  Will smiled, seeing how skilfully the wizard planned to manage things, but then Gort drew them both aside and steered them through the commotion of the outer ward, before showing them across the inner moat. They went by the inner gatehouse and threaded their way among the cluster of buildings that crowded the inner ward. Lodgings had long been prepared for them. Servants met them and took their burned and ragged cloaks away to have their scorches and holes patched.

  When they were settled in Gort’s parlour bread and stew were brought, and afterwards a pot of Gort’s medlar cheese appeared and a platter of sweetcakes to spread it on.

  ‘Hunger is surely the best relish!’ Will told him, munching with a full mouth.

  ‘“An empty belly maketh even hard beans taste sweet!” as the rede tells it,’ Gort agreed.

  The Wortmaster’s rooms were intricately decorated, the walls pained with vines and meadow plants of many kinds. It was work with great depths to be discovered in it, Will decided, work painstakingly done by a man who knew about his materials and the effects that a lifetime of honest practice could achieve. But there was magic there also. In daytime, walls and ceiling showed blue sky and clouds, while at night there were stars in a black sky. And the whimsical figures that peeped from the twists and turns of the vines gambolled and grinned. In the firelight they danced and made rude faces at one another, and one put his tongue out at Will and winked at him.

  Gort sang a tuneless verse as his nose savoured the odd, musty aroma of the medlar cheese:

  ‘Just as the pedlar,

  Who taketh the stripe,

  The medlar turns rotten,

  Before he turns ripe!’

  ‘And do you have an equally bad verse about the quince?’ Gwydion asked. He turned to Will: ‘Gort makes the best jelly of quince that I have ever tasted, but his poetry has always been woeful.’

  ‘Well, I like it!’ Will said, springing to the Wortmaster’s defence.

  Gort swept off his hat and bowed low at the compliment. ‘Ha ha! Well said, my friend!’

  Gwydion grunted. ‘Alas! Our young friend has little discrimination when it comes to the poesy!’

  ‘I know what I like, Gwydion! And that’s good enough.’

  Gort waved his hands. ‘Well, I have plenty of silly songs, but no quince jelly. Sorry to disappoint the Phantarch, but all my sealed jars remain at Foderingham.’

  They made do with a bowl of hazelnuts and a jug of cider, sitting comfortably at Gort’s untidy elmwood table. Then they moved closer round the fireplace. The mood changed as Gwydion let Will tell their host what had taken place upon Blow Heath.

  ‘Oh, that’s not good,’ Gort said, frowning back at them when Will had done. ‘No, no, not good at all. Oh, my. What does it all mean?’

  ‘It means there’s danger coming this way.’

  ‘Oh…danger! That’s not nice.’

  ‘And more fighting if we don’t do something.’

  ‘Armies trampling down the land…oh, my!’

  Gwydion raised an eyebrow significantly. ‘You see, Wortmaster, Willand here says there is a battlestone buried here at Ludford.’

  ‘A battlestone? Here? Oh. Are you sure?’

  Will took a deep breath. ‘I’ve always known it. Don
’t you remember the last time I was here? It nearly drove my wits clear out of my skull. Back then, I didn’t know what I was up against. The feelings were so strong I began to think that Duke Richard had fetched the Dragon Stone here out of some kind of lordly mischief. I wanted to kill him, and then to die myself. I was in a mess, until Gwydion came and flushed the foolishness out of me.’

  Gwydion and Gort exchanged weighty glances.

  ‘So now you’ll scry this battlestone out pretty quick, hey?’ Gort asked.

  Will scratched his unshaved chin. ‘I…hope to.’

  ‘You hope to?’ Gwydion said with some surprise.

  ‘I mean, I hope I can pick up the true patterns again. If I can, then I might be able to find the stone.’

  Gwydion seized on his faintness like a talon. ‘Doubt is not your friend, Willand. Do you not understand that you are the best scrier ever to have walked the earth? No other man can do it. I cannot. Gort cannot. You have found three battlestones since we left the Plough, and that was not so many days ago.’

  Will bit back the remark that came too readily to his lips – that he may have found three battlestones, but they had not yet dealt with any of them. Still, he felt warm and full and grateful to be in buoyant company again, and so he said, ‘If I sound doubtful it’s only because scrying depends on so many things – you know it yourself, Gwydion: the season, the shape of the moon, the lie of the land – and this is an odd place. All the stone buildings that stand around here complicate matters. They seem to affect not only the earth streams themselves, but also my ability to feel them out. If those old Slaver roads act like looking-glasses when it comes to the flows in the lorc, then Ludford’s no different. There’s something buried here. Something big.’

  Will recited the Blow Stone’s mysterious verse.

  ‘Beside Lugh’s ford and the risen tower,

  By his word alone, a false king

  Shall drive his enemy the waters over,

  And the Lord of the West shall come home.’

  Gwydion gave the cross-reading:

  ‘Lord Lugh alone shall have the triumph,

  At the western river crossing, word of an enemy

  Comes falsely by the raised water,

  While, at home, the king watches over his tower.’

  ‘What do you think of that, Wortmaster?’ Will asked.

  Gort shook his head, and at length he sighed like a man tired of thinking, and said, ‘Well…there’s an awkward piece of riddle-me-re to end a supper party, and no mistake!’

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  A THIEF AT LUDFORD

  The following morning Will rose early and went out with Gwydion to search for the Ludford battlestone. He had slept badly again, plagued by visions of doom and fed upon by the horrors that haunt a man’s thoughts between the second and fifth chimes after midnight. But whether his night sweats were prompted by the battle or by the nearby battlestone he could not say.

  A great mass of men was encamped outside the walls. The duke’s army was already mustered at Ludford, and their number had swelled to eight or nine thousand overnight. Since dawn, men had been ranging across the land, hunting out and bringing in food, or spending their labours on the felling of trees and digging of ditches and earthworks to defend the poorly protected eastern approaches. All the town gates except one had been barred and propped with heavy timbers. Inside the walls there was a mob of townsfolk and soldiers milling at the far end of the market square. Will saw several black-hooded figures among them – red hands from the town’s chapter house. They were standing around the cage in which Lord Dudlea had been brought to Ludford. At first Will imagined the nobleman had been executed and his corpse exposed for the jeering pleasure of the crowd, but the mood was not one of prurience or ridicule, but rather one of wonder.

  Gwydion raised his staff and pushed his way to the fore, and Will went after him, noting that the Sightless Ones who had been goading the crowd were hastily withdrawing. When Will reached the cage he saw that it held not Lord Dudlea but the Blow Stone, and several folk were down on their knees before it.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Gwydion demanded of those trying to reach through the bars.

  ‘’Tis a magic touchstone!’ they cried. ‘It gives powers to all those who lay hands upon it!’

  ‘Stand back!’

  A bright-eyed young soldier raised fervent hands. ‘It bestows qualities! It makes men proof against wounds. It will give us victory in war!’

  ‘Have you touched it?’ Gwydion demanded.

  ‘Aye, Master!’

  The wizard struck the man hard across the face and sent him reeling.

  ‘Agggh! What’s that for?’ the man said, holding the side of his head.

  ‘Such invulnerability as this you may have any day, my friend!’ Gwydion’s voice was enormous and wrathful. ‘Who ordered the stone put here?’

  They cowered. ‘’Twas the duke himself!’

  ‘Soldiers of Earl Sarum! Go back to your camp! And you, good townspeople – repair to your homes as fast as you may! Go now! This stone must not be violated thus!’

  The crowd groaned, angry and disappointed.

  Gwydion’s authority hardened. ‘Go, I tell you! For you do not know the dangers you court here!’

  ‘The stone heals the sick! We have heard it plain!’ a brave voice called back.

  ‘It makes the faithless husband confess his deeds!’ a woman at the back shouted.

  ‘And it will crush our enemies!’

  ‘It will do none of those things,’ Gwydion told them. ‘Do as I bid now, or I will compel you!’

  A one-eyed old man glared up at him and spat. ‘It is said to protect against wizards!’

  Gwydion raised his staff, unwilling now to be gainsaid. ‘I have warned you! Leave this place! Get about your business, all of you! There is nothing to aid you here!’

  Some recognized the power vested in the oaken staff that was raised on high above them. They made signs of respect and began to turn just as sheep obey the shepherd. But others stood stubbornly for a moment, and only when the greater number had melted away did they lose their courage.

  At last Gwydion called Will along and they too left.

  ‘What about the stone?’ he asked. ‘You can’t just leave it there. They’ll be back like mice as soon as blink.’

  ‘What can I do? It is there at the duke’s order.’ He looked over his shoulder to where a group of beggars had already begun to steal back towards the cage. ‘We must part. While you scry, I will go to Richard and try to persuade him to take the stone away.’

  While Gwydion went in search of the duke, Will did as he was told. But he wondered at Gwydion’s actions, thinking darkly that things had turned out badly again. If Gwydion had done as I warned and nipped this in the bud when we were back on the road, he thought, then the false fame of the stump would not have been blown up so large.

  He took himself out beyond the barricaded gates of Ludford town, and walked the whole sward back and forth. It was his aim to try to feel some hint of the place where the next stone might lie. But there was now such a maze of earthworks in the land outside the town walls that he found it impossible to form any picture in his mind or even to know with any certainty where the lign must run.

  After a while Gort joined him. By now it had become clear that Will would be able to do no useful scrying today, so they went together to the Wortmaster’s leech garden, where many different medicine plants grew.

  ‘Herb and stone and wholesome word! These things are richest in healing powers,’ Gort said. ‘But the greatest is the herb! And as among men, so among herbs: some are common, others most rare, and some even precious. Let me show you my little treasures, eh?’

  He pointed out a plain plant with dark, prickly leaves, pulled it up and knocked the soil from its gnarled root. ‘In warmer climes this bears a yellow bloom,’ he said. ‘But here it grows unregarded, though it is powerful against enchantments. In the Marches they call it “haemony”.�
� He rubbed the leaf of another wort that had first sprouted up where innocent blood had been shed. Yet another, he said, had been brought from over the sea by birds. And yet another had a silver flower that only appeared once every thousand years.

  ‘Many a healing herb grows out of the grave of a good man,’ he said ruefully. ‘There are rosemaries and lavenders and whortleberries in this garden which I have gathered from the barrows of a hundred of the great kings.’

  ‘And why is that pear tree’s trunk painted with whitewash?’ Will asked. ‘And why is it growing behind an iron fence, where no one can gather its fruit?’

  ‘Oh, beware that tree!’ Gort said in a loud voice. ‘For the plucking of that fruit will turn a man into a dove!’ Then he whispered, ‘Taproots and tubers! We don’t want creepy-crafties climbing up our best pear trees, do we, eh?’

  As two of Gort’s undergardeners smiled up at their master, Will realized that his own fingers had gone unbidden to his pouch and had taken out the red fish. He muttered, ‘It’s a shame there’s no herb here to heighten my senses when it comes to finding stones.’

  ‘Alas! That is indeed a shame. But there has never been a herb with that power. Your talent is one of a kind, and hardly to be tampered with.’ Gort peered at him closely. ‘But…are you feeling quite well in yourself?’

  ‘Quite well.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Why do you ask?’ He did not know why, but be resented the question.

  ‘Oh, well, if I can’t help…’

  ‘I’m healthy enough. A little light-headed maybe, now you come to mention it, but there’s nothing you can do to help that. And I think in any case I’d like to be on my own for a while.’

  Will wished Gort good day, then went out into the innermost ward and from there up onto the walls. He took the air deeply, looking down across the land from a corner of the great square tower of the keep. The various pitched roofs of the castle showed maze-like patterns in green and purple slate. Ravens circled the tower top, cawing warily at the duke’s blue and white standard as it snaked out in the breeze. The banner showed the falcon and fetterlock, the golden bird straining for freedom. Beside the duke’s standard was a flag bearing the white lion of Morte, and now flying alongside that was the Earl Sarum’s banner of red and black upon which stood a fearsome golden griffin.