‘What?’
When Will told him about the stone they had found at Tysoe and the sighting posts that pointed to it, Morann stopped him. He got up and went over to the wet sack that he had left by the door. He produced from it what looked like an old Ewle wreath. It was made from hundreds of dead leaves.
‘What is it?’ Willow asked.
‘A letter from Gwydion. It was left for my attention at Worfwyken Bog near the Crossing of Northbridge on the Severine.’ Morann threw it down onto the floor. ‘It’s in the ogham of the Ogdoad – each leaf is from a different tree, each represents a different letter. This is the last word I’ve had from him.’
‘What does he say?’ Will asked.
‘He confirms your fears. Let me see…“Maskull has now taken possession of the battlestone that was buried below Dainspeirhafoc” – that would be Sparrowhawk Hill in the present speech of the Realm.’ Morann sighed and shook his head. ‘Why didn’t you take charge of the stone there and then?’
‘Gwydion said we ought not to. We’d already found a stone near Arebury, but the ground about it was a stinking mire, and our task was made all the harder by the nearness of a stream. As for this one, Gwydion said we mustn’t bother with it, for we had bigger fish to fry.’
‘So for want of a knot a whole ship may have been lost.’
‘It was plain to Gwydion the Tysoe stone was not the one we sought.’
‘But you left it unguarded, knowing that Maskull had been there. That was a very great risk. What can Master Gwydion have been thinking?’
Will shook his head like a man overwhelmed. ‘I don’t know what else we could have done. It’s not easy for anyone to use the harm that lies within a battlestone for his own ends. Maybe Gwydion thought that leaving it as a temptation for Maskull might be a way to hinder him. At the time Gwydion was more concerned to find the stone that marked the next battle. And rightly so, for there we succeeded – we found the Blow Stone. And you know what happened to that. But what if Maskull has taken the stone that the Blood Stone points to? The one that’s due to come alive next?’
Morann stared back at him. ‘Was it a battlestone? Or a stone of the lesser kind – the kind that only guides and connects the others?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Then our only clue is the Blood Stone’s verse,’ Morann said. He picked up the leaves and began to riffle his fingers through them. Will saw among them birch and oak, hawthorn and rowan, ash and holly. Morann spoke the verse in the true tongue and the sound of it was awesome.
‘Faic dama nallaid far askaine de,
Righ rofhir e ansambith athan?
Coise fodecht e na iarrair rathod,
Do-fhaicsennech muig firran a bran.
‘Faic dama nallaid far askaine de – what does that mean, Will?’
‘Er…See the…see the wild little deer on his rope?’ Will offered desolately.
That broke the gloom. Morann laughed so hard he almost fell off his chair. ‘The wild little deer, you say? Ha ha ha! On his rope! Ha ha ha-ha!’
‘Where’s the joke?’ Will asked, bemused, but then grinning back. He looked to Willow, but she was laughing along with Morann whose howls were now resounding.
‘Oh, that tickled me. It truly did!’ Morann choked.
Will’s cheeks coloured. It was a habit that his new face had, and it was mightily annoying. ‘I’m not the scholar that I might be, I’m afraid. Gwydion only conferred the tongue of need upon me with this fine disguise. He abided by the redes and refused to throw in the true tongue for good measure.’
‘Oh, you can say that again! Ha ha!’ Morann’s face was red now.
Willow said, wiping her eyes, ‘Well, tell us, Morann. How should it be?’
‘Come on, Will! Even in the tongue of the Isle you should know what is meant by the expression “wild little deer!” Think!’
Will scratched his head. ‘I…’
Willow said, ‘Spiders! It must be spiders!’
‘So it is. Willow, you’re a marvel. And so we have…now let me see…
‘Watch the spider upon his thread,
Who shall be the next true king?
He walks abroad to seek the road,
And sees not the raven upon the wing.’
‘It doesn’t mean anything to me,’ Will said. ‘How about you?’
‘I can’t say it does,’ Morann said, sucking his teeth. ‘At least nothing that jumps right out and hits you between the eyes.’
While the fire spat, and sap sizzled and seethed at the log’s end, they looked at one another blankly.
‘Let’s hear the other reading,’ Will suggested. ‘That’s the one that should tell us where the next stone lies.’
Morann looked through the leaves again, then spoke the lines.
‘Dama nallaid rofhinn e coise do-faicsenh,
Farhe righe fodechtan a muig a de an.
An firr ansambith iarraier skainne,
Faic ath na rathod dalha na brann.
‘A spider indeed walks unseen,
While the king is yet abroad.
But he who seeks the flaxen thread,
Shall ravens find beside the road.’
Willow poked the fire and watched the red sparks fly upward. ‘A spider who walks unseen – I think we all know who that must be!’
Will nodded. ‘“While the king is yet abroad.” The Blow Stone spoke of King Hal as a “false king”, and Gwydion thought the part about “the king watching over his tower” was Duke Richard defending Ludford Castle.’
‘The stones do not seem to speak well of the usurper’s line,’ Morann said. ‘Perhaps it is soon to die out.’
‘Then let’s say that the “king” here means Duke Richard, since there’s no mention of falseness this time.’
Willow met her husband’s eye. ‘And the duke is out of the Realm, as we know. But I wonder who’s seeking the flaxen thread. What is the flaxen thread? And what are the ravens beside the road?’
Once more they sat back in silence, but then Will said, ‘The lines don’t seem to fit with the Tysoe stone or the stone at Arebury. That’s something, at least.’
‘The word “skainne”,’ Morann said. ‘In the true tongue that means something very particular – a fibre of harl.’
‘Harl?’ Will asked. ‘What’s that?’
‘The fibres of a flax plant. When flax is harvested the stalks are soaked in water and rotted until only the harl remains. It’s the harl that’s spun into flaxen thread.’
Willow said, ‘That doesn’t get us very far.’
‘Perhaps this might.’ Will gave the loremaster the green stone fish from around his neck. ‘Gwydion told me it was with me when he first found me. I used it to crack the Doomstone, and then to kill the Blood Stone. You can see why I’m keen to try it on the next stone.’
Morann took the fish and examined it briefly before handing it back. ‘It’s a strange token, your little salmon. And I’ll admit there’s not much else I can say about it, though I’ve been a jewelmaster for a fair old time.’
‘If only Maskull would cause the court to progress southward,’ Willow said. ‘Then maybe we’d get into country that Will recognized better.’
‘Perhaps we’re doing what we should by watching and waiting here, but it doesn’t feel right.’ Will frowned, and turned to Morann. ‘Would you encourage me to go against my promise to Gwydion?’
Morann looked back gravely. ‘Your promises are your own concern, Willand. I cannot give you better counsel than your own on what you must do for the best.’
‘You sound like Master Gwydion when you speak like that.’
‘Meaning…what?’
Will took Morann’s challenge. ‘Oh, come on. You know he tells me far less than he knows. He keeps things from me very deliberately.’
‘He keeps something from everyone.’
‘But why me?’
‘Don’t you know?’
‘No. He makes me wonder sometimes whose side he’s really
on!’
Morann shook his head. ‘Don’t say that, Will. You should never doubt him. He’s a wizard, and he cannot tell you all that he knows – no, not even about yourself. The reason is that he is a mover and a shaper of events. He knows cause and effect very well, and he knows that whatsoever he tells men causes them to move this way or that. But he does not reveal to you all that he knows, for he dare not interfere with your fate.’
‘But he does that equally by not telling me what he should!’
‘Let him be the judge of that. And if you’re in any doubt, recall our friend, Lord Strange – the solution to his problem has always been within his own grasp, yet he may not be told where to find it by another.’
Will stared back. ‘Are you trying to say there’s a spell like that upon my head?’
Morann drew a deep breath. ‘After a fashion, Will, maybe there is.’
‘Explain!’
‘Easy, Willand. All I meant is that Master Gwydion might see his way clear to tampering with your future and your fate, but would you expect him to play so freely with the future and fate of Great Arthur and therefore the Realm?’
Will sat back, collapsed into himself. Despite his frustration, he could see that Morann had made a crucial point. He said, ‘At this moment I surely don’t feel like I’m Great Arthur.’
‘At this moment,’ Morann said, not cracking a smile, ‘you surely don’t look like him either. And maybe you are him and maybe you’re not, but all I know is that you’d better be him, for time is moving on apace, the lorc is turbulent and too many battlestones remain in the ground. As for me, I have an ungrateful task too. Tired as I am I must leave again, and soon. Where I’m going I don’t expect to run across Master Gwydion, but if I do you’ll surely be the first to know.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
THE DRAGON’S JAWS
The weather turned warm and springlike for the next week. The splash of otters was heard in the Afon’s waters, while the flash of kingfisher blue was seen among the reed mace. Buds burst and flowers began to brighten the grounds of Castle Corben. Even the dour walls of the keep were lightened by the warmth of sunshine.
As Willow had supposed, Maskull’s next reappearance heralded a burst of activity around the king, but it was not another move that was in the offing – there was to be a gathering.
Will was glad. For all its austerity, Corben Castle was not troubled by the same joining of ligns that had made Ludford a place of madness and misery for him. Even so, whenever he cautiously opened his mind to his surroundings he could taste the odour of tainted magic hanging like a mist about King’s Hill and along the banks of the Afon. Over the roofs and towers of the castle a ghastly power writhed with a glow like King Elmond’s Fire, and Will wondered what events could have left so long-lasting a mark on the place.
Before Morann had left he had reluctantly given something of the history of Corben, telling what had taken place a thousand years before. He had spoken of royal brothers, Cynsas and Orelin, ninety-eighth and ninety-ninth kings of the line of Brea, who had first raised the sceptre here. Cynsas had reigned for fifty years, and Orelin for thirty-two, and when the latter died, in his ninety-second year, he was succeeded by the grandson of his younger brother, Robilax. This was the hundredth king and his name was Uther, later called Pendragon. It was a time of upheaval, for the famed wizard, Merlyn, had lived in those days and had come to Corben to consult with the birds of the air and to work his high magic – magic that would bring about the second coming of Great Arthur to the land. But later, in the time of the greatness of Arthur, madness had afflicted Merlyn, an insanity brought on by the death of a friend, which drove him first to the Forest of Arden and then eastward to the linden woods and the solemn rookeries of Corben. There, in the mystic glades, Merlyn had wandered many a year, living on roots and berries, riding a stag for his steed, and suffering only the company of wolves and other wild beasts. And in those days, Merlyn sought out the warlock’s doom-ground and talked with the stars and danced magic that was akin to sorcery, though it was not quite sorcery, for Merlyn had been mad and his intentions uncertain.
‘You see, Master Gwydion once knew what it was like to be a man in torment,’ Morann had said. ‘He has known love and death, for in those days he took himself a wife and then he lost her. In his madness he killed a man, the one whom his abandoned wife would have married. And what was the reason for it? It was because he thought himself the betrayer of the Ogdoad. Some beliefs a man cannot live with. They rot the mind. The blame was what sent him mad.’
On tempest nights, Will could hear the echoes of those dangerous times still hanging in the air. And he could feel now that a delicately poised web of magic enfolded the royal court, centred on the king. Regardless of where Hal went, Maskull’s spells and Gwydion’s counterspells remained locked in place about him, always vying, blocking, exerting precise magical force to and fro, the one always counterplaying the other. Although the sum of those spells was nil, Will appreciated that was not the same as there being no magical forces in place at all. And it seemed that King Hal’s spirit was wholly weary of the tensions. He appeared strained and drained and afflicted by a terrible pressure, so that what fragile sanity he possessed seemed overready to crack. And yet something prevented it. Will wondered at the unguessed personal strength that lay within the king’s heart. He was no weakling, but an embattled spirit, one enduring a monstrous burden. Perhaps that was what the churlish folk saw in him and loved.
Yet Will was able to see, as few others could, why Maskull had brought the court to Castle Corben and held it here as if in preparation for some crucial event. It was not only a place of bad aspect, but the very place where Gwydion had faced his sternest personal test. And the crucial event seemed to be connected with an announcement. There was to be a banquet, or so it was rumoured, a banquet to celebrate the king and queen’s fifteenth wedding anniversary.
But was that just a pretext? Beyond it, as yet, lay only more debate and uncertain rumour. Will had come up here to the Long Gallery to decide what must be done. Beyond the gallery was an uninterrupted view across the greensward that lay between the castle walls. A hundred paces away stood the lind tree that Morann had spoken of – the infamous Corben Tree. He had slept on Morann’s words for a week, but no clear way had yet emerged. Should he go, or should he stay? What to do for the best?
Will’s thoughts were reaching for an answer when he passed close by a stocky man with an unsmiling demeanour and an archer’s arms. The man lingered at a corner, and when Will came close he whispered, ‘Hsst, my lord! A moment, if you will!’
Catching what he thought was his real name, Will turned sharply, his hand giving warning on the handle of his dagger. ‘What did you say?’
‘Easy, my lord…’ The man’s eyes strayed briefly to the dagger, then he took a step back. He was no lord or squire, but if he was a servant he wore no livery colours or badge to show who he served. ‘I have a message for the Maceugh of Eochaidhan.’
‘A message from whom?’
‘I’m to ask the Maceugh if he’ll come along with me.’ The man seemed overeager, agitated. He looked around as if he did not quite like the business he was about.
‘Why should the Maceugh come with you?’
‘To attend a private meeting.’
‘Private, you say? Or secret?’
‘That’s all I am to say. Will the Maceugh come?’
Will calculated swiftly, thinking that if it was Duke Henry who had sent the man there might be deadly peril at the end and no simple way of avoiding it. But if it was not Duke Henry, there might be something interesting to be learned. He nodded and followed the man across the castle court, up a flight of stone steps and along a short, open gallery. He sweated as he approached the door at the far end. When the servant opened it Will was surprised to find Lord Dudlea waiting for him.
‘Greetings to you, Maceugh,’ Dudlea said. He dismissed his servant, then invited Will to sit down, an offer Will declined
. He also refused the cup of wine that was poured for him.
‘Have no fear,’ Dudlea told him, ‘we’re quite alone here.’
‘That’s what worries me. Plots are hatched in private meetings. If you have something to say to me, you should say it in public.’
Lord Dudlea’s eyes were unmoving. ‘The duke has asked me to speak with you – in private.’
‘The duke—’ He stopped himself, suddenly feeling danger close in on him. For some reason, when Dudlea had said ‘the duke’ his thoughts had flown straight to Richard of Ebor – and to Bethe.
Dudlea looked hard at him for a moment, then he said, ‘The duke needs to know where the Clan Maceugh stands in our present struggle.’
Will returned the stare, but he was thinking furiously. He knew he must tread with care. After what seemed like an age, he said, ‘My clan stands where I stand.’
‘And where is that?’
Will stiffened. ‘That remains to be seen. I was sent into this Realm as emissary of the High King. So far, I have not been allowed to present my credentials to your sovereign, and this is an affront.’
‘Come now, Maceugh. You know the reason for that, or we are both fools.’
‘If you mean that your king has the mind of a child and is ruled by others, then I must agree with you. But he is still your king, and I can speak with no other.’
Lord Dudlea gave his guest a withering look. ‘Don’t make this more difficult than it need be, Maceugh.’
‘Take my words as you will.’ He decided to gamble. ‘I have two eyes in my head, my lord. I can see that you are loyal to your king, but that you have little time for the queen and her manoeuvres. Now what of the duke? Has he a message for me, or not?’
Dudlea’s face became stony once more. ‘Maceugh, you’re a candid man. Therefore I will not beat about the bush with you. Duke Henry does not want Richard of Ebor to cross from the Blessed Isle. To that end we have been looking to acquire an ally who is prepared to prevent his leaving.’
‘And you want the Clan Maceugh to be that ally?’
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