The Giants' Dance

by Robert Carter

  ‘But then, three and a half thousand years ago, the world changed,’ Willow said. ‘And the Age of Trees came to an end.’

  Will looked at her. ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Morann told me about the Ages.’ She sighed. ‘He said that when the Age of Trees ended, the first phantarch, who was called Celenost, went into the Far North with his deputy. Then the Age of Giants began, when there were no folk in the Isles at all. And that Age was a time of desolation that lasted a thousand years.’

  As they walked, Will told her what Gwydion had said concerning the five Ages that had been, and of the Ogdoad of Nine who had arisen in the first Age when magic had been plentiful and the fae had clothed the land with trees. But then had come a great disaster and much magic had escaped the world. In the Age of Giants that followed, there had been only enough magic for an Ogdoad of Seven. And by the third Age, the Age of Iron, when the Isle was reconquered by the hero-king Brea, so much magic had drained from the world that there remained only enough for an Ogdoad of Five. In the fourth Age, the Age of Slavery and War, the Ogdoad had shrunk again to three, and now the world was in its Last Age, when all that had gone before could give no clue to what must come in future times…

  As they walked, Will became aware of a strange sensation that came every now and then. It was hard to fathom its source, but it seemed almost like a distant stroke of black lightning that made him turn his head in its direction. Though whenever he did turn, he saw nothing in the sky. He rubbed his eyes, and looked instead at the tall cow parsley that nodded at the side of the road – its small creamy flowers, its leaves ferny and home to many small, resting flies. There was nothing to be seen that was out of the ordinary: a thickly overgrown ditch had been delved along their right, and blackberry bushes grew beyond, though the fruits were still green. A flurry of little buntings broke from cover and disappeared, chirruping, into the ripening wheatfield. Then the sun went behind a cloud. It took the fierce light off the road, but the day seemed no cooler. They hurried on, heedless now of their tiredness or of who might see them.

  Will took out his hazel wand again. Scrying was not the same as casting magic, but even so he worried that the powers that stirred inside him while scrying might give some hint for Chlu to follow.

  During most of the afternoon they traced the Mulart lign and all the while Will felt the strength rising in it like waves of pain increasing in an infected limb. That was against what he had expected, and could only mean that the waning that should have come between noon and midnight was being overwhelmed by a greater surge. There was as yet no sign of the Indonen lign.

  They crossed a little brook and refreshed their feet in the cool water.

  ‘Do you think the folk in Harleston really do have four eyes?’ Willow asked uneasily. ‘And do they spin linen from their own hair?’

  He laughed. ‘Who knows what’s truth and what’s fable in an old Sister’s song?’

  ‘The old one was right about stormy weather coming though.’

  ‘Yes, the air’s very close.’

  ‘Do Wise Women have second sight?’

  ‘Do pine cones?’ he said. ‘They foretell the weather too.’

  She scoured the skies again, then ran her eyes along the horizon to where the haze was thickening and yellowing. ‘When will the moon rise?’

  ‘A little before midnight.’ He followed her gaze to the north-west. She was right – the day was becoming unnaturally sticky and oppressive. It was not just a blight that came from his own feelings. He looked deep into the land and remembered what the Wortmaster had taught him. He noted how the vetches were patterned about in the verges of the meadow. Where before he had seen purple loosestrife and yellow toadflax and the white bells of wild carrot and pig nut, now they had begun to give way to the poisonous fool’s parsley and hemlock. He looked back, checking that they were not straying from the lign, because to lose it now must cost them dear.

  ‘We’re coming to a place of poor aspect,’ he said.

  She looked around, unable to see what he meant. ‘How many chimes before sunset?’

  Will stretched out his hand and measured off the sun’s path in the sky. ‘About four. The sun will sink at the ninth chime this evening.’

  Rooks cawed among the treetops, diving and clowning in the sky, irritated maybe by the sullen charge that hung in the air. As Will scried the green lane he looked up at the birds and saw they were mobbing a dove. But then he looked again and saw it was one of their own number which was pure white. The feeling in the ground heaved queasily like music that slides from one mode to another. He knew he had found the place he was looking for.

  ‘This is Harleston,’ he said. ‘I’m sure of it.’

  ‘Be careful.’ Willow took his arm.

  ‘With a battlestone so close I think that’s good advice.’ The hazel in his hand twisted down powerfully. ‘There’s water near here too. Bigger than a pond. More like a small lake. This way.’

  They came through long grass, past a spinney of yew trees and saw a stile set across a wooden fence. Will beat the stinging nettles away from it with his wand. When they entered the village they found it was no more than a few shabby hovels built around a long pond and the shacks of the linen weavers who lived there. Beyond it was the lake Will had felt. It was long and triangular, made generations ago by the damming of a stream. In the middle of its broadest part stood the Harle Stone.

  ‘It’s not even buried,’ Willow said, looking unsmilingly at the pure white finger of stone that stuck up from the lake.

  ‘Someone in the past tried to drown it,’ he said distantly. ‘They shouldn’t have bothered. It was probably happy to be cut off by a moat. They don’t like to be disturbed.’

  ‘You make it sound like it’s alive.’

  ‘It might as well be. They harbour malice like a weakling’s mind.’

  Will wondered what violence he should expect from this battlestone. It was the biggest one he had yet seen, almost twice the height of a man, though waist-slender from top to bottom. Its surface, he could see, was patterned with spirals, loops and whorls.

  Willow tugged on his arm and whispered, ‘Look what it’s done to the folk who live here.’

  The people they saw paid them no heed, but continued about their work. They were ungainly, awkward folk, tall and thin as reeds, with skin as pale as chalk and teeth that seemed yellow by contrast. Their hair was partly hidden under their wide-brimmed hats, but it was always silverwhite, no matter what their age. They seemed to be all of one family.

  There were dogs here too, half a dozen of them at least, hairless, skinny creatures with long muzzles and mournful eyes. They trotted about but showed no interest in the new arrivals, which seemed most strange to Will. Perhaps they were mute, he thought, for they made no sound either.

  When Will approached one of the young women, he could hardly contain his shock at seeing her face. The skin of her lips was an unnatural red, but what discomfited him most were her eyes: they were bright pink and each contained two pupils.

  ‘Hey-ho,’ Will said.

  The girl twitched unhappily, half looking at him. She enquired softly what business he had in Harleston. The rest of them, mainly men, yet all dressed alike in unbleached smocks and wide-brimmed straw hats, hung back in the shade of their scutching shacks. They seemed like folk used to being left to themselves, and certainly unused to offering a welcome.

  ‘Tell me,’ Will said. ‘How deep is your lake?’

  The other screwed up her strange eyes to look at him. Her attention jinked about like a butterfly and hardly seemed able to settle. ‘Not deep,’ she muttered. ‘It’s our retting pond. It’s where we steep the flax after harvest. What do you want?’

  ‘Would the water come above my waist if I was to wade in?’

  The girl seemed bewildered, flustered by the question. She bobbed her head like a bird and answered, ‘You can’t go in the water.’

  ‘Why not?’

  She twitched and turned
away without answer.

  ‘I asked you, why not? Why can’t I go in?’

  She gave a mew of a laugh. ‘It’s the law.’

  With that she jerked up the bale of cloth she had been tying and carried it away.

  ‘What do you make of that?’ Willow asked, taking him by the arm again.

  ‘They’re an odd lot. Mild enough now, but I’m not sure what they’ll do when I break their law.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  He looked at her for a long moment. ‘You’ve caught the sun a bit,’ he said at last.

  ‘Will?’

  ‘I’m going to do what I came to do.’

  It pained him to see fear take all the beauty from her face, but it filled him with strength to see her nod at last.

  Thunder sounded in the east and a cool wind rippled the fields. He looked up at the sky, then at the water. Midges danced over it as they always dance before a summer thunderstorm. But this was different. There was something unnatural stirring the air. When he looked up he saw that the sky had become slate grey and the stone was throwing out a brilliant reflection across the pond. It seemed to be whiter than it had been. It seemed to beckon.

  He took a moment to put out of his mind a lingering fear of water. A scar had been left in him by the marish hag. He had almost drowned, then, and Gwydion had said that when a man came that close to death it always put an unseen wound in him, a wound that first had to be healed, but when that was done it could be turned into a powerful strength.

  The rooks cawed and flapped overhead, and the wind began to ripple up small waves. It was strangely cold now, and Willow clasped her arms as she watched him kneel by a clump of windblown reeds and whisper to himself. After a while he rose and trod with great deliberation – and fully clothed – into the shallows.

  ‘I’m with you, Will,’ she said. But the wind took her words away.

  Once over the shock of the water’s touch he readied himself to face the task. He began chanting the spell that would allow him to come close to the stone. He could feel it drawing powerfully on the lorc now, pulling into itself the dark streams it needed before it could vomit out its harm.

  Will knew at once that it was no guide stone. Its power ranked alongside that of the Dragon Stone. He saw its glowing, white finger pulse. Whatever power lay within was making acknowledgment. It understood that he had come, and it saw what he wanted.

  ‘Hearken to me!’ he called out in the true tongue. ‘Your long slumber has ended! I am here!’

  But his words sounded like thin vaunting, and when he took another step the water rose suddenly around his thighs. He drew out his hazel switch and held it before him like a charm, muttering the protective passes and cantrips that kept him in touch with the deadly stone. The end of the wand flexed powerfully as if it was being pulled down by an unseen hand. Then a scraping sound began to emanate from the stone, like fingernails drawn across slate. It shook Will’s teeth in their sockets, but it did not break his concentration. A glance towards the village showed that those who had been working in the sheds had gone. They had fled, first to their homes, then out again and across the flax fields, their strange dogs running at their heels. Willow stood on the bank, a lone figure, watching.

  He turned to look back, treading out the path of the lign, realizing that the stone meant to drive him onward, to duck his head under the water. He resisted too savagely, then remembered to relax, as Gwydion’s teachings advised. He thought again about the mechanism of warped fate through which the stones worked their will. Against so ancient a power, a power that could make giants dance to its tune, only the strength of quiet certainty could be set. He must not lose faith in the stone’s inevitable defeat, but neither must he fall prey to the great failing that was called vainglory. It was a path he had to feel for carefully. The redes of magic pointed the way forward, but his deeds were what counted. He must assert his will neatly at that magical point in time where all things happened – at the place where the future became the present, and the present became the past. That was what Gwydion meant when he spoke of ‘the here and now’. Will knew that he must approach the battle as if his enemy’s defeat had always been inevitable, yet without anticipating his own triumph. Only then would things fall properly into place and the true path be found.

  Suddenly, he faltered at the enormousness of his burden. Looked at from below it seemed an unclimbable peak. Seen all as one, an undoable task. But he drew a deep breath and took courage, because he knew that doubt could destroy him just as easily as arrogance. Any weakness could throw his destiny onto a track leading to disaster. In this endeavour he must stay alert and marshal all his powers. His chief task would be accomplished in the present – he must make sure that his preferred version of the future was the one that actually became real.

  As the sky darkened further, the lign lit the water in bilious green. He followed the glow step by step, feeling out the way, stirring up stinking mud between his toes, fighting down the nausea conjured by the stone. But the water was cold and getting colder by the moment, as if some bitter current was refilling the pond with icewater. The moment he recognized the danger, gooseflesh covered him and he began to see his own breath. It steamed in what had moments ago been warm summer air.

  Then he heard Willow screaming.

  But he dared not turn to her. Not now. He was waistdeep and halfway out to the stone. He stared hard at it, feeling his progress impeded, his resolve once more under attack.

  ‘I must keep the balance…’ he murmured through his teeth.

  But his steadiness was being violently shaken. As he went on, a whirlwind erupted from the top of the stone. A bolt of lightning flashed bright somewhere behind him, the clap of thunder coming so close that it made his hair stand on end. The horror that lightning might strike his head – here, as he stood in the pond – flashed briefly in his mind, but still his pace did not waver.

  All thoughts of his peril had to be cast aside. A maelstrom of vapours began to emerge from the stone – a grey cloud turning so swiftly that his eyes could not follow. Where it boiled, a scattering of hailstones formed. They fell around him, dropping like grains of corn at first, but soon their sound increased until it became a furious hiss against the water’s surface. The hail turned the lake into a seething plain. The whirling column seemed to be sucking all the air above the lake in towards it. He could hardly breathe, or keep his feet, but he reached inside his shirt to draw out his fish talisman.

  His hands were white, the pads of his fingers wrinkled like those of a drowned man.

  How long have I been out here? he asked himself.

  It seemed like an age.

  With the talisman clenched in his fist he felt able to push on again towards the roaring stone. But now his hands and feet were growing numb and his legs would hardly move to his command. As he went forward he came into chestdeep water. The cold clasped his ribs like an iron band. What looked like apple blossom flew on the freezing wind. But it was not apple blossom, for it vanished without trace into the water wherever it hit. It’s snow, he thought, and turned his face away as the storm hit.

  A slush of ice quickly plastered the back of his head, sent his hair lashing wetly about his face and shoulders. He raised the talisman before him in both hands, whispering incantations to unlock his frozen muscles, to force the warm blood out into his numb arms and legs. The cold burned his nose and the rims of his ears. He was neck-deep in freezing water now. Almost weightless. There was no longer any feeling in his feet as he propelled himself forward. His entire body began to shake uncontrollably. Then he saw the ice forming.

  It was like nothing he had ever seen before – ice spreading across the water even as he watched. The top of the lake became glassy, thin panes floating around him. He beat the water as it began to thicken, trying to break it up, but it was no good. The stone was freezing the lake from where it stood and its effects had already reached to the shore. He saw the green light of the lign fade to blue and turn p
aler as the surface of the water froze around him. He stumbled, threshing against the stone’s astonishing power, but as fast as he cracked the ice it froze again. Fear stole over him.

  The ice began to harden. He danced magic for his life, treading out over and again the only spell of thawing that he knew. His knowledge was not deep, but he knew that magic repeated many times wanes in power. He was now in a pit of icy water, but the ice was closing on him again and he was beginning to lose the clarity of mind on which everything depended. He danced hard in the icy water, gestured and struck the poses of the spell, drawing power from the mud of the lakebed and the kind earth below. But the lign blocked his efforts. Snow filled the darkened air above him and mounted like a deadly white fur all around the ice-hole. His jaw locked, juddered, making the words of the spell slur and stutter. His knees and elbows touched the closing ice. Terror speared him through as he saw the water around his neck solidify like candlewax.

  Large snowflakes stuck to his face, blotted out the world. When he closed his eyes he could not open them again – the cold had frozen the lids shut. That prompted a tremendous surge of fear. He broke off the spell to burst his arms upward and shatter the ice once more. And then he knew he was lost.

  He cried out, but the ice only closed and closed. His arms felt like so much dead meat. All his strength had been frozen away. He had panicked. He had made the wrong moves. Without constantly danced magic, the ice-hole had been able to grip him. Too late, he acknowledged his mistake. As the ice crushed his ribs, he drew one last breath, to shout defiance at the thing that was killing him.

  But then two hands were under his arms and hauling him up with strength enough to slide him forward out of the ice-hole and up into a drift of soft snow. Behind him the death pit slammed shut – solid, gone.

  ‘Fight back!’ Willow was screaming, raging at him. She had dashed across the ice to drag him clear, and now was shaking the life back into him. ‘Get up and fight, Willand! Or I swear I’ll take your talisman and do the job myself!’