The Giants' Dance

by Robert Carter

  ‘No!’ Willow shouted ‘Please, no! Not my eyes!’

  The Elder leaned forward. There was no time to run back down the stair. Will jumped from the gallery rail. He crashed down onto the guard and brought him down like a dead weight. In the same movement the iron hook was spun out of the Elder’s hand.

  When Will got to his feet, the Elder dropped to his knees and began to wail piteously. His empty sockets were painted with unblinking eyes that stared at Will. The bequines flung themselves down as Will cut the lashings and swept his wife up from the blinding chair.

  ‘They came out from the yard and took me!’ she cried, white-faced and terrified. ‘Oh, Will, they were going to cut my eyes out!’

  But already a new emergency had overtaken them. Edward’s soldiers had found the gallery, and more now burst into the room. Will was driven back against the wall at blade-point. Magical power tingled in his spine as one of the men took Willow by the throat and another demanded to know where the king might be hidden.

  ‘You will not find King Hal here,’ Gwydion told them from the doorway. ‘He sits some way distant, in a tent by the riverbank, awaiting the outcome of the battle.’

  The soldier sneered, pushed a mailed hand in Gwydion’s face. ‘And who might you be?’

  ‘Have a care!’ Will growled. ‘Do you not know the Duke of Ebor’s wizard?’

  The man stepped back, turning on his men angrily. ‘You heard him! To the river! Do you want to catch a king or not?’

  ‘What about these?’ a lone voice asked.

  ‘Since you’ve shown yourself willing, you can take them out and hold them in the yard!’

  The three young troopers left to watch over them did not dare to touch the Elder or his bequines, but they seemed to have fewer scruples where wizards were concerned, and so Will, Willow and Gwydion were shoved out, first into the cloister walk and then into the yard, where they were put under an order of silence and made to face the wall, hands on heads.

  ‘You must do as you see fit,’ Gwydion murmured, until the prod of a spear haft to his ribs shut him up.

  ‘I think we must do as they say, at least until they calm down,’ Will said, thinking he had understood Gwydion’s wisdom well enough. The magical power that stirred in his belly tempted him to act, for with its aid he could easily overcome Edward’s three young troopers and work an escape, but now the battlestone had released him from its seductive grip and the shame of his recent actions hung over him. He decided he should refuse the power. To attempt magic now might compound the disaster, and for Willow and the now-defenceless Gwydion, there was greater safety here than outside – at least until the call for common quarter was generally heeded.

  So it was that the battle of Delamprey was wholly done with. All around, Edward’s victors ran amok, turning over the sequestering hall, looking for fugitive noblemen. Others tried to find hidden gold, though the Delamprey bullion had long since been carted off to the chapter house in Cordewan. When, some time later, the three captives were led out of the yard, they saw that the ground had been trampled and the bodies of men lay scattered upon it like leaves in autumn. But there were far fewer dead than had befouled the field of Blow Heath.

  By now the chaos of battle had already begun to resolve itself after its usual fashion. Thousands of the common soldiery of the king’s army had been disarmed and were sitting bound in sullen groups, watched over by knots of cavalrymen. But still Will could feel the stain of cold blood in this place, and he knew at once that there had been some hideous additional slaughter.

  ‘Oh!’ Willow cried, turning away with pursed lips from the sudden horrific sight.

  A score of heads lay on the grass – eyes open, mouths agape. And a bloody piece of beech-trunk stood in pride of place in the grassy sward, weltered in gore.

  Will recognized many of the ghastly faces from the king’s court – maybe two dozen knights and nobles had been deliberately butchered here, including the Duke of Rockingham, the Earl of Shroppesburgh, Lords Bowmonde and Egremonde…broken swords and strapless spurs attested a grand public degradation.

  Two carts were filled with naked bodies, their flesh the colour of finest Fellowship wax. They were headless, and all had their wrists roped together behind their backs. Nor was it over yet.

  Disgust turned to rage in Will’s heart.

  ‘Villains!’ he shouted at the sky. ‘Murderers! Where is Edward of Ebor? Take me to the Earl of the Marches!’

  He struggled with the guards, then saw a head of unruly red-gold hair bowed near to the block. It was Jasper, and Lord Dudlea was next behind him. They were kneeling captives, stripped to their loins, heads bowed.

  ‘So, it’s you, is it?’ Dudlea called out in miserable disgust. ‘You unconscionable liar.’

  Nearby, another nobleman strutted, helmless but in full armour and surrounded by lesser knights and men-at-arms, the latter all in red surcoats bearing the white badge of the bear and butchered tree on their breasts.

  ‘What is this bloody mess, my lord?’ Will roared at Lord Warrewyk, pointing at the block. Warrewyk’s guards seized him. His hands shook, overtaken by wrath, they itched to blast forth the power that remained in him. ‘Edward promised me common quarter! He promised!’

  ‘And common quarter was called.’ Lord Warrewyk’s voice cut like a shard of obsidian. He poked the point of his sabaton at the nearest head that lolled forlornly on the grass. ‘But as you see, none of these fine fellows were commoners.’

  There was laughter at that. Will struggled against the guards until Willow feared he would be hurt, or the magic that was in him would burst forth uncontrolled. ‘You have betrayed me! You have betrayed Edward! And you have destroyed the cause of peace!’

  Lord Warrewyk’s tight smile snapped into anger and he lifted his sword so that the point of it was in Will’s face. ‘If there have been scores settled among men of noble birth what business is that of yours?’

  ‘And all this wading in blood settles it, does it, my lord? Well? Does it?’

  ‘Willand, be easy now!’ Gwydion’s voice was a growl of reprimand as he stepped between them. ‘Perhaps you will tell me this, Friend Warrewyk: do you propose to sully this ground with more blood? Royal blood perhaps?’

  ‘Royal blood?’ The earl turned, put a mailed hand to his chin as if perplexed. ‘Howso? The king is once more among his true friends. But if you mean the she-wolf who calls herself queen, she is gone. Fled, along with her paramour, her sorcerer and the treacherous Hogshead whom I dearly wished to bring here and see relieved of his troublesome burden.’

  Warrewyk’s followers laughed again, but Gwydion took the news impassively. ‘So the queen has escaped…’

  ‘She and her friends will be hunted down in due course, you may be sure of that.’

  ‘Hunted down? Oh…will she?’ Gwydion’s words mocked Warrewyk with scant belief.

  ‘You have your victory, my lord!’ Willow said. ‘If you have any honour, tell these men to unhand us so we may go from here!’

  ‘What’s this?’ Warrewyk stepped close, studying the upstart, cheek and chin. ‘Her hair has been cut off, yet still it seems to me that this woman was a companion of Lord Morann’s once. Yes, it was she who gave us good warning of the queen’s forces while we marched up to Ludford.’

  ‘I won’t deny that I once saved your neck,’ Willow said staunchly. ‘Though I’d never do it a second time!’

  Warrewyk pursed his lips in amusement, full of himself and playing up before a dozen admirers. ‘You know, it’s always good policy to repay favours, be they for good or ill.’

  ‘May your own neck find a sharp blade at the next battle’s end, my lord,’ she spat.

  ‘Oh, curses upon me now, is it?’ He looked around, his dignity teetering in the balance now, but then he gave a deliberately magnanimous smile. ‘Still, I say this shrew deserves her reward. Let her go. Let them all go. Stand up, Dudlea! And the others too, for you are summarily pardoned! And know that you owe your worthless li
ves to a serving woman!’

  Warrewyk’s men laughed at that. Warrewyk himself gestured to his men that Dudlea and Jasper and two other minor noblemen were to be untied and driven off – until one of his knights spoke privately to him and he bethought himself.

  ‘Wait!’

  Warrewyk pulled off his mailed glove and examined a bloodied knuckle, saying to Will, ‘Before you go – I’m told you’re a healer. Perhaps you would care to test your skills on a very nasty little cut.’ Then he stooped down and lifted up Humphrey of Rockingham’s head so that it dripped red.

  Will turned away, tight-lipped. Willow and Gwydion followed him, even though he kept walking until the laughter of Lord Warrewyk and his raucous followers had long ceased to ring.

  They headed across the part of the field in which the dead lay thickest. An acre of grass was heaped with the slain. Despite the heat of the day a pale mist was rising from them as hundreds of bodies gave up the ghost.

  Gwydion’s eyes hardened as he scoured the killing ground. ‘Maskull has gone,’ he murmured. ‘Perhaps, after that attack on the wyvern, he supposed I was no longer bound by these fetters. Whatever the case, he has decided it is unwise to be drawn into a fight now. We may suppose he has already taken all that he wanted from the day.’

  Will stopped and stared, and tears rolled down his cheeks. ‘Again,’ he said, looking around him forlornly. ‘It’s happened again. And again there was no reason for it.’

  He buried his face in his hands. Willow did not yet know the full truth of what had happened. How could she? She did not know he had failed to resist the battlestone, that it had found his weakness and he had let it master him at a crucial time. He had done nothing to end the fight. That had been Maskull’s doing. He had drawn off a portion of the stone’s harm and captured it in a weapon to be held against some dread moment when it could be decisively visited upon the world.

  Will closed his eyes. The sight of so much defaced flesh had grown so wearisome that he could feel little comfort, even in Willow’s touch.

  Gwydion’s remarks were bitter and doom laden. ‘Today we have passed the point of no return. All virtuous circles have turned vicious. A better receipt for disaster would be hard to imagine – the king is taken, yet the queen has escaped. She will go into the North and gather her strength, while he will become the pawn of a new gang. This killing of nobles – the revenges sought by their kin – that is what will fuel the war now. We cannot stop it, Willand. Not until, like a wildfire, it has exhausted itself through lack of human kindling.’

  ‘That’s enough, Master Gwydion!’ Willow cried. ‘I don’t know whether it’s those golden bracelets that’re making you talk like a fool, but if you must say things like that, then go and say them in a place where Will can’t hear you!’ But the wizard faced her angrily. ‘The fault is mine! I delayed overlong! I groped in the dark! I did not dare to make the first move! And now all is lost!’

  ‘All is not lost!’

  Gwydion turned away from them like a broken man. ‘I am done for, Willand. My powers of healing have deserted me. You must work alone among the wounded of the field of Delamprey. You must try to make some little amends for my great failure.’

  Gwydion walked through the despoiled camp of the king’s army, and there he searched out the tent that contained the spent battlestone. It was not hard to discover, for it was painted with mystical staves, and a multitude of blue butterflies had already settled on it.

  As for Will, he tended the wounded, doing what he could. Willow saw many bodies, stripped and floating in the shallows of the Neane. Some were soldiers who had been ridden down for the sake of their jackets and kettle hats, and whose ragged throats now stained the green waters red. Many more of the mutilated dead wore the marks of the plague upon them. Willow knew they had fled into the river and drowned while trying to return home to Cordewan more than a century out of their time.

  Dusk was deepening when Will, bloodied and filled with pain, joined his wife and Gwydion in the black tent. He was shown the inscription that was incised in a sharp-edged plinth of reddish ironstone – the stump was all that remained of the Delamprey battlestone. This time, the words were in no language that Gwydion knew.

  The wizard’s voice was hopeless. ‘Maskull’s spells have done this. He knows my powers well enough. He has locked it tight, and made it impossible for us to follow the lorc further by means of the verses.’

  Will picked up an abandoned stool and sat down heavily on it. ‘Don’t say that.’

  ‘I do say it, for it is the truth! And I will go further: if we should find the next stone, the leaping salmon talisman will no longer be our great advantage!’

  The recrimination hurt. ‘I’m sorry about that,’ Will said, and in a voice that was flat from fatigue he began to tell what had happened at Harleston lake, saying how the green fish had fused with the red and become real. But Gwydion seemed hardly to be listening, and before Will had finished the wizard let out a long howl of despair.

  ‘The prospect is bleaker than ever it was before! So much has conspired against us that Maskull must now prevail! When he duelled with me at the Giant’s Ring his words were more than mere boasts. I am indeed too weak! And too craven to resist him! This is the way the Last Age must end!’

  Willow gave him a look that was as dark as thunder and said, ‘All I want to know is where’s my Bethe.’

  The wizard’s sigh dismissed Willow’s cares, but then he stirred himself to make an answer. ‘Edward, Lord of the Marches, came here a little while ago to claim this stump which he calls his victory monument. He says the Lady Cicely is waiting at the port of Dundelgan. She will stay there until news of the outcome of the battle reaches her. Because of Ebor’s victory, you may now hope that Bethe will come across with her.’

  ‘Hope?’ Will said. ‘We’ll do more than that. Are the duke and duchess intending to meet here?’

  ‘That is not Richard’s plan. Edward says his father must continue south with all speed. He will meet the victors of Delamprey Field at some convenient place between here and Trinovant. They desire to enter the city together and in triumph, with Richard and the king riding side by side. It is in Richard’s mind to try himself against the Stone of Scions. He wishes to ask questions of Magog and Gogmagog.’

  ‘Who?’ Willow asked.

  ‘Magog and Gogmagog are the guardians of the throne,’ Will said bluntly. ‘They—’

  But Gwydion interrupted him. ‘It is the Stone of Scions that is the true guardian of the throne. It lies within the base of the throne in the White Hall in Trinovant. It was fetched into the Realm from Albanay, but before that it dwelt in the Blessed Isle, at Tara, and was the stone upon which the High Kings there were crowned. In ancient times it was brought out of the city of Falias by one of the Ogdoad whose name was Morfesa. He claimed it was made by the fae, and it may be so, for no king may sit the throne of the Realm for long without its approval.’

  ‘And the other two?’ Willow said. ‘Magog and Gogmagog?’

  Gwydion nodded. ‘When King Brea captured the Isle of Albion, they were the last of the giants that he overcame. They became Brea’s loyal servants, and were seen for many years fetching and carrying about the palace of White Hall. When they died two great oaken statues were carved in their likenesses and much magic placed upon their heads. They stand in their niches behind the throne and will cry out against any man who attempts to sit upon it without the mandate of Sovereignty…’ He stumbled over his words as if overtaken by a sudden bout of dizziness, and then tried to stand. ‘I must go ahead and prepare the ground in Trinovant against the day of Duke Richard’s arrival…’

  ‘It looks to me,’ Willow said, ‘that Master Gwydion is in no fit state to go anywhere just now.’

  The wizard rattled the hateful fetters, and said through gritted teeth, ‘My powers have been drawn, yet I must try to salvage what advantages I can. Some small delays may yet be strewn in the road to hamper Maskull’s progress.’

&nb
sp; Will, wearied by his effort but more so by the wizard’s bleakness, felt his spirits flickering and fading. But he had promised all his strength, and so he steeled himself for another effort. ‘We shall fight on with you.’ He took Willow’s hand. ‘We’ll travel with you, Master Gwydion, at least until Duke Richard’s retinue arrives. By the time we have our daughter back, we’ll know what else we should do.’

  But the wizard gazed back, lost in his own decaying vision. ‘Better, I think, that you return home to the Vale where you belong. If the Realm is now to fall into ruin you may as well wait for the end in the peace of your own home. You will have a year – two maybe, if you are lucky – before Maskull’s fireball finally falls on you. You saw what happened in Little Slaughter. The end, when it came, arrived at once and was painless. Knowing the end is coming, but not precisely when – that may sound like unendurable torture, but it is not so very different from the burden that is shouldered by all mortal men. You will not have quite so long to enjoy the delights of this life as you thought, and of course you will miss the satisfactions of seeing your beautiful child grow up, but—’

  ‘Now that’s more than enough of that kind of talk!’ Willow said, breaking in on him. ‘You can certainly tell it plain when you choose. But there’s nothing very brave or clever about spreading gloom and despondency, Master Gwydion, no matter how heavy your heart may feel at present.’

  The wizard held his head in his hands. ‘I do not regret it, for what I have said is only the truth.’

  She shook her head, her patience spent. ‘Well, if that’s all we have to look forward to, we might as well fight on. That’s what I say. And in the meantime, I’ll remind you that you’ve a promise to keep. Will told me you’d give up all you knew about the Dark Child once the battle was done, and now it is done. So you’d better be quick and say how you’ve fathomed so much about that villain so fast. We ought to know why he hungers to kill my Willand, for I don’t think we’ve seen the last of him, and I expect there’s nothing worse than being murdered over something without ever knowing the reason for it.’