Whitemantle

by Robert Carter

  Chlu’s power had thinned, left him a shadow of what he had been. He raised his hand to dash Will’s brains from his head. But it was fruitless and Will knew it.

  ‘You’re fading,’ he said matter-of-factly.

  ‘Fool! It’s you who is fading.’ But then Chlu gazed at himself, aghast. ‘What’s happening? What have you done?’

  Will watched his counterpart shred into the air. ‘Whatever it is, you’ve done it, not I…’

  But then his voice was lost like a wolf’s whine rolling high on a wailing wind. Chlu dissolved into dust as he watched, and the world lost its colour, and then its form melted away entirely, so that for a moment Will’s spirit seemed to go to the place it had gone that time long ago when he had been disembodied for a while and trapped inside an elder tree. All he knew was a sense of self. There was no sight, no sound, no taste, no smell, no feeling. There was no up nor down, no left nor right – only his thoughts, confirming his own existence, carrying him through a tunnel of space and time.

  And then suddenly he was ten feet above the ground and falling down into a meadow. The impact jarred his ankles and shoved his knees up under his chin so that his head was thrown back painfully as he fell.

  He leapt up, shaking his vision clear and pressed a hand to the back of his neck. He felt as if he had been spat out by a dragon. His mind reeled off balance for a moment, but then new thoughts coalesced in his head.

  There was more danger here!

  He braced himself to take another hit. But no, it seemed not to be coming after all. Only a meadow of crushed grass and brown daffodils…

  This was the same field he had vanished from. It had to be. But why did it look so different? There were no tents here now. Only the pits of old camp fires and waggon ruts in the clay. But it was definitely the same field and, better still, everything was the right way round!

  What about the wound? his inner voice demanded.

  He looked groggily at his hands, at the knot of ill-healed flesh. Was that his left hand? He made a scribbling motion in the air, knowing that this hand must be his right one, the one he used to dip the quill. Yes! That felt very good. And so did his heart, which was beating in the left side of his chest…

  He exulted.

  I’ve come back, he thought. Chlu’s vanishing spell was impermanent. The magic has fallen apart and we’ve reverted!

  But how much time had passed? And what about the battle?

  The power he had felt running through the land was entirely gone now. He looked around, haunted by the sense of imminent danger. Where was Chlu? A delay had attended his twin’s arrival on Cullee Hill, so maybe another delay would attend his reappearance here. It was a good bet that Chlu would also return to the place where he had started.

  With a bit of luck he’ll fall and break his neck, Will thought. But I guess that’s too much to hope for.

  The idea of waylaying Chlu as he fell defenceless out of the air tempted him, and he looked around for something he could use as a bludgeon. But if his speculations about victory and defeat were correct, a weapon would solve nothing. Something unknown would intercept his killing intent, just as it intercepted Chlu’s.

  As his head cleared he abandoned the idea of murder. Going to find Willow and the others seemed by far the better course.

  I’ll find her, he thought. I’ll find her and I’ll tell her about what I am…

  He saw that his horse had been taken. It must have become part of the Ebor baggage train, in which case there was nothing for it but to set out on foot. He ran towards a hole in the nearby hedge and clambered through. It made sense to get out of the open field, and even better sense to find the road. He had a few moments in hand, but it would not take Chlu long to make his appearance and he would quickly work out where his twin had gone.

  Will checked the sky and saw that some of the cloud he had thickened to assist him on Cullee Hill had drifted south. The sun was now westering, dipping behind the mountains of Cambray, sending long, cold shadows across the valley. It was already late afternoon and the short day would soon be snuffed out.

  He found the road and ran south along it, following the hoof marks and wheel ruts. Edward must have won, he reasoned, for if he had been beaten, then his remnant would have routed northward, in an attempt to fall back upon Wyg Moor and Ludford.

  The thought should not have encouraged him, but it did. An impartial spirit was hard to maintain when Edward’s mother had Bethe in her care, but the image of Jasper and his men being cut to pieces in an ambush did much to restore his sense of balance.

  He crossed the Lugg by the little stone bridge at Yatton Mystery, then ran for half a league further across flat land, pushing on until his ribs ached and his second wind came. Then he began to see the bodies.

  A scattering of white-faced corpses lounged carelessly across the meadows to his right. More slept in heaps where they had been tidied to the side of the road to get the carts through. These dead were whole, with heads and limbs attached to their trunks and no gross butchery evident. They had been killed by high-shot arrows entering them through shoulder or breast – most had bloody mouths and chins where they had coughed up their lives in small pools of blood. The killing arrows remained skewered in the flesh; only those that had missed their mark and stuck in the cold clay had been gathered up to be used in reply. Will looked out ahead and the pattern of the battle began to resolve itself.

  Already in the gathering gloom the Sightless Ones were appearing. It was their right to possess the killing ground after a battle. At the first rumour of armies marching this way they had spread the alarm abroad. They had allowed certain local families to hide in the walled grounds of their chapter houses. But a price had been put upon their asylum, and now these favoured farmers were being herded out to dig the grave pits.

  Will saw how the Fellows drove away the Wise Women who came wishing to tend the field. He hurried on, heeding no call but the terror of what might have happened to Willow.

  I’d know if anything had befallen her, he thought. Surely, I’d know. But maybe I do know. Maybe that’s what this terror is. By the moon and stars, you must stay calm!

  He knew he must set aside his fears and read the field with a knowing eye, for it was important to work out how the tide of battle had ebbed and flowed. It seemed that Jasper’s men had come up from the south, and Edward’s battalions had fallen upon them by the banks of the Lugg. Archers on Edward’s right had come from concealment to punish Jasper’s advancing vanguard. Then Edward’s left had outflanked them and swept their enemies back down the river.

  When Will reached the bridge at Morte’s Crossing he found a flooded road and gangs of fieldsmen up to their knees in the icy water. Hooded figures stood by, scanning the air, as if they knew a stranger had come among them. The Lugg had swilled back where hundreds of bodies clogged the stream. The dead were packed tight under the bridge, locked together by the force of the water.

  Will hurried onward. There was no way to count the cost of what had happened, but it was clear that many thousands had died, far more than had perished at Awakenfield. Once more, the latest battle fought seemed also to have been the bloodiest. Here the rout had run south-eastwards along the meandering Lugg. Its path was marked by much blood, and a great swathe of hacked and harrowed bodies – light Cambray bill-carriers, mounted lancers, heavy mercenary swordsmen, green-clad archers – all had come to grief here. Some of the wounded were still alive, barely so, as their spirits clung to cold and mutilated flesh. They were beyond Will’s capacity to aid – he had been too drained by his own fight to assist anyone – and those wounded that yet lived were too far gone now to be helped by any healing that Will might have delivered.

  But, horrible though the death-strewn aftermath of battle was, as Will ran on he came to an even worse place. This field stank of bloody murder and gleeful revenge, for here, in a grassy lea by some scrubby hawthorn bushes, captured men had been collected together to have their heads stricken off. Scraps of torn l
inen and woollen cloth told who they were. Not great men these. Not men of name and high renown. Only esquires and men of middling worth, men whose deaths hardly seemed worth the trouble.

  A couple of dozen headless bodies were all that remained of them, for their heads had been tossed into the river, and half a dozen had fetched up on a little shingle bank where a pack of roaming, masterless dogs had found them.

  Will shouted and ran at the animals to drive them off. In his outrage and disgust he cursed and cast stones at them, but in the end his anger frothed over into impotent rage and he wept. He had to bring himself up sharp by reminding himself that these were dumb, feral creatures, animals not motivated by any delight in malice. They had been hurt and left hungry by men, and they would feed on men’s flesh without scruple. But what made Will shiver and sent him hurrying onward was the thought that it was not the dogs who had descended into the depths of depravity here.

  The darkness was falling fast now. He looked hopelessly for Jasper’s colours, some sign of his fate, but he found nothing. And then he saw the iron oak atop its hill. The ground below it had been blasted and abandoned by the living who had left a scatter of dead men all about. There was no longer any sense of roaring power here, no malice swirling from its lair. Only a hole where a withered stump should have remained.

  But it was not there. Someone had poked a poleaxe through the cage of roots and wrestled the shrunken stump of the great Doomstone of the West out of its long captivity. It was gone, and judging by the marks in the ground, it had been taken away in a two-wheeled cart.

  And so, as the inky blackness of night put to flight all the sorrowful sights of a sour day, Will debated with himself what would be for the best. Should he stay here until first light? Or should he try to find the others without delay?

  They should not be hard to find, for they must have gone with Edward’s victorious army. And they should not be hard to catch, for armies did not move as swiftly as a man travelling alone. The moon offered him advice as well as the chance of a little light. A half moon, it was, and sinking slowly in the south, but it was sufficient and as it showed itself in fissures between the clouds, Will decided there was nothing to be gained from waiting.

  No sooner was his choice made than he was glad of it, for he wanted now to be rid of the smell of death and leave this place. That, he knew, would take him many hours. And he was right, for he made slow progress in the unforgiving night. Caltraps had been sprinkled liberally around parts of the field – iron barbs, these were, devices that presented one of their four spikes uppermost whichever way they fell. They were meant to pierce horses’ hooves and so break a charge of cavalry, but they would just as soon hobble a man finding his way in the dark.

  Wind roared in the tall beeches as Will followed the river, hurrying down past a burned-out farmhouse at Kinsland. Then he turned east for two leagues, heading for the place they called ‘the Leen’. It was a place of interlaced streams, and Will’s feet found molehills all along the way. He recalled how one of the Wortmaster’s rhymes had spoken of the Earldom of Heare, saying, ‘mud, molehills and mistletoe’, and it was true, for here the soil was a rich brown, and moles were many, and green globes of mistletoe hung in the winter trees like an ancient blessing.

  Will found the going easier with the wind at his back, and soon he saw a huddle of dark buildings that could only be the little town of Leenstone. Will approached warily, for there were gangs of men abroad, still looking for fleeing soldiers. But the town seemed untouched by the fight, and Will knew that that was probably because of the wealth of the towered chapter house that brooded near the town, and the eminence of its Elder.

  Both Edward and Jasper would have been the target of many petitioners before the battle. And among the petitioners would have been Fellows from each of the chapter houses scattered throughout the earldoms of Salop and Heare. All would have wanted to secure a charter of safety, a parchment they hoped would afford them protection against pillage.

  Deals done and soldiers paid, Will thought. How much gold has changed hands? How many victual waggons were filled up by the sale of paper promises signed and sealed with the devices of Ebor or Pendrake?

  There was an irony here that made Will shake his head, for the Fellowship habitually sold the worthless and the intangible to others. In the end, even they would have to admit that the possession of a great army trumped all other kinds of power – even that generated by their cellars full of gold.

  And a great army had certainly been at work at Morte’s Crossing. Edward’s coolly competent generalship had directed the violence with masterful aplomb. He had managed the rout with perfectly controlled vengeance. Will pictured in his mind the later stages of the killing: defeated troops streaming away south and east across the Earldom of Heare, wanting to flee back into Cambray but being driven remorselessly through a land they did not know. Ebor horsemen hunting them with long lances, striking hundreds down to be finished off by footmen following in eager bands. The simple soldier used savagery in victory to get what he wanted. He did it just as the prince used promises made beforehand.

  Will dropped down and crawled in the frozen meadow mud, feeling with his fingers for the horses’ prints, determining their speed and direction. Jasper’s baggage train had probably been seized intact, and sent to join up with Edward’s own. Will felt crushing desperation when he thought of how this war had grown stealthily upon the Realm, bursting at last like a plague-filled pustule. And the one who had been meant to stop it – at least if prophecy was to be believed – had utterly failed.

  It seemed to be the saddest truth that the more one learned about the world the less there was to like about men. As Gwydion had once taught him, there was no evil in the natural world; nothing was evil except that men made it so. How, then, to stop from falling into a grotesque dislike of all things that men did? Will fixed his mind on his friends and reminded himself that there was more kindness in men than there was harm. That had to be grasped and resolutely borne in mind.

  As the midnight hour approached, Will thought he had come far enough from the battlefield and from the ligns to refresh himself once more. Here, surely, he could rely on untainted earth power. But it was no good. There was still a lingering echo of fear in the land, and twice more he came across cold corpses. One wretch was dead in a ditch, but it was the second that struck Will with a bolt of panic fear, for the body sat upright in the main road, open-eyed, though stiff and naked and drenched in congealed blood.

  Will howled at the sight, his flight fired at first by fear, but then by despair or something like it. He stumbled on, haunted by the hooting of owls, until his feet hurt and his lungs felt as if they were bursting. Then he tripped and fell, and he lay on his back in the empty road, feeling ready to melt down into the earth.

  The moon was nearly gone now, setting in the west, and here he was, alone and half mad and fleeing from dead men in the dark. But then he thought of Lotan’s nature, indomitable and steady like a bear, and he took courage.

  He had travelled fully two leagues since the bridge, and maybe two more along a road to the south would bring him to the ancient city of Erewan. Edward had good reason to enter Erewan, for it was a populous place friendly to the Ebor cause and there was food and drink to be found. It also had a large brownstone chapter house, the main counting house of the earldom, where Ebor promises could be redeemed in coin. Edward’s army must have gone there. And so Gwydion must have taken Willow and Gort there. And so therefore, that’s where he would go.

  Will told himself that he could easily reach Erewan before first light, but long ago the Conqueror’s heirs had girded the city with walls, and the gates would not be opened until sunrise. The best course now was to rest. He found a place of good aspect and planted his feet, opening his mind and allowing cool power to flow into him. Afterwards, as he slowly returned to his thoughts, they seemed somehow less burdensome.

  It was not long before Will came to walls that were dark and stark against the
purple calm of an eastern sky. It was a freezing morning, and Ayne Gate already had many supplicants. Poor men and women waited, coughing and shuffling, beside the stock pens. Some carried loads on their backs, others sat on creaking carts. There was a knot of straggler soldiers, grim after a night of drink and wrongdoing. Their auras were ragged and brown and Will could smell shame about them, for there was blood on their hands. On the far side of the gatehouse there were four or five Fellows, cloak-wrapped and waiting silently in the shadows. Will wondered why they were not at the Nickel Gate, which led more directly to the great counting house and the Elder’s palace which took pride of place along the banks of the River Whye.

  At last there came the noise of the gate-bars being slid out of their irons. The gates were swung open. Four gatemen and a sergeant each in plumed hats watched the motley host shuffle into the city. Some gruff greetings passed, but they stopped no one. These men also seemed to have had a hard night, and Will saw that this was no ordinary morning. A duke and his victorious army had come to town.

  The Ayne was lined on each side with carts. Every inn and tavern billet, every house and stable, would be packed with snoring soldiers. When Will reached the Butcher Market he saw a grand house with liveried guards standing sentry. The house was thrice-gabled and set with costly leaded lights and the plaster panels between its sturdy oak timbers were lime-washed white and embossed with symbols of prosperity. The city’s wealthiest merchant, it seemed, had taken the opportunity to put himself at the victor’s service.

  ‘Will!’

  He turned as a grey shadow dashed from the roadside and clung to him. He enfolded his wife in his arms and closed his eyes, knowing before even the blur of her cloak had registered who she was.

  ‘I knew you’d be all right,’ Willow said, sounding more relieved than convinced. ‘I knew you would. All of this can’t be for nothing. Can it?’

  He hung onto her wordlessly for what seemed like an age, wondering how to untie his tongue. At last he managed, ‘I only got to the battlefield after the fight. I can’t deny that I was worried about you.’ He stared at her. ‘I…’