Whitemantle

by Robert Carter

  ‘That’s the battlefield,’ Will said, pointing towards a lone oak that stood out on the skyline.

  ‘Another iron tree,’ Gwydion muttered.

  ‘I don’t think so. I can see it moving in the breeze.’

  As they neared the lign, Will’s skin began to prickle. It was a cold morning with only a little wind coming in gusts down from the north and a spattering of rain in the air, but Will sweated like a man with the plague. He could feel the fire still burning in his face and he trembled at the memory of what he had gone through when they had crossed the hazel lign. But he gritted his teeth, choosing to stay alongside Gwydion this time, determined not to seek the touch of the Stone of Scions before he was driven to it. The fire of the lign had died down, but Will knew that his sickness would only grow worse as they approached the battlestone.

  A rider in Lord Warrewyk’s colours confronted them as they tried to pass along a lane crowded with soldiers. He looked hard at Will’s white face and staring eyes.

  ‘What’s to do with him?’ the rider demanded of Gwydion. ‘Is he sick?’

  ‘Sick enough. He knows he is to die today.’

  The rider laughed. ‘You’ll both die if you go up there, for the enemy is that way.’

  ‘More will die if we do not. Let us through, for the king’s sake!’

  The soldiers ahead of them parted to let them go on. Hollow looks were on all their faces. They were uncaring, men who had made a long, forced march and who had seen their first fighting the night before in the marshes on the north bank of the Eye. They were shaken and fearful, and the quiet of the grave had settled over them. They wanted the coming fight over with as soon as possible, and the big question answered once and for all – will I die today?

  Will understood what they did not, that it was only the battlestone that was holding them here. If not for its enmeshing power they would be rebelling against the men-at-arms who harried them onward – wouldn’t they?

  Will urged the cart forward, but then the rider came up alongside them again and blocked their way with a drawn sword. ‘The king’s sake, you say? But which king is that?’

  ‘The rightful king,’ Will whispered.

  ‘And what is his name?’

  ‘Edward,’ Gwydion said, seeing the danger. ‘Edward of the House of Ebor, and long may he reign!’

  The rider looked at them doubtfully, but he put up his sword all the same. Then, as they began to pass he slapped a hand on Will’s chest and said, ‘How is it that you do not know what all the rest of the army knows – that King Edward was shot last night at the Fordingbridge?’

  ‘Shot?’ Gwydion said, shocked. ‘Is he dead?’

  ‘The arrow is yet in him. The wound is said to be mortal, though a clever healer attends him.’

  ‘Then why do you still come here to fight?’ Will asked, meeting the rider’s eye.

  The rider turned aside and spat. ‘Because my lord of Warrewyk says we must!’

  The wizard took the reins from Will’s hands. ‘We fight to put a twelve-year-old boy on the throne! Young Richard of Ebor! Is that not so? And much glory to your lord for that.’

  It was a two-edged remark, but as the cart ran on, the rider did not pursue it. After all, what did it matter if two fools took their cart out into no man’s land? Every enemy arrow the cart attracted was one fewer to fall on his own head and the heads of his men. But the fools were right about one thing – many would die today.

  Gwydion slewed the cart into the meadow and it began to move slowly up the incline. The short-cropped grass told them this had been a sheep meadow, but there were no sheep here now. And then Will saw in the distance something that might have been a ewe, but that it was unmoving.

  It stood a little way from the oak, but directly on the smouldering lign. It was, without any doubt, the battlestone.

  They had to approach it, but when the cart came within a bowshot of the lign, Will began to find it hard to breathe. One hand clutched his throat, the other motioned Gwydion to keep going.

  ‘Hyah!’ the wizard cried, urging greater effort from the horses. But while they were still a hundred paces from the stone, foam began to bubble from Will’s mouth and he knew he was in danger of slipping into unconsciousness.

  Unbidden, Gwydion turned the cart aside and ran the horses away again, this time towards the lone oak tree that stood fifty paces to the east. Here, on the very top of the shield, it seemed they were alone. To their south lay Edward’s army, to their north lay the hamlet of Towstone and the queen’s forces.

  Will drew his breath in gulps, railing at the wizard that they must not turn away but go on. He fell into the back of the cart, eyes rolling, lungs filling, drawing breath only after tremendous efforts.

  ‘Do not try to speak!’

  ‘We must…’ He hammered his fists against the Stone of Scions, trying to draw strength from it.

  When at last his breath came more easily he lay gasping, but he knew he must relinquish his grip on the stone and urge Gwydion to another effort, and this time make him go through with it whatever happened.

  ‘I tell you, we must approach the stone!’

  ‘I was wrong!’ The wizard grasped his shoulder. ‘Did you not see the battlestone? It is much bigger than the Stone of Scions. It is not even the same kind of stone. Ours cannot be the sister-stone that I had hoped it might be.’

  ‘But we agreed – even if it’s not the sister-stone – still we must lay them together—’

  ‘Not yet!’

  Will tried to muster his remaining strength, furious at the wizard’s caution. When Gwydion jumped down from the cart Will took it into his mind to turn the horses around and drive them up to the stone himself. But the wizard was calling to him to follow.

  ‘Look! See what I have here!’

  Will decided to hear Gwydion out one more time. He staggered towards the tree. Here the grass was thin and his feet skidded in the mud under the oak’s skeletal spread. No hint of spring had yet swelled the tree’s buds, but there was something strange about it, something that made him think again of the iron oak that had entombed the Doomstone of the West. It had certainly been tampered with, for there was a faint smell of magic still lingering about it.

  Then Will saw the wizard’s robes moving, though there was now no wind. And he heard the soughing of a constant breeze, a sound he recognized. He saw two open shutters banging against the bark, and Gwydion staring into a square hole between.

  With a shock Will suddenly understood what he was looking at: the window that Maskull had so painstakingly removed from his secret workshop in Trinovant had been installed on the living trunk of the oak tree.

  Beyond the window, the other world was in turmoil. There was screaming and shouting and the unmistakable din of battle. Dead men were there in great numbers, round about the tree and as far as he could see. There were horses whinnying and galloping, many riderless. Snow was falling and men charged forward, their weapons comported for the fight, thousands rushing on, yet all in slow motion, as if in a dream.

  But it was no dream. The gust that came from the window was tainted with death, and they had to dodge arrows as the battle surged against the far side of the window. After a while the deadly action seemed abruptly to move on, leaving them behind.

  ‘Behold!’ Gwydion cried. ‘The tide of battle has passed. The queen’s forces are in rout!’

  But Will’s sympathies were with the world he knew and loved, and which was moving inexorably towards the grey reality beyond the window, a place where no magic coloured the lives of men and a grey God ruled on high.

  He began to whisper and to step out his magic. Then he forced the shutters closed, laid hands upon the frame of the window and muttered a formula in the language of stones that enabled it to be pulled free from the living flesh of the oak.

  A spillage of fae magic shuddered the tree. It burst fresh young shoots from the branches. The grass under Will’s feet thrived as he lifted the window and made instantly for the
cart.

  ‘What are you doing?’ the wizard shouted after him.

  ‘I’ve solved the riddle!’

  Will climbed up onto the seat of the cart and turned it around. Gwydion ran after it, but Will urged the horses into a gallop and the wizard began to fall behind.

  As soon as the stone felt his approach it directed its paralysing power at him. Again he could not draw breath, as if his windpipe had narrowed to a straw. The stone was still fifty paces away when the cart began to falter. The horses came to a standstill, then they began to buck and kick in their harness. Will felt their pain. He leapt down as, instinctively, they began to run the cart away from the battlestone.

  With them went the Stone of Scions, but Will had the window in his hands. He opened it and lifted it above his head, then dropped it down over himself.

  An extraordinary sensation flooded his body, neither pain nor pleasure, but a sense of disconnectedness. He felt confusion, as if for a moment he had lost the power of thought. Then came a terrific thump in his back as someone ran into him and sent him sprawling on the ground. He cradled his head instinctively and gasped for breath, but when no further blow came he looked up to see a lone figure pelting away from him, scrambling over ill-defined obstacles. He was surrounded by hundreds of dead bodies, their limbs flung out or folded under them, their attitudes seemingly abandoned or unconcerned, for comfort was beyond them.

  Will’s breath came easily now, but his heart almost stopped beating as he stared at the bloody aftermath of battle and tried to collect his scattered wits. The grey world was grey no longer, but red and white. An icy wind was blowing from the south. There had been freak weather here, a snowstorm, and the dead men who littered the field had been blanketed. Frozen arms and arrow shafts sprang through the drifts like black daffodils. He stared around, trying to orientate himself, but he could see no lone oak tree in this world. Then, with the force of a hammer blow, came the realization that his gamble had paid off. He could breathe now because there was no battlestone in this world.

  He picked the window off the ground, recalling the sudden flash of insight that had come to him in his own world. Fifty more paces that way was all it would take…

  Or was it that way?

  But of course! He already had the answer in his hands.

  The window was tugging at him as it swallowed a rush of air. He lifted it up, braced his arms on each side of the frame and looked through. The shutters were waving wildly as air gusted between worlds. The red glow had turned to blue. On the far side he could see the cart, overturned now and the horses furiously struggling to get up. Gwydion was dashing up the slope towards the cart as fast as he could, shouting madly.

  Will ignored him. He swung the window and saw the battlestone. Then he ran towards it, keeping it centred in the frame. Ten paces, twenty paces, thirty…stepping over bodies, printing footfalls on the white spaces of paradoxical purity. Already the snow was melting, but in this cold world day was passing into night and with the fall of darkness the horrors would multiply.

  But at least Will could breathe now and the terrible oppression of the battlestone had vanished. With the pain went his fear. The final steps were momentous, giant strides, for now he was filled with the certainty of victory. The battlestone was slender, no bigger than he was himself, and in it shimmered a hideous form ready to do in Will’s world what had already been achieved in this one.

  ‘Not today!’ he shouted, lifting the window. Then he pushed it down over the battlestone just as a cooper pushes a hoop down over a barrel. Except that this hoop was big enough to pass all the way down to the ground. The stone appeared through the frame. But in this world it was merely an innocuous block of grey limestone, its back coated with green moss and yellow lichen, that stood mute among the corpses. Will rammed his shoulder against it – once, twice, three times – so at the final heave it easily gave up the shallow socket of earth which had held it upright throughout the Ages. It gave like a rotten tooth, fell wholly into the snow of the new world and lamely broke in two.

  The window lay beside it, a square patch of green and wormy soil. Air susurrated, the blue flame burned like magelight, then, astonishingly, the frame lifted itself up from the ground and fell again, progressively revealing from head to toe a wizard’s robes.

  ‘They are coming!’ Gwydion cried, jumping through and discarding the frame. ‘Run!’

  ‘I’ll not run now!’ Will shouted. No matter what had frightened the wizard, he would face it.

  But Gwydion grabbed him and his expression brooked no further argument. ‘Run! Do as I say!’

  Will shook him off and they ran, hurdling snowy mounds, treading over dead flesh. How urgent must the danger be, how gigantic the horror, if it’s forced Gwydion to escape into this place? Will wondered. He turned and saw the window rise up for a third time behind them. A thunderbolt blasted through, narrowly missing Will’s head. The deadly fireball arced high over the battlefield, but it exploded in a harmless burst of red light, unable to exist in a world devoid of magic.

  ‘It’s Chlu!’ Will shouted.

  Two more bolts of fire swept past them as they ran, leaving smoke trails and lighting the ghastly field. They too burst in lurid red, but again harmlessly. Will and the wizard splashed through icy meltwater and a little way down the slope to the west, hiding from the summit by using the lie of the land.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Will shouted frantically. ‘Master Gwydion, they can’t hurt us!’

  ‘Look!’

  As soon as they dropped below the sightline Gwydion drew Will to a halt and pointed down the slope. Their way was blocked. For the first time they saw the full horror of what had happened here. The little stream that drained the west side of the battlefield was a swollen torrent from which the death cries of thousands of men were rising. A seething morass of soldiers were locked in a continuing struggle, a grey chaos, like insects contending furiously with one another. But they were men, dying horribly and in great numbers.

  Will could see what had happened. The queen’s army had been outflanked on its left, rolled up by the arrival of a reserve battalion coming in late and unexpectedly from the south-east – Lord Northfolk’s army. And once the queen’s left began to crumble, panic must have swept through her ranks and her whole army had disintegrated. It had fled the only way it could – to its right – which was onto the slope that dropped down towards the stream. Men had abandoned their weapons, skidded and tumbled down into the wash of icy water. They were packing the fast-flowing stream and trampling one another underfoot as they sought to escape all at once into the flooded pastures beyond.

  Will saw drowning men attempting to pull themselves up, but only dragging others to their doom. He saw men threshing in a mile-long quagmire of blood. He saw merciless attacks launched upon the heads of the dying. The whole stream was now running red.

  ‘The queen’s army is being annihilated!’ Will gasped. ‘What now?’

  The wizard stared back up the slope and he gritted his teeth with grim satisfaction. ‘Good!’ he said. ‘They are coming through the window.’

  Two tiny black figures had appeared on the shoulder of the hill. Even outlined against the sky there was no mistaking them.

  ‘What are they doing?’ Will asked.

  ‘Ha ha! Maskull thinks that the only way to prevent the advent of Arthur now is to take the Dark Child with him into this world!’ Gwydion said. ‘We’ve won, my friend!’

  ‘Won? But how?’

  ‘To thwart me, Maskull has had to make good his promise to Chlu. Now I understand my destiny. I am to counter Maskull here. We shall stand in opposition in this new world, just as once we aided one another in the old.’

  ‘You’re not going to stay here?‘ Will cried, aghast.

  ‘If Maskull stays, then so must I, for this is truly a world of good and evil.’ He threw wide his hands, begging Will to understand his sacrifice. ‘I cannot abandon a whole world to him, can I?’

  ‘But surely�
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  The wizard shook his head. ‘Our spirits are both locked within Philosopher’s Stones back in the old world. If Maskull stays here he will have one part of his heart’s desire, which is to live forever. I must stay too, for he must never rule in this world!’

  ‘Master Gwydion, you can’t!’

  But the wizard’s face grew grimmer and he stood back a pace. ‘My days in the old world are over. My destiny is clear, Willand. Promise me you will do what is necessary to fulfil your own. Lure Chlu back. I will make sure Maskull does not follow. Now, go! We both have work to do!’

  With that, Gwydion began to pick his way back up the death-strewn slope. Will could do nothing but watch him go. When he tried to open his mind, he found he had forgotten how to do it. And so he took an axe from the hand of a dead man and made straight for Chlu, roaring out his pain as if the wizard’s decision had been his twin’s fault.

  Chlu raised two hands and tried to step out the magic required to send a thunderbolt spinning into Will’s guts as he approached. But Will came on undaunted. Only at the third attempt did Chlu realize that something was wrong. He saw that his magic had failed him, and instead looked to the corpses at his feet for protection, finding among them a war-hammer.

  When Maskull pulled a lance from the ground and tried to rush to Chlu’s defence, Gwydion moved to intercept him, locking staff against lance in an adamant struggle to force the other to the ground.

  From the corner of his eye, Will saw that wizard and sorcerer fought with liquid movements that deceived the eye, whirling and spinning, their magic gone but their mastery of the fighting arts undiminished. Their combat flowed back and forth, but Gwydion was forcing his adversary away, leaving Chlu and Will to face one another alone.