Robert Carter - The Giants’ Dance

The wizard got up and walked away. Will wanted to leap up, to go after him and badger him on the matter, but Gwydion’s certainty made him pause, made him remember that a wizard’s secrets must be respected.

‘If you say so.’

As he watched his long morning shadow stretching before him, a keen hunger gnawed at his spirit. After a while, he shivered and got up. A cool westerly breeze had sprung up and he felt an ache in his bones that he thought must be coming from the dampness of the grass. The power flowing from the Giant’s Ring was subsiding as the sun rose higher, but still he could feel the echoes coursing in darkness beneath his bare feet. He looked inside himself for an answer, then went to talk with Gwydion about the power that moved in the earth.

‘Can’t you find a way to stop the empowering of the lorc?’ he asked. ‘Why not halt the flow right here at its source? That way the battlestones would never awaken.’

Gwydion shook his head. ‘What you suggest is impossible.’

‘But why? You said the Giant’s Ring controls the earth flow like a sluice controls a millstream. I can feel the influence surging under here. It’s huge.’

‘So it is, but I could not control it any more than I could dam a raging river torrent with my bare hands. And in any case, it would do no good. Any attempt to block the flow would wreak havoc – blocking the millrace would surely stop the mill-wheel turning, but it would also raise the millpond to overflowing and eventually it would burst the dam. To interfere with the lorc directly would risk disrupting all the earth flows that sustain us. In the end it would turn the Realm into a wasteland.’

‘If the power of this lign is anything to go by, I’d say the lorc is about to do that anyway. It’s definitely waking up. Can’t you feel it, Gwydion? Have your powers declined that much?’

The wizard’s glance was sharp. ‘Declined? You know very well that I could never feel the lorc directly. In that respect, your abilities are unmatched.’

Will’s mind tuned to a sound high in the air. The untiring warbling of the skylark. Could they hear that song in the Vale too? Could Willow hear it? He stopped and turned.

‘What’s the favour you wanted to ask me?’

Gwydion leaned on his staff. ‘I now know what must be done. No matter what the dangers, I must find the battlestones one at a time. I must either drain them or bind them, for I dare not confront them as you did the Doomstone.’

‘How many more have you found?’

‘In the past four years? None.’

‘None?’ The news was shocking.

‘Without your talent to guide me I have been blind.’ Gwydion opened his hands in a gesture that showed there was no other answer to the problem.

‘You should have called on me,’ Will told him. Then he saw the trap the wizard had set for him, and added, ‘Before Bethe was born I would gladly have come with you.’

Gwydion met his gaze knowingly. ‘Would you?’

He stared sullenly into the western haze, noting the starlings and how they flew. Their movements said there was something wrong with the air, something nasty blowing in from the Wolds.

‘You know I would have done anything to help you, Gwydion.’

‘But would you have wanted to?’ The wizard pulled up his staff and gestured westward. ‘I see you can taste the bitterness that lies upon the west wind. Do you smell that ghastly taint of burning? It is human flesh. We must go now. Straight away. To the hamlet of Little Slaughter to see what a fatal weakness in the spirit of a powerful man has done.’

Will’s heart sickened to hear the words that he had known were coming since before sunrise. ‘I’m a husband and a father now. I can’t just leave without a word. It’s harvest time, Gwydion, and I promised Willow I wouldn’t be long.’

His words were reasonable, sane by any standard. But they already sounded hollow in his ears.

As the morning wore on, the August sun rose hot on their backs. Will saw its golden beams glittering on the headwaters of the Evenlode stream, and by midday they were across it and turning south, so that the sun began to fill the ups and downs of their path with shimmering patches and pools.

They went a league or two out of their way to the south and passed many folk on the road. Gwydion made a sign to them and warned Will to silence. Some people seemed to see Will but not the wizard. Some seemed to see neither. Others turned about as if alarmed, or at least puzzled by some unaccountable presence. Occasionally there were those who embraced Gwydion as if they had been met by a long-dead kinsman, and to these Gwydion gave a word in friendship and sometimes a token of reward.

They came down to a little river and saw a bridge-keeper’s shack. Here two men in red livery guarded the bridge. Arms had once been painted on a board but they had faded and peeled away.

Neither the keeper of the Windrush crossing nor the two men-at-arms seemed to notice them, though a witless beggar put his hands out for a blessing and Gwydion clasped his hand briefly as he passed.

‘Welcome, Master Jack-in-a-box!’ the beggar said.

‘Keep up!’ Gwydion warned as Will looked pitifully at the beggar’s sores.

‘Has he no friends to take care of him?’ Will asked angrily. ‘Is he a man or a dog? And why is he clad in such filthy rags? Is there no Sister here? What sort of place is this?’

‘We are at the village of Lowe, and shall soon be through it,’ Gwydion said.

‘Can nothing be done for the people here?’

‘This village belongs to an ill-starred fellow whose company is best avoided. This lord has driven the local Wise Woman away, and for that his people will one day murder him, for it is a true rede that “by the least of men shall the best of men always be judged”.’

There were cottages clustered here, with folk sitting at their doors. Half a dozen dirty children played in the way, and the people seemed odd. They made no acknowledgment of Will’s greetings as he passed. One old woman, however, received Gwydion as a subject would receive a king. She gave him a bundle which was put into the wizard’s crane bag which was instantly passed to Will to carry. As they left the village and rose up the hill high above the mossy thatches Will looked back down into the valley to where the brimming waters of the Windrush shone in brash daylight. There was a large manor some way to the right of the bridge.

‘Do not look at it,’ Gwydion said, and pulled him onward.

‘But how did the village get that way?’

‘It is a place of poor aspect. Land-blighted. Not every village in the Realm is as well set as Nether Norton. Many do not have a kindly lord. You should think yourself fortunate that the Vale is a place without any ruler, for some delight in making themselves overmighty while they may.’

Their journey, Gwydion had said, would not take them far, but they had already walked many a long league and Will’s feet ached. They were going to the place where the violet light had burned, but it was ever the wizard’s way not to go anywhere very directly. He took account of the flows in the land, choosing ancient paths, or striding along great arcs that swirled from hill to saddle and then swept on along the spring-lines of an upland or plunged down into the cool heart of a wood. Always the wizard’s staff would swing out in a striding rhythm, seeking narrow deer paths, and more often than not Will found himself following in his guide’s footsteps instead of walking at his shoulder as he preferred. Seldom did they follow the ways used by men, though sometimes they found dusty tracks, or a line of gnarled trees, or a trackway that meandered among planted fields. By now Will had begun to worry about Willow and his regret at their not having said a proper farewell was eating at him. He went through what he would have liked to have said, then he pictured his daughter crawling across the grass while her mother gathered windfall apples, and that image brought him back to the events of the night and to the matter in hand.