The Giants' Dance Read online

  The Giants’ Dance

  Robert Carter

  For Gerald Wiley, Four Candles.

  ‘First there were nine,

  Then nine became seven,

  And seven became five.

  Now, as sure as the Ages decline,

  Three are no more,

  But one is alive.’

  The Black Book of Tara

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE JEOPARDY’S DILEMMA

  CHAPTER ONE THE BLAZING

  CHAPTER TWO LITTLE SLAUGHTER

  CHAPTER THREE WHAT LIES WITHIN

  CHAPTER FOUR THE LIGN OF THE ASH TREE

  CHAPTER FIVE MAGICIAN, HEAL THYSELF!

  CHAPTER SIX AN UNWELCOME GUEST

  CHAPTER SEVEN A GOOD NIGHT’S REST

  PART TWO A LOSING BATTLE

  CHAPTER EIGHT THIS BLIGHTED LAND

  CHAPTER NINE STONEHUNTERS

  CHAPTER TEN THE MAD BARON

  CHAPTER ELEVEN THE FLIES

  CHAPTER TWELVE CAPTIVES

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN THE KINDLY STUMP

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN A THIEF AT LUDFORD

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN MOTHER BRIG

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN THE HOSTS GATHER

  PART THREE MADNESS AT LUDFORD

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN HONEY MEAD

  CHAPTER NINETEEN A TOAST BY THE DUKE

  CHAPTER TWENTY THE MADNESS GROWS

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE A GLIMPSE OF THE ENEMY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO RAW MEAT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE THE BLOOD STONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR FLESH ANEW

  PART FOUR THE TURNING OF THE TIDE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE TURLOCH’S RING

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX CASTLE CORBEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN THE DRAGON’S JAWS

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT JASPER

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE THE NIGHT FLIER

  CHAPTER THIRTY THE DUEL

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE A SURFEIT AT DELAMPREY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO THE SECRET WEAPON

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE IN THE AFTERMATH

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  APPENDIX I THE OGDOAD

  APPENDIX II THE LORC

  APPENDIX III THE LORC IN OUR WORLD

  THE STORY CONTINUES IN

  About the Author

  By Robert Carter

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PROLOGUE

  THE STORY SO FAR

  The Giants’ Dance is the second book in the Language of Stones cycle. The first book, called The Language of Stones, recounted the story of Willand, a boy whose life was changed forever when the wizard, Gwydion, arrived at the village of Nether Norton in the Vale.

  Gwydion, it is revealed, brought Will to the Vale when he was a baby, and has returned to reclaim him on his thirteenth birthday. Before Will leaves, Breona, the woman Will has always thought of as his mother, hangs about his neck a talisman of green stone which is carved in the likeness of a leaping salmon. She tells him how she found it inside his blanket when he first came into her arms, and says that it should go with him now he is entering the wide world.

  No one from Nether Norton has ever been out of the Vale, and the wide world seems terrifying to Will. Gwydion explains that he must leave the Vale for his own good. Twice he tries to run away and go home, but each time he is prevented by Gwydion’s magic, and eventually the wizard tells him they are being hunted by a fearsome enemy. At first, Will imagines it must be the Sightless Ones, the sinister fellowship of tax collectors who both squeeze the common people and engage in crooked politics with the lords of the Realm, but it soon becomes clear that a far more formidable foe is looking for them. Gwydion will drop only vague hints about this, but he says that Will is a ‘Child of Destiny’ – one whose coming has been foretold in the Black Book.

  Soon they arrive at a gloomy tower in the depths of the Wychwoode, and there Will is lodged with the grotesque Lord Strange, a man who is afflicted by a vile spell and who wears the head of a boar. Gwydion leaves Will to live in the tower all summer long, and there he is taught to read and write. He also learns from the local Wise Woman something of the ‘redes of magic’ – these are curious rules that reveal the wisdom of the world and enable magic to be done. But Will’s spirit rebels against Lord Strange. He secretly looks in a forbidden book and reads certain spells, which he then uses for the unworthy purpose of trying to impress a pretty girl. What he attracts instead is the marish hag, a dangerous supernatural creature that inhabits the ancient wood. He is almost drowned by the hag, and only saved by Gwydion’s return.

  But Will has also gained friends in the Wychwoode, among them the mysterious Green Man to whom he renders an unwitting service, and the girl, Willow, with whom he discovers Grendon Mill. This, it turns out, is Lord Strange’s secret armoury, where men have cut down the great oaks of a sacred grove to roast into charcoal so that weapons of war may be forged.

  When Gwydion returns, he shows his great displeasure at Lord Strange’s activities. In turn, the hog-headed lord blames King Hal whose preparations for war are being fed by the mill. The wizard then leaves angrily, taking Will with him.

  As they travel south Will is asked if he knows about King Arthur. He says he knows about him from old tales. Gwydion tells him that the tales about the sword in the stone speak about an Arthur who became king a thousand years ago, but that he was only the second incarnation of an original Arthur. That Arthur was an adventurer who lived in the time of the First Men in the far distant past, and travelled from the land of Albion into the Realm Below to bring out sacred objects known as ‘the Hallows’. Moreover, there is a prophetic verse that speaks of a third and final incarnation of Arthur…

  Will begins to feel uncomfortable because it seems that the wizard is convinced that Will himself is that third incarnation.

  Unfortunately, the prophecy is confirmed at every turn. At Uff, Will recognizes the White Horse, and stands upon the Dragon’s Mound where he experiences a vision of an army massing below. The earth yields up the gift of a horn to him, and in Severed Neck Woods Will is given the freedom of the wildwood by the Green Man himself.

  They come at last to the royal hunting lodge of Clarendon, where Gwydion warns the weakling monarch, and asks for aid in a vital magical mission that will prevent the Realm from sliding into war. But the royal court is already deeply under the influence of the beautiful but greedy queen and her violent ally, Duke Edgar of Mells.

  The queen is pregnant, and it seems to Will that Duke Edgar is the father. Will also suspects that the gentle king has been poisoned by them. And he notices a sinister figure lurking nearby, invisible to everyone but Will and the queen. Only later does he learn that this is the sorcerer, Maskull, Gwydion’s arch-enemy, who, among other things, is trying to find Will and kill him. Fortunately, Maskull does not realize Will is present, but even so events are about to take a turn for the worse. Gwydion’s request for royal aid is refused, and he is attacked by Duke Edgar, and forced to employ a powerful vanishing spell, which is accomplished only just in the nick of time.

  Where Will and Gwydion vanish to is a sacred place, even by the standards of the Blessed Isle. They appear on cliff tops high above the sea, standing on the westernmost point of land in the whole world. Here Gwydion renews his strength and explains to Will about ‘the lorc’. This is a network of powerful earth streams that extend throughout the Isles. Long ago, he says, an array of standing stones was set up on these streams of power by an ancient race, the fae, who lived at the time of the First Men, but who long ago retired into the Realm Below. Each stone is filled with an immense quantity of harm.

  According to the Black
Book, these ‘battlestones’ were disposed across the Isles with the intention of repelling invasions. The fae believed that despotic sorcerers would one day arise in the Tortured Lands and begin to enslave men’s minds with a powerful idea called the Great Lie. In time the Isles themselves would face conquest, and their people, the First Men, would be enslaved – unless the lorc was erected as a defence. After much debate, the battlestones were wrought and put in place, and the secrets of the lorc bequeathed to the First Men when the fae withdrew.

  For many centuries, the Isles remained free from interference. The Age of Trees passed into a second, lesser Age. Then the First Men failed, and the Isles became the haunt of giants and fire-breathing wyrms. When a third Age dawned, the Age of Iron, the hero-king, Brea arose and set foot upon the shores of Albion. He vanquished the giants and proclaimed the Realm, settling the land once again. After that the Realm went unmolested for eighty and more generations, until the time when, as the fae had foreseen, the Slavers’ power burgeoned in the east. By the time of King Caswalan, the sorcerers of the Tortured Lands had spread the Great Lie far and wide. They commanded huge armies, and made no secret of their desire to conquer the Isles. Their first coming, a thousand years after the landing of Brea, was repulsed. But soon afterwards the secret of the lorc was betrayed and its protective power undermined. The invading Slavers were then able to block the vital flows of earth power by building in stone. They shattered the Realm into many shards with their slave roads, and so the lorc was broken. But by Will’s time the slave roads are more than a thousand years old. Many have begun to fall into ruin, and the lorc, so long inactive, has begun to awaken…

  Gwydion tells Will that he urgently needs to find and uproot the battlestones or there will be a bloodbath. Each stone will mark a place of great slaughter, and the ensuing chaos will enable Maskull to gain control of the mechanisms of fate. If Maskull is allowed to steer the Realm it will slide towards a devastating future – a future wholly without magic, and one in which strife and terror will reign for five hundred years.

  Will and the wizard sail back from the Blessed Isle, and soon afterwards encounter a skeleton inside a yew tree. It is the remains of a lad Will’s age (and with a similar name) who has recently gone missing. He has been magically murdered. It is grisly evidence that Will is still being sought by Maskull. It cannot be long before he realizes that the wizard’s young bag-carrier is his quarry, and so Gwydion decides that Will must once more be lodged in a place of comparative safety.

  Meanwhile, Gwydion makes absolutely sure that Will is Arthur’s third incarnation, by stirring up his latent magical talents and teaching him to ‘scry’. And so, using Will’s partly-fledged abilities and the wizard’s command of ancient lore they manage to locate their first battlestone, the Dragon Stone. As they dig it up, Will experiences for the first time the frightening mental disturbances caused when such stones are threatened, but eventually Gwydion wraps it in binding spells and they take it to a place where Gwydion thinks it may be temporarily stored.

  Once at Castle Foderingham, the stone is carefully mortared into a dungeon under the keep – Gwydion hopes it will remain dormant there while he searches for further fragments of the Black Book in order to discover how to drain the stone of its harm. But the owner of Castle Foderingham is Duke Richard who, with some justice, considers himself to be the rightful king of the Realm. He has just discovered that his claim to the throne has been fatally weakened because the queen has at last given birth to a son. He is also already aware that the boy is not the king’s child, but fathered by Duke Edgar, who happens to be Richard’s political rival. Richard must do something about this, and soon. And Gwydion realizes that he must accompany Duke Richard on his urgent mission to the great city of Trinovant, or affairs will certainly take a turn for the worse. Thus, Will is abandoned once more. Now he must live with the duke’s family and the captive battlestone. He is told that under no circumstances must the Dragon Stone be interfered with.

  As the weeks become months at Castle Foderingham, Will turns from boy to man. He begins to learn lordly ways alongside Duke Richard’s sons. But while he learns how to ride and hunt and fight as they do, he also starts to understand more about his own developing magical talents. He is befriended by the old herbalist, Wortmaster Gort, and battles with the duke’s fierce heir, Edward. One night, despite Will’s warnings, Edward acquires a set of keys and leads his many brothers and sisters down to visit the Dragon Stone. There, though they do not understand it at the time, they are stricken by the stone, and none more so than Edward’s brother, Edmund.

  Life at Foderingham settles down again, but soon a wagon train of new weapons bound for the king’s armoury is captured by Duke Richard’s men, and Will is unexpectedly reunited with Willow, the girl he met in the Wychwoode. As vassals of Lord Strange, she and her father had been set to drive one of the ox-wagons from Grendon Mill to Trinovant, but they were intercepted by one of Duke Richard’s allies. When Will sees how scared they are of returning home to face Lord Strange’s wrath, he begs the duchess that they be attached to Duke Richard’s household, and she agrees.

  Willow says that Will is turning into a young lord. Will thinks there might be more to Willow’s unlikely arrival than meets the eye – perhaps the Dragon Stone is warping the fate of everyone around it, as Gwydion has hinted it may do. Perhaps they are all riding for a fall.

  As winter closes in, the news from Trinovant is sketchy, but Will learns that Gwydion’s patient diplomacy has so far failed to settle peace upon the factions. Despite having extracted the Dragon Stone the influence of the reawakening array of battlestones continues to increase. The harm contained within them begins to corrupt the political atmosphere. Greed, vengeance and malice begin to get the better of the spirit of compromise within the opposing parties, and the Realm slips ever closer to war.

  Will’s fears grow when Duke Richard gathers his armies and moves his household to Ludford. This is a great castle, deep in the hills of the west. As soon as he arrives, Will’s sensitivity to the stones’ influence begins to grow beyond his control. A bout of suspicion overtakes him. He feels that Edward is becoming his rival for Willow’s affections, and so acute does his jealousy become that he begins to fear for his sanity. When Gwydion appears Will says he believes the duke has fetched the Dragon Stone to Ludford and is trying to use it to his own advantage. Gwydion settles his fears and then gives Will a choice: he can either stay at Ludford and fight with Edward for Willow’s favour, or he can venture out upon the land as Gwydion now must, and help in the tracking down of the other battlestones – and especially the crucial Doomstone, which appears to control the others. Will reluctantly chooses to follow the wizard, and Gwydion says that this brave decision is yet another proof that he is indeed the Child of Destiny that was foretold.

  Gwydion now explains Maskull’s intentions. The two magicians are the last remaining members of an ancient wizardly council of nine whose task it was to direct the progress of the world along the true path. As Age succeeded Age their numbers have shrunk, until there are now only two, but one of the nine was always destined to become ‘the Betrayer’. When three wizards remained there was still room for doubt, but as soon as the phantarch, Semias, failed it became clear that Gwydion’s long-held suspicions about Maskull must have been right. Maskull has now thrown aside all pretences of guardianship and is working openly upon a plan of immense selfishness. As a sorcerer – one who misuses magic to his own benefit – he is seeking to direct the future along a path of his own choosing. It is one that will concentrate power in his own hands, but will also entail a new Age of Slavery and War far more dreadful than any that has gone before.

  Maskull must be defeated, but the battlestones are the immediate problem. Fortunately, they can be made to reveal verses that predict events and describe in maddening riddles where the next stone in the sequence lies. Will manages to track down two more battlestones, and though neither of them is the Doomstone, they seem to be making progr
ess at last.

  But Maskull lays a clever trap at the stone circle known as the Giant’s Ring. Will is caught, and Gwydion is lured in to save him. Wizard and sorcerer fight and the wizard is defeated. His body is burned and his spirit banished into an elder tree. But he is saved by Will who braves his fears to restore his mentor to human form. Gwydion then sets to work on the perilous task of draining the nearby battlestone.

  After several quantities of harm have been drained from it a verse is forced from the stone:

  The Queen of the East shall spill Blood,

  On the Slave Road, by Werlame’s Flood.

  The King, in his Kingdom, a Martyr shall lie,

  And never shall gain the Victory.

  which, in the language of stones, has an alternative reading:

  When a Queen shall Enslave a King,

  Travel at Sunrise a Realm to gain,

  Werlame’s Martyr shall lose the Victory,

  And lie where Blood never Flows.

  Gwydion is elated, but as soon as he has read the verse disaster strikes. An entrapping spell that Maskull has set on the stone causes the remaining harm to escape all in a rush. Will and the wizard must flee through the night on the back of the White Horse of Uff which Will summons using the magical silver-bound horn that was given to him one Lammas night. They are pursued through the darkness by the manifest harm that has emerged from the battlestone. It almost catches them, but is then forced to fight with the earth giant, Alba, whom it devours. The harm is dispersed at last by Will as the red light of dawn glints from his raised sword above the forgotten battlefield of Badon Hill.

  They turn again to face two great armies marching, ready to give battle in the east. The shrine town of Verlamion is dominated by the great chapter house of the Fellowship of the Sightless Ones, and it is here that the Doomstone lies. Gwydion tries once again to avert disaster. He uses all his persuasion on Duke Richard, but the Doomstone has too strong a grip on the minds of those who have been drawn here to fight.