Whitemantle Page 25

  As Willow fell silent, Will despaired privately, for he had begun to see how, in the terrible world that was coming, the worth of a man would henceforth be measured in ways that were themselves worthless. He tried to imagine what kind of a world it would be if all reward was to be offered in silver alone, if all other marks of respect were made subordinate to coin. The thought of that kind of world appalled him, and he pledged himself once more to temper his steel and do what he could to avert the dreadful collision that was coming.

  But what could be done? They were a pitiful band of beggars, disregarded, ignored now even by their friends, and so, it seemed, doomed to fail. Even his revelation about the pattern of the battlestones seemed worthless, for what good could it do?

  ‘This is the Slaver road called the Emin Strete,’ Gwydion said darkly as they passed through Stammerford early the next day. ‘It looks to me as if the duke has picked up only a few men on his march. He must have hoped more would flock to him as he went along.’

  ‘They’re too wise around these parts to heed such a call,’ Will said, but he knew that the song of the lorc would eventually be too powerful even for the strongest of minds.

  They had not been riding for even an hour before the birdsong ceased and dark woodland began to crowd in around the road and the world became a green tunnel that made Will deeply uneasy.

  A fresh bout of sickness engulfed him, and though he waved Willow away he almost fell from his horse once more.

  Willow steadied him. ‘Come on, Will! Back the way we came.’

  ‘Again?’ Gwydion asked. ‘What potions have you been giving him, Wortmaster?’

  ‘Me?’ Gort said, indignant. ‘It’s nothing to do with my healing, I’m sure of that!’

  Gwydion grabbed the reins of Will’s horse. ‘It cannot be a lign! Not here. Surely Collen is still more than a league to the west. Something else must ail him.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s the phase of the moon,’ Gort suggested. ‘You know how susceptible our friend can be to its silvery influence at times, hmmm?’

  ‘We have to find another way through Tickencote Oaks,’ Will gasped. ‘The forest is alight! The road is blocked!’

  ‘The forest is alight?‘ Gort echoed.

  ‘Blocked?’ Gwydion demanded. ‘By what?’

  ‘Leave him alone, Master Gwydion!’ Willow cried, kicking her horse forward. ‘Can’t you see he’s ill?’

  ‘The…stone,’ Will murmured.

  The wizard fumed. ‘But how can there be a stone so far from a lign? It makes no sense!’

  But when Will raised his head blood began to well from his eyes like tears, and even the wizard recoiled from the sight of him.

  Now Lotan took up the burden and helped to get him off the road, leading him over old rabbit warrens and around the woods. No one saw anything untoward, no fire, no danger. Nothing.

  But lights burned in the mists of Will’s befuddled brain. He called out to Saint Elmo and asked why he had set the forest blazing. Angels, saints and seraphim swarmed in the air, closing in on him before they froze into a grotesque painted ceiling that cracked like an eggshell and fell down on him. And there, flooded in the excruciating light of the Beyond, the eye-burning brilliance, the undeniable flame. It was terrible, and he knew its name.

  He screamed and screamed, for he saw that his end was coming, and this time he understood it as clear as day. He had been born in flame and fire, he had exploded into the world, to live the life of a man, to toil and to love and to know joy and sorrow, but his end was coming, and coming soon. It would not be long now. He would explode out of the world just as he had exploded into it. He would echo away into cold and darkness and be gone from all things and nothing would remain of him but a memory in the minds of those who laboured on…

  And in Will’s own mind there was the running of cool water in river shallows, and a grey salmon surging from sight – grey, yet shimmering green on one side and red on the other. It swam towards the depthless ocean, showing him the way home.

  ‘Well, there it is…’ Gwydion was saying.

  The wizard was shading his eyes, staring at something hundreds of paces away: a pall of smoke over the trees. The smell of burning was in the air, like the thatch of a village that had been put to the sword, like the stink of a skyblasted oak. Gwydion’s robes were scorched, his beard singed. He had been among the flames.

  Will groaned. Willow held him, smiled, put a hand to his cheek then looked up at the wizard. ‘He’s with us again.’

  ‘You were right.’ Gwydion knelt over him. ‘It was a stone.’

  ‘You went there?’ he asked, horrified.

  ‘I have…dealt with it.’

  ‘Then it was a guide stone, a minor one.’

  The wizard cracked a smile. ‘It was a battlestone. But I bound what remained of it.’

  ‘It wasn’t on a lign. Not quite,’ Will said, levering himself up. ‘Where does that leave us?’

  Gwydion shook his head. ‘Are you forgetting about the battle on Blow Heath? That was fought after we carried a bound battlestone twenty leagues and more north from its burial place. This one was brought here from the hamlet of Empingham. Our example was noted by someone.’

  ‘Who?’ Will’s question hung in the air.

  ‘Who do you suppose?’

  ‘This can only be Maskull’s doing.’

  ‘My conjecture is that he found the stone on the Collen lign, dug it up and carried it eastward a league or so to the road.’

  ‘An ambush for the duke’s army?’ Willow asked, unsure.

  ‘A trap. Perhaps meant for Friend Richard, perhaps for others.’

  ‘Us,’ Will said, getting unsteadily to his feet. ‘He must have used Chlu to find the battlestone. He must know we’re following the duke.’

  Gwydion turned away. ‘If Maskull’s firework was meant for either target, it has failed him. It burst too late for Friend Richard and too soon for us. I now have some account of his methods, at least, and perhaps some notion of his limits. He has outreached his skill – he cannot yet make the battlestones dance exactly in time to his tune.’

  Will wiped his lips. ‘What did you see in Tickencote Oaks?’

  Gwydion would not answer but moved away, saying, as if it pained him, ‘There is no virtue in speaking of it now.’

  Will looked to Gort, who shook his head. He knew when to let a matter be.

  When Will went over to Lotan and thanked him for his timely work, the big man was awkward taking praise. ‘I did what I could.’

  Will flashed a glance towards the wizard. ‘What happened out there? What did he do?’

  Lotan shrugged, his look morose, reluctant. He gestured towards Gwydion. ‘Your wizard wouldn’t let me go near.’

  ‘Then has your gift of sight yielded us nothing at all?’

  ‘I saw…’ He waited, then waited again until Gwydion had moved away. At last he said, ‘I saw agony.’

  ‘Agony?’

  Lotan lifted his head and Will saw that his eyes were red now. ‘Flaming skeletons were running from the blaze. And your wizard was striking them down with blasts of blue fire. He called what he did “mercy”.’

  The next day was blustery and rainy. Lotan dourly endured it, but Gwydion said that if any present found the rain hard to bear, then they should consider how they would like it if a really large battle should take place. ‘For it is said that hard rains follow upon great battles.’

  Will supposed that the wizard was talking in impenetrable riddles, but they seemed nevertheless barbed and aimed at Lotan. He jogged Gwydion’s arm, saying, ‘Well, I have to say that I don’t like the rain either. And if you’d clear it away for us I’m sure we’d all be very much obliged to you – if you still can, that is.’

  ‘Between “can” and “should” there is an important distinction, my friend,’ Gwydion told him tardy. He raised an eyebrow and grunted, but then he went on to say that this was where the Emin Strete came closest to the Wette, a great grey-brown gulf tha
t was the domain of the ancient mud-giant, Metaris. It was his habit to rise up from the mussel beds as the silty tides ebbed and scatter the curlews and dunlins from his shoulders. But when the mood took him he liked to drown men by overturning their ships.

  ‘Many an unlucky mariner has Metaris preyed upon,’ Gwydion said with grisly relish. ‘Whether they were Slaver war-galley or Easterling pirate ship, he made no bones about any of them. Or rather many bones, I should say, for he has sucked many a sailorman’s rib clean.’

  ‘Does he live still?’ Willow asked, casting an uneasy eye eastward.

  Gwydion grinned darkly. ‘He lies even now in his watery lair, counting the riches that he once obliged King John to leave with him.’

  The views opened out and all day Will saw nothing that might be called a hill. He recalled the days he had spent as a child surrounded by hills and the yearning he had felt to know what the world looked like from their tops and what might be on the other side. And then, by turning that idea around in his mind, he understood that boys who grew to manhood in a land of flats and marshes would see the world another way entirely, and that thought pleased him for it was an understanding about life that was new to him.

  They passed through Streetton and then came by Woolthorpe where Will saw a great sky-bow overarch the grey northern clouds. Its colours spread vividly and there was much beauty in it, though its significance was not so clear.

  At last Gort said it showed where stood a certain garden, and in that garden there grew a tree that bore special apples. ‘They hang,’ he said, ‘only from the uppermost branches. But those fruits never drop of their own accord, Will. They have to be worked for, picked from the highest branches, else they wither where they’ve grown.’

  Will nodded. ‘As the rede says, “Hard won is dear loved, but easy come is easy go.”’

  ‘Aye, and so it is!’

  ‘Truly?’ Willow asked, grimacing at the strange notion of apples that refused to be picked without a great effort. ‘Then why do folk bother with them?’

  ‘Ah, because these are no ordinary apples. When baked in a pie they give anyone who eats of them a wonderful quickness of mind! The eater gains the wisdom to see answers, answers to all kinds of questions about the world.’

  ‘Then why don’t we go there and learn what we must do,’ she said.

  But Gort grimaced at the suggestion. ‘We already know enough about that, I think. And though our world is failing fast, it’s no duty of ours to give it any kind of a helping hand in that direction.’

  After Woolthorpe the road veered a little eastward into the Flatlands and away from the ligns. The rain abated and a great shaft of sunshine blasted down upon them, making a second sky-bow of nine startling colours.

  Will found that he was glad of the respite. But then he realized they were heading towards the city of Linton and he drew less comfort from the weak winter sunlight.

  ‘Is there not a great chapter house there?’ he asked Lotan.

  ‘Yes. It’s high upon a hill and so sees far.’

  The wizard glanced at the big man, sudden to pounce. ‘And how do you know that?’

  ‘I have never been there, but I have heard tell of it.’

  Gwydion’s jaw clenched. ‘We shall avoid its malign influence just as we have avoided all the others!’

  Lotan scowled. ‘I have no wish that we should do otherwise.’

  They went on until the town of Linton began to appear out of the mist. Will saw that the dwellings were indeed spread at the feet of the chapter house, which sat high up on a mound and looked out over fifty miles of good growing land. The afternoon came on wetter and they took shelter in a barn when the last of the light died.

  ‘Well, there’s one thing for sure,’ Willow said, stretching and yawning. ‘The way is certainly proving long.’

  Will turned to her. ‘And the shadow has fallen fast. Do you realize that today is Ewle?’

  ‘The shortest day,’ Lotan said, watching the rain abate. ‘We should have marked Ewle with ceremony. We’ll light a fire at least.’

  ‘And set the barn ablaze?’ Gwydion said. ‘It is dry in here. If you are cold, pack your shirt with straw.’

  ‘Oh, Master Gwydion. There’s no cheer in that,’ Willow said. ‘Let’s ask the farmer if we can kindle a small fire in the yard.’

  The wizard huffed. ‘Fire is a signal, and smoke even more so. Anyway it will rain again soon.’

  ‘Better safe than sorry,’ Will said, trying to make peace between them. ‘We don’t want to attract attention.’

  In the damp, gloomy silence that followed, Gort began to sing.

  ‘The shadow falls fast,

  Like sand in a glass.

  And the way is long,

  To the sleepless field’

  Will’s mind drifted. He was calmer now and he could order his thoughts more easily. Who had moved the stone off the Collen lign? Was it really Maskull? Or could the Fellowship have done it? Maybe the stone had spooked whoever had tried to carry it off and they had abandoned it. Was it happenstance that it had gone off just as they had come close to it?

  Their evening food was unwrapped and taken cold. The company leaned together, their conversation quiet and insignificant as the wind in dried grass. Will noticed the wrinkles and spots of age on the backs of the wizard’s hands. Rats squeaked somewhere, making Gort smile.

  Will saw Lotan go outside. After a moment, he got up and followed at a distance, like a man with business of his own.

  The big man walked away in the grey-dark, stood with his back to Will, and unsheathed his sword with a sudden, deliberate jerk.

  Will pressed himself up against the bole of a hollow ash tree. The deep grooves of its bark were damp and hard under his fingers, and tar-black blobs showed where a fungus was eating the tree alive. The smell of rotting wood rose out of the innards of the trunk, reminding him of death, of the wood pile in which Magog and Gogmagog had been dumped.

  There was a wind now, rustling the bare branches. Overhead the clouds had opened, moving on missions of their own. There were valleys of stars standing between their bluff faces. And far below them the man with the stolen eyes threw back his head and cast an unblinking gaze up at the sky. He breathed deep, like one marvelling in private at a great spectacle. Then he sheathed his sword and returned again to the barn.

  Silently, Will watched him go, feeling ashamed to be spying on a friend, but glad enough that he had witnessed nothing more than a brief spell of wonderment.

  The wizard noted Lotan’s return, and he let his glance linger long enough for Will to see it.

  ‘You still don’t trust him, do you?’ Will said when, a short while later, he got Gwydion alone.

  ‘I do not.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘Because I dare not.’

  Will snorted. ‘You dare not? You trusted Anstin the Hermit. Anstin helped you, though he once made spires for the Sightless Ones.’

  ‘Anstin worked on their houses. He was not one of them.’

  ‘So you’ll continue to refuse to put your trust in Lotan?’

  ‘Too much hangs on it.’ The wizard corrected himself, ‘Everything hangs on it.’

  Gwydion’s voice had risen, and Will cast the others a glance to check they were not listening. But he need not have worried – Willow and Lotan were laughing as Gort embroidered some unlikely tale.

  Will turned back. ‘It seems I missed quite a blaze back there.’

  ‘You see? – I asked him not to speak of it to you. Yet he did. He is not to be trusted.’

  ‘Perhaps he told me because he counts himself my friend first. And is that any wonder?’ Will drew a fast breath. ‘He said that men burned like torches.’

  ‘They burned as we all would have burned had you not sensed the stone and stopped us.’

  ‘But Lotan said you killed them.’

  The wizard’s deadly face showed how much he resented the implication. ‘I carried through an act of mercy.’


  ‘Lotan says you murdered them.’

  ‘I did exactly what had to be done. No more, and no less.’

  Will felt the moment bite. ‘Who were they?’

  ‘That was impossible to tell. Perhaps innocents, perhaps the ones who had fetched the stone for Maskull. Perhaps…others.’ No more words came, only a wall of wilful reticence.

  ‘Perhaps red hands,’ Will said. ‘And after it was over, did you wait for the flames to die down around the stone?’

  More suspicion flashed in the wizard’s eyes. ‘Why do you ask that?’

  ‘I want to know if you interrogated the stump!’

  ‘How could I? I did not know if it was yet a stump. I did not know if it had flared off all, or only a fraction, of the malice it contained.’

  ‘So what did you do?’

  ‘When it cooled I bound it and then Gort took it. He hid it somewhere far from the road.’

  ‘Do you think it still contains enough harm to cause a battle?’

  Gwydion shifted and wrapped his robe tighter about him. ‘That I cannot say. Why? Are you looking for a boon from it?’

  Will drew back stiffly. ‘Will you tell me whether or not you got its verse?’

  ‘I got nothing. Nor would anything that it gave freely be of any use to us.’

  That was evasive. Will knew he was leading the wizard onto dangerous ground, but he could not resist saying, ‘The Dragon Stone gave us a message, one that we believed, and still believe.’

  ‘That was then, this is now. I remind you again: the times are changing. Everything is changing – even, in the end, the lorc.’

  Will stirred as he began to see the sense of what was in the wizard’s mind. ‘Yes…how stupid of me.’

  The wizard sucked his teeth. ‘Trust me, Willand, in the world that’s coming there will be no lorc. Maskull’s meddling has pushed the world another step closer to the abyss. The lorc has begun to fail, just as I am failing, just as you are failing, just as the last yale has gone from this world. And what we must ask ourselves is this: is it more likely that the lorc will end with a whimper – or with a bang?’