Power of Three (32 page)

A gasp went round the crowded hall when Gest used the King's name. The King shrugged, half amused, half embarrassed, rather as Mr. Masterfield had been when Mr. Claybury told his story. “But,” he said, “I didn't unhood to you, Gest. And I didn't say words on my collar.”

“I know. You thought the collar was going to Og. I don't blame you,” said Gest. “But I said words on my collar, and you wear it. And you seem to be unhood to me now, whether you like it or not. If that means anything, you've no business to kill Gair, any more than I had to hurt Hafny. And I'm told Gair changed collars with the Giant beside him, which puts him under our protection, too.”

There was a pause. Gest watched the King intently. He had now done everything he could, including throwing Gair on the King's mercy by telling him his name. But it seemed it was not enough. The King's shoulders humped unhappily. “I told you,” he said. “Their hair has been burned. The Powers have accepted the sacrifice. Look.” He pointed to the collar, with its blackened outlines. Gest looked at it and then, helplessly, at Adara. “There really is nothing I can do,” said Hathil, and it was clear he meant it.

Before Gest could say any more, Banot stepped forward again. “Let us now leave this first matter and pass to our second,” he said. “This concerns the flooding of the Moor, and to speak on this comes this Chief of the People of the Earth.” He beckoned Mr. Claybury forward.

At this sudden change of subject, Gerald's mouth began twitching again. “Are they going to let us go, or not?” he whispered to Gair. Brenda was whispering much the same to Ceri, and Mr. Masterfield to Med.

Gair trusted Banot. He knew what he was doing. He thought that there was every chance Banot would get Gerald off—though he knew there was no hope for himself. “You'll be all right,” he whispered. “Banot's the cleverest Chanter on the Moor.”

“If you ask me, he's just enjoying himself,” Gerald whispered back.

Banot was not the only one. Mr. Claybury, in spite of being soaked to the skin, with useless sweat clustering on his bald patch, bustled forward as happily as Banot and made a speech. Though he spoke mainly to the King, he turned his face amiably round the hall from time to time, to make it clear he was talking to everyone there. When Gair caught up with what he was saying, he recognized the same speech Mr. Claybury had made the night before.

“… over Southern England with a fine-tooth comb,” he heard Mr. Claybury say, “and the Moor was the only place which seemed to fulfill all our requirements. Now we come to you people.” Mr. Claybury's glasses twinkled round the assembled Dorig. “I gather that, for you, water is somewhere safe to live. Am I right to assume you intend to build living-halls on the floor of the Moor, once it is in use as a reservoir?”

“You are,” said the King.

“Then we seem to have the same interests,” said Mr. Claybury. “Though, just in passing, I do wonder how you got to know of our plans—”

He was interrupted by a wave of amusement. Every Dorig there shared it, even Hafny. Mr. Claybury's eyebrows went up, questioningly. “We find it pays to keep an eye on you Giants,” the chief Songman explained. “We watched your people measure and listened to them talk.”

“The advantage of being shape-shifters,” added the King.

“Oh, I see,” said Mr. Claybury. “Silly of me—though it's a thing I find it hard to get used to. Anyway, you'll build these halls, even though it's going to take a lot of hard work?”

“We shall have to,” said one of the white-haired Dorig behind the King. “We have no room here at all now.”

“I saw that, as we came,” said Mr. Claybury. “You have my hearty sympathy. I've seldom seen such shocking over-crowding. But suppose I were to offer you another solution? Would you be interested?”

“Perhaps,” the King said cautiously. But, though he took care not to sound very interested, there were mutters of “Yes!” from behind him, and eager whispering all over the hall.

“Good. Well, with this in mind,” said Mr. Claybury, “I've been talking to this lad over here—Ceri, isn't it?— who seems to be a kind of water-diviner.”

“It's called Finding Sight,” said Ceri. Gerald and Gair looked at one another, exasperated to think that neither of them had thought of asking Ceri.

“Quite,” said Mr. Claybury. “Now he tells me there
is
water, in quite the quantities we need, somewhere—from his description—in the area we call the Berkshire Downs. So then I had a chat with this other lad—Hafny, is that right?—and
he
seems to think that this water is probably filling a place where large numbers of you used to live. The Halls of the Kings, he called it. Do I carry you with me?”

He did. The King, and all those round him, began to talk eagerly. “Yes, but the rock faulted.” “It's too deep for our pumps.” “We couldn't break through the crust overhead.” “The locks were useless. Water came pouring through them.”

Mr. Claybury held up his hand. “Just a moment. May I remind you that we—er—People of the Earth have pumps which are possibly more powerful than yours. We need water. You need somewhere to live. So, if you could tell me the exact location of your Halls of the Kings, my office will set about investigating them immediately.”

The King looked dubious. “But suppose your pumps do no better than ours?”

Mr. Claybury chuckled. “Now this young lady doesn't seem to think so. She really seems to be able to see into the future. Why don't you ask her for yourself?” He beckoned to Ayna. “Come over here, my dear.”

Ayna came as far as the star-shaped hole where the collar lay. There she shook her wet hair back and told the King daringly, “You have to ask me the right question.”

“I realize,” said Hathil and, not at all offended, he considered what to ask. Ayna, looking up into his narrow Dorig face, realized that here was someone who actually understood about Sight—though whether this was because Dorig had it, too, or because the King had a subtle mind, she did not know. She waited confidently, until Hathil said, “Will the People of the Earth have pumped the water from the Halls of the Kings a year from now?”

“No,” said Ayna. There was a murmur of disappointment.

“In three years, then?” said the King.

“In three years,” said Ayna, “the small hall at the top will be empty.”

“In ten?” said the King.

“In ten years, the New Halls will be dry,” said Ayna.

“And in twenty?”

“The same.”

“You see?” said Mr. Claybury. “To judge from the size of the halls here, that makes an awful lot of water. We wouldn't need the Moor at all.”

“Am I supposed to rejoice?” said the King. “The New Halls are rather smaller than these. To have them dry in ten years won't help us much.”

“You mean you won't tell me where they are?” said Mr. Claybury. “Well, I daresay we can find them for ourselves.”

“Oh, I'll tell you,” said the King. He gestured to Ayna. “It's certain you'll find them anyway, and we've no quarrel with Giants. But the People of the Sun must leave the Moor whether you flood it or not. We need it to live in, and we are the elder people.”

Before Mr. Claybury could reply, Banot was forward again, and Gest with him. “So we come to our third head,” said Banot, “which is the wars between the Peoples of the Sun and the Moon. And herein I must begin, since I know somewhat of the customs of both. The nature that lies at the heart of the ways of the People of the Sun is that they are a warlike people, but they do not shed blood except for a reason. The nature of the People of the Moon is different: they shed blood freely, but they are at heart a gentle people, given to peace. Is this not true?”

All the Dorig in the hall seemed, to Gair's surprise, to be pleased with this description of themselves. There was a murmur of approval from the crowd and the gallery. Those round the King nodded, pleased that Banot understood. Gair thought of Halla, unfeelingly ready to pull him underwater when she got the chance, and of Hafny doing no more than trying to frighten himself and Ceri away where one of Gair's own people would have fought lustily. And he saw Banot was right. The queer cruelty of the Dorig was due to the fact that they preferred not to fight. The only Dorig who did not seem to agree with Banot was the King himself.

Gest laughed at the expression on the King's face. “That won't do for Hathil,” he said. “He was born a fire-eater among the wrong people. And even he would rather use cunning than violence. Now see, Hathil, you've made a proper tangle over Garholt. You may have waited until I was out of it, but you had no business to attack it at all. You swore not to hurt Adara. You can't fight me. And you know I can't fight you. But you killed a number of my people and you hunted my children through the Moor. Why?”

From Banot's expression, he was afraid Gest's forthrightness would make the King angry. Hathil did indeed look at Gest haughtily, but the pale Dorig flush came into his face at the same time. Banot relaxed when he saw it. Gair looked from him and Gest to the King's face and had a sudden vision of Hathil as a stag, hunted this way, pushed that, running in bewilderment to the one spot from which he could not escape. It seemed an unlikely idea, when the hall was crowded with Dorig and the King had only to snap his fingers to put an end to the hunt for good and all. But Gair knew he had seen correctly. His people were huntsmen and they hunted in crowds. Dorig were like deer, and they ran when they could. Banot and Gest were both brave men and they knew what they were doing. With Ayna, Ceri and the rest of the Garholters to back them up, they had coolly separated Hathil from the rest of the herd and were busy running him down. Gair wondered if this was the way his people had first driven the Dorig underwater.

“It was a trick, if you like,” the King confessed. “I had to have the words off your wells, and I wanted to persuade you to leave the Moor. I was going to use your children as hostages and give Orban's son to the Powers. After all, my brother was only a child when Orban killed him.”

“So was Orban,” said Gest remorselessly. “And it seems to me that your brother has revenged himself amply over the years, both on us and on the Giants, who never harmed him. We came to talk peace, Hathil.”

The King made an effort to run in a different direction. “Then you'll leave the Moor peacefully, maybe?” he said.

Banot's answer to this was to beckon Mr. Masterfield forward. “I doubt if they could leave the Moor and be safe from my people,” Mr. Masterfield said.

It was as if he had stood, tall and grim, blocking the King's escape. Giants knew all about hunting, too, Gair saw. And Mr. Claybury had joined in the hunt earlier and genially helped divide the King from the herd. Gair, out hunting, had often felt a queer sympathy for the animal they hounded—it was supposed to be good to feel it: it helped you know where the creature would turn next—and he felt it so strongly now for the King that he almost cheered when Hathil showed that he understood what was going on, though being a Dorig he put it in different terms.

“I'm not a fool,” he said. “Banot's playing a tune here with living strings, and now he brings in his low note. Have you come to tell me this collar's yours? Or did you know your son shot me in the leg yesterday?”

For a moment it looked as if the hunt was diverted. Mr. Masterfield turned and glared at Gerald. Gerald swallowed.

“He did quite right!” Brenda put in shrilly. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Mr. King! There were nine of you, all bigger than I am, all on to those three kids. They had to ask us for help. And Gerald only shot him because he kept on coming after them. He warned them. But they didn't listen.”

Mr. Masterfield looked at Gerald, and Gerald nodded, very red in the face. “Well done, then,” said Mr. Masterfield. To Gair, this seemed very cool praise, but Gerald seemed to take it as the warmest congratulation. Mr. Masterfield turned to the King. “I'll pay you any compensation you ask, sir,” he said.

The Songman the King was leaning on said warningly, “Our customs put it very high.”

“As high as providing you with somewhere else to live?” Mr. Masterfield asked. “Until the Halls of the Kings are fit to live in again?”

The hall was immediately agog with interest. It hummed. The King looked round it as if he felt his own people had now joined in to hunt him, too. “Where?” he said.

“I still own a good deal of the land round here,” said Mr. Masterfield. “By our law, that means under the ground as well. Now Banot and Gest tell me that there are quite a string of empty mounds on my land. I could agree to let you live there and make sure that no one disturbs you.”

The King shrugged. “Very handsome. But I never heard of any empty mounds.”

“There are hundreds,” said Gest, and this surprised not only the Dorig, but a number of Garholters, too. Gest explained, “Most of the hills round the Moor are hollow— Banot and I explored some as children. Our people used to live in them, long ago, when there were more of us. They're all locked with words, but I can easily open any number you want.”

The hall filled with wistful mutterings. “What would the rest of your Chiefs say to that?” the King asked. “Could you answer for Islaw and Beckhill?”