The Giants' Dance (21 page)

But when he looked back he saw a sight that worried him even more. A column of men were spilling out onto the road to the south, a line of dark figures emerging from the afternoon's haze. They were many, for they were raising a lot of dust. Will could not make out the banner that streamed above them, except that it was red.

It
is
the baron, he thought. And if they're galloping we'll
soon be overtaken whatever I try to do. There's not going to be enough time!

‘Gwydion, wake up!' he yelled, but the wizard slumbered on like a man seized by a falling fit. The cart bounced and jumped as the horse gamely gave her best and took them off the line of the road. He hung on to the wizard. ‘Gwydion, by the moon and stars, if you don't wake up I'll…Oh, this is bad!'

The sun glittered now on the dark mass of horsemen, and Will saw blued-steel helms. They were not coming at a gallop, but still their approach was swift and they were closing. He guessed their number at five hundred.

Something was wrong. Too many were knights in full harness. Even if Baron Clifton had called out every last one of his vassals and all the knights of the Middle Shires he could not have mustered so many armoured men. And why would they have wasted time donning mail and plate just to chase down a pair of thieves?

‘Hyah! Puull!'

What made Will urge the horse on again was a trilling trumpet note. He looked over his shoulder. A second column of horsemen was now closing on the first, also at a trot. Many banners of red and blue and green streamed out above them as they came on. Dozens of banners flying and hundreds of riders.

‘What's happening?' he shouted angrily. Then the terrible truth began to dawn on him.

Gwydion twitched, then convulsed and began to cough. Will hung on to him as the cart bumped again over uneven ground. Will steadied the wizard as he tried to sit up.

The wizard gave Will a dark glance and wiped a little blood and spittle from his mouth. ‘Stop the cart!'

‘I can't – we're being chased!'

‘Of course we are! Pull up!'

The wizard tried to snatch the reins, but Will resisted.

‘You don't understand!'

The wizard thrust him back and wrested the reins from him. ‘Fool! Why did you leave the road? Can you not tell an
army
when you see one?'

Will looked back wildly. ‘Hey…?'

‘It is the stone that's drawing men to battle! It is pointless to try to outrun them – wherever we go they must follow!'

Gwydion slowed the horse to a walk. Ahead was the brook Will had been heading for, but now it served only to bar their way. All around it was soft, tussocky ground, the sort that carthorses did not like. Columns were gathering at their back amid a great cloud of dust. More horsemen appeared by the moment, drawn unknowingly towards the cart that was in their midst.

‘Their commanders understand nothing of us or of our cargo,' Gwydion said. ‘They do not see that all their actions are being controlled by the stone!'

‘Gwydion, what happened to you? I was scared. I thought you were going to die. I thought Maskull had landed some kind of spell on you.'

Gwydion scowled. ‘It was a trance. My awareness left my body momentarily to change places with a skylark's.'

‘A skylark? You mean a
bird
?'

‘Of course a bird! What better place to go than up into the middle airs if a man wishes to find out what is happening below? From that vantage, I saw much. These squadrons of horse are but the outriders of a far greater army that is on the move all around us. And for every rider there are a dozen footsoldiers. Look! Thousands are coming across the meadows.'

‘Are they from Ludford?' Will asked, seeing more men emerge from the cover of the woods. He tried to identify their war banners and liveries. There was one of gold-over-red
that carried the device of a severed head. Another showed a green lion with a forked tail rising up against a yellow background. ‘I'm sure these aren't the badges of Duke Richard's allies!'

‘Alas! The host is commanded by Lord Ordlea, and under him is another of the king's Commissioners of Array – Lord Dudlea. Twice as many men are in this army than all who clashed at Verlamion put together. It is my guess that Maskull has persuaded the queen to send them along this road to intercept the Earl Sarum. He is trying to bring his own army south from his castle of Wedneslea, hoping to join with Richard at Ludford.'

‘Earl Sarum?' Will asked, knowing he was one of Duke Richard's two greatest allies. ‘How many men does he lead? Did you see them?'

‘The tail of his army was but half a league to the north-east. Its head is coming now through Loggerhead Woods. He has spotted his enemy, I would say, but he has fewer than three thousand men at his command. It is hard to say what he will do, for he too has been drawn unwittingly towards the battlestone.'

‘But they'll be massacred,' Will said starkly. ‘They're outnumbered three to one.'

He shouted the tired horse on towards the small brook, but the wheels of the cart had already begun to sink in the damp ground and Will looked around him despairingly as they lurched to a halt.

‘It's no good. We can't go any further.'

And there they waited while Lord Ordlea's great, raggletaggle army engulfed them. Squadrons of armoured horsemen went rushing by to left and right, marshalling themselves to guard the flanks. Three lumbering masses of footsoldiers were now packing in tightly with one another ready for the attack. Drums were beating and men yelling as they clashed their weapons. ‘The king! The king!' they
shouted, for most were simple farmers who had been told they were doing no less than King Hal's bidding against a wicked rebel lord.

For a while the cart was surrounded by a sea of running men who wore no helmets or breastplates but only yellow hoods. They were carrying bills and axes and fearsome hooks on long poles. Their faces were filled with a fierce eagerness to kill. Half-armoured men-at-arms with drawn swords led the charge and urged men on with shouts. Then footmen began massing along the line of the brook, holding the margins of the boggy ground until archers could come forward. It seemed to Will that many of these lads were fresh from the field. They were frightened and could not help their fear. Some were white-faced, shocked even by the sight of so many men together in one place. Some knew they were being herded like sheep towards a slaughter. But there were others still, weakminded and savage of heart, who had listened to the stone uncritically and knew very well where revenge was to be found. They wanted only the chance to draw blood, to bear down upon their enemy and wreak havoc.

A mounted knight's esquire with a mace in hand came up and snarled, driving his men on. But then he wheeled about and called out to Gwydion, ‘You there, drover! In the name of the king, what are you doing here?'

Gwydion played the helpless man overtaken by calamity. ‘Carrying, sir.'

‘Carrying what?'

‘Naught but a stone, sir. It is our…business.'

The squire looked them over, but there was nothing in the cart his soldiers could use. He saw them only as an obstruction to be got around. ‘You are between armies,' he said, as if talking to a fool. ‘Get-out-of-the-way!'

‘That we would do, sir – if we was not stuck fast!'

As the horseman galloped away, Will jumped down to
help haul the cart out of the mud, but it would not move. Heat was pouring from the stone now, rippling the air above it like flame. Will could feel it like an oven against his cheek. There was swirling smoke and the smell of charred wood. He put his back against the nearest wheel and heaved, but it was no use. His feet slid in the sodden ground. Despair overcame him as he saw the Earl of Sarum's army spreading out along the rise to the wooded north-east. There were few men on horseback among them and some were dismounting ready to fight. Most were men-at-arms but there were many archers wearing red and black, and they came to the fore, all driving in sharp wooden stakes to stand behind in case enemy horsemen should charge down on them. They had come along the road and emerged in widely spread companies from Loggerhead Woods, trying perhaps to give the idea there was a far greater force in reserve. They hung back like seasoned men who had been in such a fight before. Gwydion was watching them, muttering subtle words and gesturing broadly towards the earl's army like a man willing them to disperse.

Will felt the cart lurch, then flames began to leap up from the back of it.

‘Gwydion! The cloaks! They're burning!'

He jumped up into the back of the cart once more and began beating the flaming cloth against the stone. But then the stone itself began to thresh from side to side, and when Will pulled away the second cloak he saw to his horror that the stone was a stone no longer. Now it seemed to resemble nothing so much as a giant, grey maggot. It wriggled from side to side as if trying to escape from the cart.

He gasped in disgust, his flesh crawling as he saw the thing writhe in its smoking bed.

‘It's starting!' he shouted. ‘Gwydion, there's no more time!'

Flames leapt up from under the stone. Will sprang away and began to unharness the frightened horse. In a moment the whole cart was engulfed in flame, and there was now no way to prevent the maggot falling to the ground.

‘Get back!' Gwydion said, gripping his arm. ‘Once this over-ripe thing touches the earth it will begin spewing forth all the harm it contains!'

He danced about the flaming cart, staff in hand, calling down spells of ever greater power to combat the monstrous grub. A hundred paces away the mass of Lord Ordlea's army watched a cart burn. They saw a madman dancing about the flames and many laughed to see it. Few, if any, of these common soldiers had ever been to war before, doubtless some thought that a cart was burned before every battle, and many were still in good heart, not having seen blood spilled yet.

But Will knew better. He had seen the way war arrows skewered men, how edged weapons sliced through their flesh. And he had seen the effect a battlestone had on the minds of men who heard its whisperings. His own heart squeezed in his chest as the triumphant stone vented its glee. His head filled with the sounds of laughter and another, more terrifying sound. And his spirit quailed. He had heard that dread noise before, and his own voice ebbed away.

What a fool you were to imagine you had broken the Doomstone…

Then came the familiar sound of tearing air. He cowered in fear, for he knew it as the harbinger of bloody death. It filled the sky as a thousand arrows sped over his head, carrying murder to those beyond. A few score fell short, appearing suddenly in the ground around him, the nearest of them three paces away. It stood up in an instant like a strange white flower brought magically into being.
When he looked up, he saw Lord Sarum's men stretching in an unbroken line across the wood, and many archers loosing volley after volley. He could make out their faces. He could hear the footsoldiers behind them coming forward.

For all that Lord Sarum had been touched by the battlestone's influence, he was a canny soldier. He had the advantage of higher ground, and he remained wary of the trap that awaited his outnumbered army two meadows away. Fearing he might be outflanked by a swift cavalry charge, he had planted his left wing against the boggy ground that ran down to the stream. Any horse ridden across it would sink up to its hocks in the mud. Any attack would stall. The earl had covered his right flank with a barricade made of a double line of victual wagons, and that was manned by billmen whose long weapons could unhorse any rider who came near.

Will knew the character of Lord Sarum from the weeks and months he had spent at Foderingham and Ludford. The earl was almost sixty now, one of the richest men in the Realm and as wily as any fox. He understood the art of war very well, yet here he was fighting for his life. He had been manoeuvred here by the queen's insistence, set upon by a newly raised rabble and brought to an illconsidered fight by the judgment-destroying powers of an ancient stone.

All this came in a flash to Will's mind as the air above tore with deadly sound. The arrows came so thick that Will heard their shafts clattering one against another in midflight. He crouched down, unable to do otherwise, for once experienced, the terror of being under an archers' volley never left a man.

But there was no protection to be had from an upflung arm. Screams began as the first deadly rain struck home against the advancing body of footsoldiers. Men fell down
and screwed themselves up on the ground in agony, but still the mass walked forward regardless. Then, a count of six later, the second volley struck and there were more screams. Another count of six and the same again. And on it went, with each volley taking a fresh crop of men until at last, the advance faltered and they were ordered back, leaving the field to the hundreds of dead and dying who had been struck from their ranks.

Will turned away, more compelled now by Gwydion's struggle. The burning cart sent its flames high above the wizard as his voice thundered out spells which he still hoped might restrict the stone's menace, but Will knew that without any chance to lay hands upon it all Gwydion's efforts were doomed. Amid the wreckage of the burning cart, the maggot seemed to rear up as if looking for the one whose dance tormented it so.

Amid the shouting and bleeding and dying Gwydion stepped out his magic powerfully and with courage, but perhaps he now drew too close to the stone. For a moment a blue glow haloed it, locking it tight, but then a mouth opened in the maggoty flesh that began to shriek out words that murdered the true tongue. Words of power, they were. Dire words that called down a renewal of pain and death upon the field.

The wizard reeled back, shielding himself from the twisted magic as it gushed forth. Now the mouth opened out like a broken jaw and spewed forth its black cloud. At first Gwydion's magic caught the cloud, confined it and controlled it, as if in an invisible net, so that it rose up into the air: a great swirling, whirling mass, angry and seeking escape surged out.