The Giants' Dance (9 page)

Gwydion drained his tankard. ‘Black swan, white crow, take good care, wheresoever you go!'

Morann picked up his knife and sheathed it. ‘And I have a parting toast for the both of you: may misfortune follow you all the days of your life…' he smiled a warm smile, ‘…but never catch up with you.'

And with that Morann was walking with uneven steps towards the passageway, and soon the stairs were creaking under his heels. When Gwydion also took his leave, Will
sat alone in the snug for a few moments, his thoughts darkening as he wondered about Willow and their baby daughter and the peril that still seemed to him to hang over the Vale like a dark cloud.

W
ill was surprised to find the sun high in the sky by the time he awoke. Bright shafts of sunlight pierced the shutters, and he sprang up from the mattress and got dressed as quickly as he could, fearing that Gwydion and Morann might have left without him.

But he soon found them outside in the yard, talking with the inn's people.

‘Morning, Gwydion. Morning, Morann.'

‘And a fine morning it is,' Morann said.

‘Ah, Willand,' Gwydion said. ‘I hope you are feeling able today. There may be tough work ahead.'

Dimmet sniffed at a side of beef that was hanging in his out-house. ‘Not too high for the pie, nor yet too low for the crow,' he said with satisfaction. ‘Now, Master Gwydion, shall I expect you back by noon?'

‘You may expect us, Dimmet, when next you see us.'

‘Right you are,' Dimmet said affably. ‘I'll take that to mean I should mind my own business.'

He went off to take delivery of the milk jugs, but soon Duffred had hitched Bessie, the bay cob, to the tithe wagon. Will got up onto the cart to sit alongside Morann and
Gwydion, and then they were off, heading east along a road that Will had travelled before.

A rolling land of good, brown clay met them as they drove steadily onward. The going was easy past Hemmel and Hencoop. The wagon ruts that had been made in the road during a wet spring had been baked into hard ridges by the summer sun and worn to dust. Hills to their left threw out low green rises that sloped across their path, and the sun shone on the part-harvested wheatfields to their right. But soon, tended fields gave way to wilder country.

Gwydion told of the times he had visited Caer Lugdunum, an ancient fortress that had once stood on a hill a little way to the north, and how graciously he had been received in poem and song by the druida who had lived there. Then Morann sang ‘The Lay of the Lady' in a rich, clear voice that knew the true tongue well. His song was about the brave Queen of the East and the stand she had made long ago against the armies of the Slaver empire. It was so sad a song that Will felt shivers pass through him, and it was a long while before he returned to himself and felt the hot sun on his face again. When he did, he found that Bessie had already covered half the road to Nadderstone.

Hereabouts the land was scrubby and unkempt, and Will looked to a cluster of bushes on his left that he knew hid a pond. Gwydion had once said there was probably star-iron in the bottom of it, and now Will realized how the pond had been made, by a shooting star landing hard on the earth, though one much smaller than the one that had smashed Little Slaughter. The thought made him shiver.

‘There's power flowing here,' Morann said, his blue eyes on the far horizon. ‘We may expect miracles, or worse, I'm thinking, before the day is done.'

‘Remember, the road follows the path of a lign,' Gwydion said, ‘whether we can see it or not. Willand, do you feel anything yet?'

‘Not yet, Master Gwydion. You can be sure I'll speak up soon enough when I do.'

A short shower of rain came to refresh the land and went away again as soon as it had come. They continued across the valley and soon Will noticed a tall tower of mottled brown stone. It was the same one he had seen before, standing sentinel on a ridge, above lands that had once been tilled by the Sightless Ones, or those who laboured for them. But those fields were now neglected and overgrown, and that caused Will to wonder, for the Fellowship was notorious for never allowing its lands to lie fallow if gold could be mined in them.

As they drew near Will was shocked to realize that the tower was now in ruins, as was the cloister and chapter house it had served.

‘What happened to the Fellows?' he asked in amazement.

‘Gone,' Gwydion said.

They passed by two large fishponds. Once this place had made Will feel very uneasy. And now, as their road climbed up past the tall, iron-brown walls and vacant windows of the chapter house, Will suppressed a shudder. He turned to Gwydion and saw the wizard's keen, grey eyes examining the battlements. The wizard called Bessie to a halt.

‘What are we stopping for?' Will asked.

Gwydion handed him the reins. ‘We must look into what has happened.'

Will shielded his eyes against the sun and studied the tower, but he saw nothing more noteworthy than a lone gargoyle that stuck out from the corner of the parapet high above them. Morann jumped down from the cart and they both followed Gwydion through a yard of tumbled graves beside the chapter house.

The garden that had once held neat rows of green plants
was now overgrown and its bee skeps smashed. The iron weather vane that had once shown the sign of a white heart and had stretched its four arms out above the roofs, had been cast into a corner of the yard. The roofs themselves were broken and pulled down too. Ahead the great gates were unhinged, and where, to Will's recollection, the arch of the doorway had been incised with the curious motto:

Now the stonework was defaced so that only the letters R, A, N, S and I remained. Gwydion stood before the doors, deep in thought.

‘Strange,' Will said, looking at the damage. ‘Do you think it means something?'

‘Everything means something.' Gwydion made no further answer but continued to stare at the arch and then to run his fingers over the letters.

Morann spoke in a low voice. ‘Isnar is the name of the late Grand High Warden of the Sightless Ones. It seems the letters of his name were spared from the Fellowship's motto when the rest were stricken out.'

Gwydion stirred. ‘This has meaning, for it surely was Isnar who ordered the roof of this chapter house to be broken in.'

‘How do you know that?' Will asked.

‘Because no one else has the power to order it.'

Will heard the scurry and squeak of rats as they moved inside. Black glass had been shattered from windows. It crunched underfoot in the dampness. Two or three winters
had ruined the fabric of the building, yet a greasy odour still clung to the place. They came back out into the open, entered the walled tithe yards and saw hurdles of woven willow sticks scattered about the cobbles. They were all that remained of stock pens and stalls. There was rotting gear here, tools for hauling animal carcasses: blocks, hooks, red rusted chains…

Will picked his way through the ghastly ruins and saw the slaughter sheds and the stone basins that had once caught the hot blood of terrified animals. The slaughter knives and poleaxes were all gone from their racks, but the grim channels and lead pipes put down to feed a line of barrels were still there. In the next shed was what remained of the fat-rendering cauldrons – the vats and moulds where the Sightless Ones had once mixed up wood-ash and fat to make their ritual washing blocks. The stone floor was still waxy from old spills, and slippery.

Will's skin tingled as he looked around, but he could not be sure if it was the lign that was causing it. The pillars of the cloister stood like broken teeth now and the space of the great hall was open to the sky, though half of the roof beams remained overhead like the ribs of a great whale. Will saw ear-like growths on the timbers, and many of them were nibbled, as if by rats, though how rats had got up so high he could not imagine. Fragments of gilding and painting remained on the walls. Everything was defaced, rain-washed and sun-faded, and the gravestone floor was scattered with thousands of broken candles and spoiled washing blocks. The place seemed to have been ransacked and then abandoned quite suddenly many months ago. There had been much violence done here.

‘Now you see the horrible truth about what happens when the Sightless Ones gather the tithe,' Morann said. ‘It's not just carts full of grain they take to hoard and sell. Horses, cattle, sheep, fowl – all go into their slaughterhouses.'

Will saw the place where sheep and calves had been strung up to have their throats cut. Anything that walked on two legs or four was bled into ritual jars, then soap and wax made from their fat.

‘A sickly smoke always hangs over the houses of the Fellowship at tithing time,' Gwydion said. ‘Many trees are hewn and much wood burned for ash to make soap. Flesh is boiled up and rendered of its fat, and the meat buried or left to rot, for the Fellows partake only of the blood.'

Will knew that the soap was used in ritual washing, which was why townspeople nicknamed the Fellows ‘red hands', though never in public for that was punishable and could end in a person's lips being cut off.

‘And why do they make so many candles?' Gwydion asked, and when Will made no answer he added, ‘The Fellowship make candles to light their sacred pictures.'

Will looked to the wizard and then up at the faded remnants of paint and gold leaf. ‘But…why? When the Fellows have no eyes to see them? And why would a Grand High Warden want to visit destruction upon one of his own chapter houses?'

‘The Fellows call such a thing a “Decree of the Night Fogs”,' Gwydion told him distantly. ‘It is ordered only rarely. It is their punishment for
deviation.
'

‘Deviation?'

‘That is, if a house strays from their creed so far that they cannot whip it back into line. Then they cut it off and trample it into dust. This is done partly lest the disease spreads to other chapter houses, and partly by way of example. They erase all reference to the broken house from their records. They destroy its chronicle, take away its adherents. Such a house becomes to them a house that has never stood, and the Fellows who failed become men who have never lived.'

‘Is that what happened here?' Will said, looking around.
He could feel the prickling in his skin growing stronger and wanted now only to get away from the place.

‘I do not know what happened here, for the doings of the Fellowship are kept a tightly bound secret. But did I not tell you how the houses of the Sightless Ones are most often built upon ligns and other streams of earth power?'

‘How could this house have failed?' Will asked, stepping over piles of broken wood and fallen slates.

‘This may be the explanation,' Gwydion said. ‘You know that the Doomstone was the slab that capped the tomb of their Founder. When it was broken that source of power which is habitually tapped and abused by the Sightless Ones must have shifted. Did you not tell me of the madness that beat through the chapter house of Verlamion when the lorc came alive?'

Will remembered. ‘It was hardly to be imagined. As if the one idea filling all their heads had suddenly gone out like a candle and left a darkness which they could not bear.'

Gwydion turned to him. ‘In like wise, Willand, the troubles of this house may have started as soon as we plucked up the Dragon Stone. For the power of the lorc certainly shifts when a battlestone is taken from the earth, and this house also stands upon the lign of the ash.'

Will looked around the stone-cold walls, aware of the perpetual shadows that lurked in the corners.

‘You must beware the Sightless Ones,' Gwydion told him earnestly, ‘for they do not love you. They will not easily forgive the intruder who defiled their most revered shrine.'

Will felt the walls close in around him. ‘I've wondered more than once why the Fellowship has not come into the Vale to get me. They were the only ones, apart from yourself and Morann, who ever came near.'

Morann shook his head. ‘They cannot find the Vale. They've never come into it, nor will they ever. I was always at Nether Norton when the tithe fell due. It was I who took
the carts through the quag and down to Middle Norton. The red hands from Great Norton never approached further than that. They don't know of the Vale's cloaking. They're interested only in amassing wealth. It's gold that gives them influence.'

Gwydion said, ‘The Fellowship does not connect the Vale and what they call the pollution of their chapter house at Verlamion. Still, at their annual public self-mutilations in Trinovant Isnar has sworn to destroy the one who broke the Doomstone. You must not underestimate him, for he never underestimates his enemies. And the threat you pose them is very great.'

‘With all their wealth and power?' Will said, looking about. ‘What threat could I be to them?'

‘That is easy to answer. I have already said that you are the Child of Destiny, third incarnation of Great Arthur of old. What you will do if the prophecies of the Black Book are brought to full fruit, will cause their spires to topple. And not before time!'

‘But I don't see how—'

Morann made an open-handed gesture at what lay around them. ‘It's been their habit for at least a thousand years to build where the men of olden times set up cairns and groves, and so supplant the Old Ways.'

Gwydion grasped his staff tighter. ‘Many of their chapter houses must be built upon ligns. They do not know it, but they feed on the power of the lorc as greenfly feed upon sap that rises in a flower stem. With every battlestone we discover and root out, Willand, another of their houses will fall as this one has.'