Whitemantle (21 page)

Gwydion raised his hands like one who has grown tired of fruitless debate. ‘And how would you tempt him aboard your ship and keep him there? My friends, we must do the seemingly impossible. We must find Maskull a place of exile where there is no guide to conduct him out again, a place from which there is truly no escape.’

Then out of the silence an unlooked-for comment came. ‘I know of such a place…’

Gwydion had reached the window. Now he turned and looked at Lotan. ‘Did you speak?’

‘Yes. I said I know a place from which there would be no escape for Maskull.’

Gwydion showed his impatience. ‘Do not concern yourself with things about which you cannot possibly know any—’

‘I not only know of such a place,’ Lotan said, shoving aside all objections, ‘I have been there.’

‘You?’

‘Yes, me.’ The big man’s voice became wistful. ‘In my youth I sailed with sea rovers across many an ice-cold ocean. I visited the Baerberg, which is the northernmost isle of the whole world.’

‘I suppose you will claim to have stepped ashore there,’ Gwydion said as if he were interviewing a liar.

‘No mariner will willingly land there. But I have seen it as close as any man – from the distance of a bowshot. It is a tall mountain that rises from the sea, and on its frost beaches there are mermen and mermaids who bathe by night in the silvery moonbeams. Their skins are blue and green and their teeth are sharp and they are a handsome and strange folk. They come in great numbers to swarm around any ship that dares to approach their beaches, but
there can be no trade with them, for they go bare and lack for nothing, and no one knows their tongue, for they speak a language known only to gulls and skarvens.

‘The mountain called Baerberg has a great stone stair that rises up into the sky. I have seen it, though its top is most often wreathed in cloud. A secret is kept by the Sightless Ones that speaks of it. At the top, so they say, there stands a door, and the keyhole in that door awaits a golden key. I do not know what lies beyond the door unless it be only the brightness of the stars. But I will tell you this – the Fellowship believes the legend of the Baerberg, and part of it says that mountain is a place where no magic can be worked.’

All of them stared at Lotan, while he in turn gazed in fascination at the merry flames crackling from the log in the grate.

‘Fire is so beautiful,’ he said. ‘I would have risked everything a thousand times for just one moment such as this.’

The sentiment touched Will’s heart, but still he wondered about how Lotan’s view of the Baerberg fitted with what he had once been told by Gwydion; that Maskull had visited the Baerberg, that it was there he had opened the door in the sky and first gained knowledge that there was another world. Few men had ever travelled in sight of that far island, and Will found it wonderful that Lotan should be one of them. From the calculating expression on Gwydion’s face, however, it seemed that the wizard did not share Will’s sentiments. One by one, the company began to stir from their thoughts. Lotan’s interruption had served to draw a line under their talk. Willow sensed their mood and said, ‘We’d all better get some sleep, for tomorrow looks like being a very long day.’

‘Sound advice,’ Gwydion said, moving towards the door. ‘And since it is poor policy to send you to your dreams with no greater hope in your hearts than this evening has
so far provided, let me say to you in parting: I may have the beginnings of a plan in my mind. I shall summon Maskull to a meeting. And if all goes well, it will be a meeting he will wish he had never attended!’

All except Will greeted the wizard’s words with nods and gestures of approval and they too began to head for the door. As they stood before it, amazingly, Lotan began to sing.

‘
Patta inca tutna,

Farel sut sehutma.

‘Isi arki par charwan,

Gurna, ganta, gusarnan.

‘Lamba uscra ra raahan,

Jarga hura maddana chan.
’

‘What’s that?’ Willow asked, surprised at the sudden melody.

‘A ragha, or song. It comes from the Tortured Lands, and is a very old form, woven from thoughts of hope and despair.’

Will looked to him perplexed, not knowing why he had burst so unexpectedly into song. ‘Well…what does it mean?’

‘The first part of a ragha is always hopeful. It says that even a broken stone can be made whole. The second part is always despairing. It says that life passes as quickly as sand falls in a – what do you call it?’ He made a shape with his hands like the contours of a woman.

‘An hour glass,’ Willow said, grinning.

‘Yes, an hour glass.’

‘And the third verse?’ Gwydion asked. His presence was becoming more real, swelling suddenly like a fanfare as his interest burgeoned.

‘The third and last verse is always the most hopeful. It says something like…hmmm…that, nevertheless, it is
a long road to the cemetery.’ Lotan grinned at the wizard. ‘I think the song has much truth in it, but I didn’t expect to find it written here.’

Will’s eyes went wide with the sudden realization of what had prompted Lotan to sing – it was the parchment pinned to the back of the door. Lotan had not only read it, he had sung it out!

The wizard pulled everyone away from the exit and made them sit down again. Then he tore down the parchment on which he had written the inscription from the Delamprey stone and spread it wide on the table.

‘Show me the script,’ he commanded. ‘I want you to tell me everything you can about it.’

T
he next morning they waited for their horses in Albanay Yard during the last dark before dawn. The air was very cold and dry, and though rain puddles had collected over the last few days they had now largely drained away. The king’s ostler brought out their mounts and baggage horses. Will heard Gwydion and Morann whispering in low tones, and something about the manner in which they huddled made him suspicious. But it was the way they switched to the true tongue as soon as he appeared that irked him.

‘I don’t care what you’re planning,’ he told them both as he passed, ‘but if I’m going north then Lotan goes too.’

Gwydion looked back stonily. ‘Is it your wish to humble me?’ he asked quietly. ‘Have I not already agreed that, between your wife and I, Willow has by far the greater wisdom? I have merely warned that we should not forget Lotan’s oaths to the Fellowship.’

Will stuck his foot in the stirrup and swung himself up into the saddle. ‘Oaths like that count for nothing. He was suffering and in misery.’

‘That’s when the oath works hardest,’ Morann said.

‘He’s helped us once. He deserves to be trusted again.
And Master Gwydion has said himself that without Lotan we wouldn’t know where to go.’

Gwydion forced a smile and offered a compromising gesture that Will decided concealed much.

He sees difficulties everywhere, Will thought. But he should remember the rede that says, ‘Perfection is the enemy of progress.’

He recalled how bitterly it had pained Willow and himself to kiss their daughter goodbye for the second time. Bethe would stay in the duchess’s tender care once more, and though Gwydion had not liked the instant obligation that the favour had put Will under, he had had little choice.

Breath plumed from the horses’ nostrils as they passed out through the gatehouse. Will pulled on his gloves, glad to be quit of the suffocations of the palace. Willow rode to his left, darkly cloaked, her face pale and drawn, but she had been adamant that she would not be left behind. He respected her for that decision – more than she knew, for he was quietly aware of the honour it did him, and his spirit blazed up at the depth of love her choice had shown.

After the gates slammed shut the horses walked quietly along by the tilt-yards. This road, which usually reeked of horse dung, now smelled only of clean night air. Damp that had fallen overnight as dew now rimed everything with frost, and the uneven dirt of the road that had been shaped by the previous day’s traffic was now unforgiving under the horses’ hooves. As the road widened Will noted that they were being followed by a point of light that stood over the City. It was violet and intensely bright, and Will knew it as Rhiannon’s Spark, the sky wanderer that often heralded the dawn.

As the roofline fell, he looked to the east and saw the reluctant day gathering. A haze of smoke hung over the sleeping city and he felt a hollowness in his belly, something like hunger or disappointment – a feeling that confirmed
Chlu had left the City. He had gone into the north to prepare himself for the final conflict. Will understood that the bond linking them was strengthening, for he, in his own way, was doing exactly what Chlu had already done.

But the mood now was far from being one of trenchant resolve. They were sneaking, rather than spurring, out of the City. They went on in silence a little way until Lotan showed them a half-hidden lane opening to their left. He suggested they take it, saying it would lead them wide of the Charing and the lone sentinel who always stood at the foot of the spire-like monument.

‘And why should we do that?’ Gwydion said, turning to Lotan.

‘The watcher is there to control the crossroads,’ Lotan explained. ‘If he steps out into the Charing and blows his horn then the road will be set swarming with Vigilants. We should not go that way.’

‘Do you fear they will come for you?’ Gwydion asked.

‘No. I fear they will know Will for who he is.’

‘He’s right,’ Morann said. ‘Best not show our hand unless we’re forced to, eh, Master Gwydion? Or they’ll have us marked for sure.’

‘As you wish.’

It was a reluctant agreement on the wizard’s part, but then Will saw the confirming glance that Morann sent Gwydion’s way, and he knew that Lotan had been up for some secret test – and had passed it.

They led their horses alongside a tall brick wall, then a little while later they came to a pair of ornate iron gates. Gwydion opened them easily, though they were locked and chained. Then they crossed a plank bridge over a shallow ditch and began to make their way through what Will knew was the royal deer park.

Here leafless oaks grew black from the mist-white ground. It was said that the ghostly figure of Herne the Hunter
sometimes appeared among the herd, though his true home was at Wyndsor, many leagues to the west. Will pulled his cloak tighter around him and turned his mind instead to the way Gwydion had become fired up last night. He had leaned over the verse and questioned Lotan rigorously over his knowledge of the Delamprey inscription, then he had run what he heard through the medium of the true tongue.

‘And this word means?’

‘Break.’

‘So this one is “stone”?’

‘Yes. That is the root-word.’

‘And in this line the roots are “make” and “heal”?’

‘Yes. And here – “sand”, “fall”, “hour”, “glass”. And here – “long”, “road”, “awake” and “field”.’

‘But you said this word undoes what comes after it, so “not awake”.’

‘No. This and this together means “not sleeping”. But here it means a place of burial.’

‘A graveyard? Why?’

‘Why?’ Lotan had made noises like an affronted expert, then he had given a dismissive gesture towards the parchment like a gamer casting down dice or knucklebones. ‘Because it is.’

But there had been many more questions about the finer points of grammar and even the poetic form that Lotan had called a ragha, before finally Gwydion had stood up, satisfied, and said,

‘
The stone that was broken,

Is now healed.

The shadow falls fast,

Like sand in a glass.

And the way is long,

To the sleepless field.
’

The meaning had hardly been very clear, Will thought. But it reminded him of something, and after a while he realized that it rang eerily like the verse he had read on the Harle Stone.

‘Soon no more the plague pits,

Shall hold the dead of Corde.

A field of statues shall awake,

And death shall walk abroad.’

That message too had been about illness and graves and awakening. But as Will opened his mind to it a little more he began to recall yet another verse.

‘King and Queen with Dragon Stone.

Bewitched by the Moon, in Darkness alone.

In Northern Field shall Wake no more.

Son and Father, Killed by War.’

That one had appeared on the Dragon Stone. The last time Will had read it was moments before the malign power trapped inside had lashed out and overwhelmed Edmund.

The puzzle stayed with Will as they rode up through Isling Forest, where well-to-do young men came to hunt on rest days like these. He saw children wrestling, leaping and playing at ball upon Fensburgh Hill, and much sliding on the frozen ponds of Finchlea. Will wanted to veer off and take a quicker way across the fields, but at the wizard’s urging, they stuck to the main road. By the time they reached Whetstone, three leagues north of the City walls the sun was fully up and the road thawing, and Will had begun to taste the particular flavour of the hazel lign. Then at Baronet Hadlea, where they halted to water the horses, he recognized the bitter foulness of the elder lign emerging from a rise. It lay beneath the taste of the hazel and
corrupted it, a taint he knew from Delamprey and from Verlamion before that. Will sickened suddenly, and the moment he slid down from his horse he knew this for a place where a battlestone of great power lay.

‘What is it?’ Willow asked, coming to him while the others looked on anxiously from a distance. ‘You’re as pale as a cheese.’

‘Tell Master Gwydion,’ he said, his throat so constricted that his voice seemed strangled. He waved a hand vaguely to the north. ‘It’s here…’

And then he fell down and his head banged hard, and he lay groaning.

‘Quickly! Get him off the ground!’ Gwydion ordered.

Judging by the look of concern on Willow’s face I must be a sight to see, the calm, disembodied part of Will thought. He knew his face must be twisted up like one suffering the racks of a dread disease, but there was a disconnection between his mind and his leaden body, so that it would not do as he told it.

‘Come on, Green-gills,’ Morann told him gently. ‘Let’s get you back on your horse.’

Spirit and body joined again with a clap. He retched then vomited as Morann and Lotan lifted him. And they all stood poised, waiting to see if he would slide off his horse again.

‘I don’t like it here,’ he said, spitting untidily as he came to. ‘Elder, hazel and yew – all of them flowing into one another. The place stinks of…death!’

‘I won’t tell you what you stink of,’ Morann said, his humour stoutly intact, but he was worried. He had never seen Will’s talent react so strongly.

Willow handed Will a cloth and he wiped the mud from his face.

‘A premonition?’ Gort whispered to the wizard, but it was loud enough for Will to catch.

‘No!’ he cried out to the pair of them. ‘Let that not be so!’ And the cloth fluttered from his hand, was caught by the wind and flew up into a stark, leafless bush.

As they rode on, the stomach cramps and dizziness began to leave him, but he could not yet marshal his thoughts as he wished. His spine seemed to have turned to gristle and he had difficulty keeping his saddle. They stopped and tied his ankles together, passing a rope along his horse’s girth strap. Gort laid healing hands upon him and gave him a draught of something that overpowered his senses and made him wipe his mouth often.

‘Have a care. We don’t know what he’s seeing,’ Lotan said, lifting up one of Will’s eyelids. ‘I think we must try to get him out of harm’s way.’

‘How can we?’ Gwydion demanded harshly. ‘How, when we cannot see the ligns that are doing this to him?’

‘Don’t you know where they run?’

‘What business is it of yours what I know?’

For the next hour, Will swam in and out of shallow consciousness, and the horror of the vision that played in his head ebbed and flowed. He seemed now to be enfolded in thick fog, now seeing ghost armies marching out of a misty morning, men-at-arms and knights in harness, banners held on high, swords drawn, chanting as they advanced upon the enemy. And then he saw himself locked in among the men of the first rank of an unsteady rabble, armoured only in a leather coat and an ill-fitting iron bonnet. He had a billhook in his hand, and he was being thrust forward, too fast, by the pressure of men behind him. He was their shield, and the speed with which they forced him towards the enemy was frightening. It was as if they wanted the clash to be done and over as quickly as possible, as if they knew they had no choice but to try their hand against death and wanted to find out if they had won or lost. But Will only wished they would stop. He
wanted it all to stop – for everyone to stand still and drop their weapons and shout out, ‘I won’t do what you tell me!’

But the gap between Will and the men they called the enemy was narrowing with every step. The clash was coming closer and closer, and now he could see the horror in the faces of the enemy. Now their bills and poleaxes were lowered and they began stabbing and chopping furiously and there were screams and he saw flesh cleaved open, steaming obscenely in the cold morning air. Then as he fended off blows, there came a deafening clatter, and his helmet brow was shoved down so that its hard rim split open the bridge of his nose. The lines of men closed, smashed together, and his arms were shoved back, pinned, and the shaft of another man’s poleaxe dug into his neck and prayers to Almighty God filled the air around him.

The irresistible pressure at his back had forced him chest to chest with a terrified man whose face was splashed with blood but whose right hand had found enough space in that tightly packed crush to stab him full in the belly with a dirty little knife. Then the pain came, and the understanding that his body was being ripped open, inch by inch, butchered by a man screaming insanely in his face. There was not even the decency of death to blind him, and nothing he could do but look into the man’s eyes and beg him not to tear the wound open any further for fear that his dear guts would spill out on the ground and be trampled into the mud. But the man just screamed into his face…

Abruptly, the horror shut off as he felt a blow against his cheek. One blue eye and one brown examined him closely. Then a deep, stolid voice ordered him to be quiet and to listen to the birdsong. It was such a strong voice that he trusted it instantly and was glad to have it tell him what to do in this new nightmare world.

‘It is not real,’ the voice said. ‘The battle you are fighting is not real. Do you understand me?’

Will clapped a hand to the pit of his stomach and his eyes stood out in amazement He knew there had been a miracle, for somehow the irreversible had been undone. Somehow the clock had been turned back, and he was more grateful than he could say. He never wanted to see horror like that again.

Though the road meandered along the Collen lign, Will knew they were moving away from the fork at Wrotham Common where the ground had so foully betrayed him. All afternoon he fought against the lorc, and he fought alone, for his friends were powerless to aid him.

‘It was near the obelisk,’ Gort said. ‘That’s when his pain was at its height.’

‘Obelisk?’ Willow asked. ‘What’s that?’

‘The grey pillar set back from the road. Did you not see it? Square in form, yet narrowing as it rose. And pointed at the top.’

‘Perhaps she means the word, Wortmaster,’ Gwydion said. ‘We have never heard you use that word before. Where did you learn it?’