Whitemantle (22 page)

Gort scratched at his beard. ‘I…I’ve always known it.’

‘Have you indeed?’

Will’s glance fell upon the wizard as the latter said, ‘More than one strange word has been used within my hearing just lately.’

‘That doesn’t surprise me,’ Will joked. But his attempt at levity fell on stony ground. He said, ‘You know, when I spoke with Edward he kept using a particular word as a sort of curse. I didn’t know what it meant at the time, but I think I do now.’

‘What was the word?’ Gwydion asked.

‘Damned.’ Will held his gaze. ‘I know it means…sent to Hell.’

‘Quite so. But where is Hell? Do you know that yet?’

He shook his head wonderingly. ‘No. But I think there’s
a monster called “Almighty God” who lives there. Where are they coming from, Master Gwydion? These new words, these terrible ideas?’

‘Where do you think?’

‘From the other world, I suppose. Because we’re already changing, fitting in with it.’

‘Correct. The closer we approach, the more like it we become. If left alone it will become an inevitable process. Soon there will be no stopping it.’

When next they halted, Will sought his own company, but though he had made it plain that he wished to be left alone for the time being Lotan came and sat close by him. The big man said nothing, being himself deep in thought, but all the while his fingers were playing with a gold coin, spinning it time and again on the flat top of a stool, catching it as it fell, or watching as it spun faster and finally came to a dead stop.

‘Where did you get that?’ Will asked, abandoning his own thoughts.

Lotan looked up in surprise. ‘This is not what you think.’

‘Not…money?’

‘It is not a coin. In the Fellowship we called them “eallub”. You see these two holes? That’s where the stitch goes. One of these is sewn inside every Fellow’s robe on the day he loses his eyes.’

Will took it and examined it with grim fascination. On one side was inscribed a radiant heart and the legend, ‘ecipsuA.nretarF.’ which he knew meant, ‘Under the guidance of the Fellowship.’ On the other side was ‘satinretarF dA tE bA’, meaning, ‘From and To the Fellowship.’

‘I had no idea that Fellows carried gold pieces about with them.’

‘One more secret. And kept for reasons you can easily understand. When a man’s eyes are taken, this lessens the pain. That’s why you must have it.’

Will’s gaze flickered to Lotan’s. ‘I…can’t do that.’

But Lotan held it out to him and Will received it reluctantly.

It was a vastly personal possession – how could Lotan give away an item of such significance? And whether Will liked the gesture or not, the token had been made by the Sightless Ones. That fact alone was enough to cause him to think again.

He tried to give it back. ‘Lotan, I mustn’t.’

‘Please. It might help.’

Lotan made no move to take back the button, and as Will weighed it in his palm he wondered how he could avoid giving offence. When he closed his eyes he could feel no magic in the metal. And when he looked at it again, he saw that it was more than just a stamped and worn disc of pure gold – it was a gift, made compassionately, by a friend.

‘Well, then I thank you for it.’ He smiled and put it in his pouch. ‘Best keep it hidden though – I don’t think Master Gwydion would understand.’

As they rode on over Dancer’s Hill and crossed the Mymms Brook, the road turned north-west. There was no doubt that a large army had come this way, and Lotan surveyed the road knowingly. ‘Maybe ten thousand went through here yesterday.’

‘Aye, and in two separate passings, one coming after the other.’ Morann stared at the ground. ‘Edward first, then three hours later his father.’

‘How can you tell that?’ Lotan asked, amazed.

Morann winked at him. ‘I asked the brewster at the inn back there.’

When the light began to die they took themselves far from the road and made camp in a quiet hollow that sheltered them from the west wind. All the land roundabout had been scavenged clean by the troops who had passed through the day before, but they eventually found enough
dry kindling to make a small, smoking fire, and soon the smell of bacon fat was in the air.

‘I can see the lorc!’ Will shouted out, shattering the calm. He was tortured now by the vastness of the power he could sense flowing through the veins of the land.

‘Tell us what you see,’ the wizard cried, holding him fast.

‘It’s on fire, Master Gwydion! Five ligns all passing within a league or two! Three go through the Doomstone at Verlamion, three through the monster that I felt back there. And there are two more stones each standing where two ligns cross. The lorc is in full spate! This is the final battle, Master Gwydion! It must be! We’re too late!’

He tried again to force his panicking mind shut, but feared now that he was too weak to do it.

‘Shhh!’ Willow calmed him and gave him fresh milk to drink from a leather bottle. He gulped until it ran down his cheeks and Gort took it away from him. His mouth burned, but the Wortmaster made him wait for an infusion of sweet herbs, and all the while he suffered, feeling that he was trapped, boxed in by a demon forest of holly and hazel, of rowan, yew and elder. Branches were plucking at him, thorns digging in, roots growing through his flesh, until he was eaten alive.

But through all that nightmare vision, a diamond-clear point still shone in his mind, hard and lucid, like the Star of Annuin. That, he knew, was his own fortress of self-possession, an inviolate watcher of the world that never let go, never willingly abandoned him to danger. It warned him that a horrifying experience could tear down a man’s mind
whether or not that experience was real
– for the horror certainly was. It told him that he must try one more time to close his mind to the lorc, or risk madness.

‘Not too much medicine, now,’ Gwydion told Gort. ‘He must return to clear-mindedness.’

‘He’s suffering great pain, Master Gwydion.’

‘Then I shall speak softly to him and divert his mind.’

The wizard came to his side and began to speak soothingly as he had done in years gone by, telling a tale that Will’s mind easily latched onto.

‘A great army once gathered near here, Willand, at the place that is now called Wetamsted. Four thousand chariots mustered upon Nomansland Common as soon as news of the Slaver invasion was heard. Those were the days when Caswalan was king, and it fell to him and his brother Neni to face the might that was come…’

Will’s thoughts slipped away from the world once more and the picture of ancient days and the swirl of wizardly words was lost in a dark void, until…

‘…and so you see how the power of the lorc saved the Realm in those dark days. There is no question of it, for Iuliu was very great in war, and though brave Neni fell, still Caswalan had the victory. And afterwards, Iuliu took his steel-clad warriors back to their ships, and Caswalan withdrew to his great hall at Ayot and there took a blessing upon the Lulling Stone.’

Slowly Will returned to his right mind, and presently he looked around and asked in a puzzled voice, ‘Where are we?’

Gwydion told him, ‘In a tent, and camped a league to the east of Verlamion. We have crossed the Colne Brook. I thought it best to take you as far away as possible from the places where we know the ligns run.’

‘Where’s Morann?’

‘He has gone with Lotan to find something out for me.’

‘Where?’ he asked, alarmed.

‘Verlamion.’

‘Oh, not to the chapter house?’ he cried. ‘The shrine’s guarded by Sightless Ones. This time they are ready and greatly roused up!’

‘Do you think we are
all
insane?’ The wizard chuckled.

He subsided. ‘Where have they gone, then?’

‘Ask them when they return if you must know their precise movements.’

‘The stone that was broken,’ Will muttered through chapped lips, ‘is now
healed.
’

‘What are you saying?’

‘The Doomstone of Verlamion – it has repaired itself. Such power, such ancient power…and back there, the stone Gort called ola…olbal—’

‘Obelisk.’

‘Obelisk – that has a greater power even than the Doomstone.’

Gwydion clicked his tongue. ‘Greater? How can that be?’

‘Because it also stands on three ligns. That must be the reason. The stones have powers that are in proportion to the strength of the ligns that feed them.’

‘But…a second doomstone there? That does not fit our pattern.’

‘Then our pattern must be wrong!’

‘Calmly, Will,’ Gort said, attending most solicitously now.

Will nodded at the Wortmaster, acknowledging his own rudeness, yet he remained fervent. ‘Don’t you see, Master Gwydion? Our world has always been one where things go in the direction that the sum of our beliefs sends them. If we do not believe in the isle of Hy Brasil, then there
is
no Hy Brasil. But once the
idea
of Hy Brasil becomes a reality, and once people begin to believe in the place, then the discovery of the actual Hy Brasil cannot be far off. This is what allows magic to work, what permits us to influence the world by means other than the purely physical. I’ve come to see how it’s all to do with willpower and belief.’

‘These things are well known…’ The wizard nodded, but he said nothing more. And even if he had, Will would not have been deterred from going on because now he could hardly stop himself.

‘Yes, that’s it! That’s why there’s no magic in the coming world – because in the coming world if the facts don’t fit the ideas, then it’s the
ideas
that have to change, because the facts can’t. It’s a hard world that’s coming. A hard world where the facts are fixed…’

‘There now,’ Willow cooed. She tried to soothe his raving, dabbing his brow with a wetted scarf. ‘Don’t worry, you’ll be all better by tomorrow.’

‘I’m better now! I’ve never been saner. Listen to me! I have the answer!’

But no one listened to another word from him, because a twig snapping in the darkness made them all look into the void beyond the reach of the fire. The hairs on the back of Will’s neck stood up as Gwydion’s hand groped for his staff. Then a shape appeared. A hooded figure in grey and black, immensely sinister, shot bolts of fear into them. It loomed for a moment that swelled unbearably just as a moment of torture swells to seem like an hour. But then the set of Gwydion’s arms relaxed and he sat down.

‘Welcome back,’ he said.

Willow put a hand to the nape of her neck and let out a shuddering breath. Her relief was palpable. She said, ‘That wasn’t funny.’

Will sank within himself again, struggling to recall the great insight that had just come to him. Instead he could bring to mind only something that Willow had said to him long ago before the battle at Delamprey. He had remarked that some battlestones were near one another while others stood far off, and she had said that there had to be a pattern in the way they were laid out. And later that night he had dreamed there was a way of picturing the whole Realm, as if he was looking down on it from above…

‘The duke’s split his army,’ Morann said, throwing back his hood and coming forward.

‘Where’s Lotan?’ Willow asked.

‘I’m here.’ He emerged silently from the space between the tents.

‘We skirted the whole town around,’ Morann said. ‘Five thousand men are headed into the north under the duke. And five thousand more have gone up the Wartling.’

Will knew that the Wartling was the old Slaver road that ran north-west from Verlamion. Just as he had thought, Edward was repairing to his castle of Ludford, the fortress which had become his the day he had taken the tide Earl of the Marches.

‘That’s Edward’s army,’ Will said.

Morann blew out his cheeks. ‘He should have known better than that!’

‘He’s angry!’

‘Edward?’ Willow asked. ‘Who with?’

‘With his father. He thinks he’s about to be dispossessed, passed over in favour of his brother.’

Morann screwed up his face. ‘
What
?’

‘It’s become an obsession with him. “Ebor shall overlook Ebor before the year is out” – remember?’

‘But now Richard has stopped pursuing his son – if that was what he was doing,’ Gwydion said.

Morann shrugged. ‘We don’t know what either of them intends. Richard may have sent messengers to persuade Edward to halt. Don’t you think so?’

Gort said, ‘Maybe there’s no rift at all, hey? The duke might have sent Edward on ahead and across to the Cambray Marches to raise men. He’ll not lack for recruits in the west, especially at Ludford – not after what the royal forces did there a little while ago, with all that burning and looting and murdering and the like.’

‘What is certain,’ Gwydion said, ‘is that Richard and Sarum are making haste into the north together with just five thousand men. That is not nearly enough to meet the host that is coming south under the queen’s banner,
which if you are right, Morann, numbers thirty thousand and more.’

Morann nodded. ‘All the magnates of the north are roused up. And the word is that Warrewyk and Lord Northfolk have been left to secure Trinovant and keep the king, so their strength may not be counted upon by the House of Ebor.’

‘What I’d like to know,’ Gort burst out, ‘is has the duke taken complete leave of his senses?’

Will grunted. ‘He took leave of them months ago, or didn’t you notice, Wortmaster?’

Gort had unpacked his writing gear, and Will took a couple of quills, a knife, the little bottle of ink and the roll of parchments that had been scratched clean. He called his companions closer. ‘Let me show you something. Suppose these lines are the coast of Albion,’ he said, outlining the Isles. Once the ink had dried he marked Trinovant and Ebor and all the cities and towns of the Realm he could recall. It was a crude plan, but clear enough.

‘What now if I try to mark the ligns? Nine ligns – all straight as arrows. The battlestones all stand upon one lign or another, many on more than one, for where the ligns cross, there always lies a stone. There is our pattern.’

They all stared at the ink lines, seeing nothing significant. Then the wizard said, ‘The ligns are laid out haphazardly. There is no pattern.’