Whitemantle (37 page)

Above him Chlu was only ten paces away now. Will stepped out from the wall of rock and raised his hands as if to fling fire at his twin.

‘No further!’

Chlu put his hands on his hips and looked down. His brazen manner was what fools mistook for confidence, but wise men recognized as vainglory. ‘Ah, there you are, little brother.’

‘Stay where you are!’

‘Or what? You’ll speak my name and destroy me?’ Again that cruel smile. ‘And yourself too, I suppose?’

‘Never doubt that I’d do it, Llyw.’

Will pronounced the name with precision, but his twin ridiculed him. ‘My true name won’t help you this time – even if you knew how to say it. Lord Maskull has told me what would happen if you tried. A spell so made would break back on you, and you would die too!’

‘Fear won’t stop me when the time comes.’

The Dark Child looked at him strangely as if he had formulated an idea beyond comprehension. ‘You say that now, but in the event…’

The wind howled, carrying Chlu’s words away. He danced back from the outcrop. It must have been an illusion, but he seemed to spin, faster and faster, until he had drilled himself down into the earth. Then the whole mass of rock below tore away and began to rumble down. It
drove Will before it like some fearsome siege engine breaking open a castle wall. A weight of stones and soil cascaded onto him, but he raised a shield of green light that turned the danger as it fell upon him.

Chlu rode the landslide of earth rubble forward, bursting fire from the gorse bushes below as he came. The ground shuddered with detonations.

Will found his feet, danced again and clapped his hands above his head. The clouds above turned slate grey.

Then – nothing.

‘No more clever tricks?’ Chlu pouted. ‘Are you out of arrows, little brother? No matter. You’ll have no need of them where you’re going. Don’t you realize yet that you’ve been doomed by your master’s scheme?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The trap Gwydion Stormcrow devised to send Lord Maskull to the Baerberg seems to have caught a far less able magician – you! Now I’ve got you where I want you.’

Will whispered and clapped his hands again, harder now. He tore off the rag that bound the swollen ball of his thumb and clapped a third time. The clouds boiled, sickly, dark and heavy-bellied, but still no dousing rain came as Will had wanted. His appeal to the clouds had failed.

Chlu laughed, stood tall and raised up his hands like vipers’ heads. Without thinking, Will countered. Twin thunderbolts flew in opposition. They burst against one another in green and red. Where the flames met midway between them, a great disc of fire spiralled out. The heat from it seared Will’s face. He roared in reply until he could roar no more, and just as his fire gave out, so did Chlu’s.

Smoke rose from Will’s singed cloak. His hands had turned soot-black. He dived behind a burning bush, once more taking cover. Then, delayed by its fall from the middle airs, the rain he had summoned came down. It had met the wind on its way and had become dense and driving. It
did what Will had meant it to do, which was to put out the fires and quench the combat.

Fighting fire with fire is foolish, he reminded himself. Always use water…

For a while, the rain blinded both of them with its intensity. But the deluge was short-lived, and as Will found fresh cover, red beams began to hunt him out. They tore up the hill all around. And there was rage behind those deadly rays – unsubtle, impatient, ill-directed rage.

But if Chlu lacked magical style, he made up for it with raw power. What Maskull had taught him was deadly enough. The beams were powerful, sufficient to burst steam from wet moss and send the sheep bolting. Will went to ground, but he gasped as the lethal light flashed ever nearer to the place where he had chosen to hide.

He’ll hunt me out, he thought. In the end he’ll find me. He can do no other, for until he does away with me I’ll remain a threat to him.

His heart hammered against his ribs. He could feel it beating against the
right
side of his breastbone…

He had enough self-possession to realize what must have happened. The slapdash magic of the vanishing spell had left them both turned about. Something in the spell had been wrongly cast. Chlu had managed to mix up left and right.

As he crabbed round the slope, he began to see how that faulty magic had worked on him. He understood now why he had felt disorientated – this was not some strange looking-glass world he had come to. The reason things seemed to be the wrong way round was because he himself had been changed. Not only had his body been reversed, but also his brain and all its workings, so it was the outside world that looked wrong.

And Chlu? he wondered. Surely he had been affected in the same way too.

Another red beam slashed, burning a path through a patch of bracken, flashing across his aching eyes. Will danced away and summoned fork lightning suddenly from the angry sky. He struck it at Chlu, who leapt aside, and in revenge sent twin fire balls to blast the knoll behind which Will had fled.

And so the deadly dance continued, repeating the pattern time and again. Will hid, but Chlu found him. Will fought Chlu off and attacked, then it was Chlu’s turn to run. The fight ranged the summit of Cullee Hill, filling the air with deafening bursts as they hurled flame at one another’s heads and called down hail and vapours in turn from the air. But it was happening now as it had happened on the Spire: every blow drew a parry, every counterblow was anticipated. Neither could gain the advantage, and in the end both tired and were forced to withdraw to gather strength for a new effort.

Will’s body trembled with fatigue as he came down from the top of the hill. He felt drunk with effort. His eyes popped with phantom lights where a scarlet beam had momentarily caught his vision. He was drained. Neither could he any longer draw power enough for great magic, and so soon they would have to start on a fray of fists and fury.

By now the beacon had all but burned itself out, and Will realized that if he was seeing east as west, then time must have jumped forward rather than back. It was no longer morning but afternoon. The sun was setting, not rising, and the battle at Morte’s Crossing must therefore already have started. It might even have finished. He teetered on the fragile edge of laughter, seeing suddenly that all his efforts had come to naught. And if that’s so, then I have nothing better to do than finish my own business up here, he thought.

He felt that his only protection would be to kill Chlu, despite what that meant. How could he do that? It would require less courage to hack off his own arm. It was
hopeless. He dragged himself away, fighting off the weakness that was closing in on him. But the magic would no longer come. He was weak. Nor could he draw further refreshment in this high place until it was itself replenished, for the power here was as thin as the wind.

He cursed his flesh and told himself he should have been better prepared. He could easily have nipped the problem in the bud if he had come to his decision sooner. If only he had had the ruthlessness to believe that getting in the first blow was the right thing to do, then he could have blasted Chlu while his back was turned, while he was busy lighting the beacon.

But it was nonsense. It would not have worked. Because something would have prevented it. Something always did.

What was the point of even trying? He knew now, as certainly as anyone could know anything, that his goal could not be achieved. Whatever the magic that ruled the unnatural link between them, it would tolerate neither a victory nor a defeat.

That much had become obvious, though he had not understood it before. The question was, would Chlu come to the same realization?

Will stumbled and almost fell. He was broken, but he still had the strength to get down off Cullee Hill even if that meant crawling away while Chlu crawled after. Will told himself that he may have been half-blinded, but he could still see that hindsight offered a clear but dangerously distorted view. ‘Put your faith in yourself and the unalterable truths of the world,’ he muttered. ‘Listen to no lies and you won’t go far wrong.’

Gwydion had once told him that. But with the world changing so fast, what could be regarded as an unalterable truth now?

He wiped the black from his hands, saw how the wound under his thumb had knit into a livid scar. So great had
the flux of magic been that it had knotted the broken flesh. He laughed wryly, knowing that Chlu, wherever he was, would be doing much the same.

However can I beat such an opponent? he wondered. Maybe it’s not possible. And if that’s so, then isn’t that my protection? Maybe I should show myself, walk towards him. If I did, wouldn’t that force him to do the same?

As he pushed his way through the bushes, the gorse jags scratched at him. Gorse, he thought. The only plant that has thorns on its thorns. I should shove Chlu into one of these patches and he’d never get out. I must come down off this bare mountain. My proper place is with Willow and the others…

But then he saw he had made a mistake in coming this way, for ahead lay an unexpected interruption in the hill. When he came to the brink he saw that a great hole, flat-bottomed, steep-walled and shaped like a horseshoe, had been quarried out of the living rock. He wasted no time trying to scale it or even to look down into it, for its walls were sheer. He made his way as quickly as he could along the rim until he came to the bottom. The walls rose up impressively to left and right, but ahead was a sight that was altogether more astonishing.

It was a work of long ago, a monument of heroic size, and made perhaps by the servants of giants who had ruled in an Age when greater magic was in the world. The fear that suddenly welled in Will’s guts was that the figure that commanded this great throne room was yet alive. But the giant who sat in the chair was unmoving and made of cold stone. A king of the Second Age of the world, he seemed. A monarch from a time when only giants and dragons had made the Isles of Albion their home. But there was something about this relic that spoke more of men than monsters.

‘The Giant’s Chair,’ he breathed, recalling now the other name that was used for Cullee Hill. ‘So that’s why…’

But this giant was unlike Magog or Gogmagog. Nor was he kin to the ogres and moorland trolls of the north. Not even Alba bore him much resemblance. Years of wind and weathering had worn his features down, rusted his iron crown into dark streaks that stained his noble face. But the passage of time had not taken away the smallest part of this great king’s majesty. The giant-king
possessed
the throne on which he sat.

Will approached until the legs of the statue rose like columns to either side of him. They made an entrance, a black square opening into the base of the throne. What massive doors had once graced this tomb Will could not imagine, for there were only holes where the hinges had been torn away. This was a resting place long ago robbed of its hoard. One clue yet remained – above the lintel, in reversed ogham, carved deep and reading in the language of stones, the single word:

RUHTRA

But there was no time to stand and stare, for ahead, already waiting for him in the shadows, was Chlu. In his hand was a large stone.

W
ill, fearless now, came and stood in the entrance of the tomb before his other half. He looked silently at the face that had so often disturbed his sleep and terrified his dreams. Not so now. Pale and grey that face seemed, and lacking in life. Will saw fascination there too, and knew that Chlu also saw otherness mirrored. It was like looking at all that oneself was not. This was the way they connected.

‘We’re not brothers,’ Will said.

‘We never were.’ Chlu stared at him pitilessly. His fingers closed around the stone like a claw, turning it into a club. ‘For all that you wanted to believe it.’

‘No longer. Betrayal runs too deep in you for any trust that I might want to hazard.’

Chlu’s power had thinned, left him a shadow of what he had been. He raised his hand to dash Will’s brains from his head. But it was fruitless and Will knew it.

‘You’re fading,’ he said matter-of-factly.

‘Fool! It’s you who is fading.’ But then Chlu gazed at himself, aghast. ‘What’s happening? What have you done?’

Will watched his counterpart shred into the air. ‘Whatever it is, you’ve done it, not I…’

But then his voice was lost like a wolf’s whine rolling high
on a wailing wind. Chlu dissolved into dust as he watched, and the world lost its colour, and then its form melted away entirely, so that for a moment Will’s spirit seemed to go to the place it had gone that time long ago when he had been disembodied for a while and trapped inside an elder tree. All he knew was a sense of self. There was no sight, no sound, no taste, no smell, no feeling. There was no up nor down, no left nor right – only his thoughts, confirming his own existence, carrying him through a tunnel of space and time.

And then suddenly he was ten feet above the ground and falling down into a meadow. The impact jarred his ankles and shoved his knees up under his chin so that his head was thrown back painfully as he fell.

He leapt up, shaking his vision clear and pressed a hand to the back of his neck. He felt as if he had been spat out by a dragon. His mind reeled off balance for a moment, but then new thoughts coalesced in his head.

There was more danger here!

He braced himself to take another hit. But no, it seemed not to be coming after all. Only a meadow of crushed grass and brown daffodils…

This was the same field he had vanished from. It had to be. But why did it look so different? There were no tents here now. Only the pits of old camp fires and waggon ruts in the clay. But it was definitely the same field and, better still, everything was the right way round!

What about the wound? his inner voice demanded.

He looked groggily at his hands, at the knot of ill-healed flesh.
Was that his left hand?
He made a scribbling motion in the air, knowing that this hand must be his right one, the one he used to dip the quill. Yes! That felt very good. And so did his heart, which was beating in the left side of his chest…

He exulted.

I’ve come back, he thought. Chlu’s vanishing spell was impermanent. The magic has fallen apart and we’ve reverted!

But how much time had passed? And what about the battle?

The power he had felt running through the land was entirely gone now. He looked around, haunted by the sense of imminent danger. Where was Chlu? A delay had attended his twin’s arrival on Cullee Hill, so maybe another delay would attend his reappearance here. It was a good bet that Chlu would also return to the place where he had started.

With a bit of luck he’ll fall and break his neck, Will thought. But I guess that’s too much to hope for.

The idea of waylaying Chlu as he fell defenceless out of the air tempted him, and he looked around for something he could use as a bludgeon. But if his speculations about victory and defeat were correct, a weapon would solve nothing. Something unknown would intercept his killing intent, just as it intercepted Chlu’s.

As his head cleared he abandoned the idea of murder. Going to find Willow and the others seemed by far the better course.

I’ll find her, he thought. I’ll find her and I’ll tell her about what I am…

He saw that his horse had been taken. It must have become part of the Ebor baggage train, in which case there was nothing for it but to set out on foot. He ran towards a hole in the nearby hedge and clambered through. It made sense to get out of the open field, and even better sense to find the road. He had a few moments in hand, but it would not take Chlu long to make his appearance and he would quickly work out where his twin had gone.

Will checked the sky and saw that some of the cloud he had thickened to assist him on Cullee Hill had drifted south. The sun was now westering, dipping behind the mountains of Cambray, sending long, cold shadows across the valley. It was already late afternoon and the short day would soon be snuffed out.

He found the road and ran south along it, following the hoof marks and wheel ruts. Edward must have won, he reasoned, for if he had been beaten, then his remnant would have routed northward, in an attempt to fall back upon Wyg Moor and Ludford.

The thought should not have encouraged him, but it did. An impartial spirit was hard to maintain when Edward’s mother had Bethe in her care, but the image of Jasper and his men being cut to pieces in an ambush did much to restore his sense of balance.

He crossed the Lugg by the little stone bridge at Yatton Mystery, then ran for half a league further across flat land, pushing on until his ribs ached and his second wind came. Then he began to see the bodies.

A scattering of white-faced corpses lounged carelessly across the meadows to his right. More slept in heaps where they had been tidied to the side of the road to get the carts through. These dead were whole, with heads and limbs attached to their trunks and no gross butchery evident. They had been killed by high-shot arrows entering them through shoulder or breast – most had bloody mouths and chins where they had coughed up their lives in small pools of blood. The killing arrows remained skewered in the flesh; only those that had missed their mark and stuck in the cold clay had been gathered up to be used in reply. Will looked out ahead and the pattern of the battle began to resolve itself.

Already in the gathering gloom the Sightless Ones were appearing. It was their right to possess the killing ground after a battle. At the first rumour of armies marching this way they had spread the alarm abroad. They had allowed certain local families to hide in the walled grounds of their chapter houses. But a price had been put upon their asylum, and now these favoured farmers were being herded out to dig the grave pits.

Will saw how the Fellows drove away the Wise Women who came wishing to tend the field. He hurried on, heeding no call but the terror of what might have happened to Willow.

I’d know if anything had befallen her, he thought. Surely, I’d know. But maybe I
do
know. Maybe that’s what this terror is. By the moon and stars, you must stay calm!

He knew he must set aside his fears and read the field with a knowing eye, for it was important to work out how the tide of battle had ebbed and flowed. It seemed that Jasper’s men had come up from the south, and Edward’s battalions had fallen upon them by the banks of the Lugg. Archers on Edward’s right had come from concealment to punish Jasper’s advancing vanguard. Then Edward’s left had outflanked them and swept their enemies back down the river.

When Will reached the bridge at Morte’s Crossing he found a flooded road and gangs of fieldsmen up to their knees in the icy water. Hooded figures stood by, scanning the air, as if they knew a stranger had come among them. The Lugg had swilled back where hundreds of bodies clogged the stream. The dead were packed tight under the bridge, locked together by the force of the water.

Will hurried onward. There was no way to count the cost of what had happened, but it was clear that many thousands had died, far more than had perished at Awakenfield. Once more, the latest battle fought seemed also to have been the bloodiest. Here the rout had run south-eastwards along the meandering Lugg. Its path was marked by much blood, and a great swathe of hacked and harrowed bodies – light Cambray bill-carriers, mounted lancers, heavy mercenary swordsmen, green-clad archers – all had come to grief here. Some of the wounded were still alive, barely so, as their spirits clung to cold and mutilated flesh. They were beyond Will’s capacity to aid – he had been too drained
by his own fight to assist anyone – and those wounded that yet lived were too far gone now to be helped by any healing that Will might have delivered.

But, horrible though the death-strewn aftermath of battle was, as Will ran on he came to an even worse place. This field stank of bloody murder and gleeful revenge, for here, in a grassy lea by some scrubby hawthorn bushes, captured men had been collected together to have their heads stricken off. Scraps of torn linen and woollen cloth told who they were. Not great men these. Not men of name and high renown. Only esquires and men of middling worth, men whose deaths hardly seemed worth the trouble.

A couple of dozen headless bodies were all that remained of them, for their heads had been tossed into the river, and half a dozen had fetched up on a little shingle bank where a pack of roaming, masterless dogs had found them.

Will shouted and ran at the animals to drive them off. In his outrage and disgust he cursed and cast stones at them, but in the end his anger frothed over into impotent rage and he wept. He had to bring himself up sharp by reminding himself that these were dumb, feral creatures, animals not motivated by any delight in malice. They had been hurt and left hungry by men, and they would feed on men’s flesh without scruple. But what made Will shiver and sent him hurrying onward was the thought that it was not the dogs who had descended into the depths of depravity here.

The darkness was falling fast now. He looked hopelessly for Jasper’s colours, some sign of his fate, but he found nothing. And then he saw the iron oak atop its hill. The ground below it had been blasted and abandoned by the living who had left a scatter of dead men all about. There was no longer any sense of roaring power here, no malice swirling from its lair. Only a hole where a withered stump should have remained.

But it was not there. Someone had poked a poleaxe through the cage of roots and wrestled the shrunken stump of the great Doomstone of the West out of its long captivity. It was gone, and judging by the marks in the ground, it had been taken away in a two-wheeled cart.

And so, as the inky blackness of night put to flight all the sorrowful sights of a sour day, Will debated with himself what would be for the best. Should he stay here until first light? Or should he try to find the others without delay?

They should not be hard to find, for they must have gone with Edward’s victorious army. And they should not be hard to catch, for armies did not move as swiftly as a man travelling alone. The moon offered him advice as well as the chance of a little light. A half moon, it was, and sinking slowly in the south, but it was sufficient and as it showed itself in fissures between the clouds, Will decided there was nothing to be gained from waiting.

No sooner was his choice made than he was glad of it, for he wanted now to be rid of the smell of death and leave this place. That, he knew, would take him many hours. And he was right, for he made slow progress in the unforgiving night. Caltraps had been sprinkled liberally around parts of the field – iron barbs, these were, devices that presented one of their four spikes uppermost whichever way they fell. They were meant to pierce horses’ hooves and so break a charge of cavalry, but they would just as soon hobble a man finding his way in the dark.

Wind roared in the tall beeches as Will followed the river, hurrying down past a burned-out farmhouse at Kinsland. Then he turned east for two leagues, heading for the place they called ‘the Leen’. It was a place of interlaced streams, and Will’s feet found molehills all along the way. He recalled how one of the Wortmaster’s rhymes had spoken of the Earldom of Heare, saying, ‘mud, molehills and mistletoe’, and it was true, for here the soil was a rich brown, and
moles were many, and green globes of mistletoe hung in the winter trees like an ancient blessing.

Will found the going easier with the wind at his back, and soon he saw a huddle of dark buildings that could only be the little town of Leenstone. Will approached warily, for there were gangs of men abroad, still looking for fleeing soldiers. But the town seemed untouched by the fight, and Will knew that that was probably because of the wealth of the towered chapter house that brooded near the town, and the eminence of its Elder.

Both Edward and Jasper would have been the target of many petitioners before the battle. And among the petitioners would have been Fellows from each of the chapter houses scattered throughout the earldoms of Salop and Heare. All would have wanted to secure a charter of safety, a parchment they hoped would afford them protection against pillage.

Deals done and soldiers paid, Will thought. How much gold has changed hands? How many victual waggons were filled up by the sale of paper promises signed and sealed with the devices of Ebor or Pendrake?

There was an irony here that made Will shake his head, for the Fellowship habitually sold the worthless and the intangible to others. In the end, even they would have to admit that the possession of a great army trumped all other kinds of power – even that generated by their cellars full of gold.

And a great army had certainly been at work at Morte’s Crossing. Edward’s coolly competent generalship had directed the violence with masterful aplomb. He had managed the rout with perfectly controlled vengeance. Will pictured in his mind the later stages of the killing: defeated troops streaming away south and east across the Earldom of Heare, wanting to flee back into Cambray but being driven remorselessly through a land they did not know.
Ebor horsemen hunting them with long lances, striking hundreds down to be finished off by footmen following in eager bands. The simple soldier used savagery in victory to get what he wanted. He did it just as the prince used promises made beforehand.