The Giants' Dance (46 page)

‘Tell me,' Will said. ‘How deep is your lake?'

The other screwed up her strange eyes to look at him. Her attention jinked about like a butterfly and hardly seemed able to settle. ‘Not deep,' she muttered. ‘It's our retting pond. It's where we steep the flax after harvest. What do you want?'

‘Would the water come above my waist if I was to wade in?'

The girl seemed bewildered, flustered by the question. She bobbed her head like a bird and answered, ‘You can't go in the water.'

‘Why not?'

She twitched and turned away without answer.

‘I asked you, why not?
Why can't I go in?
'

She gave a mew of a laugh. ‘It's the law.'

With that she jerked up the bale of cloth she had been tying and carried it away.

‘What do you make of that?' Willow asked, taking him by the arm again.

‘They're an odd lot. Mild enough now, but I'm not sure what they'll do when I break their law.'

‘What are you going to do?'

He looked at her for a long moment. ‘You've caught the sun a bit,' he said at last.

‘Will?'

‘I'm going to do what I came to do.'

It pained him to see fear take all the beauty from her face, but it filled him with strength to see her nod at last.

Thunder sounded in the east and a cool wind rippled the fields. He looked up at the sky, then at the water. Midges danced over it as they always dance before a summer thunderstorm. But this was different. There was something unnatural stirring the air. When he looked up he saw that the sky had become slate grey and the stone was throwing out a brilliant reflection across the pond. It seemed to be whiter than it had been. It seemed to beckon.

He took a moment to put out of his mind a lingering fear of water. A scar had been left in him by the marish hag. He had almost drowned, then, and Gwydion had said that when a man came that close to death it always put an unseen wound in him, a wound that first had to be healed, but when that was done it could be turned into a powerful strength.

The rooks cawed and flapped overhead, and the wind began to ripple up small waves. It was strangely cold now, and Willow clasped her arms as she watched him kneel by a clump of windblown reeds and whisper to himself. After a while he rose and trod with great deliberation – and fully clothed – into the shallows.

‘I'm with you, Will,' she said. But the wind took her words away.

Once over the shock of the water's touch he readied himself to face the task. He began chanting the spell that would allow him to come close to the stone. He could feel it drawing powerfully on the lorc now, pulling into itself the dark streams it needed before it could vomit out its harm.

Will knew at once that it was no guide stone. Its power ranked alongside that of the Dragon Stone. He saw its glowing, white finger pulse. Whatever power lay within was making acknowledgment. It understood that he had come, and it saw what he wanted.

‘Hearken to me!' he called out in the true tongue. ‘Your long slumber has ended! I am here!'

But his words sounded like thin vaunting, and when he took another step the water rose suddenly around his thighs. He drew out his hazel switch and held it before him like a charm, muttering the protective passes and cantrips that kept him in touch with the deadly stone. The end of the wand flexed powerfully as if it was being pulled down by an unseen hand. Then a scraping sound began to emanate from the stone, like fingernails drawn across slate. It shook Will's teeth in their sockets, but it did not break his concentration. A glance towards the village showed that those who had been working in the sheds had gone. They had fled, first to their homes, then out again and across the flax fields, their strange dogs running at their heels. Willow stood on the bank, a lone figure, watching.

He turned to look back, treading out the path of the lign, realizing that the stone meant to drive him onward, to duck his head under the water. He resisted too savagely, then remembered to relax, as Gwydion's teachings advised. He thought again about the mechanism of warped fate through which the stones worked their will. Against so ancient a power, a power that could make giants dance to its tune, only the strength of quiet certainty could be set. He must not lose faith in the stone's inevitable defeat, but neither must he fall prey to the great failing that was called vainglory. It was a path he had to feel for carefully. The redes of magic pointed the way forward, but his deeds were what counted. He must assert his will neatly at that magical point in time where all things happened – at the place where
the future became the present, and the present became the past. That was what Gwydion meant when he spoke of ‘the here and now'. Will knew that he must approach the battle as if his enemy's defeat had always been inevitable, yet without anticipating his own triumph. Only then would things fall properly into place and the true path be found.

Suddenly, he faltered at the enormousness of his burden. Looked at from below it seemed an unclimbable peak. Seen all as one, an undoable task. But he drew a deep breath and took courage, because he knew that doubt could destroy him just as easily as arrogance. Any weakness could throw his destiny onto a track leading to disaster. In this endeavour he must stay alert and marshal all his powers. His chief task would be accomplished in the present – he must make sure that
his
preferred version of the future was the one that actually became real.

As the sky darkened further, the lign lit the water in bilious green. He followed the glow step by step, feeling out the way, stirring up stinking mud between his toes, fighting down the nausea conjured by the stone. But the water was cold and getting colder by the moment, as if some bitter current was refilling the pond with icewater. The moment he recognized the danger, gooseflesh covered him and he began to see his own breath. It steamed in what had moments ago been warm summer air.

Then he heard Willow screaming.

But he dared not turn to her. Not now. He was waistdeep and halfway out to the stone. He stared hard at it, feeling his progress impeded, his resolve once more under attack.

‘
I must keep the balance
…' he murmured through his teeth.

But his steadiness was being violently shaken. As he went on, a whirlwind erupted from the top of the stone. A bolt of lightning flashed bright somewhere behind him, the clap
of thunder coming so close that it made his hair stand on end. The horror that lightning might strike his head – here, as he stood in the pond – flashed briefly in his mind, but still his pace did not waver.

All thoughts of his peril had to be cast aside. A maelstrom of vapours began to emerge from the stone – a grey cloud turning so swiftly that his eyes could not follow. Where it boiled, a scattering of hailstones formed. They fell around him, dropping like grains of corn at first, but soon their sound increased until it became a furious hiss against the water's surface. The hail turned the lake into a seething plain. The whirling column seemed to be sucking all the air above the lake in towards it. He could hardly breathe, or keep his feet, but he reached inside his shirt to draw out his fish talisman.

His hands were white, the pads of his fingers wrinkled like those of a drowned man.

How long have I been out here? he asked himself.

It seemed like an age.

With the talisman clenched in his fist he felt able to push on again towards the roaring stone. But now his hands and feet were growing numb and his legs would hardly move to his command. As he went forward he came into chestdeep water. The cold clasped his ribs like an iron band. What looked like apple blossom flew on the freezing wind. But it was not apple blossom, for it vanished without trace into the water wherever it hit. It's snow, he thought, and turned his face away as the storm hit.

A slush of ice quickly plastered the back of his head, sent his hair lashing wetly about his face and shoulders. He raised the talisman before him in both hands, whispering incantations to unlock his frozen muscles, to force the warm blood out into his numb arms and legs. The cold burned his nose and the rims of his ears. He was neck-deep in freezing water now. Almost weightless. There was no longer
any feeling in his feet as he propelled himself forward. His entire body began to shake uncontrollably. Then he saw the ice forming.

It was like nothing he had ever seen before – ice spreading across the water even as he watched. The top of the lake became glassy, thin panes floating around him. He beat the water as it began to thicken, trying to break it up, but it was no good. The stone was freezing the lake from where it stood and its effects had already reached to the shore. He saw the green light of the lign fade to blue and turn paler as the surface of the water froze around him. He stumbled, threshing against the stone's astonishing power, but as fast as he cracked the ice it froze again. Fear stole over him.

The ice began to harden. He danced magic for his life, treading out over and again the only spell of thawing that he knew. His knowledge was not deep, but he knew that magic repeated many times wanes in power. He was now in a pit of icy water, but the ice was closing on him again and he was beginning to lose the clarity of mind on which everything depended. He danced hard in the icy water, gestured and struck the poses of the spell, drawing power from the mud of the lakebed and the kind earth below. But the lign blocked his efforts. Snow filled the darkened air above him and mounted like a deadly white fur all around the ice-hole. His jaw locked, juddered, making the words of the spell slur and stutter. His knees and elbows touched the closing ice. Terror speared him through as he saw the water around his neck solidify like candlewax.

Large snowflakes stuck to his face, blotted out the world. When he closed his eyes he could not open them again – the cold had frozen the lids shut. That prompted a tremendous surge of fear. He broke off the spell to burst his arms upward and shatter the ice once more. And then he knew he was lost.

He cried out, but the ice only closed and closed. His arms felt like so much dead meat. All his strength had been frozen away. He had panicked. He had made the wrong moves. Without constantly danced magic, the ice-hole had been able to grip him. Too late, he acknowledged his mistake. As the ice crushed his ribs, he drew one last breath, to shout defiance at the thing that was killing him.

But then two hands were under his arms and hauling him up with strength enough to slide him forward out of the ice-hole and up into a drift of soft snow. Behind him the death pit slammed shut – solid, gone.

‘Fight back!' Willow was screaming, raging at him. She had dashed across the ice to drag him clear, and now was shaking the life back into him. ‘Get up and fight, Willand! Or I swear I'll take your talisman and do the job myself!'

And so he was roused. His eyes bled as he tore them open. He looked at the dead fingers that grasped the leaping salmon. He forced himself to concentrate on it, to stand barefoot in the ankle-deep snow, shattering the ice from him where it had formed on his body. Willow had somehow resisted the stone's monstrous magic. Perhaps it had not thought her worthy of attention. That would be its undoing. He raised his arms and let forth a defiant burst of the true tongue, calling down all the powers of the air upon the white stone.

The warmth that came from within flooded him to blood heat. Feeling returned. Life went roaring through him again like the heat that Gwydion had taught him to summon while travelling the winter land. Love had done this – it was a force against which nothing could stand.

His body dripped and steamed. Water pooled on the ice. He became enwrapped in an aura of light and heat and gradually part of him became aware that the snow had stopped falling. The sky was clearing above, and the westering sun
was throwing yellow beams across a small landscape of white drifts, beyond which a summer's day still prevailed across the Middle Shires. Yet here was the stone, still white and tall, silent and malevolent and unbroken. He gathered up all the strength left inside him, made blue fire and threw it. Once! Twice! Thrice! He ringed the stone as he had seen Gwydion do. He danced on the ice, kicking through the snow, chanting incantations that bound the stone ever tighter. In the end he had used the stone's own deadly defences against it, for the ice had become his floor and he could never have danced out magic this powerful in neck-deep water.

The first of his tasks done, he put his hands to his temples and took a deep breath. He knew he must fight the exhaustion and emptiness that threatened to undermine the calm he would need to seal the spells. The stone shone brilliantly, but while the blue rings sparked and flashed and complained, they held. They stayed tight on the stone's malice like the hoops around a barrel.

Will danced again, splashing through meltwater. Time dragged, then rushed on, then dragged again. When next he looked up, the sun was sinking fast towards the treetops, casting long shadows. Clouds raced overhead, spattering the land with brightness and shadow. At last, he sat down hard – the containing of the battlestone had been accomplished.

Willow touched him, almost waking him, or so it seemed. ‘We must get off the ice,' she said.

‘No. I must drain the stone,' he told her, stirring, unsure how long might have passed.

‘But look at you. And look at the ice.' She hauled him up as the surface groaned under them. The snow had melted into pools. He slid and staggered to his knees. She supported him, led him back to the clump of reeds that marked the edge of the pond and he saw the snow banked there had
collapsed into slush. Feeling no cold, he lay down in the mud and felt his body feed hungrily on the earth.

He knew what he must do. Willow was wrong – it must be done right away. But how? He felt spent, worn down on every edge, ready to rest, and ultimately to draw a reviving draught of power from the earth. But that would take time – he would need to recover a measure of strength in order to draw strength. By the time he had rebuilt his powers, the ice would have melted. He must go out to the stone now and engage it, ready or not. He must!