Whitemantle (24 page)

Lotan shrugged, his look morose, reluctant. He gestured towards Gwydion. ‘Your wizard wouldn’t let me go near.’

‘Then has your gift of sight yielded us nothing at all?’

‘I saw…’ He waited, then waited again until Gwydion had moved away. At last he said, ‘I saw agony.’

‘Agony?’

Lotan lifted his head and Will saw that his eyes were red now. ‘Flaming skeletons were running from the blaze. And your wizard was striking them down with blasts of blue fire. He called what he did “mercy”.’

The next day was blustery and rainy. Lotan dourly endured it, but Gwydion said that if any present found the rain hard to bear, then they should consider how they would like it if a really large battle should take place. ‘For it is said that hard rains follow upon great battles.’

Will supposed that the wizard was talking in impenetrable riddles, but they seemed nevertheless barbed and aimed at Lotan. He jogged Gwydion’s arm, saying, ‘Well, I have to say that I don’t like the rain either. And if you’d clear it away for us I’m sure we’d all be very much obliged to you – if you still can, that is.’

‘Between “can” and “should” there is an important distinction, my friend,’ Gwydion told him tardy. He raised an eyebrow and grunted, but then he went on to say that this was where the Emin Strete came closest to the Wette, a great grey-brown gulf that was the domain of the ancient mud-giant, Metaris. It was his habit to rise up from the mussel beds as the silty tides ebbed and scatter the curlews and dunlins from his shoulders. But when the mood took him he liked to drown men by overturning their ships.

‘Many an unlucky mariner has Metaris preyed upon,’ Gwydion said with grisly relish. ‘Whether they were Slaver war-galley or Easterling pirate ship, he made no bones about any of them. Or rather
many
bones, I should say, for he has sucked many a sailorman’s rib clean.’

‘Does he live still?’ Willow asked, casting an uneasy eye eastward.

Gwydion grinned darkly. ‘He lies even now in his watery lair, counting the riches that he once obliged King John to leave with him.’

The views opened out and all day Will saw nothing that might be called a hill. He recalled the days he had spent as a child surrounded by hills and the yearning he had felt to know what the world looked like from their tops and what might be on the other side. And then, by turning that idea around in his mind, he understood that boys who grew to manhood in a land of flats and marshes would see the world another way entirely, and that thought
pleased him for it was an understanding about life that was new to him.

They passed through Streetton and then came by Woolthorpe where Will saw a great sky-bow overarch the grey northern clouds. Its colours spread vividly and there was much beauty in it, though its significance was not so clear.

At last Gort said it showed where stood a certain garden, and in that garden there grew a tree that bore special apples. ‘They hang,’ he said, ‘only from the uppermost branches. But those fruits never drop of their own accord, Will. They have to be worked for, picked from the highest branches, else they wither where they’ve grown.’

Will nodded. ‘As the rede says, “Hard won is dear loved, but easy come is easy go.”’

‘Aye, and so it is!’

‘Truly?’ Willow asked, grimacing at the strange notion of apples that refused to be picked without a great effort. ‘Then why do folk bother with them?’

‘Ah, because these are no ordinary apples. When baked in a pie they give anyone who eats of them a wonderful quickness of mind! The eater gains the wisdom to see answers, answers to all kinds of questions about the world.’

‘Then why don’t we go there and learn what
we
must do,’ she said.

But Gort grimaced at the suggestion. ‘We already know enough about that, I think. And though our world is failing fast, it’s no duty of ours to give it any kind of a helping hand in that direction.’

After Woolthorpe the road veered a little eastward into the Flatlands and away from the ligns. The rain abated and a great shaft of sunshine blasted down upon them, making a second sky-bow of nine startling colours.

Will found that he was glad of the respite. But then he realized they were heading towards the city of Linton and he drew less comfort from the weak winter sunlight.

‘Is there not a great chapter house there?’ he asked Lotan.

‘Yes. It’s high upon a hill and so sees far.’

The wizard glanced at the big man, sudden to pounce. ‘And how do
you
know that?’

‘I have never been there, but I have heard tell of it.’

Gwydion’s jaw clenched. ‘We shall avoid its malign influence just as we have avoided all the others!’

Lotan scowled. ‘I have no wish that we should do otherwise.’

They went on until the town of Linton began to appear out of the mist. Will saw that the dwellings were indeed spread at the feet of the chapter house, which sat high up on a mound and looked out over fifty miles of good growing land. The afternoon came on wetter and they took shelter in a barn when the last of the light died.

‘Well, there’s one thing for sure,’ Willow said, stretching and yawning. ‘The way is certainly proving long.’

Will turned to her. ‘And the shadow has fallen fast. Do you realize that today is Ewle?’

‘The shortest day,’ Lotan said, watching the rain abate. ‘We should have marked Ewle with ceremony. We’ll light a fire at least.’

‘And set the barn ablaze?’ Gwydion said. ‘It is dry in here. If you are cold, pack your shirt with straw.’

‘Oh, Master Gwydion. There’s no cheer in that,’ Willow said. ‘Let’s ask the farmer if we can kindle a small fire in the yard.’

The wizard huffed. ‘Fire is a signal, and smoke even more so. Anyway it will rain again soon.’

‘Better safe than sorry,’ Will said, trying to make peace between them. ‘We don’t want to attract attention.’

In the damp, gloomy silence that followed, Gort began to sing.

‘The shadow falls fast,

Like sand in a glass.

And the way is long,

To the sleepless field’

Will’s mind drifted. He was calmer now and he could order his thoughts more easily. Who had moved the stone off the Collen lign? Was it really Maskull? Or could the Fellowship have done it? Maybe the stone had spooked whoever had tried to carry it off and they had abandoned it. Was it happenstance that it had gone off just as they had come close to it?

Their evening food was unwrapped and taken cold. The company leaned together, their conversation quiet and insignificant as the wind in dried grass. Will noticed the wrinkles and spots of age on the backs of the wizard’s hands. Rats squeaked somewhere, making Gort smile.

Will saw Lotan go outside. After a moment, he got up and followed at a distance, like a man with business of his own.

The big man walked away in the grey-dark, stood with his back to Will, and unsheathed his sword with a sudden, deliberate jerk.

Will pressed himself up against the bole of a hollow ash tree. The deep grooves of its bark were damp and hard under his fingers, and tar-black blobs showed where a fungus was eating the tree alive. The smell of rotting wood rose out of the innards of the trunk, reminding him of death, of the wood pile in which Magog and Gogmagog had been dumped.

There was a wind now, rustling the bare branches. Overhead the clouds had opened, moving on missions of their own. There were valleys of stars standing between their bluff faces. And far below them the man with the stolen eyes threw back his head and cast an unblinking gaze up at the sky. He breathed deep, like one marvelling in
private at a great spectacle. Then he sheathed his sword and returned again to the barn.

Silently, Will watched him go, feeling ashamed to be spying on a friend, but glad enough that he had witnessed nothing more than a brief spell of wonderment.

The wizard noted Lotan’s return, and he let his glance linger long enough for Will to see it.

‘You still don’t trust him, do you?’ Will said when, a short while later, he got Gwydion alone.

‘I do not.’

‘Why is that?’

‘Because I dare not.’

Will snorted. ‘You
dare
not? You trusted Anstin the Hermit. Anstin helped you, though he once made spires for the Sightless Ones.’

‘Anstin worked on their houses. He was not one of them.’

‘So you’ll continue to refuse to put your trust in Lotan?’

‘Too much hangs on it.’ The wizard corrected himself, ‘
Everything
hangs on it.’

Gwydion’s voice had risen, and Will cast the others a glance to check they were not listening. But he need not have worried – Willow and Lotan were laughing as Gort embroidered some unlikely tale.

Will turned back. ‘It seems I missed quite a blaze back there.’

‘You
see
? – I asked him not to speak of it to you. Yet he did. He is not to be trusted.’

‘Perhaps he told me because he counts himself my friend first. And is that any wonder?’ Will drew a fast breath. ‘He said that men burned like torches.’

‘They burned as we all would have burned had you not sensed the stone and stopped us.’

‘But Lotan said you killed them.’

The wizard’s deadly face showed how much he resented the implication. ‘I carried through an act of mercy.’

‘Lotan says you murdered them.’

‘I did exactly what had to be done. No more, and no less.’

Will felt the moment bite. ‘Who were they?’

‘That was impossible to tell. Perhaps innocents, perhaps the ones who had fetched the stone for Maskull. Perhaps…others.’ No more words came, only a wall of wilful reticence.

‘Perhaps red hands,’ Will said. ‘And after it was over, did you wait for the flames to die down around the stone?’

More suspicion flashed in the wizard’s eyes. ‘Why do you ask that?’

‘I want to know if you interrogated the stump!’

‘How could I? I did not know if it was yet a stump. I did not know if it had flared off all, or only a fraction, of the malice it contained.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘When it cooled I bound it and then Gort took it. He hid it somewhere far from the road.’

‘Do you think it still contains enough harm to cause a battle?’

Gwydion shifted and wrapped his robe tighter about him. ‘That I cannot say. Why? Are you looking for a boon from it?’

Will drew back stiffly. ‘Will you tell me whether or not you got its verse?’

‘I got nothing. Nor would anything that it gave freely be of any use to us.’

That was evasive. Will knew he was leading the wizard onto dangerous ground, but he could not resist saying, ‘The Dragon Stone gave us a message, one that we believed, and still believe.’

‘That was then, this is now. I remind you again: the times are
changing.
Everything is changing – even, in the end, the lorc.’

Will stirred as he began to see the sense of what was in the wizard’s mind. ‘Yes…how stupid of me.’

The wizard sucked his teeth. ‘Trust me, Willand, in the world that’s coming there will be no lorc. Maskull’s meddling has pushed the world another step closer to the abyss. The lorc has begun to fail, just as I am failing, just as you are failing, just as the last yale has gone from this world. And what we must ask ourselves is this: is it more likely that the lorc will end with a whimper – or with a bang?’

The next day was drier, but colder and full of the grey that attends a year’s end. Duke Richard’s army had followed a branch of the Great North Road as it turned westward at Scanton and passed along a stretch known to carriers and carters as Bridge Lane, for on its way it crossed many tributaries of the Umber. Unfortunately for Will the road also strayed across the Collen lign.

He smelled it first like a gust of corruption, then the sickness descended on him as a fit. His limbs began to twitch and then jerk, moving in a way that was beyond his control. His friends galloped him across as quickly as they could, until he began to regain a little colour and revive.

‘It’s flowing north,’ he said, tears reddening his eyes. ‘Very strong.’

Soon the character of the road changed, and the appearance of the land itself, for at Boar Tree there was a gate bearing a gilded crest that gave notice to all who travelled this way that they were entering the great Duchy of Ebor.

There was to Will’s eyes a glitter to all things beyond the gate, as if a weird’s spell rested upon the place, but he could not be certain that it was not an aftershock running through him – that, or some foul glamour caused by the
presence of both the Collen and Celin ligns, a power which now ran strongly to either hand.

‘Thus we depart the ancient kingdom of Axenholme,’ Gwydion said.

‘Is this then the Mezentian Gate?’ Will asked, vaguely remembering the fame of the place.

‘Alas, it is not,’ Gwydion said. ‘For that is at the port of Memison. That is a far grander gateway than this, a thing of lofty pillars and set with many fine statues. We will not go that way, for ahead of us lie two more leagues to the River Dunne, and there are four more to Castle Pomfret if ever we should go there. We will not do that today, however, but cut westward instead.’

‘Shouldn’t the way we choose depend on the one that Duke Richard has taken?’ Will asked.

‘We must go where my intuitions say we should,’ the wizard insisted. ‘There is no longer any doubt where Friend Richard is bound, and I would rather not go by Pomfret in whose dreadful dungeons Hal the Usurper did starve to death his rightful king!’

Will agreed, but before they came to Duncaistre there was bad news. The old man whom Gwydion questioned knew little enough, but it seemed that the Duke of Mells had fallen upon the advance riders of Duke Richard’s army and there had been a skirmish.

‘A slaughter, they’re calling it. Some dozens of men slain, but more fled, and all from deadly giants.’

‘And the queen’s army?’ Lotan asked.

The old man waved a shaky hand northward. ‘There be monsters holding the castle at Pomfret.’

‘And may the shame of the Usurper’s crime humble them all,’ Gwydion muttered.

‘We must take special care now,’ Lotan said. ‘For we do not want to meet Duke Henry’s armed bands while we are out in the open.’