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The Giants’ Dance
Robert Carter
A rich and evocative tale set in a mythic 15th century Britain, to rival the work of Bernard Cornwell.
In the peaceful village of Nether Norton life goes on as it has for centuries in the Realm. On Loaf Day, as the villagers celebrate gathering in the first of their harvest, Will looks back fondly on the two years since he and his sweetheart Willow circled the fire together, especially the year since their daughter Bethe was born. But despite his good fortune, a feeling of unease is stirring inside him. When he sees an unnatural storm raging on the horizon he knows that his past is coming back to haunt him.
Four years ago Will succeeded in cracking the Doomstone in the vault of the Chapter House at Verlamion to bring a bloody battle to its end. It seemed then that the lust for war in men's hearts had been calmed forever. But now Will is no longer certain his success was quite so absolute, and he calls on his old friend and mentor Gwydion, a wizard of deep knowledge and power once called 'Merlyn', for advice. Gwydion suspects his old enemy, the sorcerer Maskull, has escaped from the prison he was banished to when Will cracked the Doomstone. Now Maskull is once again working to hasten a devastating war between King Hal and Duke Richard of Ebor, with the help of the battlestones that litter the landscape inciting hatred in all who draw near.
Only Will, whom Gwydion believes to be an incarnation of King Arthur, has the skill to break the power of the battlestones. When Will last left Nether Norton he was an unworldly youth of thirteen. Now he is a husband and father, he has a lot more to lose. But he has a whole Realm to save.
The Giants’ Dance
Robert Carter
For Gerald Wiley, Four Candles.
‘First there were nine,
Then nine became seven,
And seven became five.
Now, as sure as the Ages decline,
Three are no more,
But one is alive.’
The Black Book of Tara
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#u6e79c4b8-0406-5660-b7ee-b1ab82c84a60)
Title Page (#u7f503037-3720-5418-827d-f3f4a1f86c43)
Epigraph (#u50692310-92c8-5eec-8541-bce12dd66da8)
PROLOGUE (#u68bd8e92-b925-572b-bb2c-6eec10cdc023)
PART ONE JEOPARDY’S DILEMMA (#ua0ac6008-dcfe-539d-8a92-884c3c81eddf)
CHAPTER ONE THE BLAZING (#ua207d640-f7dd-5814-b915-47e2248b38dd)
CHAPTER TWO LITTLE SLAUGHTER (#uc1d19165-e42f-5376-a853-6c2df8c0e1f7)
CHAPTER THREE WHAT LIES WITHIN (#uea67f319-dec8-517e-a1b0-332c32ac9a47)
CHAPTER FOUR THE LIGN OF THE ASH TREE (#udd0a45af-4537-54d6-9759-9c72288cf319)
CHAPTER FIVE MAGICIAN, HEAL THYSELF! (#u5d55ddc5-f288-5b39-a3f4-f2232e14c61a)
CHAPTER SIX AN UNWELCOME GUEST (#ud7f7b216-141c-5853-aa50-dd965517c3dc)
CHAPTER SEVEN A GOOD NIGHT’S REST (#u352c3990-7cd4-5bfc-bb75-dc6af2ab0d0a)
PART TWO A LOSING BATTLE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHT THIS BLIGHTED LAND (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE STONEHUNTERS (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN THE MAD BARON (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ELEVEN THE FLIES (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWELVE CAPTIVES (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN THE KINDLY STUMP (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIFTEEN A THIEF AT LUDFORD (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIXTEEN MOTHER BRIG (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN THE HOSTS GATHER (#litres_trial_promo)
PART THREE MADNESS AT LUDFORD (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN HONEY MEAD (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINETEEN A TOAST BY THE DUKE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY THE MADNESS GROWS (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE A GLIMPSE OF THE ENEMY (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO RAW MEAT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE THE BLOOD STONE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR FLESH ANEW (#litres_trial_promo)
PART FOUR THE TURNING OF THE TIDE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE TURLOCH’S RING (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX CASTLE CORBEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN THE DRAGON’S JAWS (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT JASPER (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE THE NIGHT FLIER (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY THE DUEL (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE A SURFEIT AT DELAMPREY (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO THE SECRET WEAPON (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE IN THE AFTERMATH (#litres_trial_promo)
AUTHOR’S NOTE (#litres_trial_promo)
APPENDIX I THE OGDOAD (#litres_trial_promo)
APPENDIX II THE LORC (#litres_trial_promo)
APPENDIX III THE LORC IN OUR WORLD (#litres_trial_promo)
THE STORY CONTINUES IN (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
By Robert Carter (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PROLOGUE (#ulink_23e453d2-3c1c-5161-ba31-5bfa12a209dd)
THE STORY SO FAR
The Giants’ Dance is the second book in the Language of Stones cycle. The first book, called The Language of Stones, recounted the story of Willand, a boy whose life was changed forever when the wizard, Gwydion, arrived at the village of Nether Norton in the Vale.
Gwydion, it is revealed, brought Will to the Vale when he was a baby, and has returned to reclaim him on his thirteenth birthday. Before Will leaves, Breona, the woman Will has always thought of as his mother, hangs about his neck a talisman of green stone which is carved in the likeness of a leaping salmon. She tells him how she found it inside his blanket when he first came into her arms, and says that it should go with him now he is entering the wide world.
No one from Nether Norton has ever been out of the Vale, and the wide world seems terrifying to Will. Gwydion explains that he must leave the Vale for his own good. Twice he tries to run away and go home, but each time he is prevented by Gwydion’s magic, and eventually the wizard tells him they are being hunted by a fearsome enemy. At first, Will imagines it must be the Sightless Ones, the sinister fellowship of tax collectors who both squeeze the common people and engage in crooked politics with the lords of the Realm, but it soon becomes clear that a far more formidable foe is looking for them. Gwydion will drop only vague hints about this, but he says that Will is a ‘Child of Destiny’ – one whose coming has been foretold in the Black Book.
Soon they arrive at a gloomy tower in the depths of the Wychwoode, and there Will is lodged with the grotesque Lord Strange, a man who is afflicted by a vile spell and who wears the head of a boar. Gwydion leaves Will to live in the tower all summer long, and there he is taught to read and write. He also learns from the local Wise Woman something of the ‘redes of magic’ – these are curious rules that reveal the wisdom of the world and enable magic to be done. But Will’s spirit rebels against Lord Strange. He secretly looks in a forbidden book and reads certain spells, which he then uses for the unworthy purpose of trying to impress a pretty girl. What he attracts instead is the marish hag, a dangerous supernatural creature that inhabits the ancient wood. He is almost drowned by the hag, and only saved by Gwydion’s return.
But Will has also gained friends in the Wychwoode, among them the mysterious Green Man to whom he renders an unwitting service, and the girl, Willow, with whom he discovers Grendon Mill. This, it turns out, is Lord Strange’s secret armoury, where men have cut down the great oaks of a sacred grove to roast into charcoal so that weapons of war may be forged.
When Gwydion returns, he shows his great displeasure at Lord Strange’s activities. In turn, the hog-headed lord blames King Hal whose preparations for war are being fed by the mill. The wizard then leaves angrily, taking Will with him.
As they travel south Will is asked if he knows about King Arthur. He says he knows about him from old tales. Gwydion tells him that the tales about the sword in the stone speak about an Arthur who became king a thousand years ago, but that he was only the second incarnation of an original Arthur. That Arthur was an adventurer who lived in the time of the First Men in the far distant past, and travelled from the land of Albion into the Realm Below to bring out sacred objects known as ‘the Hallows’. Moreover, there is a prophetic verse that speaks of a third and final incarnation of Arthur…
Will begins to feel uncomfortable because it seems that the wizard is convinced that Will himself is that third incarnation.
Unfortunately, the prophecy is confirmed at every turn. At Uff, Will recognizes the White Horse, and stands upon the Dragon’s Mound where he experiences a vision of an army massing below. The earth yields up the gift of a horn to him, and in Severed Neck Woods Will is given the freedom of the wildwood by the Green Man himself.
They come at last to the royal hunting lodge of Clarendon, where Gwydion warns the weakling monarch, and asks for aid in a vital magical mission that will prevent the Realm from sliding into war. But the royal court is already deeply under the influence of the beautiful but greedy queen and her violent ally, Duke Edgar of Mells.
The queen is pregnant, and it seems to Will that Duke Edgar is the father. Will also suspects that the gentle king has been poisoned by them. And he notices a sinister figure lurking nearby, invisible to everyone but Will and the queen. Only later does he learn that this is the sorcerer, Maskull, Gwydion’s arch-enemy, who, among other things, is trying to find Will and kill him. Fortunately, Maskull does not realize Will is present, but even so events are about to take a turn for the worse. Gwydion’s request for royal aid is refused, and he is attacked by Duke Edgar, and forced to employ a powerful vanishing spell, which is accomplished only just in the nick of time.
Where Will and Gwydion vanish to is a sacred place, even by the standards of the Blessed Isle. They appear on cliff tops high above the sea, standing on the westernmost point of land in the whole world. Here Gwydion renews his strength and explains to Will about ‘the lorc’. This is a network of powerful earth streams that extend throughout the Isles. Long ago, he says, an array of standing stones was set up on these streams of power by an ancient race, the fae, who lived at the time of the First Men, but who long ago retired into the Realm Below. Each stone is filled with an immense quantity of harm.
According to the Black Book, these ‘battlestones’ were disposed across the Isles with the intention of repelling invasions. The fae believed that despotic sorcerers would one day arise in the Tortured Lands and begin to enslave men’s minds with a powerful idea called the Great Lie. In time the Isles themselves would face conquest, and their people, the First Men, would be enslaved – unless the lorc was erected as a defence. After much debate, the battlestones were wrought and put in place, and the secrets of the lorc bequeathed to the First Men when the fae withdrew.
For many centuries, the Isles remained free from interference. The Age of Trees passed into a second, lesser Age. Then the First Men failed, and the Isles became the haunt of giants and fire-breathing wyrms. When a third Age dawned, the Age of Iron, the hero-king, Brea arose and set foot upon the shores of Albion. He vanquished the giants and proclaimed the Realm, settling the land once again. After that the Realm went unmolested for eighty and more generations, until the time when, as the fae had foreseen, the Slavers’ power burgeoned in the east. By the time of King Caswalan, the sorcerers of the Tortured Lands had spread the Great Lie far and wide. They commanded huge armies, and made no secret of their desire to conquer the Isles. Their first coming, a thousand years after the landing of Brea, was repulsed. But soon afterwards the secret of the lorc was betrayed and its protective power undermined. The invading Slavers were then able to block the vital flows of earth power by building in stone. They shattered the Realm into many shards with their slave roads, and so the lorc was broken. But by Will’s time the slave roads are more than a thousand years old. Many have begun to fall into ruin, and the lorc, so long inactive, has begun to awaken…
Gwydion tells Will that he urgently needs to find and uproot the battlestones or there will be a bloodbath. Each stone will mark a place of great slaughter, and the ensuing chaos will enable Maskull to gain control of the mechanisms of fate. If Maskull is allowed to steer the Realm it will slide towards a devastating future – a future wholly without magic, and one in which strife and terror will reign for five hundred years.
Will and the wizard sail back from the Blessed Isle, and soon afterwards encounter a skeleton inside a yew tree. It is the remains of a lad Will’s age (and with a similar name) who has recently gone missing. He has been magically murdered. It is grisly evidence that Will is still being sought by Maskull. It cannot be long before he realizes that the wizard’s young bag-carrier is his quarry, and so Gwydion decides that Will must once more be lodged in a place of comparative safety.
Meanwhile, Gwydion makes absolutely sure that Will is Arthur’s third incarnation, by stirring up his latent magical talents and teaching him to ‘scry’. And so, using Will’s partly-fledged abilities and the wizard’s command of ancient lore they manage to locate their first battlestone, the Dragon Stone. As they dig it up, Will experiences for the first time the frightening mental disturbances caused when such stones are threatened, but eventually Gwydion wraps it in binding spells and they take it to a place where Gwydion thinks it may be temporarily stored.
Once at Castle Foderingham, the stone is carefully mortared into a dungeon under the keep – Gwydion hopes it will remain dormant there while he searches for further fragments of the Black Book in order to discover how to drain the stone of its harm. But the owner of Castle Foderingham is Duke Richard who, with some justice, considers himself to be the rightful king of the Realm. He has just discovered that his claim to the throne has been fatally weakened because the queen has at last given birth to a son. He is also already aware that the boy is not the king’s child, but fathered by Duke Edgar, who happens to be Richard’s political rival. Richard must do something about this, and soon. And Gwydion realizes that he must accompany Duke Richard on his urgent mission to the great city of Trinovant, or affairs will certainly take a turn for the worse. Thus, Will is abandoned once more. Now he must live with the duke’s family and the captive battlestone. He is told that under no circumstances must the Dragon Stone be interfered with.
As the weeks become months at Castle Foderingham, Will turns from boy to man. He begins to learn lordly ways alongside Duke Richard’s sons. But while he learns how to ride and hunt and fight as they do, he also starts to understand more about his own developing magical talents. He is befriended by the old herbalist, Wortmaster Gort, and battles with the duke’s fierce heir, Edward. One night, despite Will’s warnings, Edward acquires a set of keys and leads his many brothers and sisters down to visit the Dragon Stone. There, though they do not understand it at the time, they are stricken by the stone, and none more so than Edward’s brother, Edmund.
Life at Foderingham settles down again, but soon a wagon train of new weapons bound for the king’s armoury is captured by Duke Richard’s men, and Will is unexpectedly reunited with Willow, the girl he met in the Wychwoode. As vassals of Lord Strange, she and her father had been set to drive one of the ox-wagons from Grendon Mill to Trinovant, but they were intercepted by one of Duke Richard’s allies. When Will sees how scared they are of returning home to face Lord Strange’s wrath, he begs the duchess that they be attached to Duke Richard’s household, and she agrees.
Willow says that Will is turning into a young lord. Will thinks there might be more to Willow’s unlikely arrival than meets the eye – perhaps the Dragon Stone is warping the fate of everyone around it, as Gwydion has hinted it may do. Perhaps they are all riding for a fall.
As winter closes in, the news from Trinovant is sketchy, but Will learns that Gwydion’s patient diplomacy has so far failed to settle peace upon the factions. Despite having extracted the Dragon Stone the influence of the reawakening array of battlestones continues to increase. The harm contained within them begins to corrupt the political atmosphere. Greed, vengeance and malice begin to get the better of the spirit of compromise within the opposing parties, and the Realm slips ever closer to war.
Will’s fears grow when Duke Richard gathers his armies and moves his household to Ludford. This is a great castle, deep in the hills of the west. As soon as he arrives, Will’s sensitivity to the stones’ influence begins to grow beyond his control. A bout of suspicion overtakes him. He feels that Edward is becoming his rival for Willow’s affections, and so acute does his jealousy become that he begins to fear for his sanity. When Gwydion appears Will says he believes the duke has fetched the Dragon Stone to Ludford and is trying to use it to his own advantage. Gwydion settles his fears and then gives Will a choice: he can either stay at Ludford and fight with Edward for Willow’s favour, or he can venture out upon the land as Gwydion now must, and help in the tracking down of the other battlestones – and especially the crucial Doomstone, which appears to control the others. Will reluctantly chooses to follow the wizard, and Gwydion says that this brave decision is yet another proof that he is indeed the Child of Destiny that was foretold.
Gwydion now explains Maskull’s intentions. The two magicians are the last remaining members of an ancient wizardly council of nine whose task it was to direct the progress of the world along the true path. As Age succeeded Age their numbers have shrunk, until there are now only two, but one of the nine was always destined to become ‘the Betrayer’. When three wizards remained there was still room for doubt, but as soon as the phantarch, Semias, failed it became clear that Gwydion’s long-held suspicions about Maskull must have been right. Maskull has now thrown aside all pretences of guardianship and is working openly upon a plan of immense selfishness. As a sorcerer – one who misuses magic to his own benefit – he is seeking to direct the future along a path of his own choosing. It is one that will concentrate power in his own hands, but will also entail a new Age of Slavery and War far more dreadful than any that has gone before.
Maskull must be defeated, but the battlestones are the immediate problem. Fortunately, they can be made to reveal verses that predict events and describe in maddening riddles where the next stone in the sequence lies. Will manages to track down two more battlestones, and though neither of them is the Doomstone, they seem to be making progress at last.
But Maskull lays a clever trap at the stone circle known as the Giant’s Ring. Will is caught, and Gwydion is lured in to save him. Wizard and sorcerer fight and the wizard is defeated. His body is burned and his spirit banished into an elder tree. But he is saved by Will who braves his fears to restore his mentor to human form. Gwydion then sets to work on the perilous task of draining the nearby battlestone.
After several quantities of harm have been drained from it a verse is forced from the stone:
The Queen of the East shall spill Blood,
On the Slave Road, by Werlame’s Flood.
The King, in his Kingdom, a Martyr shall lie,
And never shall gain the Victory.
which, in the language of stones, has an alternative reading:
When a Queen shall Enslave a King,
