The Giants’ Dance. Robert Goldthwaite Carter
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Название: The Giants’ Dance
Автор: Robert Goldthwaite Carter
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Героическая фантастика
isbn: 9780007398232
isbn:
Will is trapped among the savagery and bloodshed below. He knows he must reach the Doomstone and try to stop the battle, but the stone is somewhere inside the chapter house. Will claims the ‘sanctuary of the Fellowship’ and so gains entry. He fights his way through hundreds of blind, kneeling, enraptured Fellows before he locates the deadly stone under the Founder’s shrine. The power of the Doomstone is very strong, but Will remembers everything that Gwydion has taught him. He digs deep and finds the courage to do what he must – go down into the tomb to attack the battlestone directly.
As his spells are spoken out, the Doomstone fights back, but Will hangs on grimly. Appalling visions are cast into his mind, and it is only when he uses the leaping salmon talisman which Breona gave him that the stone submits. There is a blinding flash, and when the smoke clears he sees that the monstrous slab has been cracked in two!
Will emerges from the tomb, his head ringing. Outside, the roar of battle has ceased, brother has stopped killing brother, and war seems to have been averted. But there has been bloodshed – Duke Edgar, Baron Clifton and several of the other corrupt lords who have been controlling the king now lie dead. Others, including Queen Mag, have fled. As for Maskull, Will finds him atop the fire-blackened curfew tower where he has been conducting his own magical duel against Gwydion. When Will confronts him, Maskull recognizes him as the Child of Destiny, and prepares to kill him, saying, ‘I made you, I can just as easily unmake you.’ But as Maskull readies the killing stroke he is vanished away by a spell that Gwydion manages to land on him while his back is turned.
Now the battle is truly over. The king and Duke Richard jointly announce that they will ride to Trinovant together and put in place the foundations of good government.
Will is rewarded and says he wants nothing more than to return to his home village of Nether Norton with Willow, whose father has been killed in the fighting.
As they part, Gwydion gives Will a magic book, and bids him read from it often.
Will and Willow arrive home to general delight. Will tells his friends in the Vale that the king has freed them from the tithe and so they will never again have to hand over their livestock and grain to the sinister Sightless Ones. Then Will is reunited with his happy parents – after all they have not lost a son but gained a daughter – even so, there is a sense that things are not over quite yet.
More than four years have now passed since the fighting at Verlamion. We meet Will and Willow again in Nether Norton in the Vale at the Lammastide festival. It is the time of the first fruits and of harvest blessing and the joining of man and woman…
Flames leapt up from the fire, throwing long shadows across the green and dappling the cottages of Nether Norton with a mellow light. This year’s Blazing was a fine one. Tonight was what the wizard, Gwydion, called in the true tongue ‘Lughnasad’, the feast of Lugh, Lord of Light, the first day of autumn, when the first-cut sheaves of wheat were gathered in to the village and threshed with great ceremony. On Loaf Day, grain was ground, and loaves of Lammas bread toasted on long forks and eaten with fresh butter. On Loaf Day, Valesfolk thought of the good earth and what it gave them.
Today the weather had almost been as good as Lammas two years ago when Will had taken Willow’s hand and they had circled the fire together three times sunwise, and so given notice that henceforth they were to be regarded as husband and wife.
He put his arm around Willow’s shoulders as she cradled their sleeping daughter in her arms. It was a delight to see Bethe’s small head nestled in the crook of her mother’s elbow, her small hand resting on the blanket that covered her, and despite the dullness in the pit of his stomach, it felt good to be a husband and a father tonight. Life’s good here, he thought, so good it’s hard to see how it could be much better. If only that dull feeling would go away, tonight would be just about perfect.
But it would not go away – he knew that something was going to happen, that it was going to happen soon, and that it was not going to be anything pleasant. The foreboding had echoed in the marrow of his bones all day but, unlike a real echo, it had refused to die away. Which meant that it was a warning.
He brushed back the two thick braids of hair that hung at his left cheek and stared into the depths of the bonfire. Slowly he let his thoughts drift away from Nether Norton and slip into the fire-pictures that the flames made for him. He opened his mind and a dozen memories rushed upon him, memories of great days, terrible days, and worse nights. But the most insistent image was still of the moment when the sorcerer, Maskull, had raised him up in a blaze of fire above the stone circle called the Giant’s Ring. That night he had seen Gwydion blasted by Maskull’s magic, and afterwards, as Gwydion had tried to drain the harm from a battlestone, the future of the Realm had balanced on the edge of a knife…
It had been more than four years ago, but the dread he had felt on that night and the redeeming day that had followed remained alive in him. It always would.
‘Will?’ Willow asked, searching his face. ‘What are you thinking?’
He broached a smile. ‘Maybe I’ve taken a little too much to drink,’ he said and touched his wife’s hair. It was gold in the firelight and about as long as his own. He looked at her, then down at the child whose small hand had first clasped his finger just over a year ago. How she had begun to look like her mother.
‘Ah, but she’s a beautiful child!’ said old Baldgood the Brewster, his red face glowing from the day’s sunshine. He had begun to clear up and was carrying one end of a table back into the parlour of the Green Man. The other end of the table was carried by Baldram, one of Baldgood’s grown sons.
‘Seems like Bethe was born only yesterday,’ Will told the older man.
‘She’ll be a year and a quarter old tomorrow, won’t you, my lovely?’ Willow said dreamily.
‘Aye, and she’ll be grown up before you can say “Jack o’ Lantern”. Look at this big lumpkin of mine! Get a move on, Baldram my son, or we’ll be out here all night!’
‘My, but he’s a bossy old dad, ain’t he?’ Baldram said, grinning.
Will smiled back at the alehouse-keeper’s son as they disappeared into the Green Man. It was hard to imagine Baldram as a babe-in-arms – nowadays he could carry a barrel of ale under each arm all the way down to Pannage and still not break into a sweat.
‘Hey-ho, Will,’ one of the lads from Overmast said as he went by.
‘Hathra. How goes it?’
‘Very well. The hay’s in from Suckener’s Field and all’s ready for the morrow. Did you settle with Gunwold for them weaners?’
‘He offered me a dozen chickens each, but I beat him down to ten in the end. Seemed fairer.’
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