The Chalk Giants (25 page)

Round the great gates stood it seemed all the people of the town. The crowd opened silently, for the King to pass. He stood staring, the wind moving his hair and cloak, while his skin turned white as salt-crusted rock.

At the gates stood a cart, drawn by a span of bony oxen. On it had been erected a stout wooden post. The thing bound to it was reddened from head to foot. Its tunic, tied up soddenly above the waist, displayed the ruined groin. The eyes of the messenger glared appalled above a mask of flesh. From the mask the manhood swung, and dripped.

Drums beat, in every village of the Crab. Fires burned, and torches; by their light men polished armour, honed axes and swords. The messages flew, to Orm Rock and White Bear Lake and the satrapies that clustered round Long Fen. Fighting ships rode at Crab Key, patrolled the mouth of the Gut. The land seethed, like a boiling pot. Day and night, the soldiers streamed in; and finally, Rand was ready. He showed himself to his people; and folk marvelled, seeing Cedda come again in youthful glory. Then the gates creaked back, the King and his bodyguard rode through. Behind them, an army streamed north to war.

The din, the shouting and crack of whips, creak and rumble of wheels, faded. His shoulder was shaken, and again. He groaned, rolled over, tried to stand.

Grey light was in the sky. Outside the hut, in silence, stood the Sealanders, drawn swords in their hands. Six of them would not rise again; they lay stark in the dawn, their eyes rolled up beneath the lids. Beside them was the body of a priest. In his hand he still gripped a furry paw, its claws dipped in some brownish substance. Long scratches on the faces of the dead showed where the Hare had taken his revenge.

Round them, the village slept.

‘Now,’ said Elgro, ‘I hope your thirst for wisdom is slaked, my Lord. Before we leave, we will show some skills of our own. I will speak with this little Chief.’

In Rand’s brain the drugged fumes of the beer still spun. He stared round him, at the dull eyes and trembling hands, and shook his head. He said bitterly, ‘Do that and we are all dead, Elgro. All we can save is our lives.’

The little party straggled grimly, in the growing light. No further words were spoken till the valley was behind them. By midday they were deep among the hills. For an hour or more clouds had been thickening on the higher slopes; now they crept lower, bringing a thin, chilling rain.

The mist saved them. Twice they heard the voices of pursuers below them; twice the shouts, and jangling of weapons and harness, passed them by. That night they sprawled beneath an overhanging rock, too weary to seek proper shelter. At dawn some sixth sense roused the Dancing Man. He rose quietly, narrowing his eyes. One place in the heather was empty; Dendril had gone.

The weather worsened. The rain fell steadily, day after day. Above and to every side sounded the roar of waterfalls, invisible in the driving mist. The Sealanders moved south blindly, living as best they could on stream fish, eggs of wild birds. They would have starved; but on the fourth morning they came on the ruins of a town.

It had been of considerable extent. They wandered uneasily along paved, grass-grown streets, between shells of ragged stone. Watchtowers reared gaunt and desolate, the dim sky showing through their windows; to either side, stretching into the mist, ran a great ditch and mound, once topped by a palisade of sharpened stakes. It was the finest and highest fortification they had seen; but like the city it had been overthrown. More watchtowers had stood at intervals along it; now their stones lay tumbled and fire-blackened on the grass.

On the outskirts of the place Egrith made a discovery; a patch of curious fleshy-stemmed plants, tubers growing thickly round their roots. Raw, the things had a sweetish, earthy taste; cooked, they were better. A fire was coaxed into life in one of the roofless buildings; the Sealanders sat all day boiling pan after pan of the strange earth-fruits, burning fingers and mouths in their haste to gulp the things down. Their hunger appeased, they stoked the fire again, making some shift to dry their clothes. They passed an uneasy night in the ruins, starting at the slightest sounds; the splash and drip of water, calls of night-flying birds. The desolate place seemed thronged with ghosts; even the Dancing Man sat frowning, a drawn sword by his side, a spear laid ready to hand.

Morning brought a cheering gleam of sunlight. They gathered the last of the tubers, cramming what they couldn’t eat into their packs. At last it seemed their luck was changing; for they were leaving the hills. Beyond the ruins the land swept down to a great green plain. Along the horizon ran a strange dusky band; beyond, very sharp and clear, peaks jutted into the sky, laced with the rolling blue and silver of clouds. The sight further heartened them; and Elgro smiled, gripping Rand’s arm. ‘There, my Lord,’ he said, pointing, ‘is as fine a place as I have seen, to search for Gods.’

They started down, in good spirits; but the promise of the morning was not sustained. Before they had cleared the hills, clouds were once more climbing to obscure the sun. The distant mountains vanished; and rain began to fall, as heavily as before. They plodded on dourly, pausing once to eat. Shortly after Matt, who was leading, stopped and pointed. Rand joined him, and Egrith and the Dancing Man. They stood staring, frowning up at the obstruction that blocked their path.

It looked like nothing so much as the crest of a vast, frozen wave, twenty feet or more in height and as black and shiny as polished jet. It seemed the land sloped up to the lip of the bluff; in places too the rock of which it was composed overhung slightly, heightening the curious impression. Elgro, approaching carefully, struck with his spear-tip; gently at first, then harder. Chips flew; he picked one up, stood turning it in his palm. Its edges were sharp as the blade of a knife.

The party moved to the right, seeking a way round or over the obstacle. A mile or so farther on, the cliff edge was split by a series of deep cracks. They climbed, carefully, one of the little ravines so formed, stood once more staring. In every direction save the one from which they had come the rock lay bare and glittering. No tree grew, no blade of grass; the wind, rushing across the emptiness, made a thin, persistent moan. Stretching into distance were more of the curious wave-like forms, like ripples on a gigantic pond, each crest the height of a man. It was as if the land itself had burned, flowing outward from some focus of unspeakable heat.

Rand pushed the wet hair from his eyes and frowned. He said slowly, ‘The Hare King told me, there were once Giants. Elgro, could this be?’

The Dancing Man pulled a face. ‘That I do not know,’ he said. ‘But if this was their work, I shouldn’t have cared to meet them.’

The party trudged south, through the grey void of the still-falling rain.

The strange place was vaster in extent than they had realized. Water had collected in every dip and hollow of the rock; they splashed knee-deep through lake after lake, some of them scores of paces wide. Darkness overtook them far from shelter. Lacking fuel, they could build no fire; they ate the remainder of the tubers raw, huddled miserably in the lee of one of the curious ridges. Round them the wind howled and zipped like an entire legion of spirits.

The rain eased toward morning. The sun climbed blind and red, throwing long spiky shadows across the rock. To the south rose the peaks they had struggled to reach. They drank a little water from the pools, squeezed out their cloaks as best they could and staggered on.

The hours that followed were torture of a different kind. The sun, strengthening, brought steam boiling from the rocks; the strange landscape blurred and shook, hazed with vapour. Also the ridges to the south were steeper than any they had seen. The land rose in swell after swell, each terminating in a vicious, jagged little cliff. They detoured and backtracked wearily, stumbling and skidding, gashing hands and knees on the sharp rock. The place, most certainly, was cursed; for strive as they might, the hills drew no closer.

It was past midday before they reached the final crest; and another hour before a safe descent was discovered. They ran and leaped the last few yards, rolled gasping in unbelievable grass. They lay a time seeing the high rock they had quitted cut the sky like an edge of night; then Elgro snorted disgustedly, and delivered his opinion. ‘Giants I cannot speak of, or Gods,’ he said. ‘But I have had some small experience of demons. And demons it was beyond a doubt that shaped that place, to be their own.’

Beyond their resting place a track led through a little wood. Bluebells hazed the grass. It was as if the tree boles rose from a vivid lake; between them shone the sunlit flank of a hill. They climbed, slowly. At the crest they turned, saw the place they had left lie black and shimmering like a miles-long scab of pitch.

That night they came on a scattered flock of sheep, grazing untended at the head of a tree-filled valley. At the base of a rocky outcrop showed the mouths of several caves. They built a fire in the largest, slept comfortably for the first time in weeks, and with full bellies.

Elgro roused his master early next morning. Rand sat up, grunting and rubbing his face. Outside the cave mouth, sunlight dazzled through a screen of leaves. The morning was golden, and still. Somewhere a bird piped; close at hand was the tinkle of running water. Rand turned, frowning; and the Dancing Man tilted his head, laid a finger to his lips. He heard it then, distant but clear; a high fluting, mixed with the steady thudding of a drum.

The others were already awake; they stood chafing their hands and frowning. The noise faded, eddied closer. The Dancing Man ducked under the cave mouth, cautiously parted the bushes. He stiffened then and wriggled back, beckoning the others to join him.

Along the valley bottom moved an odd procession. First came the musicians, leaping and gyrating; then a little knot of white-robed men; then a cart drawn by oxen, an elegant affair with slender gilded wheels. On it, bound upright to a post, stood a black-haired, bare-legged girl in a short yellow tunic. She was wrenching at the cords that held her, trying to break free. Cymbal men followed, and more dancers and priests; bringing up the rear was a procession of folk in multicoloured trews and tunics, for the most part carrying bows or spears.

The Sealanders watched in silence. The procession passed not much more than a stone’s throw away, moved on up the little coombe. At the head of the valley the track climbed steeply. The cart was halted, the girl released. She was bundled roughly forward; and the whole group of people vanished from sight over the crest.

Rand, staring, met Elgro’s puzzled frown. He ran stooping, along the high side of the valley, darting cautiously from rock to rock. The others followed, keeping below the skyline.

Beyond the ridge the land sloped with unexpected steepness. Hills ringed the horizon, blue and grand; closer, immediately below their vantage point, was a great tongue-shaped depression, its sides thickly overgrown. In it a lake lay black and utterly still.

The procession was once more visible, descending the last few yards of a rocky path. At the water’s edge grew a stout, gnarled tree. The strangers clustered round it, with much shouting and gesticulating. A wait; and horns blew across the water, their voices clear and glittering. The party began to retreat, it seemed with more haste than dignity; behind them, tethered at the lake edge, they left the girl. The cart was turned, the oxen prodded into a trot; and the procession headed back the way it had come, vanishing finally between the sloping shoulders of the hills.

Elgro watched it go, and shrugged. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is extremely odd. Either these folk are mad, which seems most likely, or my eyes have been deceiving me.’ He rose; and there drifted from below a single piercing cry.

‘Eyes and ears both,’ said Elgro dryly. ‘Now that I cannot have.
My Lord ...’

He was too late. Rand had risen without a word, set off down the hillside at a fast run. Elgro swore his loudest and loped in pursuit, waving to the rest to follow.

By the time they gained the lip of the depression their leader was halfway to the water, running with great leaps. Elgro pulled up, panting; and Matt gripped his shoulder, pointed silently. Across the loch, speeding toward the opposite bank, ran a smooth vee-shaped ripple. For an instant, a pale bulk might have showed behind it; then it was gone. The water swirled, and was still again.

Elgro tackled the descent, still cursing. When he reached the tree, Rand had already slashed through the cords. The girl sagged forward, knee-deep in water; the Dancing Man caught her roughly, pulled her to the bank. ‘What is your tribe?’ he demanded. ‘This is my Lord Rand, a King of Sealand. What is this place called?’

She could only shake, and whimper.

Galbritt said, ‘Something was in the fjord.’

They stared at the water, gripping their sword hilts. Orms were not unknown in Sealand. Egrith said apprehensively, ‘Perhaps we should have left her where she was. The monster will be angry.’

Elgro snorted derisively. He said, ‘The water horse eats no maiden’s flesh. Salmon he will take in season, and browse among the deep weed. These people are fools. In any case, better use can be made of this.’ He shoved the girl’s kilt up with his foot, stared appraisingly, then hauled her to her feet. He said, ‘To ease a sickness, we would all risk much.’

Galbritt said, frowning, ‘What sickness, Dancing Man?’

Elgro inclined his head, and grinned. He said beneath his breath, ‘The sickness of our Lord the King,’

From above came a high-pitched shout. Elgro jerked his head up; and something bright and rushing flicked past his eyes. A thud; and Galbritt staggered. He said, ‘Our Lord the King.’ Then he dropped to his knees, sagged forward. From his neck protruded six inches of gaily-feathered shaft.

Elgro took his captive’s wrist, and ran. Missiles hummed past him. Another man flung his arms up with a shriek, toppled into the lake.

Ahead, the valley side steepened. A great rock thrust out above the water. The Dancing Man ducked underneath, Rand at his elbow. A yell from behind; the Sealanders turned, stared back appalled.