Power of Three
Diana Wynne Jones
This is the story of Ayna and Ceri, who both had Gifts, and of Gair, who thought he was ordinary.Gair spent his time gazing out onto the Moor and brooding. Ayna could answer questions about the future, Ceri could find things which were lost. Gair seems to have no Gift and knew he was a disappointment to his jovial, heroic father – who is Chief. Perhaps his feelings of not fitting in was what made him so curious about these other different sorts of beings who lived on the Moor – the Giants and the Dorig. Certainly it was because he believed he was ordinary that he did his best to become wise, and to learn as much as he could abou the three great Powers of Sun, Moon and Earth. And when the crisis came, Gair found the knowledge he had gained was to help save not only his own life but those of all his people.
power
of
three
by
Diana Wynne Jones
ILLUSTRATED BY DAVID WYATT
Dedication (#ulink_6fe38ebf-7f75-55fb-8052-28cac6b1e0c8)
For Kit and Jannie
Contents
Cover (#u709d2154-5b9d-5d14-9b61-a8869f2e8519)
Title Page (#uceafeeb2-cc40-5db7-8493-e08775f0f56b)
Dedication (#ud4f6a22a-aa98-5a8e-9ce1-355bfa518b4c)
Chapter One (#u30f8ddd4-beff-5727-a9b9-5a27875f7766)
Chapter Two (#u81dc9aa3-ded5-5464-a371-2ff7664009a5)
Chapter Three (#ue92aa351-ec32-55cb-a10b-1ced1e97829d)
Chapter Four (#ud1750d23-5477-54c3-9140-55d0b3530646)
Chapter Five (#u7cf7124b-1825-5d5f-a8ad-561813135a9d)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Other Works (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
chapter one (#ulink_54ee13c2-31a9-55f9-926d-c063b115d4a5)
This is the story of the children of Adara – of Ayna and Ceri who both had Gifts, and of Gair, who thought he was ordinary. But, as all the things which later happened on the Moor go back to something Adara’s brother Orban did one summer day when Adara herself was only seven years old, this is the first thing to be told.
The Moor was never quite free of mist. Even at bright noon that bright summer day there was a smokiness to the trees and the very corn, so that it could have been a green landscape reflected in one of its own sluggish, peaty dykes. The reason was that the Moor was a sunken plain, almost entirely surrounded by low green hills. Much of it was still marsh, and the Sun drew vapours from it constantly.
Orban was swaggering along a straight green track, away from Otmound, which stood low and turfy behind him, slightly in advance of the ring of hills round the Moor. Beyond it, away to his left, was its companion, the Haunted Mound, which had a huge boulder planted crookedly on top of it, no one knew why. Orban could see it when he turned to warn his sister, loftily over his shoulder, not to go near marsh or standing water. He was annoyed with her for following him, but he did not want to get into trouble for not taking care of her.
It was one of those times when the Giants were at war among themselves. From time to time, from beyond the mists at the edge of the Moor, came the blank thump and rumble of their weapons. Orban took no notice. Giants did not interest him. The track he was on was an old Giants’ road. If he looked down through the turf, he could see the great stones of it, too heavy for men to lift, and he thought he might kill a few Giants some day. But his mind was mostly taken up with Orban, who was twelve years old and going to be Chief. Orban had a fine new sword. He swished it importantly and fingered the thick gold collar round his neck that marked him as the son of a Chief.
“Hurry up, or the Dorig will get you!” he called back to Adara.
Adara, being only seven, was nervous of the Giants and their noise. It was mixed up in her mind with the sound of thunder when, it always seemed to her, even bigger Giants rolled wooden balls around in the sky. But she did not want Orban to think she was afraid, so she hurried beside him down the green track and pretended not to hear the noise.
Orban had come out to be alone with his new sword and his own glory but, since Adara had followed him out, he decided to unveil his glory to her a little. “I know ten times as much as you do,” he told her.
“I know you do,” Adara answered humbly.
Orban scowled. One does not want glory accepted as a matter of course. One wants to shock and astonish people with it. “I bet you didn’t know the Haunted Mound is stuffed with the ghosts of dead Dorig,” he said. “The Otmounders killed them all, hundreds of years ago. The only good Dorig is a dead Dorig.”
This was common knowledge. But since Adara really thought Orban was the cleverest person she knew, she politely said nothing.
“Dorig are just vermin,” Orban continued, displeased by her silence. “Cold-blooded vermin. They can’t sing, or weave, or fight, or work gold. They just lie under water and wait to pull you under. Did you know half the hills round the Moor used to be full of people, until the Dorig killed them all off?”
“I thought that was the Plague,” Adara said timidly.
“You’re stupid,” said Orban. Adara, seeing it had been a mistake to correct him, said humbly that she knew she was. This did not please Orban either. He sought about for some method of startling Adara into a true sense of his superiority.
The prospect was not promising. The track led among tufts of rushes, straight into misty distance. There was a hedge and a dyke half a field away. A band of mist lay over a dip in the old road and a spindly blackbird was watching them from it. The blackbird would have to do. “You see that blackbird?” said Orban.
A blunt volley of noise from the Giants made Adara jump. She looked round and discovered that Otmound was already misty with distance. “Let’s go home,” she said.
“This is one thing you don’t know. Go home if you want,” said Orban, “but if that blackbird is really a Dorig, I can make it shift to its proper shape. I know the words. Shall I say them?”
“No. Let’s go home,” Adara said, shivering.
“Baby!” said Orban. “You watch.” And he marched towards the bird, saying the words and swishing his sword in time to them.
Nothing happened, because Orban got the words wrong. Nothing whatsoever would have happened, had not Adara, who hated Orban to look a fool, obligingly said the words right for him.
A wave of cold air swept out of the hollow, making both children shiver. They were too horrified to move. The blackbird, after a frantic flutter of protest, dissolved into mist thicker and greyer than the haze around it. The mist swirled, and solidified into a shape much larger. It was the pale, scaly figure of a Dorig, right enough. It was crouched on one knee in the dip, staring towards them in horror, and holding in both hands a twisted green-gold collar not unlike Orban’s or Adara’s.
“Now look what you’ve done!” Orban snarled at Adara. But, as he said it, he realised that the Dorig was not really very large. He had been told that Dorig usually stood head and shoulders above a grown man, but this one was probably only as high as his chin. It had a weak and spindly look too. It did not seem to have a weapon and, better still, Orban knew that those words, once spoken, would prevent the creature shifting shape until sundown. There was no chance of it turning into an adder or a wolf.
Feeling very much better, Orban marched towards the dip, swinging his sword menacingly. The Dorig stood up, trembling, and backed away a few steps. It was rather smaller than Orban had thought. Orban began to feel brave. He scanned the thing contemptuously, and the collar flashing between its pale fingers caught his attention. It was a very fine one. Though it was the same horseshoe shape as Orban’s and made of the same green gold, it was twice the width and woven into delicate filigree patterns. Orban glimpsed words, animals and flowers in the pattern. And the knobs at either end, which in Orban’s collar were just plain bosses, seemed to be in the shape of owls’ heads on this one. Now Orban, only the day before, had been severely slapped for fooling about with a collar rather less fine. He knew the art of making this kind had been lost long ago. No wonder the Dorig was so frightened. He had caught it red-handed with a valuable antique.
“What are you doing with that collar?” he demanded.
The Dorig looked tremulously up at Orban’s face. Orban found its strange yellow eyes disgusting. “Only sunning it,” it said apologetically. “You have to sun gold, or it turns back to earth again.”
“Nonsense,” said Orban. “I’ve never sunned mine in my life.”
“You live more in the air than we do,” the Dorig pointed out.
Orban shuddered, thinking of the way the Dorig skulked out their lives under stinking marsh-water. And they were cold blooded too, so of course they would have to sun any gold they stole. Ugh! “Where did you get that collar?” he said sternly.
The Dorig seemed surprised that he should ask. “From my father, of course! Didn’t your father give you yours?”
“Yes,” said Orban. “But my father’s Chief Og of Otmound.”
“I expect he’s a very great man,” the Dorig said politely.
Orban was almost too angry to speak. It was clear that this miserable, tremulous Dorig had never even heard of Og of Otmound. “My father,” he said, “is senior Chief on the Moor. And your father’s a thief. He stole that collar from somewhere.”
“He didn’t – he had it made!” the Dorig said indignantly. “And he’s not a thief! He’s the King.”
Orban stared. The Giants interrupted with another distant thump and rumble, but Orban’s mind took that in no more than it would take in what the Dorig had just said. If it was true, it meant that this wretched, skinny, scaly creature was more important than he was. And he knew that must be nonsense. “All Dorig are liars,” he explained to Adara.
“I’m not!” the Dorig protested.
Adara was in dread that Orban was going to make a fool of himself, as he so often did. “I’m sure he’s telling the truth, Orban,” she said. “Let’s go home now.”
“He’s lying,” Orban insisted. “Dorig can’t work gold, so it must all be lies.”
“No, you’re wrong. We have some very good goldsmiths,” said the Dorig. Seeing Adara was ready to believe this, it turned eagerly to her. “I watched them make this collar. They wove words in for Power, Riches and Truth. Is yours the same?”
Adara, much impressed, fingered her own narrower, plainer collar. “Mine only has Safety. So does Orban’s.”
Orban could not bear Adara to be impressed by anyone but himself. He refused to believe a word of it. “Don’t listen,” he said. “It’s just trying to make you believe it hasn’t stolen that collar.” Adara looked from Orban to the Dorig, troubled and undecided. Orban saw he had not impressed her. Very well. She must be made to see who was right. He held out his hand imperiously to the Dorig. “Come on. Hand it over.”
The Dorig did not understand straight away. Then its yellow eyes widened and it backed away a step, clutching the collar to its thin chest. “But it’s mine! I told you!”
“Orban, leave him be,” Adara said uncomfortably.
By this time, Orban was beginning to see he might be making a fool of himself. It made him furiously angry, and all the more determined to impress Adara in spite of it. “Give me that collar,” he said to the Dorig. “Or I’ll kill you.” To prove that he could, he swung his new sword so that the air whistled. The Dorig flinched.
“Run away,” Adara advised it urgently.
Finding Adara now definitely on the side of the Dorig was the last straw to Orban. “Do, and I’ll catch you in two steps!” he told it. “Then I’ll kill you and take the collar anyway. So hand it over.”
The Dorig knew its shorter legs were no match for Orban’s. It stood where it was, clutching the collar and shaking. “I haven’t even got a knife,” it said. “And you stopped me shifting shape till this evening.”
“That was my fault. I’m sorry,” said Adara.
“Shut up!” Orban snarled at her. He made a swift left-handed snatch at the collar. “Give me that!”
The Dorig dodged. “I can’t!” it said desperately. “Tell him I can’t,” it said to Adara.
“Orban, you know he can’t,” said Adara. “If it was yours, it could only be taken off your dead body.”
This only made it clear to Orban that he would have to kill the creature. He had gone too far to turn back with dignity, and the knowledge maddened him further. Anyway, what business had the Dorig to imitate the customs of men? “I told you to shut up,” he said to Adara. “Besides, it’s only a stolen collar, and that’s not the same. Give it!” He advanced on the Dorig.
It backed away from him, looking quite desperate. “Be careful! I’ll put a curse on the collar if you try. It won’t do you any good if you do get it.”
Orban’s reply was to snatch at the collar again. The Dorig side-stepped, though only just in time. But it managed, in spite of its shaking fingers, to get the collar round its neck, making it much more difficult for Orban to grab. Then it began to curse. Adara marvelled, and even Orban was daunted, at the power and fluency of that curse. They had no idea Dorig knew words that way.
In a shrill hasty voice, the creature laid it on the collar that the words woven in it should in future work against the owner, that Power should bring pain, Riches loss, Truth disaster, and ill-luck of all kinds follow the feet and cloud the mind of the possessor. Then it ran its pale fingers along the intricate twists and pattern of the design, bringing each part it touched to bear on the curse: fish for loss by water, animals for loss by land, flowers for death of hope, knots for death of friendship, fruit for failure and barrenness, and each, as they were joined in the workmanship, to be joined in the life of the owner. At last, touching the owl’s head at either end, it laid on them to be guardians and cause the collar’s owner to cling to it and keep it as if it were the most precious thing he knew.
When this was said, the Dorig paused. It was panting and palely flushed. “Well? Do you still want it?”
Adara was appalled to hear so much beauty spoilt and such careful workmanship turned against itself. “No!” she said. “And do get them to make you another one when you get home.”
But Orban listened feeling rather cunning. He noticed that not once had the Dorig invoked any higher Power than that of the collar itself. Without the Sun, the Moon or the Earth, even such a curse as this could only bring mild bad luck. The creature must take him for a fool. The Giants began thumping away again beyond the horizon, as if they were applauding Orban’s acuteness. Determined not to be outwitted, Orban flung himself on the Dorig and got his hand hooked round the collar before it could move. “Now give it!”
“No!” The Dorig kept both hands to the collar and pulled away. Orban swung his new sword and brought it down on the creature’s head. It bowed and staggered. Adara flung herself on Orban and tried to pull him away. Orban pushed her over with an easy shove of his right elbow and raised his sword again. Beyond the horizon, the Giants thundered like rocks raining from heaven.
“All right!” cried the Dorig. “I call on the Old Power, the Middle and the New to hold this curse to my collar. May it never loose until the Three are placated.”
Orban was furious at this duplicity. He brought his sword down hard. The Dorig gave a weak cry and crumpled up. Orban wrenched the collar from its neck and stood up, shaking with triumph and disgust. The Giants’ noise stopped, leaving a thick silence.
“Orban, how could you!” said Adara, kneeling on the turf of the old road.
Orban looked contemptuously from her to his victim. He was a little surprised to see that the blood coming out of the pale corpse was bright red and steamed a little in the cold air. But he remembered that fish sometimes come netted with blood quite as red, and that things on a muck-heap steam as they decay. “Get up,” he said to Adara. “The only good Dorig is a dead Dorig. Come on.”
He set off for home, with Adara pattering miserably behind. Her face was pale and stiff, and her teeth were chattering. “Throw the collar away, Orban,” she implored him. “It’s got a dreadful strong curse on it.”
Orban had, in fact, been uneasily wondering whether to get rid of the collar. But Adara’s timidity at once made him obstinate. “Don’t be a fool,” he said. “He didn’t invoke any proper Powers. If you ask me, he made a complete mess of it.”
“But it was a dying curse,” Adara pointed out.
Orban pretended not to hear. He put the collar into the front of his jacket and firmly buttoned it. Then he made a great to-do over cleaning his sword, whistling, and pretending to himself that he felt much better about the Dorig than he did. He told himself he had just acquired a valuable piece of treasure; that the Dorig had certainly told a pack of lies; and that if it had told the truth, he had just struck a real blow at the enemy; and the only good Dorig were dead ones.
“We’d better ask Father about those Powers,” Adara said miserably.
“Oh no we won’t!” said Orban. “Don’t you dare say a word to anyone. If you do, I’ll put the strongest words I know on you. Go on – swear you won’t say a word.”
His ferocity so appalled Adara that she swore by the Sun and the Moon never to tell a living soul. Orban was satisfied. He did not bother to consider why he was so anxious that no one should know about the collar. His mind conveniently sheered off from what Og would say if he knew his son had killed an unarmed and defenceless creature for the sake of a collar which was cursed. No. Once Adara had sworn not to tell, Orban began to feel pleased with the morning’s work.
It was otherwise with Adara. She was wretched. She kept remembering the look of pleasure in the Dorig’s yellow eyes when it saw she was ready to believe it, and their look of despair when it invoked the Powers. She knew it was her fault. If she had not said the words right, Orban would not have killed the Dorig and brought home a curse. She could have gone on thinking the world of Orban instead of knowing he was just a cruel bully.
For Adara, almost the worst part was her disillusionment with Orban. It spread to everyone in Otmound. She looked at them all and listened to them talk, and it seemed to her that they would all have done just the same as Orban. She told herself that when she grew up she would never marry – never – unless she could find someone quite different.
But quite the worst part was not being able to tell anyone. Adara longed to confess. She had never felt so guilty in her life. But she had sworn the strongest oath and she dared not say a word. Whenever she thought of the Dorig she wanted to cry, but her guilt and terror stopped her doing even that. First she dared not cry, then she found she could not. Before a month passed she was pale and ill and could not eat.
They put her to bed, and Og was very concerned. “What’s on your mind, Adara?” he said, stroking her head. “Tell me.”
Adara dared not say a word. It was the first time she had kept a secret from her father and it made her feel worse than ever. She rolled away and covered her head with the blanket. If only I could cry! she thought. But I can’t, because the Dorig’s curse is working.
Og was afraid someone had put a curse on Adara. He was very worried because Adara was far and away his favourite child. He had lamps lit and the right words said, to be on the safe side. Orban was terrified. He thought Adara had told Og about the Dorig. He stormed in on Adara where she lay staring up at the thatch and longing to confess and cry.
“Have you said anything?” Orban demanded.
“No,” Adara said wretchedly.
“Not even to the walls or the hearthstone?” Orban asked suspiciously, since he knew this was how secrets often got out.
“No,” said Adara. “Not to anything.”
“Thank the Powers!” said Orban and, greatly relieved, he went off to put the collar in a safer hiding-place.
Adara sat up as he went. He had put a blessed, splendid idea into her head. She might not be able to tell Og or even the hearthstone, but what was to prevent her confessing to the stones of the old Giants’ road? They had watched it all anyway from under the turf. They had received the Dorig’s blood. She could go and remind them of the whole story, and maybe then she could cry and feel better.
Og was pleased to see how much better Adara was that same evening. She ate a natural supper and slept properly all night. He allowed her to get up the next morning, and the next day he allowed her to go out.
This was what Adara had been waiting for. Outside Otmound she stayed for a while among the sheep, until she was sure no one was anxiously watching her. Then she ran her hardest to the old road.
It was a hot day. The grey mists of the Moor hung heavily and the trees were dark. When Adara, panting and sweating, reached the dip in the track, all she found was a column of midges circling in the air above it. There was not a trace of the Dorig – not so much as a drop of blood on a blade of grass – yet her memory of it was so keen that she could almost see the scaly body lying there.
“He looked so small!” she exclaimed, without meaning to. “And so thin! And he did bleed so!”
Her voice rang in the thick silence. Adara jumped. She looked hurriedly round, afraid that someone might have heard. But nothing moved in the rushes by the track, no birds flew and the distant hedge was silent. Even the Giants made no sound. High above Adara’s head was the little white circle of the full Moon, up in broad daylight. She knew that was a good omen. She went down on her knees in the grass and, looking through to the old stones, began her confession.
“Oh stones,” she said, “I have such a terrible thing to remind you of.” And she told it all, what she had said, what Orban had said, and what the poor frightened Dorig had said, until she came to herself saying, “off your dead body.” Then she cried. She cried and cried, rocking on her knees with her hands to her face, quite unable to stop, buried in the relief of being able to cry at last.
A little mottled grass-snake, which had been coiled all this while in the middle of the nearest clump of rushes, now poured itself down on to the warm turf and waited, bent into an S-shape, beside Adara. When she did nothing but rock and cry, it reared up with its yellow eyes very bright and wet, and uttered a soft Hssst! Adara never heard. She was too buried in sorrow.
The snake hesitated. Then it seemed to shrug. Adara, as she wept, thought she felt a chill and a rising shadow beside her, but she was not aware of anything more until a small voice at her shoulder said imperiously, “Well, go on, can’t you! What did my brother say next?”
Adara’s head whipped round. She found herself face to face with a small Dorig – a very small Dorig, no bigger than she was – who was kneeling beside her on the track. His eyes were browner than the dead Dorig’s, and he had a stouter, fiercer look, but she could see a family likeness between them. This one was obviously much younger. He did not seem to have grown scales yet. His pale body was clothed in a silvery sort of robe and the gold collar on his neck was a plain, simple band, suitable for somebody very young. Adara knew he could not possibly harm her, but she was still horrified to see him.
“Go on!” commanded the small Dorig, and his yellow-brown eyes filled with angry tears. “I want to know what happened next.”
“But I can’t!” Adara protested, also in tears again. “I swore to Orban by the Sun and the Moon not to tell a soul, and if you heard me I’ve broken it. The most dreadful things will happen.”
“No, they won’t,” said the little Dorig impatiently. “You were telling it to the stones, not to me, and I happened to overhear. What’s to stop you telling the stones the rest?”
“I daren’t,” said Adara.
“Don’t be stupid,” said the Dorig. “I’ve been coming here and coming here for nearly a month now, and I’ve got into trouble every time I got home, because I wanted to find out what happened. And now you go and stop at the important part. Look.” His long pale finger pointed first to the ground, then up at the white disc of the Moon, and then moved on to point to the Sun, high in the South. “Three Powers present. You were meant to tell, don’t you see? But if you’re too scared, it doesn’t matter. I know it must have been your brother Orban who killed my brother and stole his collar.”
“Oh, all right then,” Adara said drearily. “Stones, it was my brother. I tried to stop him but he pushed me over.”
“Didn’t my brother say anything else?” prompted the Dorig boy.
“Yes, he put a curse on his collar,” said Adara. “Stones.”
“Ah!” said the Dorig boy. “I thought he must have done something. He wasn’t much of a fighter, but he was very clever. What was the curse?”
“Stones,” said Adara, and hesitated. She dared not repeat the words of the curse, well though she remembered them, for fear of bringing it on herself. She had to pick her way, telling it haltingly in her own words, through the pattern of the collar and the pattern of disaster woven into it, until she reached the owls’ heads at either end. “Then he said the birds’ faces were to – er – watch and make sure the one who has the collar will – not be able to let it go even though – er – it costs him the everything he’s got. Stones,” she concluded, thankful to have got it over.
The small Dorig beside her frowned. “But didn’t he name any Powers? I thought—”
“Oh yes, stones,” said Adara. “But not ones I know, and not until Orban tried to take the collar off him.”
“What Powers? Sun, Moon—?”
“No, no. Stones,” said Adara. There seemed to be no way of mentioning the Powers without naming them. Adara dropped her voice and crossed the fingers of both hands, with her thumbs under that for added protection. “The Old Power, the Middle and the New,” she whispered.
“Oh.” The Dorig boy looked very awed and also very satisfied. “That’s all right then. Nothing will stop the curse working now.”
“Unless the Powers are appeased,” Adara said. “Can’t I try and appease them? It was my fault.”
“I don’t think so. Not all Three.”
“Well, I swear to try,” said Adara.
The Dorig boy seemed a little troubled by her decision. “But I don’t want you to.” He thought a moment. “What’s your name?” he asked.
Adara simply looked at him. She knew well enough that you did not trust strangers with your name. And the worst of it was that she had already made him a present of Orban’s.
“It’s all right,” he said irritably. “I quite like you. And I only asked so that I shouldn’t swear to kill you by mistake. Mine’s Hathil – truly. Now what’s yours?”
Adara looked into his yellow-brown eyes and thought he was telling the truth. Having glanced at his hands, in case his fingers were crossed, and found them straight, she said, “Adara.”
“Thanks,” said Hathil. “Now I can swear. You can swear to lift the curse if you want. I swear to revenge my brother by helping the curse in every way I can. I shall spill every drop of Orban’s blood, except Adara’s, and dedicate it to the Powers. I call on them not to be placated until none of Orban’s people are left alive on the Moor. May the hidden stones bear witness, and the Sun, Moon and Earth.”
Adara listened dejectedly. She did not deny Hathil had the right to swear, but it did not seem fair on all the other people who had done him no harm. When he finished, she said, “Don’t you think you’re rather young to swear all that?”
“Blame your brother,” Hathil said stiffly. “He’s a murdering brute.” Adara sighed. “And I liked H—my brother,” Hathil explained. “He was clever, and he told me all sorts of things. I was going to go exploring when I grew up, and now I can’t because they’re going to make me King instead. They won’t let me out of their sight most of the time now. But the one good thing I can see about being King is that I can order everyone to fight Orban. And I’m not too young to swear. Do you see those stones?” He jabbed his pale finger down at the old road. Adara looked through at the cracked old stones in some perplexity. Though they had figured largely in the conversation, she could not see quite what bearing they had on Hathil’s age. “The Giants who made this road,” said Hathil, “were almost destroyed by a Giant who swore to stamp them out when he was not much older than I am.”
Adara was impressed. “How do you know that?”
“I learnt it,” said Hathil. “It pays to learn things.”
Adara, in spite of her dejection, felt Hathil was right. Perhaps, if she learnt and learnt, she might find a way of lifting that curse before it destroyed Orban, and before Hathil was old enough to carry out his oath. “I think,” she said, “you’ll make an awfully good King.” Hathil looked at her suspiciously. “You seem to know so well what you’re going to do,” Adara explained.
“Oh, that,” said Hathil. “Yes, I do.”
After that Adara went home greatly comforted and worked hard to learn as much as she could. She grew up famous for her wisdom. Orban, on the other hand, grew steadily more unlucky. He broke his leg twice. When he was fourteen, he accidentally killed his best friend. When he was eighteen and had grown into a sulky young man with scraggly red hair, he fell in love with the most unpleasant woman on the Moor. Her name was Kasta. Many people thought it was the greatest misfortune yet, when Kasta married Orban. They had several children, but none lived to be a year old.
The bad luck spread from Orban to the rest of Otmound. Sheep died, hunting was bad and other food scarce. Otmound got steadily poorer. Outside, Dorig roamed in increasing numbers, and grew bolder and bolder. Otmounders soon dared not go out alone for fear of being pulled under water.
The bad luck spread from Otmound to the other mounds. There was fire in Beckhill and flooding in Islaw. And as Adara, for all her learning, could not learn how to lift the curse, it went on spreading, so that long before Ayna, Ceri and Gair were born, even the Giants were affected.
chapter two (#ulink_f80d74b5-7a90-56eb-a88c-dbfd3b88a8c1)
Ayna, Gair and Ceri were born in Garholt. Their father was Gest, who was a hero. This is how Gest became famous.
Garholt was on the south of the Moor, not far from the other end of the old Giants’ road. It was the largest of all the mounds and by far the most prosperous. While Chanters and Wise Women all over the Moor were shaking their heads and wondering what could be causing the growing bad luck, for many years the curse seemed to pass Garholt by.
Garholters – rather unwisely – prided themselves on their luck. They had gold, wool and hides in plenty; salt, fuel and wine. Their sheep were more numerous and in better shape than any on the Moor. Their honey was famous. Indoors, the houses were roofed with stone, and the five wells, round and stone-roofed like the houses, had been made safe from Dorig and from every other danger. The walls of the mound, below the big windows, were hung with tapestries embroidered in dark, bright colours. And Garholt could, in a quarter of an hour, muster more than a hundred of the fiercest and best-armed fighting-men on the Moor – not to speak of equally warlike women and children.
But this took a good, careful Chief to maintain it. Gart, the old Chief, was just such a one. But he died quite suddenly, and his two sons were killed the same night. Hearing their father had been taken ill, Gart’s two sons were hurrying home from hunting, using one of the new Giants’ roads for speed. This was unwise of them. As the curse had affected the Giants too, they had grown fewer, but those few had become very violent and untrustworthy. While Gart’s sons were hurrying along the road, a Giant caught and crushed them. So, as Miri the Beekeeper’s wife, who was a Wise Woman, pointed out, the bad luck came to Garholt after all and left it without a Chief.
That was how Gest came to be Chief in Garholt. He was old Gart’s nephew and lived in the much smaller mound of Islaw. Messages were sent to Gest at once, but the Garholters were very much afraid he would not be the good, careful Chief they were used to. Islaw people had a name for being queer and shifty – though, of course, no one in Garholt would have dreamt of calling them half-Dorig the way the Otmounders did. Still, Islaw people were known to be different. And Gest’s Islaw father had been a Chanter, who were odd people at the best of times. Then it was learnt that Gest was bringing his own Chanter, a man called Banot, with him. From being dubious, the Garholters became indignant. Weren’t the Garholt Chanters good enough for Gest? Or what?
When Gest arrived, everyone was relieved to find him fair, handsome, jolly and not at all peculiar. He was a big man, as a Chief should be, and obviously a seasoned fighter. Nor did he seem particularly clever. The Chanter, Banot, though his thin face had the dreamy look of his profession, seemed to have no harm in him either. It soon became clear that Gest had brought him simply because he and Banot were bosom friends. The Garholters all heaved sighs of relief and began to manoeuvre Gest into marrying Tille, the granddaughter of old Gart.
Nothing came of that. Gest was nice to Tille – as he was to everyone – but it was Banot who fell in love with Tille and married her.
Gest had not been a month in Garholt, when a messenger arrived from Og of Otmound. Og greeted the new Chief and wanted a band of fighting-men from Garholt at once to help him fight the Dorig. Hearing this, Gest smiled, a wide, jolly smile. Banot, who knew that smile, looked apprehensive. But the older and more responsible Garholters, who did not know it, took Gest aside and gave him the benefit of their advice. They did not know then that Gest was a hero.
“See here,” said the oldest Chanter, “Og has no right to take that tone with you. He may be the senior Chief, but we’ve made no treaty with him. Send me back to say No.”
“He’s giving you orders because he can’t afford to pay for our help,” said the goldsmith. “But we Garholters have our pride.” He looked round, with satisfaction, at the gold glimmering on people’s necks and wrists.
“I’ll say No very tactfully,” said the Chanter.
“Why is he so set on fighting the Dorig?” Gest asked.
“It’s the natural order of things,” Miri, the Beekeeper’s wife, told him. “Men against Dorig, Giants against men.”
“They say the only good Dorig is a dead Dorig,” added the oldest smith.
The Beekeeper, who always had news, said, “The Dorig have been pulling their people and sheep under water for years. A while back, they took to waiting outside Otmound in their own shapes and attacking anyone they met. Og warned everyone who went outside to carry a thornbush against them, but Dorig don’t seem to be afraid of thorns the way they used to be. Their latest trick is to pretend to be game when the Otmounders are out hunting: let a man chase them, then shift to their true shape and kill him. You know their crafty ways.”
“Well, no,” Gest said apologetically. “I’ve only met a Dorig once and it ran away before I could speak to it.”
“Then you have a lot to learn,” said the smith.
Gest smiled again. “I know I have. That’s why I think I’d better go over the Moor and talk to Og.”
To the consternation of all Garholt, this is just what Gest did. He sent Og’s messenger back to say he was coming and then prepared to set out himself, with only Banot for company. Everyone implored him to consider. They reminded him there was no one to be Chief after him. They said, if he must go, he should take twenty good men with him to protect him from Dorig. They told him fearsome tales about the way the Dorig sacrificed their victims and hung them up to the Sun.
Gest attended to none of it. He was quite pleasant, but completely firm. The Garholters discovered that their new Chief was the most obstinate man on the Moor. They respected him greatly for that, but it made them all the more anxious to have him safe back again. They took Banot aside and made him promise to see Gest was safe.
“I’ll do what I can,” said Banot. “But you don’t know Gest.”
They had to be content with that. Everyone anxiously watched the two set off along the line of the old road. The early Sun glinting on the gold collar of each was the only bright thing about them. Their clothes and weapons were dull and serviceable. Banot’s harp was shut in a dingy travelling case, so that it would not catch the attention of Giants. When the two had disappeared into the mists, the Garholters retired to the mound and spoke words for their safety. Then they waited.
Two days later, to their dismay, Banot came back alone. He was vague-eyed and abstracted, and Tille was the only one who was wholeheartedly glad to see him. The rest crowded round him, demanding to know where Gest was.
“In Otmound, I suppose,” Banot said vaguely. “He sent me home.”
Though they were all relieved to hear Gest was still alive, they wanted to know what Og had said, why Banot had been sent back, and what Gest was doing.
Banot seemed tired. “Gest always does things his own way,” was all he would say. “Someone bring me a drink.”
Miri, the Beekeeper’s wife, hurried up with beer, hoping it would loosen Banot’s tongue. Tille helped him take the harp off his back. The case came open as she did so, and she noticed that one of the harp strings had broken. It had been replaced by a queer pale length of gut, which gave off a strong smell of glue.
“Where did you come by that peculiar string?” she said.
“Oh that – I had to take what I could get,” said Banot. He drank some beer, seemed to recover, and began to laugh a little. “I’ve been singing and playing and talking for hours,” he said. “I’ve no voice left and I ache all over.”
“Was this in Otmound?” said Tille, glad to hear things were so merry there.
Banot shook his head. “No. By the roadside. We met some friends, Gest and I, while we were on our way – no one you know, but great fellows – and I stopped over with them on the way back.” He laughed. “The best of friends.”
“But when is Gest coming?” everyone wanted to know.
“In a day or so,” said Banot, yawning. “If he comes at all. And he may be in a hurry.” With that, he laughed and yawned and staggered off to sleep, leaving no one much the wiser. Nor would he say any more the next day.
Gest arrived in the middle of the following night. The first anyone knew of it was when Gest turned and shouted the words that sealed the main door against enemies. Startled by the shout and the thump of the door, people scrambled from their beds. Someone had the sense to raise the light, whereupon everyone stared in amazement. Gest had brought with him a beautiful young woman, tall and pale, with hair as black as peat. Both of them were splashed with mud to the eyebrows and almost too much out of breath to speak. Gest no longer wore his golden collar. The woman, on the other hand, wore a collar richer and more intricate than anyone in Garholt had seen before in their lives.
“Speak the rest of the doors shut!” Gest panted to the first person to arrive.
The boy scampered to do as he was told. The rest crowded up, shouting, “Why? Is it Dorig?”
Gest had used up all his breath and could only shake his head. The young woman shyly answered instead. “It’s my brother, Orban. I’m Og’s daughter, Adara.”
This caused gasps and murmurs. It was well known that Og loved his daughter more than he loved himself. Adara was said to be the most beautiful woman on the Moor, and the wisest who ever lived. And it looked as if Gest had carried her off.
“War,” said the Beekeeper gloomily. “This means war.”
“Doesn’t,” said Gest, still very short of breath. “Did three tasks for her. Marry her tomorrow. Got to rest now. Get a feast ready.”
“Just like that!” Miri said indignantly, as she and Tille led Adara off to Tille’s house to rest. “Does he think we can have a feast ready in five minutes?”
“Of course you can’t,” said Adara. “I don’t suppose he thought. I’ll go back and tell him to put it off, shall I?”
This of course put both Tille and Miri on their mettle. “You’ll do no such thing!” said Tille. “We’ll manage.”
“Besides, if he’s carried you off, it’s not proper to wait,” said Miri.
“He didn’t carry me off. I came of my own accord,” Adara protested.
“What you thought of it doesn’t count,” Miri said severely. “Now you get to bed and get some rest. We’ll see to it.”
By the time she and Tille had put Adara to bed, they had both lost their hearts to her. Neither of them blamed Gest for losing his. “Or his head into the bargain,” Miri said sourly. Adara was gentle and sympathetic and not in the least proud. But the greatest point in her favour, Miri and Tille agreed, was that though she was supposed to be the Wisest Woman ever, you would never have known it from the way she talked. “I can’t abide Wise Women who are always letting you know what a fool you are,” said Miri, from bitter experience, being a Wise Woman herself. “I wish she’d told us what happened though. Now we’ll have to wait for brother Orban to tell us.”
Orban arrived as she spoke. Garholt quivered with the noise. From the shouts and thumps at the main door, it sounded as if half the men of Otmound had come with Orban.
Gest, refreshed with a long drink of beer, took all the men of Garholt out of the side doors. The two bands confronted one another under a full Moon and everyone inside the mound waited for the battle to begin.
Orban, who had grown into a lumpish, sulky man, stepped out in front of the massed Otmounders and scowled at Gest. “I want to speak to you alone,” he said.
The Garholters were beginning to get used to Gest. They were not surprised when he agreed. The Otmounders, however, were clearly very surprised. They stared uneasily after Orban and Gest as the two climbed to the top of the mound together. But Orban made no attempt to hit Gest. Instead, he spoke to him in an undertone, savagely and urgently. Nobody heard what he said. Once Gest, who had been shaking his head at Orban every so often, put both hands up to his neck, with the gesture of a man about to remove his collar. Then he seemed to remember his collar was gone, and took his hands away.
“No, the other one, you fool!” Orban was heard to say. “The one Kasta—” But then he realised other people could hear and lowered his voice again.
“Who’s Kasta?” the younger smith whispered to Banot.
“Orban’s wife,” whispered Banot. “Awful woman. She—”
He was interrupted by a roar from Orban. “GIANTS! You—!”
Gest said something loudly at the same time. Orban seemed to calm down. He stood under the Moon with his arms folded, growling sullenly at Gest, and Gest seemed to be watching him warily. One thing at least was clear: Orban did not like Gest and Gest did not much care for Orban. Gest said something. Then, to everyone’s surprise, the two of them shook hands. Orban turned and came jauntily down the mound, looking as if a weight was off his mind. He smiled, and waved airily to the seventy Otmounders waiting below Garholt.
“Right, everyone,” he said. “That’s it. We’re going.”
“Going? Without Adara?” one of them asked blankly.
“Yes. I’ve told Gest she can stay. He did three tasks for her after all,” Orban said gaily. He shepherded them back along the roadline. They went reluctantly, and it was plain they were very puzzled indeed.
So that was how Gest came to marry Adara. As to quite how he had managed it, the Garholters were mystified. But from what they had heard so far, it was clear to them that Gest was a hero and a Chief straight out of the old stories. Three tasks! They were agog with pride and curiosity. Though some people took the reasonable line that this kind of thing was well enough in the days of King Ban, but what was needed nowadays was a careful, steady Chief, nobody could wait to find out exactly what Gest had done to win Adara.
But neither Gest nor Adara would talk about it and if Banot knew, he was not saying either. People kept their eyes and ears open for hints all through the bustle of preparing the wedding feast, working a new gold collar for Gest, making clothes for Adara, and the hundred other things necessary, but no one learnt anything until the wedding feast was in full swing. Then Miri happened to come up with wine for Banot, just as Adara approached him from the other side.
Adara looked more beautiful than ever in her wedding dress, but she also looked troubled. “Banot,” she said, “what do you know of the Old Power, the Middle and the New?”
Banot, like all the Chanters, was working hard, playing for the dancing and singing. His face had been flushed and shiny. But Miri saw, when he looked up at Adara, his face was pale. “Those are Dorig things,” he said. “You shouldn’t talk of them at a time like this.”
“Just tell me if you know how to appease them,” Adara said coaxingly.
Banot would not look at her. He stared straight ahead, with his fingers ready on a chord. “I only know one way,” he said, “and that’s by sacrifice. And if I told you what kind and how made, we’d have to stop the feast and chant for luck until the new Moon.” Then he struck the chord and began playing to prevent Adara saying any more.
Adara turned away, looking appalled. It was some time before she seemed happy again. And Miri was equally upset. It was well known how the Dorig sacrificed. Sometimes hunting parties would come upon the corpses of their sacrifices hanging in the Sun to rot. If you had the bad luck to find one, the only thing to do was to stop and use the very strongest of the strong words, or the Dorig Powers would fasten on you. Giants sometimes sacrificed in the same way, but they only used moles, weasels and other small animals, whereas the Dorig used men, women and Dorig. Miri, not knowing why Adara should ask otherwise, began to have a suspicion that Gest or Adara had invoked the Dorig Powers to help Gest perform his three tasks. She became more anxious than anyone to know just what had happened in Otmound.
The story came out gradually, piece by piece – nobody really knew how. It seemed that Gest and Adara had fallen in love as soon as they set eyes on one another. Gest promptly asked Og if he could marry Adara. Now Og was hoping Gest would bring him the men of Garholt to fight the Dorig, so he did not want to offend him. But neither could he bear to have his beloved Adara go right away to the other side of the Moor. He had been in great distress. “The silly old woman!” Miri said contemptuously. No one in Garholt thought much of Og.
During a sleepless night, Og hit on the notion of making Gest do three tasks to win Adara’s hand. He had an idea this would appeal to Gest’s adventurous spirit. But he would make the tasks totally impossible. When Gest failed to do them, Og would be very sorry and very kind, keep Adara to himself and still keep Gest friendly enough to help him fight the Dorig. As Og hoped, Gest was delighted to perform three tasks for Adara, but since he saw Og was going to refuse to let him have Adara if he could, Gest sent Banot home, so that no one could say he had used a Chanter’s help.
Og thought he had chosen cunningly. He announced that the first task was to answer riddles. He could see Gest was a man of action, not a thinker. Anyone in Garholt or Islaw could have told him that too. Gest could not answer riddles to save his life. Yet Gest had stood in front of Og for a whole day steadily answering all the riddles Og and his Chanters could devise, and getting them right. Perhaps love had sharpened his wits. But no one in Garholt thought it was natural.
Og was forced to concede Gest had done the first task. He took care to make the second as difficult as he could. Gest was to fetch him a gold collar off the neck of a Dorig. Orban and a number of other Otmounders had protested, saying Dorig did not have gold collars. And Adara had made matters more impossible by calling out to Gest, “I shall never marry you if you kill a Dorig! Never!” Yet Gest had simply smiled and gone out on to the Moor to try his luck. In the early evening, he returned with a magnificent collar.
At this, Og took fright and made the third task truly monstrous. Even Gest had despaired at first. Adara had been so upset that Og gave her the magnificent Dorig collar to console her. Og said Gest was to move the great boulder from the top of the Haunted Mound, drag it a quarter of a mile and put it on top of Otmound. The boulder was as big as a house and locked in place with words. Ten men – twenty – could hardly have shifted it. But Gest had done it. Around midnight, he had come in and invited Og out to look. And there was the great stone perched on top of Otmound, and the marks of it all the way across the field from the Haunted Mound.
Og nearly went mad. By then, he was so frightened of Gest that he wanted nothing more to do with him. He refused utterly to let him marry Adara and ran away inside Otmound. This made Gest angry. He went after Og and found Adara coming out. The two of them ran most of the way across the Moor with Orban in pursuit.
Miri wondered very much about some parts of this story. It was queer enough that Gest had been able to answer riddles. But then he had apparently killed a Dorig for its collar, and Adara had not only still married him, but wore the collar every day. It was beautifully and intricately worked, in a filigree of twisted signs and symbols around pattern of Power, Riches and Truth, all flowing like a song into the exquisitely modelled birds’ heads of the bossed ends. Miri knew it could not have come from any Dorig. It was a collar from the Old Days, such as a King might have worn. Miri thought Gest must have traded his own missing collar for it.
But then there was the matter of the stone from the Haunted Mound. Miri, remembering Gest’s father had been a Chanter, had some hopes that it was an illusion which would not last. But, after the wedding, Og graciously forgave Gest and Adara, and there was more coming and going between Garholt and Otmound. Miri went and saw the stone on top of Otmound for herself. It was really there. The marks where it had been dragged from the Haunted Mound had not yet grown over. Miri was shaken, because she knew it could not have been done without the aid of some mighty Power.
“Well, I wish Og joy of it, that’s all,” she said. “I wouldn’t like a great thing like that on top of my mound. Whatever words I said, I’d be afraid of it coming through and squashing me.”
Og might have forgiven Gest, but Gest was clearly still angry with Og. He refused outright to help Og against the Dorig. Og and Orban were forced to help themselves. In the autumn, having carefully armed and drilled the Otmounders, they attacked a huge body of Dorig who were moving east across the Moor. The Dorig were taken by surprise. Since words had stopped them shifting shape, they fled frantically south and west. Islaw saw them coming and hurriedly sealed its gates. But the Dorig did not attack. They went into the river near Islaw and that was the last of them for some time. The Moor became much more peaceful.
Luck seemed to return to Otmound after that. The people there grew richer. Orban’s wife Kasta at last had a baby which did not die. She called him Ondo. He was a fine, healthy child, but Kasta nevertheless fussed over him as if he was the most delicate baby alive.
“She makes me ill!” Miri said, after a particularly tiresome visit.
“She had four babies before, and they all died,” Adara reminded her.
“So she did!” said Miri. “Which makes this one so unusually gifted, particularly intelligent—” she mimicked Kasta’s harsh voice “—so exactly cut out to be a Chief! How can she tell? Just let her wait till your son’s born, that’s all. I’ll have the nursing of him, and I’ll show her!”
Though she was the Beekeeper’s wife and a Wise Woman, Miri was determined to nurse Adara’s son. There was quite a struggle for that honour, since everyone expected that son to be special, but Miri won the struggle because she was a Wise Woman.
But when Adara’s baby was born, it was a girl. Miri was speechless. She could think of nothing to say for a whole hour. Then she said, “Don’t you dare let her marry that Ondo!”
“No fear!” said Gest. He was enchanted with his daughter. He called her Ayna and walked about holding her proudly. She was fair and rosy and very like him.
Miri swallowed her disappointment, looked after Ayna carefully, and waited for the next baby.
He came the following year. Adara called him Gair. “Ah!” said Miri proudly. “Just look at him, Gest.”
Gest looked and was rather startled. Gair was dark and pale, like Adara, and stared solemnly up at Gest with big grey eyes. “Why doesn’t he smile?” said Gest.
“They don’t at first,” said Adara. “Even Ayna didn’t.”
“I expect you’re right,” said Gest. All the same, he remained a little awed by the strange, solemn baby, even when Gair was old enough to smile.
Two years later, Adara had another son. Gest, looking resigned, took Ayna in to have a look at him. Miri, chuckling with pride, unwrapped a baby with huge blue eyes and hair as dark as Gair’s. “Ceri,” she said. “Isn’t he a fine one?”
“Isn’t he a bit pretty for a boy?” Gest said doubtfully. He would have preferred another girl. Miri scolded him. She was delighted. Whatever Ondo’s nurse, Fandi, said, Miri knew they had done three times as well as Kasta.
The children grew up with all the other children, tumbling and quarrelling in the Sun that streamed into Garholt. It was a good time to grow up in. In spite of being the hero of three tasks, Gest proved the careful Chief everyone had hoped for. Garholt prospered and there was plenty to eat. Adara taught the children. Miri spoiled all three, particularly Ceri. In the evenings, Miri told them the stories from the tapestries round the walls. Their favourite was the newest: How Gest performed Three Tasks to Win Adara. Miri always told it them as it was generally told. She never hinted at her doubts, but she felt a little guilty at the way they drank it up and asked for it again and again.
chapter three (#ulink_e835329a-4eff-519c-a5c5-e08a854ad47e)
One day, when Gair was five and Ayna six, Gair said wistfully, “When shall I be allowed to go hunting?”
“Next full Moon, of course,” said Ayna.
Gair looked at her incredulously. She was standing very straight and her face was grave and serious. He could see she meant it. Without bothering to ask how she knew, he trotted off to Gest and told him he was coming on the next hunt.
Gest looked up from lashing a spearhead and laughed. “Whatever put that into your head?”
Gair did not like being laughed at. His mouth trembled. “Ayna says I’m going. She told me.”
Ayna had followed Gair out of interest. Gest asked her angrily what she meant by putting such nonsense into Gair’s head. “It’s not nonsense. It’s true,” Ayna said. She was quite certain.
Gest opened his mouth to tell her what happened to children who made up stories. Before he could speak, Miri dashed forward. “Ask her something else!” she said excitedly. “Go on!”
Gest was annoyed. Miri was far too fond of bobbing up and preventing him scolding his children. “Ask her yourself,” he said crossly.
“All right,” said Miri. “Ayna, who’s going to be the next person to come into Garholt?”
Ayna again stood straight and grave. “Uncle Orban. He’s hurt himself.”
“Of all the—! “Gest began.
Before he could say more, Orban tottered through the doorway above them with a broken arm. “Met a Giant,” he said miserably. “Your place was nearest.” Seeing the way Gest was staring, he said irritably, “I’m not a ghost!”
Gest pulled himself together and welcomed Orban properly. He helped Orban to Adara to have the arm set. Miri bustled round in the greatest excitement. It was clear to her that Ayna had the Gift of Sight, which had not been known in Garholt for two generations. Better still, since Orban was here, she knew Kasta would hear of it at once. Gest and Adara both took a little more convincing. But, after careful questioning, they agreed that Ayna really did seem to have Sight. Gest went to the goldsmith to order the double-twisted collar Ayna was now entitled to.
The news caused great excitement. People crowded round Ayna to ask her things. One or two people, knowing that the Gifts often went by families, hopefully asked Gair questions too. Gair was unable to answer. He was ashamed. He tried saying the first thing that came into his head, but they soon saw through that and lost interest in him. Gair began to see that he was just ordinary.
Adara caught sight of him standing to one side of the excited group round Ayna, looking humble and sad. She pointed him out to Gest.
“I’ll take him out hunting to make it up to him,” Gest said without thinking.
So Ayna’s first prophecy was fulfilled. To his huge delight, Gair was taken on a real hunt. He thought he enjoyed it enormously. He toiled in the rear, his calves aching with the effort, bitten by midges and shivering in the night mist. The marsh underfoot made his boots three times their usual weight and his feet were numb. But he still thought he was enjoying it.
No one else on the hunt enjoyed it at all. It seemed to them that they were continually going back for Gair, waiting for Gair, telling Gair to be quiet, explaining things to Gair, or finding Gair in the way when they wanted to shoot. Twice they lost him completely in the tall marsh grass. It grew as high as a man’s head, and to Gair it was like a bamboo forest. Thoroughly exasperated, Gest told one of the girls to look after Gair. She did her best, but Gair was too proud to be carried and would not hold her hand. He kept asking questions too, and he was too young to understand the answers.
The full Moon set. Gest, by this time, had sworn never to bring Gair on a hunt again. He would have gone straight home, except that because of Gair, they had caught next to nothing. They had to go on. At dawn, they had caught sufficient, but they were far out in the marshes. Gair did not think he was enjoying himself any more. He was tired out and slower than ever. Gest debated waiting for night and decided it would be too much for Gair. He trusted to the long white grasses to hide them and they turned back.
In the middle of the morning, they met a party of Giants.
Gair could not think what was going on. The ground seemed to be quivering. Agitated birds went whirling up all round him, but he was suddenly quite alone. There was not a soul, not a dog, in sight. All he could see was grass.
Gest looked between the grasses and saw Gair standing in full view, directly in the path of the Giants. Cursing, he leapt up, threw himself on Gair and rolled with him into the damp bushes beside the nearest dyke.
“What—?” Gair said loudly. Gest pushed his face into the ground.
The booming voice of a Giant said, “What was that? It looked like an animal.” It sounded alarmed.
“Rabbit,” suggested another thunderous voice.
“Too big,” rumbled another. “More like a badger. Let’s see if we can catch it.”
Three or four of the Giants rushed trampling along the edge of the dyke. They had thick sticks, and they jabbed about with them, shouting. The bushes whipped about. The ground shook. Gair lay with most of Gest on top of him, most uncomfortable and utterly terrified. If he moved his face round on the peaty earth, he could see pieces of the bank falling off into the dyke. If he screwed round the other way and squinted, he saw twigs wildly shaking. Once, an enormous blurred foot came heavily down beyond the twigs. Gair winced. The size of the body above that foot must have been horrendous.
Luckily, the Giants had mistaken the place where Gest and Gair were lying. After crashing about for five minutes or so, they became bored and took themselves off, laughing and rumbling, away along the dyke. Eventually, the bank ceased to quake. Gest moved cautiously. Gair bobbed up from underneath, red and indignant with terror.
“Those were Giants! Why didn’t you kill them?”
Gest wondered how to explain that the only thing to do with Giants was to leave them alone. “There are far more Giants than people,” he said. “If we harmed a Giant, they’d kill everybody on the Moor. Get up.”
Gair realised he had said something stupid. That, and the thought of hundreds of huge Giants, so depressed him that tears began to trickle down his face.
Gest picked him up and carried him the rest of the way home. As they went, he went on trying to explain about Giants. “They’re stronger than we are, Gair, and they have a great deal of magic, which makes them very dangerous. And they steal children. If they’d seen you standing there, they’d have taken you away with them. I know. They stole a little girl from Islaw.”
“Why?” said Gair. He was growing sleepy and demanding with jerking about in his father’s warm arms.
“They seem to think they can bring children up better,” Gest explained.
“Tell them they can’t,” Gair suggested.
Gest sighed and explained, several times, that one had nothing to do with the Giants. Nothing. “And certainly not with the Giants near here,” he said. “You see – well – they’re under a curse. It makes them even more dangerous.”
“Why?” said Gair, and fell asleep before Gest answered. He slept the rest of the way back and did not wake until Gest dumped him into Miri’s arms. Gest wondered if Gair would remember anything he had said. He rather thought not. But he was wrong. Gair, though he did not talk about them, thought about Giants often. What puzzled him particularly was the uneasy, almost guilty, way his father had talked about a curse. But he did not ask to go hunting again.
In fact, there was more than enough to do in and around Garholt. Children played, picked fruit, helped with the Feasts and played. They were given lessons by Wise Women and Chanters. Adara taught them to read. Gest himself saw to it that Ayna, Gair and Ceri learned to handle weapons. They learned how to drop out of sight if Giants were near. “Keep still and rely on your clothes to hide you,” Miri impressed on them. “Giants don’t see much. Your coats are the colour of the marsh and Moor, so drop and lie. Don’t stir a finger and you’re safe.” Before long, Gair could do this without needing to think. He was ashamed of the way he had behaved on the hunt.
The other early lessons were about Dorig. They were warned, over and over, never to go near standing water unless it had been made safe. They were warned to watch for the thorn trees that showed water was safe from Dorig. The first words of power they learnt were those which made water safe. They were made to say them till they could say them in their sleep. They were told, almost as often, that Dorig were shape-shifters and never to trust any animals they did not know. But they were not taught the words to shift a Dorig to its true shape. Adara forbade it.
Meanwhile, it was discovered that Ayna’s Sight was very clear indeed. She could foretell the future as far on as anyone could test. She was consulted frequently. She often talked to Gair about it, usually at night, sitting up very straight in bed because the responsibility weighed on her. For the Gift was quite as mysterious to Ayna as it was to anyone else.
“You see, I don’t know the future,” she would explain. “You have to ask me a question. And then I know the answer, without knowing I knew. And I don’t know any more until someone asks me something else.”
Gair listened humbly and nodded. When Ayna talked like this, he knew how ordinary he was.
“The worst of it is,” Ayna said, “they can ask me the wrong questions. I won’t know they have. Suppose I’m asked if food will be plentiful, and I say Yes. And it turns out that there’s plenty of food because the Giants have killed most of us. It worries me. Do you see?”
Gair nodded and tried to feel sympathetic, as far as an ordinary person could. But it was hard not to feel saddened too. And it was worse when Ceri’s Gift was discovered.
Ayna and Gair had known about Ceri’s Gift for nearly a year before Miri discovered it. It was very useful to be able to say, “Ceri, where’s our ball?” and be told it had stuck between the second and third stones of the fourth well. But they kept it to themselves. Ayna said, “Don’t tell a soul. The little beast will get more spoilt than ever if they find out he’s useful.”
Ceri was certainly spoilt. He had big blue eyes, clustering black curls and an enchanting smile. He made shameless use of all three. He could get exactly what he wanted from anyone, from Gest to the stupid young man who worked the bellows in the forge. But Ceri was no fool. He very soon grasped that no one else could find things as he could.
Unknown to Ayna and Gair, he began to make shameless use of that too. One day, Miri found him in a ring of older children. Ceri was saying, “Tops and balls are a handful of nuts – a real handful, Lanti, not just a few – but I need a honeycake to find your knife, Brad.”
Miri’s sister had had Finding Sight. It was not as uncommon as Ayna’s Gift. She tumbled at once to what was going on. She broke up the group and led Ceri by one ear to where Gest was. “Do you know what this child of yours has been up to?” she said.
Gest looked down into Ceri’s blue eyes. “What was it?” he said, doing his best to sound stern. No one but Ayna and Gair found it easy to be angry with Ceri. But Gest pretended fairly well. Ceri’s knees knocked.
“I caught him asking a whole honeycake to find a knife!” said Miri. “And for all I know he may not have Finding Sight at all. Ask him where that spearhead you lost is. Go on.”
Gest had to try hard not to laugh at Ceri’s enterprise, but he asked, pretty sternly. Ceri quaked and wondered if he dared lie. But all Sight forces you to be truthful – unless you hold your tongue, and Ceri dared not hold his. “Gair’s got it,” he quavered. “He’s using it to dig with, by the beehives.”
Gest strode to the hive-gate, snapped out the words and stormed outside. Sure enough, there was Gair, using the head of a prime hunting-spear as a trowel to make mud-pies with. The bees came out of their clay tunnels to defend Gair, saw it was Gest and went in again. The upshot was that Gair was in dire trouble, and Ceri was given a double-twisted collar like Ayna’s.
“I couldn’t help it! Really!” Ceri protested, when Gair came to hand some of his punishment on to Ceri.
“He probably couldn’t,” said Ayna. “A Gift makes you tell when you’re asked. Just hit him once to stop him getting spoilt.”
Gair was forbearing. He hit Ceri twice. He was fairly sure nothing would stop Ceri getting even more spoilt anyway. And certainly the presents Ceri got to find things after that would have corrupted Ban the Good himself.
“He’ll be as odious as Ondo if this goes on,” Ayna said gloomily.
“No one could be,” said Gair.
In fact, Ceri stayed much the same. He had had all the attention he could wish for before his Gift was discovered and he was perfectly happy. It was Gair who changed. He was now convinced to the core of his being that he was unspeakably ordinary. He suspected that his parents, Gest particularly, were secretly disappointed in him. He took to spending long hours on his favourite windowsill, one hand hooked into his plain gold collar, brooding over what he could do about it.
It was a splendid windowsill. Gair had been going there ever since he was large enough to make the climb. It looked out above the beehives to a wide view across the Moor. Even before Ceri’s Gift was discovered, Gair had liked sitting there alone, watching the Giants’ flat fields, the woods and the ever-waving marsh grasses change with the changing weather. From it, you could watch a rainstorm march clear across the Moor, in a sky-tall column of grey and white. The bees buzzed beneath the window on the outside. On the inside, the looms clacked steadily and the people at them talked and laughed. You had the advantage of smelling the Moor under rain and Sun and, at the same time, all the homely smells of Garholt: wool, cooking, smoke, leather, people. But now Gair spent so much time there that everyone came to think of that windowsill as his place. Few people would have climbed up there unless he let them.
After some weeks of brooding, it occurred to Gair that one way to stop being ordinary was to have wisdom, like his mother. People came from all over the Moor to consult Adara. And she was only too willing to teach him. Gair was so fired by this notion, that, for one wild moment, he had impossible dreams of becoming a Chanter. But he knew that was out of the question. He was not very musical, and he would be Chief after Gest. Chiefs were never Chanters. But anyone could have wisdom, if they were willing to learn.
Gair threw himself into learning. Much of it was words. Gair already knew the simplest and most practical words, which many people never got beyond: words for fastening and unfastening, entering and leaving, invoking and dismissing, blessing and cursing. Now he learned new words and the rules for combining them in new ways. Before long, he had overtaken even Banot’s son, Brad, and knew how to fix the green gold so that it could be worked; how to make food grow and herbs heal; how to give cloth the power of concealment; and how to divine weather. Then, to his delight, Adara began to show him something of the rules behind all this, the more hidden knowledge of the dangerous, narrow path between Sun, Moon and planets, without which the stronger words were useless. Gair began dimly to see that one could call on the power in everything, provided one knew when and how to do it.
Adara was often very pleased with him. Whenever he saw she was pleased, Gair tried to coax his mother to tell him something he and Ayna had always longed to know: the story of Gest’s three tasks from her point of view. But Adara never would tell him. She simply laughed and changed the subject.
What with Adara’s teaching and Gest’s instruction, Gair was said to be very accomplished. The time came when the children and young dogs were taken out on a training hunt, and Gair was expected to do well. It was very different from Gair’s first hunt. They had the good luck to meet one of the rare herds of deer that sometimes strayed down into the Moor. Gair staggered home under a heavy hind he had killed himself. His parents were pleased. Banot praised him. Gair was proud and pleased himself. But it made no real difference. He still knew he was ordinary.
No one else thought he was. The opinion in Garholt was that Gair was the most extraordinary of Gest’s three children. People said confidently that when Gair had done all the thinking he needed and left his windowsill, you would not find a better Chief. They would not have believed Gair if he told them he was ordinary. And he was much too reserved to do that.
Gest found Gair extraordinary too. He had never got over his first awe of Gair as a solemn baby. Then Gair, instead of behaving like other children, chose to spend hours sitting on that windowsill of his. “What’s the matter with the boy?” Gest kept asking Adara.
“Nothing,” Adara always answered. “He just likes to be alone.”
Gest could not understand it. He liked to live surrounded by other people. Things he did not understand always irritated him. He tried to be fair, but he could not manage to show as much affection to Gair as he did to Ayna and Ceri. Gair saw it. He knew his father was disappointed with him for turning out so ordinary. He went on to his windowsill all the more to avoid Gest. And the longer he spent there, the less Gest could understand him. By the time Gair was twelve, no two people in Garholt understood one another less than Gest and Gair.
Shortly after Gair’s twelfth birthday, Ondo came to pay a visit in Garholt. With him came Kasta his mother, Fandi his nurse, and his two friends Scodo and Pad.
“I wish Ondo was more likeable,” Ayna sighed. “We might get him to tell us about Father’s three tasks.”
But Ondo was not likeable. All they ever got out of him on that subject was a knowing sneer, and sniggers from Scodo and Pad. Ondo detested his three cousins. In Ondo’s opinion, no one was so fine a person as Ondo of Otmound, and he could not tolerate anyone who threatened to dim that fine person’s glory. Ayna and Ceri dimmed it by being Gifted, so he hated them heartily. But it was Gair he hated most. Thanks to Miri’s boasting, Ondo knew Gair was supposed to be the most extraordinary of the three, and that was reason enough to detest him.
But it is probable that, even without Miri’s boasting, Ondo would have concentrated his hatred on Gair. The Gifts set Ayna and Ceri apart – but what business had Gair, with no more Gifts than Ondo, to look at Ondo in that solemn, speculative way? It made big, strong Ondo feel small. It also gave him a hazy but certain knowledge that Gair was more easily hurt than the other two. That, and the fact that Gair was more than a year younger and half a head shorter than Ondo, made him the ideal cousin to pick on.
This visit, with Scodo and Pad to support him – “Those two horrid toadies,” Ayna called them – Ondo picked on Gair all the time. He gave Gair no peace. It was not only sly arm twisting and slyer kicks. It was a stream of hints, jeers and abuse: hints that Gair was not quite right in the head, jeers at the way he liked to sit on his windowsill, and reminders that Gest had come from poor, queer Islaw. “You get your bad blood from Islaw,” Ondo said. “Are you quite sure you can’t shift shape?”
Ondo took care never to be far away from his burly friends, or from Kasta or Fandi, so that Gair never had a chance to hit him. He just had to endure it. He was miserable. Ayna and Ceri were furious on his behalf, but there was nothing they could do either. They all counted the days until Ondo went home.
There were only three days left, when Ondo came into the house with Fandi, looking for Ceri, because Fandi had lost a good gold thimble. Ayna, Gair and Ceri were all there, trying to keep out of Ondo’s way. All three sighed when they saw Ondo.
“Your thimble’s in your pocket,” Ceri said coldly to Fandi. Gest had forbidden him actually to ask for presents, but he thought Fandi might have offered him something. Everyone else did.
Ondo said patronisingly to Gair, “Of course, you haven’t any Gifts, have you?”
That hit Gair so much on the raw he could not answer. Ayna said quickly, “Neither have you!”
Ondo saw he had hurt Gair. He was far too pleased to bother with Ayna. He looked at his fingernails and polished them carelessly on his coat. “Oh,” he said, “a man in my position doesn’t need Gifts.”
Gair thought of himself taking Ondo by his gold collar, rushing out of the house and upstairs with him, and plunging him face-foremost into the nearest beehive. If Fandi had not been there, he would have tried to do it. Fandi was nodding and smiling as if they were all the greatest of friends, but Gair well knew that she would bawl for Kasta at the slightest sign of trouble. He had to content himself with advancing grimly on Ondo. Ondo glanced round for Scodo and Pad and remembered they were not there. He went pale, and his sneering grin wavered. Gair pushed contemptuously past him and stalked through Garholt to his windowsill. He wished he had realised before what a coward Ondo was. It made him easier to bear.
In the house, Fandi or no Fandi, Ayna and Ceri were determined to revenge Gair.
“I don’t advise you to talk to Gair like that,” Ayna said. “We’d put words on you, if we didn’t think you were just too stupid to know better.”
Ceri, relying on Fandi to stop any violence, went one better. “It isn’t only that you’re stupid, Ondo,” he explained pityingly. “You’re ugly. Your ears stick out.”
As he said this, Ceri went red with pleasure, and delight at his own daring. He had longed to say it for years. Ondo’s ears sprang from his head like a sheep’s. Unfortunately, Fandi was quite as insulted as Ondo. She had tried every way she knew to make those ears lie flat, and they had defeated her every time. So she made no attempt to stop Ondo when he advanced angrily on Ceri.
“Just you wait!” said Ondo.
Ceri backed away, feeling sick. Ondo towered above him and Ceri knew from painful experience that Ondo was an expert at hurting smaller children. He knew he was in for it, if Fandi was simply going to stand by. “Ayna!” he said hopelessly.
Ayna, in spite of being very much afraid of Ondo, dashed to Ceri’s side. Fandi caught her arm as she passed. Fandi was strong. “Really, Ayna,” she said. “Be a lady.”
Ondo pounced for Ceri and Ceri scudded for the door. Fandi pushed Ayna aside and got in his way. Ceri was terrified. He was also furiously angry, on his own account, on Ayna’s, and most of all on Gair’s. He turned on the pair of them and used a Gift which, up to that moment, he had no idea he possessed.
He did not say anything. He did not seem to do anything. But Fandi screamed. She clutched her head and her face went yellowish. As for Ondo, he gave a queer squawk and stuck, just as he was, with his arms crookedly outstretched to grab Ceri. “He looked exactly like a crayfish!” Ayna told Gair afterwards.
Paralysed and panic-stricken, Ondo shrieked the worst insult he knew. “You – you little Dorig!”
Ceri looked at them for a moment, with his own face rather a queer colour. Then he ran out of the house and hid behind the tapestries.
chapter four (#ulink_8bc1b4c6-7f60-55f5-af58-8cb55f131d11)
Gair had never heard anything like the bawling of Fandi and Ondo, and the yells of Kasta, Scodo and Pad on their behalf. He came down from his windowsill to investigate. By then, the whole mound was in an uproar. Gair learnt from Ayna and Miri that his brother had put a Thought on Ondo and Fandi, and, from Miri, that it was going to take the next three days to get it off them. There was great excitement, because the Gift of Thought was an extremely rare Gift. The last person to have it had died over a hundred years before.
None of this mattered to Kasta. She just wanted Ceri punished for damaging her Ondo. In intervals of wringing her hands over the stuck, crooked Ondo, she searched for Ceri and made everyone else search too. Ayna and Gair did their best for him by suggesting all sorts of places where Ceri could not possibly be. But Kasta found him in the end – “She would!” said Ayna – and dragged him to Gest. Gest took his shoe to Ceri.
After that, Gest went to order the making of the triple gold collar Ceri was now entitled to. Adara caught his arm and stopped him. “Why?” Gest said crossly. “Kasta can shout all she likes, but I’d bet half the gold in Garholt it was all Ondo’s fault.”
“I’m sure it was,” said Adara. “But Ceri’s far too conceited already. Give him the collar when he’s old enough to have earned it. For the moment, I think this Gift is best forgotten.”
Gest thought she was right, on reflection. Thought was a very dangerous thing in the hands of someone like Ceri. So Adara called Ceri aside and talked to him. She explained that the Gift of Thought was a serious responsibility: it could do a great deal of harm. Ceri was neither old enough nor sensible enough to use it. Therefore, he was not being given a triple collar yet, until he could prove he knew how to use the Gift responsibly. In the meantime, he was utterly forbidden to put Thoughts on people and was to do his best to forget he had the Gift. Adara talked for a long time, and Ceri cried.
When Adara had finished, he crept miserably away among the clacking looms to Gair’s windowsill and asked Gair if he could come up. Gair agreed. He did not blame Ceri for wanting to be private too. But Ceri did not want to be private. He wanted to consult Gair.
Gair, to his great astonishment, discovered that his habit of sitting apart on the windowsill had given him a reputation for wisdom among all the children in Garholt. Gair was ashamed. He wanted to explain to Ceri that he only sat there because he was ordinary, but he had not the heart to. Ceri was sniffing and sobbing and trusted Gair to help him.
“I don’t mind about the collar,” he said. “Or the things Mother said. Or Father’s shoe – much. But I don’t know what I did, Gair. I don’t know how to stop doing it again. I’m afraid of killing someone! What shall I do?”
Since Ceri thought he was wise, Gair did not like to disappoint him. He thought about it. “Perhaps,” he said dubiously, “you’d better find out how you did it and practise using it on something that doesn’t matter.” This sounded very feeble to him. “Then you wouldn’t do it by accident,” he said.
Ceri seemed to think this was perfectly good advice. “Yes. But I don’t know what I did,” he said dolefully.
Gair could not tell him that. All he could say was, “Well, try and remember what you did. Go on. Think.”
“All right.” Ceri sat beside Gair on the sill, with his knees drawn up beside his ears and his hands between his feet, and thought until Gair was bored. At last he said doubtfully, “I think I sort of pointed a piece of the inside of my head at them.”
“Then try and do it again now,” said Gair.
“What on? I’m not supposed to use you,” said Ceri.
Gair had worn the windowsill smooth. There was nothing there Ceri could use. Gair looked out at the bees – but you did not meddle with bees for a number of good reasons – and thought over the things in his pockets. He had nothing in them that he was willing to let Ceri spoil. He could think of only one thing that might do. “Here you are.” He took the gold collar off his neck, careful to keep hold of either end so that it would not start turning to black ore again, and held it out towards Ceri. “Try and break this in two.” Ceri looked awed by Gair’s daring. “Go on,” said Gair. “Plain collars are easy to mend, if you can’t.”
“All right.” Ceri clasped his arms round his knees and stared at Gair’s collar. Nothing happened. Gair was just about to give up and put the collar back on again, when Ceri’s eyes widened. Gair found his hands moving apart from one another, each holding half of the collar. “I did it!” said Ceri. Both of them burst out laughing.
“Now mend it,” said Gair.
“Ooh!” said Ceri. “Suppose I can’t?”
“I’ll get into trouble. Not you. Go on. Try.”
Gair held out the two halves. Ceri tried. The effect was immediate, but unexpected. The collar leapt together, dragging Gair’s hands with it. One piece slid on top of the other and, the next second, Gair was holding one half of a collar twice as thick. He was forced to laugh again at the frantic bewilderment on Ceri’s face.
“Oh dear!” said Ceri.
“Try again,” said Gair. “We’ll both get into trouble if it stays like this.”
Ceri knelt up and tried earnestly. The collar grew between Gair’s hands, and grew, and went on growing, until Gair was holding both ends of a gold wire. The wire tied itself into a bow. The bow compressed into a little gold bar. It took Ceri half an hour to work Gair’s collar back to its proper shape, and by that time they were both weak with laughing. Gair put the collar back on.
“Use something else next time,” he said.
Ceri went away and fetched some marbles. Then, for the next three days, while, from among the houses below came the monotonous chanting of the words which would eventually take the Thought off Ondo and Fandi, Ceri sat on Gair’s windowsill and exercised his Gift. He chopped marbles in two, turned them egg-shaped and rolled them this way and that. Gair grew heartily bored and longed to have his windowsill to himself again. But he saw Ceri felt safest there. He thought Gair was wise enough to protect him from the consequences of his new Gift. Gair felt a fraud, but he had not the heart to turn Ceri out.
Gest saw Ceri sitting up there and began to feel that both his sons were turning out peculiar. “I think they’d both better come on the next hunt,” he told Adara. Adara agreed, thinking it would help Ceri to forget about his latest Gift.
Ondo and Fandi were themselves again on the third day. Orban arrived with an escort to take them home again, and they left. Kasta gave Ceri – and Gair too – very baleful looks before she went. She was convinced Gair had egged Ceri on.
That same evening, Ceri put his marbles in his pocket, smiled happily and told Gair he knew how to manage Thoughts now. Gair was relieved. But the peace he was looking forward to was shattered when Gest told him he and Ceri were coming on the hunt.
Gair enjoyed hunting, these days, but Ceri loathed it. So far, Ayna and Gair had prevented Gest finding out. Gest would have been furious to find any son of his did not love to hunt. Gair’s heart sank, because he would be responsible for Ceri. They would be out two days too, for the great midsummer Feast of the Sun was near and had to be provided for. Ayna had been consulted and she had said there would be deer again, in the north-east of the Moor. Gair thought he would be lucky to get Ceri all that way without some kind of trouble.
There was every kind of trouble. Ceri made every possible mistake and contrived to get left behind whenever he could. He hated every minute, and said so. By dawn on the second day, Gair was thinking that it was rather to his credit that he had only hit Ceri nine times in all: six times when he richly deserved it, and three times to stop him complaining in Gest’s hearing. They trailed through a rushy meadow hung with mist. The coming dawn made the grass as white as the mist and the chill struck through to their bones. They were behind as usual. Ceri was wailing that he needed a rest or he would die, and Gair, knowing everyone else was in the next meadow already, took Ceri’s arm and dragged him along.
There was a pool of water in their way, edged with stiff rushes. Because of the whiteness of everything, Gair did not see it until he was in it. They splashed round one end of it and Ceri complained bitterly that his feet were wet now.
A dark shape about the size of Gair loomed at them through the mist. Ceri’s whine stopped in a squeak. Gair jumped. But the shape was only a red stag, about to make off across the meadow.
“Quick!” Gair shouted to Ceri. In great excitement, he levelled his spear and ran through the whiteness to head the stag off. “Quick! Or I’ll hit you again.”
“That’ll be ten times. And I’m cold,” Ceri said sullenly. But, when Gair glanced back to see, he found Ceri had stopped using his spear as a walking stick and was pointing it in the general direction of the stag. If Ceri stood firm – a thing not altogether to be relied on – they could pin the stag between them.
Gair circled quickly beside the pool, trying to drive the stag towards Ceri. But the beast circled with him, keeping its horns lowered. It seemed they had found a crafty one. Gair could not see it very well in the swirling whiteness, but it looked larger than he had thought. Some trick of the mist and the dawn light made its head look higher than his own. The antlers looked wicked. Gair advanced behind his spear, wondering why he felt so cold. And the stag grew again, until it towered over him.
“Gair!” said Ceri, in a squeaky voice of real terror. “Gair, that’s standing water!”
So it was, Gair realised. He had made poor work of looking after Ceri. He thrust at the stag with all his strength, but the spearhead met nothing. The huge antlered shape wavered and swirled into mist, darker and greyer than the white mist around. There was a blast of cold air. Gair backed hurriedly round the pool towards Ceri, water squirting in sheets from under his feet, until they stood shoulder to shoulder. There they watched in fascinated horror the grey mist harden into a tall, tall shape covered in dim silvery scales like armour, a pointed head solidify, a pale face with queer yellow eyes, a round shield and a sharp, bent scimitar. Gair could have kicked himself. He had been told often enough that Dorig were shape-shifters. But he had had no idea they looked so dangerous. He hoped it would not notice how both their spearpoints were juddering.
It came towards them in a wafting, gliding way that had both of them sick with terror. “Keep back!” Gair said to it. It took no notice. Gair wondered if it spoke some other language.
Before he could speak again, Gest’s voice barked, “Stop that, you!”
The Dorig jumped. Gair, feeling weak and bewildered, found that the entire hunt was back and surrounding the pond in the mist. As soon as Gest spoke, the dogs began to paw and snarl to get at the Dorig. Those who were not holding dogs had their spears aimed at it. Slowly and haughtily, the Dorig looked round the hostile ring. It was a good head taller even than Gest. But it still said nothing.
“You’re outnumbered,” said Gest. “There’s nothing you can do. Get out of here.”
The Dorig did not say a word to this, either, but it plainly understood. It simply turned and dived into the pool. It made barely a splash. Smokily, it slid under the surface of the water and was gone, with not much more disturbance than if someone had thrown a small pebble into the pond. Indeed, Gair had the impression that the Dorig did become smaller – almost half the size – before it had quite reached the water.
Gest looked at the rippling white pool for a moment, as if something puzzled him. “Lucky for you two that we missed you,” he said to Gair and Ceri. “Keep up with the rest in future.” He had been pleased to find the two boys standing their ground against a full-grown Dorig warrior, but it never occurred to him to say so.
They felt they were in disgrace. As they moved on again, Ceri burst into tears. He swore to Gair that he was crying out of annoyance. It had never occurred to him to put a Thought on the Dorig. Gair said sourly that it made a good story. He was quite as shaken as Ceri, but he hoped no one had noticed.
“You had a narrow escape,” Brad said, coming up alongside Gair. “Why didn’t you keep clear of the water? Didn’t you notice the cold?”
“Yes. But I thought that was the mist,” Gair admitted. He liked Brad best of all the boys in Garholt, or he would not have admitted it. “Why do they make it cold? Do you know?”
“Fishiness, I expect,” said Brad. “They’re cold-blooded, aren’t they? Ask my father.”
Gair left Ceri with Brad and trotted up beside Banot. Banot grinned. “You’ve got your mother’s knack of asking the difficult questions, Gair. I don’t think they are cold-blooded, but I couldn’t say for sure. As for making it cold, they say the shape-shifting does it. It takes a good deal of heat to shift shapes, and they get it from the air. It’s like – well, you may find it grows cold when Ceri puts a Thought on someone.”
“Thanks,” said Gair. Banot had given him a great deal to think about, but it did nothing to stop his growing feeling of shame. He had been so stupid! He had walked into standing water with Ceri and it had taken the whole hunt to rescue them. No wonder Gest was disappointed in him. He longed to prove – to himself at least – that he was not quite that stupid and ordinary. He trotted back and asked Ceri to put a Thought on something.
Ceri, to Brad’s keen amazement, obligingly broke his spear in two and joined it again. But, either this was only a very small Thought, or the dawn mists were still too chilly. Gair could not tell if the air round Ceri had gone any colder. Neither could Brad.
“I’ll do something else when we get home,” Ceri offered. Gair agreed that would be best. They turned for home soon after and Gair thought about their narrow escape most of the way. He had been terrified, he had to admit that. The noisy, heavy Giants beating the bank of the dyke for him had been nothing to the silent silver Dorig. It was the queerness of the Dorig that made it so frightening. Even Banot did not claim to understand or explain them; and Banot, Miri had told Gair, had made quite a study of the Dorig. Gair thought Banot must be a very brave man. He wished he was more like him. He was so ashamed of himself that he began to think he would like to find out more about Dorig too, in spite of his horror at the mere idea. No one thought Banot stupid.
Gair never had a chance to find out if Ceri’s Thoughts made the air cold. They arrived in Garholt that evening with a fair catch, ravenous for the good supper that was waiting. Gair and Ceri both tried not to fall asleep while they ate and told Ayna and Adara about the Dorig.
“It was tall,” Ceri said, yawning, with his mouth full. “I couldn’t believe even Dorig—”
There was a violent hammering at the main gate. A woman’s voice screamed, “Dorig!”
All the chatter at the eating-squares stopped. Before anyone could move, the words had been spoken and the gate rumbled open.
“Dorig!” shrieked Kasta, towing a green-faced terrified Ondo. “You have to help us, Gest!”
Streaming into the mound behind Kasta came a host of people from Otmound. All were white and frightened. Some were wet; some, Orban among them, were hacked and bloody. They had cooking-pots, bundles, spindles, babies and all the gold they could wear. Sheep, dogs and cats came streaming into the mound amongst them.
For a time, there was desperate confusion. The Garholters had to leave their supper unfinished and find food, beds and medicine for the fugitives. And, as Kasta kept screaming that the Dorig had chased them the whole length of the old road, the Garholt sheep had to be got inside and the doors locked as quickly as possible. Gair found himself with Brad, both of them yawning till their ears cracked, guarding Ayna and the other girls, who were running about by Moonlight, shrieking the words to the sheep, which had scattered for the night nearly as far as the old road itself. They were relieved but puzzled not to see a single Dorig.
“Just as well,” said Brad. “I think I’d snore in their faces. What do you think happened?”
Gair wanted to know that too, but he had to wait until the sheep were in, the doors locked, watch posted and the fugitives all settled in somewhere. Orban, Kasta and Ondo were, of course, settled in Gest’s house. Ayna, Gair and Ceri all gathered to watch Orban, with his wounds now bathed and bandaged, drink mug after mug of beer and explain what had happened.
The long and short of it was that the Dorig had driven them from Otmound. That afternoon, the wells of Otmound had begun to overflow. While the Garholt hunt had been peacefully making its way home, Og’s people had been struggling to hold back a flood which no words would stem. The water ran from the wells, filled the mound and went on rising. By Sundown, the flood had reached the rooftops and everyone was forced to go outside. And outside, the Dorig were waiting.
“Crafty swine!” said Orban. “It was just like smoking out bees. They hid in the Haunted Mound and waited for us to come out.”
Orban and Og rallied those who could fight and attacked the Dorig, while the rest got away with their possessions. The fight had gone very badly. Og was killed. Orban had been forced to run for it with the rest of the fighting-men, and the Dorig had pursued them. But the Dorig had not been anxious to go beyond the thorn trees along the first Giant road – Kasta, as usual, had overstated the case – and had turned back to Otmound. Orban had caught up the rest and they had come on to Garholt as fast as they could.
“And you’d better watch that they don’t try that trick with the wells here,” Orban said, passing his mug to Miri for more beer.
“They can’t,” Gest said confidently. “All our wells are protected.” He pointed to the nearest, with its rounded stone hood and the twig-shaped writing on the stonework, which was the indoor equivalent of a thorn tree.
“I hope you’re right,” Orban said glumly.
Gair looked from his uncle’s weary face to the tears running down his mother’s. In a shocked, distant way, he knew there had been a terrible disaster. War, he thought. But it did not feel like that. He could not imagine Otmound as an underground lake or think of more than one Dorig at a time. As for Og, it was a shame, but to Gair he was a fussy old grandfather whom Gair had not known very well, or to tell the truth, liked very much. He looked at Ayna and Ceri’s sober faces and saw they felt the same.
The important thing to all three was that here was Ondo back again after only two days, and the important question was when was he going?
chapter five (#ulink_fc73acc9-189d-5d9a-b6a8-c1a5321e5c82)
That night, Ondo had Gair’s bed again and he had to share with Ceri. Neither of them slept as well as they wanted. Gair woke feeling gloomy and apprehensive. He could hear the double flock of sheep bleating, the girls at the lookout posts calling to one another, and Orban snoring. That in itself would have made anyone gloomy. But Gair felt uneasy too, in a way he could not explain. He forgot that he had intended to find out whether Ceri’s Thoughts made the air cold and hung about with most of the rest of Garholt, waiting for news.
Gest had sent Banot over to Otmound in the early hours of the morning. He came back, red-eyed and fagged, soon after midday. Gair and Ceri wriggled near enough to hear what he said. It was not cheering. Banot had gone right up to Otmound to find water running out of it and the fields beyond it turning into a marsh. He could see it was still flooded.
“Then the Dorig saw me,” he said. “They came running out of the Haunted Mound – they seem to have made a camp there – and the captain – he was a long, tall one with a big opinion of himself – called out to know what I wanted.”
“You were lucky they didn’t kill you first and ask after,” Orban said. Gair was chiefly surprised that Banot and the Dorig could understand one another.
Banot winked and tapped his harp. “Dorig love music,” he said. “He waited till I’d finished playing, and then I asked what was going on. Told him I was making enquiries from Garholt. He didn’t say too much, but he told me they were going to live in Otmound in future. They want to keep it for themselves.”
“Let them try!” Orban said angrily. “What then?”
“He went away for a bit and set a guard over me,” said Banot. “I began to wonder whether I would come back. But he must have gone to ask advice, I think, because he came back and said two things. One was that they’d got their revenge for that battle the year Gest did those tasks. The other was that their King was not going to attack Gest. May I get some sleep now? I’m worn out.”
“What did he mean by that?” Orban demanded.
“He didn’t say,” said Banot, who seemed to be falling asleep where he stood.
Gest smiled and signalled to Tille to get Banot away to bed. Then, still smiling, he turned to Orban. “This is a very sad business,” he said. “But don’t think you and your people have nowhere to go. You must make your home with us for as long as you need.”
Ceri gave a small moan of dismay. Gair crossed his fingers and prayed to the Sun that Orban would refuse. There must be an empty mound somewhere where the Otmounders could live.
But Orban laughed and clapped Gest on the shoulder. “Thanks. I was hoping you’d say that, Gest. You’re such a good fellow. We’ll fight the Dorig together, then. Drive the brutes out of Otmound and then out of the Moor!”
Gair wondered how his father could smile like that. He wondered how he was going to bear having Ondo living in Garholt. He felt miserable and also indefinably uneasy, worse than he had done when he woke up that morning. He tried to explain to Adara how he felt.
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