“As I see,” the King said coldly, raising his eyes to Hafny’s curly head. “I can’t think what you thought you were doing.” Suddenly he seemed sick of Hafny. He turned his face away. “Go away,” he said. “Get out.”
Hafny shrank into himself and almost slunk to the doorway. He did not look at Gair and Gerald, and neither of them liked to look at him. They heard him say, behind them, “You mustn’t hurt them. They came in good faith.”
“Get out!” said the King. His voice put Gair in mind of Gest’s belt whistling through the air. From the way Gerald’s face twisted, it had the same kind of associations for him. They heard Hafny’s soft footsteps leaving. Then the King looked at them and Gair again wondered how they had been mad enough to come here. The answer was not far off. It lay, sickeningly cold, wrapped up against his chest. “What did you do to Hafny to make him bring you here?” the King said.
There was no point saying they had caught Halla. She would be in trouble, too, and the King would still ask why Hafny had not gone back for help. “Nothing,” Gerald said.
“We talked,” said Gair.
“What kind of talk would that be that turns my son into a traitor?” asked the King.
That was a nasty question. Neither of them had seen Hafny’s behavior in this light before, but it was clear that the six Dorig in the room had done so all along. “It was a Thought,” Gair said. “We stopped him shifting shape while we talked to him. It wasn’t his fault.”
“How like Lymen!” said the King. “What did you expect to gain by it?”
Gair knew that, for some reason, his answer had made the King savagely angry, though his calm Dorig features did not show it much. Gerald did not quite see. Or perhaps he did, but despairingly seized the only chance he had yet had to say what he had come to say.
“I wanted to come and ask you where the Halls of the Kings are, sir,” he said. “If there’s enough water there—” He tailed off a little as he saw he was making no impression on the King, but pulled himself together and went on. “My people could pump it out to use, you see, sir, and your people could go and live there again. Then the Moor—”
“Be quiet, Giant!” said one of the old men. He sounded so truly shocked that Gerald muttered, “Well, it’s for the good of both of us,” and fell into rebellious silence.
“Sir, now, am I?” the King said mockingly, and looked at Gair.
Gair, though his stomach was sinking and he knew nothing was any good, felt, like Gerald, that he had nothing to lose in saying why he had come. “I came to ask you to make peace with my people.”
“Haven’t you anything useful to say?” the King asked crushingly.
“Yes,” said Gair, fighting against a sense of doom and failure worse than he had felt in Garholt. He dragged the cold bundle with the collar in it out of his jacket. He did not want to. But he felt that the one good he might do was to get the Songmen to lift the curse. And he knew a curse made you want to keep the thing that was cursed. In fact, at that moment, the curse and his Gift were in such raging conflict that he had no idea which was telling him to do what. He held the damp bundle out toward the three Songmen. “I wanted to ask you about this. There’s a curse on it, and it may be lying on you, too.”
“What is it?” asked the one who seemed chief Songman.
“A collar—one of your kind,” Gair explained. “My father gave it to”—he did not like to give Gerald’s name—“his father, years ago, to move the stone on top of the Haunted Mound.”
Before the Songman could move, the King held out his long pale hand. “Let me see.”
Gair went up to him and reluctantly put the bundle in his hand. He did not want to give it to the King at all. And the King shivered as he took it and looked up into Gair’s face in a very odd way. Gair looked down into the golden-brown eyes, which were curious even for a Dorig, and wondered why the King was staring at him like that. Since collars were in his mind, he also wondered why the King’s collar, instead of being rich and elaborate like the others in the room, should be a plain twist of gold, of very ordinary workmanship. Perhaps it was some back-to-front custom.
“Where’s your collar?” said the King. “You had one yesterday.”
“I gave it to him,” Gair said, nodding at Gerald.
The King shrugged and delicately unwrapped the wet bundle of sacking. The paper bags underneath were sodden. The King’s white fingers peeled them away. And there lay the collar, a rich poisonous gleam under the plastic. The King’s face went gray-white. The five other Dorig drifted away from it, muttering uneasily. Waves of evil poured from the green gold, as if the bag was no barrier at all. Gair had to back away and hang onto Gerald for support, and he could feel Gerald shivering in spite of the warmth.
“Tell me about this,” the King said to the chief Songman.
The Songman’s face looked deathly. “I hardly like to,” he said.
“Then I’ll tell you,” said the King. “It was a very strong curse, a dying curse, and it was uttered in the name of all three Powers.” At that, the five other Dorig made the same small, frightened sign. “But the curse is weaker now than it was,” said the King. “This collar gave itself as a reward, fifteen years ago, to those who dared weaken it by moving the stone from the Mound of Sorrow. By that, the dead men there were set free and the Old Power was appeased. In its absence, the curse could be lifted.” Dimly, through the flood of evil, Gair saw the King was looking at him. “What would you give to have this curse lifted?” he asked, and his soft voice seemed to come and go on the pulses from the collar.
Gair hardly knew what to say. The collar and the Gift he was still barely used to clashed in his head, a wild mingling of hope and despair, and one of them made him say, “I’d give a great deal. Anything.”
“Me, too,” said Gerald.
Quickly, the King sat up straight and wrapped the sacking back over the collar. “You heard that, all of you. We need a willing sacrifice for each Power remaining, and here they are. Take these two away and prepare them for sacrificing.”
At least ten silver warriors were in the room before Gair understood what was happening. “Look here,” Gerald was saying loudly. “You can’t do this! We’re ambassadors.”
“It was lucky Hafny forgot to promise you should go back,” the King said calmly. Then, not at all calmly, he said to Gair, “And I’ve never made a sacrifice so gladly!” Gair wondered what he had done to make the King hate him so.
They were hustled helplessly away among staring Dorig, down a long hall and into a small place with a thick door. The warriors thrust them inside it so hard that they both stumbled right to the far end and, before they could turn round, the thick door slammed behind them. Gair’s first act was to whirl round and say the words for opening that door. But it remained fast shut. Vary the words as he would, Gair made no impression on it. Just as Gair’s people knew how to make water safe from Dorig, so Dorig knew how to make doors safe from Lymen.
Chapter
14
CERI AND AYNA SAID GOOD-BY TO BRENDA AND set off to find their father as soon as the moat had ceased to swirl and they were sure no more bubbles were rising to the surface. Brenda was doleful at their going, but they could not help that. They waved and walked briskly away across the tufty field.
Gest and the hunt were not as far away as Ayna had supposed. Ceri said he thought they must be on their way back. He took Ayna to a bushy wood, just on the edge of the marshes. There, Ayna had that usual queer moment when she thought there was nobody there at all. Then a dog roused and stood wagging its tail at them. Ayna’s eyes cleared and she saw the shapes of people sleeping under blankets everywhere she looked, blankets so much the color of the ground and the grass that they were as hard to see as a speckled moth on a tree trunk.
“Father!” called Ceri.
When Gest sat up sleepily, brushing dead leaves from his golden beard, he seemed for a moment unnaturally small. After a day among Giants, even Gest’s open ruddy face seemed little
and delicate. He blinked bright blue eyes at them, startled and a little cross to be woken in the middle of the day after a hard night’s hunting. Ayna found she had never realized before how much she loved him. She flung herself on him and burst into tears.
“Oh, Father! The most awful things have happened!”
She and Ceri shouted one another down to tell him. People sat up all round, dismayed and sleepy. Ondo’s teeth chattered. Orban kept saying, “Ban’s bones! This won’t do!” And Banot got up on one knee to give Gest a meaning look.
“Said he wouldn’t attack you.”
“Yes,” said Gest. “Someone we know being too clever by half. Where’s Gair? I don’t understand where Gair’s got to.”
“He’s hiding behind a Giant somewhere, I bet,” said Ondo.
Ayna and Ceri explained that Gair had gone with Gerald to the halls of the Dorig, taking the collar with him. “And Gair has Sight Unasked, Father. He knew there was a curse on it.”
Gest got to his feet, looking thoroughly alarmed. “I know that!” he said tetchily. “He warned me. Why didn’t you stop him going? It’s the worst thing he could have done.”
Ondo, who had not a word to say, had to content himself with looking superior. Orban said, “It never does any good to talk to Dorig. The only good Dorig are dead ones. But I always did think the boy was odd, Gest.”
“Oh be quiet!” Gest bellowed, rounding on Orban. “None of this would have happened if you hadn’t murdered the King of the Dorig’s brother!”
There were shocked, angry murmurs from most of the Otmounders.
“For the sake of a collar with a curse on it,” said Gest.
The murmurs died away as everyone saw the curious yellow color of Orban’s face. “Who told you that?” he said. “Adara swore—”
“Adara kept her word. The King told me himself,” said Gest. “Pack, everyone. Strike camp and leave the catch here.” He whipped up his own blanket and folded it. “Hurry. We must get to Garholt.”
“That’s right,” Orban said, making an unconvincing effort to be natural. “Let’s kill all the damn Dorig we can!”
“Oh no, we will not!” said Gest. “Unless you want Kasta’s throat cut, of course.” Everyone was now feverishly folding blankets and strapping up bags. Gest called out so that they should all hear, “If any one of you raises a hand against a Dorig, I shall say words he will feel even beyond the grave. Now move. You can pack properly as you go.”
Aunt Mary sat in her kitchen and read Gerald’s note for the fourth time. The house felt emptier and quieter than she had known it for years. Gerald probably out for lunch, those three strange little children departed without warning and her brother still cavorting all over the Moor with that Mr. Claybury when they must know it was lunchtime. How thoughtless everyone was! Aunt Mary did not believe for an instant that those three children would come back to thank her, as Gerald’s note said. And to add to her annoyance, that gross, fat child Brenda was hanging about the house, crunching around in the gravel and breathing like a sheep wth asthma. Why couldn’t she go home?
Brenda, at that moment, put her head round the back door. “Is Gerald back yet, Miss Masterfield?”
“No he is not! Will you go home!” snapped Aunt Mary. “Dear,” she added, not to sound unkind.
Brenda, without a word, shut the back door again. At the same moment, someone knocked at the front door. Sighing, Aunt Mary got up and answered it.
The thinnest child Aunt Mary had ever seen stood on the doorstep in a pool of water. It was wearing an odd kind of frogman’s suit. Aunt Mary could not tell whether it was a girl or a boy—you so seldom could these days, she thought—but she nevertheless looked the child searchingly in the face in hopes of a clue. It was horribly pale, and the eyes that met hers were a deep amber yellow—just like a goat’s, thought Aunt Mary. “Good God!” she told it weakly.
“Could I speak to Brenda, please?” the strange child asked anxiously. It had a peculiar lisping voice.
“Brenda doesn’t live here,” said Aunt Mary. “Dear.”
The child looked so cast down that Aunt Mary was almost glad when Brenda burst round the side of the house like a stampeding carthorse, shouting, “Halla! What’s the matter? Where’s Gerald?”
Aunt Mary was not the most sensitive of Giantesses, but something in the manner of both girls made her pause in the middle of shutting the front door and ask, “Is something wrong?”
The strange girl looked at her blankly. “Oh no. I’ve just come to ask Brenda something.” And Brenda, with her mouth stretched into a long, false smile, added, “Nothing’s wrong at all.”
Aunt Mary shut the front door, slightly uneasy. Then, because she was not the kind of Giantess to whom things happen, she went to bed with a headache, wondering why the house felt so peaceful for once.
Outside, Brenda took Halla’s slippery elbow and towed her over the bridge and out onto the gravel, where they would not be overheard. “What is it, Halla?”
“Hafny,” Halla said wretchedly. “I’ve got him here. I daren’t tell his mother, let alone Father. So you have to help me.” Puzzled and alarmed, Brenda watched Halla rip open her silvery jacket and take out a furry thing. She held it out toward Brenda in both long white hands. “Look.” It was something the shape of a ferret. But, if it had eyes, they were tight shut, and it did not have either ears or legs. Brenda found it repellent. She shuddered.
“That’s never Hafny!”
“Yes it is.” There were tears in Halla’s yellow eyes. “I was there when he did it. It’s called morgery, but I’ve never seen it happen before. You’re supposed to stop people before they do it. And I didn’t. I thought he was just making a silly fuss, going on about being a traitor and saying he’d let Gair and Gerald down.”
“He wasn’t a traitor,” Brenda said. “Was he?”
“That’s what I said,” said Halla. “But he was told Father called him one. Then they shut Gair and Gerald up and burned their hair—”
Brenda squawked. She made Halla jump, but the ferret-thing did not move. “Burned their hair!”
“They cut it off first,” Halla explained impatiently. “It’s what they do to dedicate sacrifices.”
“Sacrifices!” squealed Brenda.
Halla saw Brenda was upset. “They won’t feel it,” she said. “And they’re the first there have been for years, so it’s quite an honor. And it’s an honor to hang up to the Sun afterward.”
Brenda knew Halla meant to be kind, but she could have smacked her all the same. “When are they going to do it—this sacrifice?” she demanded.
Halla shrugged. Brenda’s hand almost went out to clout her. “It’s nothing to do with me,” said Halla. “The Feast of the Sun, maybe sooner. I don’t know. But you must help me! Don’t you understand, I unhooded to you! You’ve got to help me get Hafny back before Father finds out!”
She held the furry thing out to Brenda again. She was crying. Brenda simply could not credit that anyone could worry about a thing like that when two people were going to be killed. On the other hand, the shapeless furry creature did look pathetic, lying limply across Halla’s palms—and Hafny seemed to have got that way because he, at least, minded about Gerald and Gair.
“How do you get them back?” Brenda asked gruffly.
“I don’t know,” said Halla. “I know you have to do it soon, or he’ll die.”
Making three of them, Brenda thought. “Well, I don’t know if you don’t. How could I?”
“But you could take him to Adara for me, couldn’t you?” Halla said eagerly.
“Adara? You mean Gair’s mother!”
Halla nodded. “Everyone says she’s famous for healing. Here.” She pushed the furry thing into Brenda’s hands.
Brenda recoiled. But Hafny’s queer form did not feel nearly as unpleasant as it looked. It was as soft and warm and piteous as a sick rabbit. Brenda had half a mind to suggest to Halla that Adara might not feel like healing a Dorig if the Dorig were going
to kill Gair. But Halla was probably too stupid to see that. And Brenda was fairly sure that Adara was the kind of person who would try to cure Hafny simply because he needed it. So all she said was, “Why can’t you take him?”
Halla thought Brenda stupid, too. “Because Garholt is full of our people, of course! Father will find out I didn’t stop Hafny and—tell them anything you like, but don’t say I gave him to you.”
“All right,” said Brenda.
“Thanks.” Halla smiled brilliantly—she might be stupid, but she was very pretty, too, Brenda thought wistfully—and slipped away into the moat almost without a ripple.
Brenda was left holding a warm furry something. She glanced at the house, wondering if she ought to tell Aunt Mary, and decided against it almost at once. If Mr. Masterfield had been there, he might have done something, but Aunt Mary was no good. Brenda clutched the furry shape to her chest and set off at a heavy trot to her own house beyond Gerald’s wood. Gair’s people were the only ones who could help. Besides, she very much wanted to see Adara on her own account.
She lumbered through the wood and along the track to Lower Farm as gently as she could. Every second she held the helpless Hafny she was more sorry for him. She could almost feel how miserable he was. He had hoped for great things.
In the farmyard, her mother’s bicycle, large and old, with string laced over the back mudguard, was leaning against the wall. It had a basket, which would do beautifully for Hafny. Brenda popped him into it and hurried into the house for a cushion to make him comfortable. For once in her life, the smell of Sunday lunch meant nothing to her.
As Brenda dashed out again with the cushion, her mother shouted, “Brenda! Your dinner’s ready.”
Brenda stopped in the middle of the yard to roll her eyes at the sky. Parents! The high sun dazzled her, and she noticed, just above the trees, the white disk of the moon, too. “Do me good to slim!” Brenda bawled as she ran to the bicycle.
As soon as Hafny was safely bedded on the cushion, Brenda set off, pedaling for dear life, up the lane and along the road through the village. Ceri had talked of a wood. Brenda assumed he had meant the one near Garholt, which you could reach from the road beyond the village. While she got herself and Hafny there, she talked to Hafny between puffs and wheezes, trying to comfort them both. “You shouldn’t get like this, Hafny. You don’t want to believe that about traitors. You didn’t join our side, did you? That’s what they do—traitors. Oh, this hill! But it was lucky I didn’t go down in the moat. I was a coward not to, I know that. But just think if I had! Cheer up, Hafny. Those Lymen’ll do something, I know they will, if we get there quick.”