Power of Three (28 page)

“Will you let me in to my father?” Hafny asked them. “It's important.”

“You're to go in,” one of the warriors replied. “He's already heard.”

They separated enough to let Hafny, followed by Gair and Gerald, slip through into the room beyond. “Don't Dorig ever use doors?” Gerald wondered in a rumbling whisper. He stopped suddenly, as he realized he was standing before the King already.

There were six robed and collared men in the room. Two were white-haired and stately. The rest seemed young. Dorig had a way of looking either quite young or very old, with no stages in between. Three of the young-looking ones were probably Songmen, to judge from their collars and the way they had their heads together over a harp. The harp had curious white strings, just like the one string that never broke on Banot's harp. The fourth young-looking man was sitting in a low chair with one leg bandaged and propped on a stool. He was dressed in wide blue robes, with a cloud of dark-honey hair loose on his shoulders, and they might not have recognized him but for his bandaged leg and a slight pink swelling round his left eye. He recognized them. His brown-gold eyes widened and his face became as blank as a carving. Gerald went red, and redder, and redder still, and finally as purple as Brenda, as he took in the fact that he had, yesterday afternoon, shot a hole in the leg of the King of the Dorig himself.

“I'd like an explanation of this, Hafny,” the King said. His soft Dorig voice sounded quiet and reasonable, but they all knew he was ferociously angry. And as soon as he spoke, Gair knew they had been mad to come. Perhaps it was his Gift again, but it hardly needed a Gift to tell him that the King would never forgive Gerald, nor Gair for calling Gerald to the pool. Gerald had made him look ridiculous. He had trodden on the King, and the King had lost his head and turned into a fish three times in quick succession, and Gerald knew he had. Gair needed no Gift to tell him that this was the cause of the King's fury. If there was one thing Gest could not forgive either, it was being made to look ridiculous.

Hafny saw, quite as clearly, that he had been mad to bring Gair and Gerald. His assurance went, like water from a pricked blister, though he tried hard to pretend it was still there. “These two are messengers,” he said. “I brought them here because they have something to say.”

“And how did you meet them?” the King asked.

“Up on land,” Hafny said, with false airiness.

“Unfortunately for you, I know exactly where,” said the King. “You've been in that moat again, haven't you?” Hafny could not deny that, and he did not attempt to. “Consorting with creatures like Giants and Lymen,” said the King. “And you have the face to bring them here. What have you to say?”

Hafny had nothing to say. He looked wretched. Gerald hung his head in embarrassment. Gair looked at the other men in the room, hoping they might defend Hafny, but their faces were serious and shocked, as if they thought Hafny had been very wrong indeed. Gair risked making things worse for Hafny by saying, “We asked Hafny to bring us because we wanted to talk to you.”

It did make things worse. Gair saw from the expression on the King's face that he should have pretended not to know Hafny's name. “Did you?” said the King. “And he doesn't know a spy when he sees one?”

“We're not!” Gerald and Gair said together.

“Be quiet,” said the King. “Hafny, did you promise them anything?”

Hafny was alarmed. “I promised to bring them here.”

“Nothing more?”

The pale flush filled Hafny's face. “Listen,” he said. “I unhooded to them.”

“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.