The Language of Stones

by Robert Carter

  Though Will was called a page he was not treated much differently from the duke’s two elder sons. When they went riding so did he, when they ate supper so did he, when they endured their long lessons so did he. Yet, in some hard-to-grasp way, they managed to remain aloof from him. He did not dislike them for it – this was their home and he was an unwanted guest in it – but he wondered why Edward remained so suspicious of him. And why Edmund, who allowed himself to be ruled so easily by his elder brother, refused his friendship as if attending to some expected duty.

  Edward was as tall and strongly built as Will himself, but he was as changeable as Edmund was constant. Edward’s moods rose and fell, and his manners or temper could not be relied upon. Edward could be generous, but he also liked to be in charge. Will quickly realized that to annoy him he only had to challenge him in some detail. It did not matter how unimportant the detail, Edward would insist to the point of violence if he found that Will disputed it with him.

  Will soon recognized that whenever Edward was trying to insult him he would always call him ‘pageboy’. At such times, Will would put on an annoying smile and tell himself what Gwydion had told him very firmly, that pity was as demeaning and useless an emotion to feel about another as was envy.

  Ewle came and went without snow. There was a feast of sorts, but it was mostly a gloomy time with mournful songs and another grim procession of Fellows. Will watched from what he hoped was a safe distance. Again there were long tapers and droning speeches made by men in golden cloaks and tall hats. Pale light glinted on their ritual fleshing knives. When they spoke they did so in a halting language that Will could not understand. A severed pig’s head was put on a platter, lifted on high and brought into the Great Hall. Salvers of blood were poured into golden basins. And speeches were made wishing a health upon Isnar, the present Grand High Warden of the Fellowship. Only after they had left the castle precinct did Lady Cicely call her children to her and take them down to the Lesser Hall where there was a juggler dressed in red and yellow, and a tumbling dwarf who had bells on his hat, and a man like Jarred, the one who had worked fire at Clarendon Lodge, who blew flames from his mouth and conjured for them and made bangs and sharp smells with sorcerer’s powder. After having seen the real thing, Will thought it all very poor fare.

  But in February, news came that raised everyone’s spirits. The duchess gathered her children and brought in all the heads of the household servants and told them that Duke Richard had lately won a bloodless victory. His patient diplomacy in Trinovant, she said, had convinced many of the lords that he should be allowed to open the Grand Council in the king’s name. And since King Hal continued weak and speechless and unable to handle public affairs, Duke Richard had been awarded the title ‘Lord Protector and Defender of the Realm’.

  To Will’s chagrin, no mention was made of Gwydion, and when he asked the Lady Cicely if there had come any news of the wizard she smiled at him in a kindly, regretful way and said that she had heard no word of him at all.

  ‘The Crowmaster is always late,’ Edward said, believing himself to be funny. ‘Just like you, he doesn’t know what a clock is.’

  ‘He comes when it pleases him and he leaves when it pleases him. That’s what you mean,’ Will said.

  ‘Don’t tell me what I mean, pageboy. I know what I mean and I mean what I say.’

  ‘But you don’t always say what you know,’Will said cryptically, then he added a bit too loudly. ‘And half the time you don’t know what you say.’

  ‘I heard that, pageboy!’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Take it back!’

  ‘If you like. Consider it taken back.’ He offered his insincerest smile, hoping it would enrage Edward further, but this time Edward was minded to accept what he supposed was an apology. He barges about like a bull in a bottle shop, Will thought, amused. What an idiot, when there’s no need for it.

  As the icy blasts of February gave way to the rain of March everyone found themselves longing for more good news, but what came next was more disturbing. Parties of armed men had clashed in the Northern Marches. The queen’s men and friends of the Duke of Mells were riding about like reivers and robbers, stirring up trouble for anyone with links to the house of Ebor. Now the rumours spoke of orders sent out across the land telling the most powerful lords to raise troops for duty on the king’s behalf. And what that portended Will could easily guess. While winter’s icy touch lay upon the land, he found that good cheer remained hard to come by. More than once he saw columns of men marching by the castle and soldiers foraging the distant fields. Numerous lordly retinues travelled up and down the Realm on the Great North Road, coming in sight of the highest tower of Foderingham and causing the guards to stand vigil in doubled strength all night.

  Throughout the long weeks of cold Will endured the simmering dislike of Edward. But he had learned by now to hold himself in check. Each time the duke’s son made a remark calculated to rile him, he would shrug it away like water off a duck’s back. He tried to be a man about Edward, tried to do as Gwydion would have counselled – to see things from the other person’s point of view and to make broad allowances for his failings. But it was not easy.

  Gwydion had said that the seven human failings were built on the three weaknesses, though he had not really explained what those were. The failings were, so far as Will could remember: pride, vanity, tyranny, wrath, sloth…and a couple of others which he could not readily call to mind. Edward was certainly prideful and vain. He was also apt to be tyrannical when he thought he could get away with it. As for wrath, he was quite hot-tempered, and if sloth showed itself as a lack of conscientiousness in lessons, then Edward was that too.

  But Edward was also hard to despise. In truth, Will genuinely felt sorry for him. Duke Richard was so much the master here, and so much at the centre of everyone’s thoughts, that no one else seemed to matter. During the duke’s absence everything fell silent and dark, and it was not just the inactivity of winter that was the cause. There was a noticeable emptiness, a sense that everyone was waiting for their lord’s return. And no one felt that loss as keenly as Edward.

  It was no way to live. News was hoped for daily, and when some snippet came it was treasured and mulled over and looked at from every angle. Only Lady Cicely knew the real contents of the letters that came by exhausted rider under the duke’s personal seal and signet. Will had once seen impressed into the hard red wax the shape of a fourleaf clover and three flowers. But though the duchess often broke the seal while they watched, she would never read out the duke’s letters in full. And when it came to it she did no more than tell of inconsequential things and then assure everyone of their father’s continuing good health and best wishes.

  But if time spent gathered in the Great Hall was bittersweet, then that spent in the school room was gall. Tutor Aspall insisted they study great books. He made them learn and recite the names of the thirty-nine earldoms of the Realm. He told them in his high, precise voice about valorous deeds. ‘A knight must ever seek to avenge wrongs,’ he assured them. ‘He must protect the weak and give charity unto the needy. Neither does a knight knowingly abandon a friend, but shows courage in the fray and gives quarter to all who cry for it. Always he fights with honour, and is mindful of his oaths.’

  And of honour their tutor told them: ‘A knight must always keep his word. No secret and no comrade may he ever betray. Never shall he tell a lie, for this is called chivalry and it is a code that applies to all men of sufficient rank. Now hearken to me, while I read to you from the Lay of Sir Tristrem…’

  Will considered the rules of chivalry, but he was unimpressed by them. It was obvious that all those complicated regulations could be thrown out and replaced by just one simple rede – the Great Rede, or if not that, then perhaps the special one that counselled, ‘Do not do unto others what you would not have done unto you.’ That was something that never entered anyone’s head at Foderingham, least of all Edward’s. Little of the chivalric code had
rubbed off on him despite all his pretences. He’s riding for a fall, Will thought, as he watched the duke’s heir casually defacing his father’s property with the point of a dagger.

  ‘What are you looking at, pageboy?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’ve never seen one before.’

  Edward held out the dagger. ‘What? It’s just an old doorframe. And anyway it’ll be mine one day.’

  And Will took himself off, saying under his breath, ‘Everything comes full circle in time, Edward. And you’ve yet to learn that.’

  But for all Will’s difficulties, there was one great compensation – Wortmaster Gort.

  TheWortmaster was so called for his knowledge of worts, or plants, of all kinds. Here was a man who though seeming only middling old in years was very ancient. In wisdom he seemed unsurpassed. Yet he was young enough in spirit for he danced through forest and fen like a child. The guards – whom the duke’s children called ‘jacks’ on account of their padded jackets – swore that the Wortmaster had not pruned his badger-streaked beard nor cut one hair of his head within living memory. They said he was a wizard of some kind, though Will knew the jacks had only the haziest idea of what a wizard might be.

  Will knew that Gort was no wizard but that he did understand much that Gwydion taught about magic and the wild world, for he was a loremaster. He could charm blossoms from the bud, and like a Sister of the Wise he had a ‘familiar’ – a fat, white, red-eared rabbit called Osric which could fight cats and win.

  Gort liked to cook for himself, and he liked to brew. The shambles that was his shed contained much that burbled yeastily or stank of decay. Gort stored huge, smelly fungi there and kept rank cheeses wrapped up in cloths. He saved crusts of bread until they went so mouldy that mice would not eat them. And he hung dried herbs from his rafters. Whereas most people’s tongues could make out only the five principal flavours, Gort said his own tongue could distinguish two dozen, and his long nose could smell bluebells in a wood three leagues away. He always wore a long, dark green robe and a grey hat on his head that was as shapeless as a pastry – though with something of the squareness of a scholar’s about it – and embroidered with a leaf.

  He was often to be seen in the gardens, helping to push a barrow of manure, or basking in a corner of the castle grounds that had trapped a little winter sun. He said that whosoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, grow upon a piece of ground where only one had been before, did more for the Realm than the whole tribe of disputatious lords put together. Gort really came alive when he was in a meadow. Then walking with him was a joy. He would go into the beechwoods and slap a hand on one of the great rising silvery-skinned trunks and say, ‘Is this not like the leg of some great grey beast? Ha-har!’ or ‘“The beech he be a sacred tree, good for you and bad for me,” quoth the villain!’ And away he would dance until he came to another tree, when he would say something else like: ‘Shelter not beneath the oak, for he attracts the lightning stroke!’ or ‘Oh, sweet woods how much I do like your solitariness!’ or ‘Elm tree graceful, elm tree tall. Elm tree never let me fall!’

  ‘Is that a spell?’ Will would ask at such times. But Gort would say, ‘Phial, philtre and fiddlededee! Why, no, pilgrim!’ in a way that at once made Will feel foolish for asking, and sure that Gort had said something much more interesting than anything that was as ordinary as a magical spell.

  Inside the castle, Gort’s manner was generally as unassuming as a snail’s, but in the fields it was all dancing and prancing and song:

  ‘U for the alphabet,

  Ewe for the show,

  You for the archer,

  And yew for the bow.

  ‘Ha-har-har!’ or any of a thousand other pieces of sense and nonsense that happened to flitter through his head.

  From Wortmaster Gort Will learned all about the world of living things, all except the hunt, for matters of blood were reserved for the brusque and stoical Huntmaster Tweddle. Tweddle came from the hard dales of the North. He had greying unkempt whiskers and stub teeth and hard-to-see eyes. He wore a raven’s wing in his hatband and his hands were large, hands that had wrung many a game bird’s neck and heaped up many a quarry. But for all that, he also kept the falcons and hawks, and to them the huntmaster was like a doting father.

  The hunting birds were a delight to Will’s spirit, for they were fierce creatures and touched with a powerful glamour. They led unknowable lives of wing and wind and had in them a keen understanding of the middle airs that no man could ever share.

  Still, time spent in the mews was time out of the company of the Wortmaster. Gort and Tweddle avoided each other, for they had a mutual loathing which was rich and rare. Will saw straight away that they pulled at the opposite ends of most ideas. Somewhere in between them came two men who taught about the world of men: Sir John Morte, who could show how to do most things but could never explain it in words, and Tutor Aspall who could tell the whys and wherefores in his high, reedy voice, but could not actually do anything himself.

  ‘Ahem!’Tutor Aspall would begin. ‘Today – ahem! – we shall consider The Jeaste of Sir Gawain…’

  But after the romances it was Sir John who showed them how to ride and to shoot like a real knight. He taught them much that Will did not want to know, like how to slit a man’s gizzard, or how best to burn the thatch off a house. But there were compensations, like country horsemanship and how to hide a whole company of spearmen in the woods without them being seen.

  It was from Tutor Aspall that Will one April day learned about lordly rank. The lesson was in the garden, and they were all enjoying the warmth of early spring sun. In the centre of the garden was a neat patch of turf called a ‘lawn’. All year it was kept closely mowed by two men with reaping scythes and stiff brooms. Will wondered why these lawn mowers did not use sheep to crop their grass and save men the trouble as happened with the bowling green in Nether Norton. Every Valesman knew that what sheep left behind did the grass no end of good, but Tutor Aspall tutted at him for making low suggestions and Edmund whispered that lawn mowers and those who attended the duchess’s wardrobe and all the other servants had to be allowed some way to make their livings.

  ‘Still doesn’t make sense…’

  ‘Willand! Attend to your lesson!’ Tutor Aspall pointed to the scroll he had opened out. It seemed he was unhappy teaching this lesson, as if he thought there was something indelicate about it that he thought he had to tread carefully around.

  ‘As you can see, the king is of highest rank,’ Tutor Aspall explained. ‘After the king come princes. After them, the king’s brothers and uncles, though King Hal has none.’

  ‘King Hal – ha!’ Edward murmured scornfully, his arms folded.

  ‘Ahem!’ The tutor tapped the corner of his table smartly with his finger, then he went on. ‘After the king’s brothers…’

  After the king’s brothers, Will discovered, came men of curious title: the Lord Great Chamberlain, the Lord High Admiral, the Earl Marshal of the Realm. Below them were dukes, then marquesses, and then earls. Viscounts and barons came even lower down, and so, Will thought, must hardly figure even though they still came above knights. Right at the bottom of the list were people called esquires and gentlemen-of-coat-arms. Pages were not mentioned at all, nor were farmers, blacksmiths or swineherds, which seemed odd for they did all the useful work.

  ‘That’s because everyone else is a commoner,’ Edward said, poking Will in the ribs. ‘Like you, Willy Wag-staff.’

  ‘All right then, what about wizards?’ Will asked, unmoved.

  Tutor Aspall said, ‘Wizards do not appear either.’

  ‘I don’t think much of it, then,’ Will said, ‘if wizards don’t appear.’

  ‘Wizards! Ha!’ Edward said.

  ‘How do you know when you’ve even seen a wizard?’ Edmund asked.

  ‘Wizards have big eyes, long ears and short tongues,’ Will said archly, sounding, or so he thought, a little like a wizard himself.<
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  Tutor Aspall tutted at him, and Will knew he would soon be ordered out of the garden, but just then Wortmaster Gort came by with a bunch of freshly-picked charlock in his hand. He said he was looking for his rabbit, and moments later there was uproar as Rock, one of HuntmasterTweddle’s lurchers, bounded into the garden. Will saw the great grey hunting hound make for the far corner where Osric was sunning himself. Will jumped to his feet, put out his hands and shouted.

  ‘Nooo, Rock!’

  The sun flashed on the hound’s bright steel collar. Just as its jaws were about to close on Osric, Rock crashed to the ground as if his forepaws had been swept out from under him. Then he rolled under the rose bushes and began yelping, more from surprise than hurt.

  Edmund ran forward then, but Osric bounded away from him until Gort snatched him up and away from the dog.

  ‘Master Tweddle! Take this hound of yours out of the garden! He’s been lapping at the brewhouse beer drippings again, by the looks of him. And you too, come to mention it.’

  The huntmaster and Sir John came for Rock. Once the lurcher had trotted after them the peace of the garden returned. Or almost, for Will sat down heavily on the bench, his hands by his sides.

  Edward stared down at him dispassionately. ‘Are you unwell? You’re as white as a miller’s boy.’

  ‘I feel…’ he said, trying to think of a word for the odd empty-chested discomfort. ‘It’s…passing.’

  ‘Look into my eyes,’ Gort said, peering closely at him.

  ‘He’s just afraid,’ Edward said, hands on hips and grinning. ‘He imagined the dog was biting that coney’s head off and all the blood squirting out like a fountain. That’s what made him want to faint!’

  Tutor Aspall’s finger pecked the duke’s elder son on the shoulder. ‘Sir Edward, please. You too, Sir Edmund, attend to the chart.’

  While Will sat and regained his strength the engine of time made its clangs and the lesson came to an end. Will did as he was told and remained on the bench. The Wortmaster said, ‘Clench the fingers of your right hand as hard as you can around my wrist.’