Whitemantle. Robert Goldthwaite Carter

into these Isles.’

      Gort shook his head at the memory. ‘During Maglin’s phantarchship the last of the First Men died, you see? Only wyrms and giants thrived here after that.’

      ‘Until King Brea came?’ Willow asked.

      ‘Until King Brea came.’

      Will looked at the staff with new eyes. ‘So is this the Staff of Justice, then?’ he asked in amazement. ‘The third of the Four Hallows of the Realm?’

      Gwydion was quick to undo that idea. ‘Oh, this is not the hallowed staff. This is just an old wizard’s helpmeet. But well-fashioned and supple enough still, I hope, to do daring deeds when put into the right hands. I asked the Wortmaster to bring it out from a place that you know well, Willand.’

      ‘A place that I know well?’

      ‘You mean the Vale?’ Willow asked.

      ‘Not the Vale!’ Gort laughed.

      Puzzled, Will turned to Gort, but the Wortmaster merely stooped and reached into the crane bag to lift out another article, this time a cloak of white feathers. ‘Appleseeds, appleseeds, appleseeds…ha-har!’

      And Will instantly knew the cloak for what it was. ‘That’s the kind that wizards once used to wear. It’s a swan cloak. Maglin’s staff must have come from the tomb of King Leir!’

      ‘Ah-ha…Right you are!’ Gort danced the cloak by the shoulders so that the sheen on the feathers became otherworldly. ‘This is the White Mande, the cloak that was once draped over that great king’s dead body by Semias.’

      ‘Leir’s cloak,’ Will breathed, recalling the moment he had discovered the lost tomb. Wonderful things had been arrayed around that vault, but they all belonged to a dead man. He turned to Gwydion. ‘You told me that the cloak was brought out of the Realm Below long ago by Arthur, and whoso-ever wore it would become invisible.’

      Gwydion shook his head. ‘These, I believe, were my words. “He who wears Leir’s mantle shall remain unseen by mortal eye.”’

      ‘Well, isn’t that the same thing?’

      ‘My meaning at the time was that Leir’s tomb was fated to remain undisturbed by lesser men, until such time as it should be found by one who is greater than Leir. However, you are right that a swan cloak will cause anyone who wears it to fade from view unless that person is a true king.’

      Will slowly understood the implications and he began to redden in the face. Then Gort threw the cloak neatly about Will’s shoulders and stood back. ‘It fits! It fits!’

      Will tried to shrug it off. ‘Oh, Wortmaster, what are you doing? Of course it fits – it’s a cloak.’

      ‘Fit for a king, I’d say,’ Gort insisted.

      ‘Master Gwydion, you’ve put him up to this nonsense.’

      But the wizard merely drifted into the shadows as the shimmering feathers settled around Will, sheathing him in glory.

      ‘Please, Wortmaster,’ he said unhappily. ‘Take it off me. I daren’t wear such a fine thing.’

      But Gort would not take it off him. Will looked down at the empty clasp of gold and silver, the setting that had once held a great blue-white diamond called the Star of Annuin, and he could not help but think that the world was rushing headlong towards an unthinkable chasm, and that a great weight would soon fall upon his inadequate shoulders.

       CHAPTER EIGHT MAGOG AND GOGMAGOG

      Three days passed, and the wizard came and went, busying himself in the seeking out of tokens. Much had been hidden away in the palace by Maskull. Three dried toads were found nailed to the rafters of the royal bedchamber. Maskull’s magical traps still tied up parts of Trinovant in a spider web, nor could Gwydion’s dancing unweave it all. He had made many libations at key points, shaping counter-spells at crossroads and leaving sigils under stairs. Yet too often the working required the moon to be at the full, or a vial of royal blood that was hardly to be had. Still, the wizard erected a cordon around the palace in the form of a single flaxen thread, and within its circuit he made scatterings of ash. Various woods were needed to cleanse and restore the White Hall, and so he had hung swags of holly and twisted dried mistletoe over door lintels, and sent Gort out to the royal forests beyond Hammersmyth to fetch back a boatload of oak, ash and elm.

      One thunderstruck evening he had ranged up and down like a demon, flinging open shutters to light and air to admit the purifying blast of the west wind. That cool messenger of the middle airs had swept out the stink of incense and guttered the votive candles placed in so many corners by the Sightless Ones. Gwydion had found slips of paper containing malign formulae, seed pods, withered berries, dead flowers, knots of hair and knuckle bones, old cod-heads, the mummified body of a black cat with the halter still tight about its neck. But nothing had worked to remove the last lingering stench of dismal fortune that hung about the palace.

      In cellars as dank as dungeons he had found the carefully arranged shards of a broken mirror, things stolen, things lost, things entombed under stone flags. Equerries and under-chamberlains were disturbed from their beds at midnight. High palace officials were roused up in the misty dawn as the wizard came in bearing in his hands the bones of a long-dead prince, to mutter and dance and run his new-found wand over chest and chimney-breast alike. And finally, in a tower occupied by no one at all, Gwydion had felt his way forward with remorseless care, for in a solitary cell at the top of a stair Maskull had kept his workshop of vile creation.

      The sorcerer’s chamber was not without subtle defences. Magic was set, ready to snare the unwary. Walls that were not walls, seemingly thin air that was. And so Gwydion halted his attack. He let his investigation flow around the problem, then proceeded crabwise. At last, he went at it like the village worthy who goes to the local well, draws out on the end of long tongs the wriggling, spitting young of a water drake and dashes out its brains against a rock. A huge wasps’ nest was smoked out and taken down from the roof space, and when the wizard broke it open he found it to contain a human skull. Inside that was a dripping honeycomb that Gwydion sealed in a great jar.