Read Online The Giants' Dance by Robert Carter - Free Book Online

and drew a deep breath. ‘And it may still happen.’
    Will stood up and walked away. He wanted to run, to run from the wizard, to run far away. And when his thoughts touched Willow and Bethe the blood in his heart froze solid. He was scared to open his mind in case too many terrors rushed in on him at once. Instead he wandered wherever his feet might lead him and cried for the people of the lost village, and his tears fell upon the wounded earth.
    In return the earth threw up an unlooked-for gift. He bent to look at a reaping hook that was lying on the ground nearby. It was rusted as red as hearth iron and the handle was black, turned wholly to charcoal. It flaked away as he tried to pick it up. But then a blood redness caught at his tear-blurred eyes. Something was down there in the dust at his feet. It was a little figure, carved in some material that was not harmed by fire. When he picked it up it was warm in his hand. It was a stone fish.
    He looked around, suspecting sorcery. This little fish was so very like his own in size and shape. But whereas his own had an eye of red set in green, this one had an eye of green set in red. On its side were marks he could not read, but they were just like those on his own talisman, and it bore the same sigil of three triple-sided figures set one within another. Hardly knowing why, he closed his hand over it as Gwydion came to stand beside him. The wizard signalled that they should leave, for there was nothing else to be done here.
    Will said, ‘You knew last night that something as terrible as this was happening, didn’t you?’
    Gwydion fixed his eyes on Will’s own. ‘As soon as you showed me the light in the sky I knew that a vicious revenge had been taken. I did not know precisely how, but it was clear that we were already too late to stop it.’
    â€˜Then it was a battlestone?’
    â€˜You are wrong.’
    â€˜But what else could have done this?’
    â€˜This was the work of a fireball.’ The wizard took his little knife from its sheath and showed it to Will. ‘I have spoken of this before. It is made from star-iron, the only thing of metal I carry, for it was neither wrested from the earth nor roasted from the rocks by men. This iron came down from above, just like the fireball that destroyed Little Slaughter. Have I not told you about the great, turning dome of the sky? How it is pierced in many places by holes through which we can see the brilliance that lies in the Beyond? Those holes are what we call the stars. It is said that nothing lives on the far side of the dome of the sky. There is only a great furnace that goes on forever, a parched realm of heat, of blinding light and searing fireballs.’
    Will nodded, seeing what the wizard was driving at. ‘And sometimes it happens that a fireball falls through a star hole and it’s then what we call a shooting star.’
    â€˜Correct. Mostly these lumps burn away in the upper airs. But sometimes they are big enough to fall to earth as pieces of star-iron. Such iron was once rarer than gold. And in the days before men learned how to burn iron from the bones of the earth the finest magical tools were made from it.’
    â€˜Is that what happened here?’ Will coughed and rubbed at his eyes as he looked around again. ‘A shooting star landed on the village? A lump of star-iron? But it must have been as big as a house to have done this. How coulda thing so big fall through something so tiny as a star?’
    â€˜Stars are not tiny. They are far away – nearly seventeen hundred leagues, which is half a world away. Each star is a hole, a great round window like the pupil of your eye. It opens as it rises and closes as it sets. And the biggest stars at their largest are large indeed – as many as twenty paces across when fully open. I know, for I have sailed to the very rim of the Western Deeps and stood upon the cataract at the end of the world. There