The worm chose him. Its movement—from a coiling stillness to a pounce—was horribly swift. Only the rush of its proximity saved Lance: he and Balana were knocked aside by the shock it produced in the air. The mare went down on her flank, but somehow struggled up again, Lance clinging to her neck and her mane.
The beast was intelligent. Lance, mind cold and clear as White Lawns snow now, saw it turning, reassessing its prey, lurching round on one huge coil to strike at him again. Its breath snatched his own from his lungs with its foul heat, underlain by a tang like scorching, like the tinder-dry moment before a forest fire. One great green eye brought its eerie light to bear on him. Lance drove his sword up, but the tip glanced off the socket’s bony ridge, striking sparks.
He had one more chance. The creature arching over him, he pulled his spear from its leather hoops. It was the same weapon he’d carried since he’d grown tall enough to lift it and hunt deer on the moors, Ban’s spare army lance, the source of his own name. Drawing back with all his strength, he thrust it at the place where the beast’s jugular ought to be.
The skin looked thin as silk. Beneath it he saw organs shifting, veins pulsing. His spear’s bronze head struck true—impacted with the impossible clang of metal on its own substance, and snapped in two.
Lance was finished. Time dilated unnaturally around him, as the worm reared back to strike again, and he found he could reflect on this, and even feel an instant of relief. He’d been in Art’s service for less than two days. Now, at least, he would never have a chance to fail him. No chance to betray him, something hissed inside his mind, and he cast around him, bewildered, for the source of the terrible voice, almost blind to the descent of the beast’s gaping mouth…
It swung away from him, grazing Balana’s ears, spattering the front of his chainmail with slime. The night cracked in half to a shriek which held a note of outrage and surprise, and he saw blood fly from a hole torn in the beast’s neck. Not his own doing… Shocked at the human scarlet of the wound, he spun Balana around.
Art was so close to the worm that he had almost disappeared within one coil. If the creature was immune to ordinary blades, Excalibur could hurt it still. Art lunged again and again, using his stallion’s terrified leaps for escape to carry him close and fast enough to strike. He wasn’t doing much damage, but the creature was distracted.
He hadn’t thought the matter through any further than that. His expression, when he threw a dismayed glance at Lance, was almost comical. The worm shot its great neck to its fullest extent, out of the reach of this small, biting nuisance, then arched like a hard-curbed charger and slowly, deliberately, brought its head down, down, to stare direct at Art. It pushed its nose forward until it was almost resting on the poor stallion’s muzzle, and whether out of terror or the sheer force of its rider’s will, the horse stayed motionless. Art gazed into the maw of the dragon, his face a blank of fascination, colourless in the beast’s moonlight gleam. Then, very slowly, step by step, he began to back the stallion up. “Lance,” he said, never taking his eyes off the beast. “Lance, what do I do?”
How should I know? But, inexplicably, Lance did. He looked to the top of the crag, where a single spire of rock was outlined against the sky. “Tell her to go to her stone.”
“Her?”
“Of course. Can’t you feel it?”
“All I can feel is her breath. She’s got flames in her gullet. I think she can spit fire. What stone, for God’s sake?”
“The spindle stone that gives this place its name—up there. You have to command her.”
“What? She’s about to devour us both.”
“If she could kill you, you’d be smoking bones by now. She’d love to, but something’s stopping her.”
“What—my kingly authority?”
“No. I think it’s the sword. Try!”
Art opened his mouth for another question, but it was too late. The worm was coiling herself up for a strike. Her horse-sized maw gaped wide, and Lance tensed to dodge a fireball, but what came forth was a shriek that shook the rooks from their roosts and sent surviving children in villages five miles around wailing to their parents’ beds. His eardrums tried to burst beneath the strain of it. Art was closer. Surely the sound would paralyse him, drop him where he and his stallion stood…
But Arthur gave no sign of fear or pain. His face exalted, rapt with vision. He lifted the sword high above his head.
The shrieking stopped. Lance drew a deep, shuddering breath. What should Arthur fear? With Excalibur in his hand, was he not as strong as the earth on which he stood? Could he not, if he wished, stretch out and encompass the whole night sky, and was not the moon, now rising full to the southeast, his protection and guide, promised to him in the forbidden rites of his childhood?
Lance lost the sense of his own interior, the sense of himself as a spirit marooned on an island of flesh. When Arthur spoke, it was as if he’d drawn the words from Lance’s own deepest soul. He spoke with the voice of the sea in the darkness to the east of him, the night-wind that stirred in the gorse. “Creature of earth,” he cried, and the worm went still, arrested at the moment of her final rush. “Creature of earth, return to your stone. Trouble the people of these lands no more.”
The worm raised her great head. She swayed it from side to side, as if considering obedience. Lance urged Balana forward. Whatever the outcome of this confrontation, he had to share Art’s fate. The lantern eyes glowed fiercely. The swaying intensified, and then the creature gaped, issued a frustrated hiss, and darted off sharp to the left.
She wound herself sunwise three times round the hill, and clasped it so hard that the very stone cried out. She squeezed, and the hill would forever retain the spiral grooves of her form. She howled, but there was no resisting the sword’s command—and anyway, now her rage was done, she wanted to obey. It was right to do so: she had somehow forgotten. She had been lost.
Unwinding herself from the hill, she shrank to half her size, and then a quarter, and then when there was just enough of her to fit, she slithered to the foot of the spindle of rock. Wearily she coiled her way up it, and rested her head on the top.
Lance and Arthur rode after her. They stopped the horses by the rock. Lance said uncertainly, “You could kill it now.”
Back in his skin, shaking with reaction, Arthur looked at him. “I thought it was… You were calling it she.”
“I know. That makes it harder to kill, though. I’ll finish it off, if you don’t want to.”
“It’s all right. I must, I suppose. Well, you murderous brute,” he said without enthusiasm, “you deserve it, don’t you?” Two green eyes, still full of uncanny light, fixed on him unfathomably. “Why, Lance, look—it’s nothing but a snake!”
The snake shrank still further. The fires of its eyes went out. It became a worm indeed, a little turner of the soil no longer than Lance’s finger. The worm found a hole in the rock: formed a small circle around it. Touched its nose to the tip of its tail as if in salute, vanished into the hole and was gone.
Chapter Thirteen