ALSO BY WILLIAM HORWOOD
The Duncton Chronicles
Duncton Wood
Duncton Quest
Duncton Found
The Book of Silence
Duncton Tales
Duncton Rising
Duncton Stone
The Wolves of Time
Journeys to the Heartland
Seekers at the Wulfrock
Tales of the Willows
The Willows in Winter
Toad Triumphant
The Willows and Beyond
The Willows at Christmas
Other Works
The Stonor Eagles
Callanish
Skallagrigg
The Boy with No Shoes (Memoir)
To Deborah, with love
First published 2010 by Macmillan
This electronic edition published 2010 by Macmillan
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CONTENTS
Beornamund’s Prophecy
I The Rider and her Quest
II Fires of the Universe
III Ten Years Later
IV Into the Hyddenworld
V Brum
VI Spring
VII Shield Maiden
Beornamund’s Prophecy
There was once a metal-smith named Beornamund who lived in Mercia, one of the seven great kingdoms of Englalond, that land of mist and mystery that lies on the north-western edge of things.
In his youth he loved his Master’s daughter Imbolc, a name which in the old language means Spring.
When she was carried away in a flood and drowned he dedicated his life to making objects in memory of her beauty and their love.
So great were his skills, so profound his understanding of the mortal spirit, that he was made CraftLord, maker of great things. Many say he was the greatest of them all.
Two objects above all gave birth to legend.
The first was a flawless sphere of metal and glass he made in anger the day she died. It was so perfect that when he hurled it into the sky in defiance of the Gods who he thought had let his Imbolc die, it stole something of the fires of the Universe and all the colours of the earthly seasons. Seeing which, the Gods broke it into a hundred thousand fragments. He found only three of these, each a flawless gem which carried in itself the essence of a single season: one for Summer, a second for Autumn and the last for Winter.
Beornamund was sure that the gem of Spring also lay near his workshop, but he never found it.
The second great object was linked to the first most strangely. It was a pendant disc of gold in which he set the three gems he found in the belief that Spring, the lost one, might one day come to light.
This pendant was worn down the centuries by Imbolc, whom the Gods had made Peace-Weaver in recognition of her purity and goodness and who rode the world of mortals, whether human or hydden, upon a white horse.
Beornamund prophesied that before the gem of Spring was ever found those of Summer, Autumn and Winter must fall unseen and forgotten from the pendant he gave Imbolc. When the last of these, Winter, was lost, her journey as Peace-Weaver would be over. Only then could she return to him as Imbolc, his beloved, her duty done.
But he also warned that so destructive were the greedy hands of mortals that with Imbolc’s final passing the Earth and Universe would face extinction. All that could save them was the coming of her fabled sister, the Shield Maiden, aided by a group of courageous mortals. Their first task would be to find the lost gem of Spring. After that and down the years the other gems of the seasons must be recovered from where they had been scattered across the Earth during the Peace-Weaver’s wanderings. Only when that quest was complete might the Sphere Beornamund first made be recreated, the fires of the Universe rekindled, the earthly seasons renewed and the Earth and Universe be saved . . .
1
THE RIDER AND HER QUEST
Shortly before dawn on the first day of Spring the White Horse and its rider came out of the darkness of winter to pause awhile on Waseley Hill near Brum in Englalond.
Wraiths of cold mist stirred with the fretting of the horse’s hoofs and lingered in the hollows and ditches downslope of where it stood, more fearful of the rising sun than of the rider on its back. For she was nothing much to look at now and barely more than a wraith herself.
As she was too old to easily dismount, the White Horse dropped gently to its knees and let her down. Her hands and fingers were bent, her eyes rheumy, her white hair thin and her papery face wrinkled with fifteen hundred years of journeying.
Around her neck was an old pendant disc of gold, worn and battered, its gems nearly all lost – yet still a thing of beauty.
The rider had seen through all the seasons of her life and with the coming of Spring she had started to live on borrowed time while she completed her great task, before returning to the stars. For her quest was not yet done, and with what little time and energy remained to her she intended to see it to its end. Her body might be that of a crone but her eyes shone still with the light of the love she had received when she was young and beautiful, which she, in return, had given back to the Earth and mortals ever since.
So now she stood on the wet grass of a hill where she’d once been held in her lover’s arms and surveyed the still-dark landscape below. In the fading gloom of the human city she saw that which no human was able to see, the secret and most fabled city of the Hyddenworld.
Brum, the former capital of Englalond, was now the last stronghold of liberty and those most subversive of all mortal inclinations, good humour and individuality.
The rider’s name was Imbolc, or Spring.
Her lover had been Beornamund, greatest CraftLord of them all, founder of Brum.
Her quest was the last of her great tasks and the hardest. It was to find her sister and successor, the Shield Maiden.
For there was trouble in the air, not just in Englalond and across the wider world, but throughout the Universe. The time had come when the Shield Maiden was needed.
The end of days was threatening and Imbolc the Peace-Weaver, having prepared the w
orld as best she could for what needed to be done, knew she must leave the rest to her sister, wherever and however she might be found.
So now she stood, holding her great steed’s rein for support and eyeing the cold morning all about, waiting for what would be.
2
BEDWYN STORT
Three hydden and a half – the half being a thin, gawky, fair-haired boy of eleven – lay huddled and asleep in one of the ditches not far below where Imbolc stood.
One was Brief, Master Scrivener of Brum and the most eminent archivist of his age. He was tall for a hydden, nearly three feet high, and was wrapped in a thick, grubby red cloak with the black woollen cap of a scholar on his head to keep him warm.
Next to him lay the stocky well-made figure of Mister Pike who, at thirty years, was a good many years younger than Brief. He was a staverman: a hydden trained in the military arts, and his role just then was to protect Brief against those who might wish to harm him and his own occasional folly in venturing where he should not go. Pike’s heavy ironclad, a stave hooped at either end with cast-iron, lay beside him.
Further on still in this muddy abode was Barklice, one of the city’s most renowned verderers, whose ancient role involved travelling about Brum and its environs dealing with matters of dispute and litigation and soothing the troubled waters and sometimes intemperate spirits of different hydden communities thereabout.
As such, and as a by-product of his demanding work, he was not only one of the most experienced route-finders alive in Englalond but also spare of build, thin of face and free of spirit.
All were dressed in trews and jerkins, their shoes home-made, the uppers of leather and the black soles of the best material available to them: pieces of tread taken from the discarded car tyres of humans.
None of these three had wyfkin or living family, which was why they had chosen each other’s company to trek out of the city the evening before to welcome the coming of Spring with story and chatter, shared jokes at themselves and the world at large, a few simple rituals that went to the deep core of their faith in Mother Earth. More deeply still they were worshippers of the Mirror-of-All in whose vast reflection they believed all mortals, hydden and human alike, had their reality and being.
To hydden such as these, the first day of Spring was a very different thing than that which humans usually celebrate. For humans live mainly in cities and homes which isolate them from the elements. Which means that by the time humans recognize that Spring is in the air Spring is in fact already well begun.
Hydden are closer to the Earth and know that the loveliest of seasons starts much earlier than March or April. It arrives with the first stirrings in the cold ground, and certain yawnings and scratchings in deep burrows, occasional glimmerings of softer light through clouds still bleak with winter chill and in the new-found life and joy of the rilling of the streams that comes with the thawing of winter snow and late January rain.
No one can say with certainty at what hour or day Spring actually begins, but in the northern part of the Hyddenworld the first day of Spring is arbitrarily set at February 1st, using the human calendar, and that was why despite the cold, dank weather Master Brief and his friends had made the trek south-west out of Brum to Waseley Hill to welcome the season in with a warm brew and open fire. The mead had been strong and they snored still.
The fourth among their number, the ‘half’ as Brief sometimes called him, though he was tall for his age, was his assistant Bedwyn Stort. He lay separately from the others wrapped tight in a discarded black plastic refuse sack – a logical if eccentric protection from the damp. He looked as he was, a restless sleeper, and he never imbibed. One foot, shoeless, had forced itself out of the bag on one side, the other had twisted and stuck uncomfortably into one of its corners.
An arm, ending in a freckled hand, had thrown itself up the side of the ditch as if attempting to escape his body. The other hand was clasped tight over the face and eyes to protect them from the dawning light.
But to no avail.
Fingers parted, an eye opened and then closed again before the hand moved away altogether and Stort slowly opened his eyes and peered with such curious intensity that it was as if he was not sure where he was or even who he was.
His nose, which was long, sniffled at the air and as he looked at the mist swirling just above it, and over his sleeping companions, his expression changed to one of surprise, even astonishment.
He sat up and disentangled himself from the bag to reveal his normal garb, which was a suit of Harris tweed, made by himself to his own design, which had so many bulging pockets of different shapes and sizes that it was impossible to work out where one began and another ended.
It was the mist that puzzled him.
‘Strange,’ he murmured, ‘it’s moving as if stirred, which means that something has stirred it, something big.’
He heard the snorting of a horse.
‘A horse,’ he told himself aloud, which was how he often worked things out, ‘but no ordinary horse. No ordinary horse!’
He glanced at his companions, saw they were fast asleep and heaved himself out of the ditch onto the grass above, where he stood quite still, his tousled head with its protruding ears to one side, listening.
‘Very weird,’ he told himself, adding with playful but serious irony, ‘wyrd indeed!’
For ‘wyrd’ is what humans sometimes call fate or destiny. But for the hydden, wyrd is a matter of choice rather than inevitability and they know that to make the choice may change a life for ever. So wyrd was to be taken seriously.
Stort hesitated only briefly before, without a thought for his personal safety, he began striding up the hill into the mist. For even at eleven Bedwyn Stort’s scientific curiosity and quest for answers ran far ahead of any danger his actions might attract.
3
PACT
Whatever else Imbolc expected to appear at this late stage of her search for her sister the Shield Maiden, it was not a strangely dressed and gangly young hydden, barely more than a boy, climbing up the wet grass towards her.
The White Horse had made itself scarce, so she stood alone pondering whether or not to change her guise, for there are few mortals able to look into the eyes of an immortal. On this occasion instinct told her to stay as she was.
Peace-Weavers do not see like mortals only the latest, newest reflection from the Mirror of reality of what comes before them. They see as well what the Mirror has held in the past and will one day hold in the future. They see these things as not-quite-shadows, light grey with an occasional dash of real colour, vague precedents and prefigurings, fragments of time that add up to a life.
As she now set eyes on Bedwyn Stort, Imbolc was astounded at what she saw. Image after image affirmed him as a most extraordinary hydden.
An infant who from the first moments of his birth saw the world with the curiosity of a child; a child who bore himself with the courage of youth; a youth who wandered the world and bore with fortitude the loss of his family with the wisdom of an adult; an adult who cried out early with the pains of age and loss; and finally one of the old ones, his first innocence still intact and his eyes filled with that same light of life as when they first opened, despite the ravages of suffering and old age.
Such seemed to be the past and present and future of Bedwyn Stort.
Most of all she saw in his eyes as he came up to her, undimmed by the times he must live through, the light of great love. She knew it as she knew her own. In that she guessed she had found at last one of those who, if they were true to their wyrd, and had the courage and strength to journey to the furthest end of the pilgrim road, would be the ones to help the Shield Maiden fulfil her difficult task.
Stort stared at her and then at the pendant that she wore, old and battered as it was, its gems all gone, its gold dinted with many knocks, the white quartz in its centre worn and dull, with no hope, it seemed, of ever shining with the light of love again. He guessed who she was.
&
nbsp; ‘Is that the pendant Beornamund made for you?’ he asked, undaunted by her stare.
‘It is, Master Stort, the very same. Its gems are gone now, scattered across the Earth.’
He stared at it more closely and said, ‘Master Brief believes . . .’
‘Sssh . . .’ she whispered, reaching towards him and placing a finger on his lips, ‘do not say what Brief said, it is better that I am not told.’
She knew at once that she had done wrong, not through her words but by her touch, for it is said that a mortal touched by an immortal may be given thereby a burden too great to bear.
Stort fell silent and felt flow through him a storm that began as an icy wind but ended with an elemental blizzard. It left him hollowed and aged, wore him to his knees and began to steal his life away right there on Waseley Hill.
But it is said as well that what the mortal loses the immortal gains, and Imbolc the Peace-Weaver felt his youth pass briefly into her so that what once she had been to Beornamund the CraftLord she became again: young, beautiful, filled with the life and love of the season that bore her name.
At once she knelt down by Bedwyn Stort, held him close and whispered, ‘You shall not leave us yet, for you have work to do . . .’
Then she told him that someone was coming to Englalond alone soon who was in danger and might need help.
‘. . . he’s the giant-born on his way already . . . find him and do what you can. Do this and I will ask the Mirror-of-All to return your life to you by the light of this rising sun. Can you do it for me?’
Stort nodded and reached up his hand and touched her lips as she had his. At once his youth returned and she began to age again.
‘There!’ she said, ‘It is good! It is as it had to be. See him now through the coming years so that he is ready to help find the Shield Maiden and change all your lives through the dark decades ahead when I shall be here no longer to help . . .’